[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 98 (Monday, June 18, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H6648-H6653]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           NATIONAL SECURITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
half the remaining time until midnight.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the privilege 
to address you on the floor of the House on the House of 
Representatives. It is always a privilege.
  And this time in our history reflects I think one of the most pivotal 
times that we've had. We are at war for one thing, and it is a pivotal 
moment within that war. And we are watching terrorists from overseas 
that have attacked the United States. And as we are watching our 
national security on that hand and as we are debating how we proceed to 
victory over al Qaeda and those terrorists on that end, at the same 
time our southern border is being flooded with just masses of illegal 
immigrants on a nightly basis. And to give, Mr. Speaker, some 
perspective on the scope of that problem, we have this testimony before 
the Immigration Subcommittee, of which I am the ranking member, and I 
sat intensively through hearings and engaged in questions and actually 
testified myself for the better part of 5 years at this point, Mr. 
Speaker.

                              {time}  2215

  Mr. Speaker, the testimony that we get from the Border Patrol, as far 
as the Border Patrol representatives for the profession and the 
Government, identifies that 2 years ago on the southern border, our 
Border Patrol and other immigration officers interdicted 1,155,000, I 
believe, illegal immigrants attempting to come across our border. Last 
year, it was 1,188,000. The number increases.
  Now, one might argue that the effectiveness of our Border Patrol is 
reflected in the increase in the number of interdictions from about 
1,155,000 to 1,188,000. But, Mr. Speaker, I would submit also that that 
could very well be a reflection of increased numbers coming across our 
border. It is not possible to identify whether the Border Patrol is 
more effective or whether they simply have a larger mass of people.
  But in any case, when questioned before Committee in testimony before 
Congress as to what percentage of the illegal border crossers they were 
interdicting, the number fell between 25 percent and 33 percent. I 
believe the quote in the testimony was, ``We think we catch between a 
fourth and a third of those who attempt to cross.'' Now, that is not a 
very good record when you consider that there are 1,188,000 illegals, 
and that could potentially represent a third of those that tried or a 
fourth of those who tried.
  So, I simply take that math and put that number at 25 percent, which 
is the lower part of the number, and then round it up to put it into a 
perspective in between the 25 and 33 percent. If you take that number 
and do the calculation, you come to about 4.6 million, let me see, 
about 4.6 million attempts. If you look at the interdiction numbers it 
amounts to and round it down, 4 million coming across our southern 
border on an annual basis, and that divides out to be about 11,000 a 
night coming across our southern border; 11,000, Mr. Speaker, every 
night on average. I say ``night,'' because during the day, the activity 
slows down. It doesn't stop. But at night it speeds up.
  I have gone down and sat on the border in the dark, and without night 
vision goggles and without the aid that we have of our security 
personnel down there, but I just sat there and listened, sitting next 
to that cattle fence, that is not a very good cattle fence, about 5 
barbed wires and steel posts that are stretched out to where the wires 
are separated in the middle so that the illegal traffic can simply bend 
down and step over through the fence.
  I sat there and listened maybe 3 hours at a crack with a retired 
Border Patrol officer. I could see the shadows filtering through. I 
could hear the cars coming down on the Mexican side of the border. I 
could hear one of them dragging its muffler rattling as it drove down 
there. I could hear it stop by a big mesquite tree. I could hear the 
doors open. You hear people get out. You hear them drop their packs on 
the ground and the doors close kind of quietly, but the doors close. 
You can hear them pick things up in a hushed whisper and talk. Then 
they line up in single file, and they walk through the mesquite brush 
in the desert that 100 or 150 yards on down to our border and then file 
through the fence single file and go on up through the brush into the 
United States.
  Some of them, I will concede, are coming here because they would like 
to find a job and they would like to find a better life. Some of them 
will send money back to their family. Some of them, that pack they drop 
on the ground and pick up again is the pack of illegal drugs that they 
will be carrying into the United States and delivering to a 
predetermined location, perhaps 25 miles up into the United States 
across the desert along the highway where a vehicle is scheduled to 
pull off on a turnoff and have those packs of illegal drugs tossed into 
the back of that truck. Maybe some of the illegals get in the truck and 
go on up into the United States. Some of them turn around, walk back 
across the desert that 20 or 25 miles and go down and get another load.
  This goes on every single night on our southern border, Mr. Speaker, 
every single night. That isn't all the drugs that come across our 
border, but that is one of the methods that they use. If we put a 
vehicle barrier in place, in some places we have them, that amounts to 
a 5-by-5 steel tubing that is welded on our steel posts, and these are 
a 5-by-5 steel piling that are set in the ground, and a 5-by-5 steel 
tubing that is welded on there at about bumper height of a vehicle, 
that vehicle barrier will slow down and actually stop vehicles from 
driving across the border, but it doesn't stop individuals from walking 
right through there and carrying their packs of illegal drugs.
  The number that is most commonly represented by the Drug Enforcement 
Agency is $65 billion worth of illegal drugs coming across our southern 
border on an annual basis. That $65 billion is, I believe, a street 
value. I don't know what it is worth at the border specifically. In 
fact, they don't know either. They have got some representations of the 
breakdown of who gets what share of the profit as it flows through the 
illegal drug cartels. But $65 billion worth on the street is no small 
number.

  That value in illegal drugs consumed by Americans destroys untold 
numbers of lives, an incalculable amount of human potential, and an 
innumerable number of children suffer because their father or mother or 
both are hooked on illegal drugs, methamphetamines, marijuana, heroin, 
cocaine, you name it, that comes across that border. Especially the 
methamphetamine that comes up into my part of the country, up the NAFTA 
Highway, as I heard some of my colleagues talking earlier, and the pain 
and the suffering and the death that has been dealt out by those 
illegal drugs, but pushed by $65 billion worth, the street value in the 
United States.
  First, Mr. Speaker, I want to make the statement that we have a 
responsibility here in the United States to address the illegal drug 
consumption in this country. As long as we have the kind of demand that 
demands $65 billion worth of illegal drugs on the streets, in noses and 
in the veins and in the systems of our American drug abusers, illegal 
drug abusers, there is always going to be somebody that seeks to meet 
that demand.
  Right now, the most efficient system that is set up, the most 
competitive system that is set up, the system that has the distribution 
wired in, is the illegal drug lords that control our southern border 
and the families that control their segments, the drug cartel families 
that control the segments of our southern border.
  Mr. Speaker, we can't solve this problem by addressing the border

[[Page H6649]]

alone. We have to solve this problem by reducing and eliminating the 
demand here in the United States for illegal drugs. I am not going to 
spend a lot of time on this, but I want to go on record, Mr. Speaker, 
and let you and let the rest of the body know that there are three ways 
that we can address illegal drugs.
  One of them is through interdiction. We currently do that. We try to 
stop all the drug pushers we can. We try to take all the drugs out of 
their hands we can. We try to take them off the street. We put them in 
prison. We put mandatory sentences on some of them, and some of them 
have faced those mandatory sentences. We are doing a lot of what we can 
do with interdiction.
  The only other two places we can address the drugs is rehab, and we 
have invested some money in rehab and we have gotten some pretty good 
results from those who have hit bottom, from those, Mr. Speaker, who 
want to. But the rehabilitation isn't going to solve the problem with 
the demand.
  So the third place is how do you reduce and eliminate the demand, and 
I will submit that the way to address this, if we want to dry up the 
demand of illegal drugs in the United States, we are going to have to 
provide random testing in the workplace and also in the educational 
field and also in the welfare rolls.
  Now, we have a drug testing law in Iowa that I worked intensively to 
get passed and drafted a lot of the components and worked those pieces 
through. I spent 2 years doing not exclusively that, but focusing a lot 
of my time getting that legislation passed, Mr. Speaker.
  What it provides for is preemployment testing, post-accident testing, 
reasonable suspicion testing and random testing. If you have those four 
categories of drug testing and you provide that for that in the 
workplace, in our educational institutions so our students are being 
tested, and in our welfare rolls, you will be able to, and we could as 
a society, if we determined we wanted to dramatically reduce the demand 
for illegal drugs, if we would put a drug testing system in place, we 
could dramatically reduce the demand.
  By doing so in the workplace under those four methods that I said, 
preemployment, post-accident, reasonable suspicion and random testing, 
we can provide and essentially guarantee a drug-free workplace.
  I first brought my focus on this when as in the contracting business 
I had a Federal contract. The Federal contract required me to sign a 
document that I would guarantee a drug-free workplace. Now, I take 
those contracts seriously. When I sign my name to something, I intend 
to follow through. That is my commitment and that has been my record.
  But it disturbed me that Iowa law didn't allow me to truly guarantee 
a drug-free workplace. I could watch out for it, I could check for it 
as much as I could, I could educate my employees, but I couldn't 
legally test my employees. So I did what I could to meet a drug-free 
workplace. I think I provided a drug-free workplace, but I don't know 
that. But it set me down the path of working on the drug testing side 
of it.
  We essentially don't have a conversation going on in America about 
how to eliminate drug abuse in America. That conversation doesn't exist 
in a meaningful fashion. We talk about all kinds of things, but $65 
billion worth of illegal drugs representing 95 percent of the overall 
drug consumption in America coming across our southern border and the 
attendant violence that comes with that and the drug cartels that comes 
with that, the smuggling of drugs and people and human slaves that are 
put into the sex slavery business, and that violence and the crime that 
is naturally associated with illegal drugs, we are not addressing the 
demand.
  We are not particularly concerned about the abuse of drugs in the 
workplace. And I believe we have got to raise that issue. I believe 
that we need to bring the focus of America's society on dramatically 
reducing the demand for illegal drugs in this society so that we can 
provide a lot better culture for our children to grow up in than 
perhaps we grew up in. That is not being addressed, Mr. Speaker, and I 
want to raise this issue.
  But on the other side of this, the flip side of this issue is U.S. 
demand, $65 billion coming across our southern border representing 90 
percent of the illegal drugs. The other side is on that side of the 
border, they are delivering that amount of drugs to us.
  They are producing many of them in Mexico and Central America and the 
northern part of South America. Also there is heroin and other drugs 
coming in from China that flow into Mexico. And that distribution 
network is the magnet that draws those illegal drugs into Mexico. The 
marijuana that comes in, the methamphetamines that are manufactured 
there. The pseudoephedrines that come in from China to Mexico to be 
processed into methamphetamine, that spells a society that doesn't have 
the rule of law.
  I will argue that we are deficient in our own rule of law here 
because we are not reducing the demand in the United States. But they 
are pouring across the southern border. And as much rhetoric as we have 
had about people that want to come here for a better life, we need to 
have a lot of rhetoric about what has happened to the lives of the 
people who have been sucked into this drug smuggling, who have been 
sucked into the drug consumption and become drug addicts? What about 
the lives of the American people who have been sacrificed on this alter 
of permissiveness that we don't have the will to shut down the abuse of 
illegal drugs in American and we don't have the will to shut down the 
flow of those illegal drugs across the border?
  As I watch that and I look at the violence, and here two years ago, 
Mr. Speaker, actually it was more than 3 years ago, I commissioned a 
GAO study, a Government Accountability Study, and asking this question, 
and that is, we saw the testimony of how many people didn't make it 
across the desert to come into the United States illegally. That number 
has grown in the years that I have been in this Congress from perhaps a 
little more than 200, to now over 450, and perhaps as many as 500 
people dying coming across the southern border.
  That is a human tragedy. It is an agonizing human tragedy. The images 
of that easily come to mind to the American people, because we have 
seen a lot of news on it, we have seen film on it, we have seen 
pictures.
  The other side of that tragedy is of those that make it across the 
border, those 11,000 a night that try, the 66 to 75 percent of those 
that make it, or more, and I will add that when I talk to the Border 
Patrol officers on the border and I ask them what percentage of 
effectiveness do you have, what percentage of them are you catching 
that are trying to come across the border, 25 percent, 33 percent? They 
laugh at me. They say, no, that number is more like 10 percent.
  That is the most consistent number I get when I am speaking 
confidentially with the people that are boots on the ground, facing 
this enemy to our society, eye-to-eye, face-to-face. Perhaps 10 
percent. I get numbers that go down as low as 3 percent. But it is the 
testimony here that is the highest that I hear, that perhaps a quarter 
to a third of those are interdicted.

                              {time}  2230

  But of those that come across the border and get across the border, 
and we are losing 450 or 500 trying to come into the United States that 
don't make it across the desert, how many Americans die at the hands of 
those who do make it across the border? Those involved in the crime, 
and there is plenty of it, do commit crimes against American citizens.
  The measure of that crime falls into this category: 27 percent of the 
inmates in our Federal penitentiaries are criminal aliens. Some of them 
came into the United States legally and overstayed their visa. But most 
of them came into the United States illegally and committed crimes. 
That is 27 percent.
  If you look at the State penitentiaries, the same Government 
Accountability Office report has in there that they are only funding 25 
percent through SCAAP, the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, 
that funds our States, our counties, our local prisons, reimburses them 
for the trouble of having to incarcerate criminal aliens here in the 
United States because the United States isn't able to control our 
borders, and the burden of enforcing that crime falls upon the local 
governments and the cities, increasingly. But the Federal Government is 
to reimburse them for incarcerating the inmates.

[[Page H6650]]

  In the GAO study, it shows that we are only reimbursing for 25 
percent of the cost of the incarceration of criminal aliens in the 
local prisons, State and local. When you do the math, that 25 percent 
comes to about $22,000 a year by their numbers. That is a pretty 
typical number for the cost of incarcerating someone in a penitentiary.
  So if they are paying 25 percent and it is costing $22,000 a year for 
those that we do pay for, it is not $88,000 a year, so the only other 
conclusion one can draw is, at least in our State penitentiaries, that 
at least 25 percent of the inmates are criminal aliens.
  Now one comes to the conclusion that more than 25 percent of the 
inmates that are in our Federal and State penitentiaries are criminal 
aliens. They commit crimes against Americans. If they are committing 
crimes against Americans in the proportion that they are represented in 
our penitentiaries, that means more than 25 percent of the murders, 
more than 25 percent of the assaults, more than 25 percent of the rapes 
and more than 25 percent of the grand larceny, and the list goes on and 
on and on.
  We have few in our Federal penitentiaries that are in there just 
because they violated immigration law. They may be there under that 
charge, but if they are and that is the charge that they are under, it 
is most likely that they simply could not make another charge stick and 
the prosecutors chose to use immigration charges rather than something 
else.
  But just think, we are sitting here now with 16,400 murders a year in 
America. And if a fourth of those are attributable to criminal aliens, 
you are at 4,000 Americans a year. We crossed that sad threshold of 
those killed in action in Iraq, total, in addition to those killed in 
accidents in Iraq, over 3,000, a while back, Mr. Speaker.
  But that number compared to the number of over 3,000 a year, in fact 
the almost 4,000 a year that die at the hands of criminal aliens here 
in the United States, and that is every single year. So, each year, we 
have had more Americans die at the hands of criminal aliens in this 
country than we have cumulative total of all of the soldiers, sailors, 
airmen and Marines that have been killed in Iraq since the operations 
began in March of 2003. We have more Americans dying at the hands of 
criminal aliens on the streets and the roads and in the back alleys and 
homes of America each year than died on September 11, 2001. This total 
accumulates over and over again.
  In addition to that number, there also is a slightly larger number of 
Americans who die at the hands of criminal aliens who have committed 
negligent homicide, generally in the form of drunk driving, although 
not always. If you add these numbers up, my numbers show 12 Americans a 
day murdered at the hands of criminal aliens, and 13 die every day at 
the hands of criminal aliens who have committed negligent homicide, 
generally victims of drunk drivers. And I am not counting the criminal 
aliens who have been killed because of their own drunk driving, Mr. 
Speaker.
  So you add that number up, and it comes to 25 a day, 25 Americans a 
day. If the news media focused on that instead of some of their other 
priorities, I think we would have come to a conclusion on this illegal 
immigration issue that we are facing. But what is coming across that 
border and the violence that flows with it, and again, I will stipulate 
that most are good people. When they are our neighbors we like them. 
And when they go to work, we like them. And when they go to church, we 
like them. And when they raise their children and educate their 
children and when they assimilate into the American culture, we love 
everybody that comes to America to do that. We love those who come here 
legally. Those who come illegally subvert the rule of law.
  But the violence that is part of the society that they come from is 
significant. I have to talk a little bit about the levels of violence 
here in the United States compared to the countries that many of our 
immigrants come from.
  That is, our violent death rate here in the United States is 4.28 per 
100,000. And the violent death rate in Mexico is 13.2 per 100,000. That 
is actually one of the safer countries in South and Central America. I 
was in Sao Paolo, Brazil, a little over a year ago. They told us to be 
careful where we go because in that city, they have over 10,000 murders 
a year.
  I don't know the violent death rate in Brazil, but I do know what it 
is in Honduras. It is nine times that of the United States. In El 
Salvador, they don't publish the violent death rate, and one can only 
presume what it might be and why they don't.
  But in Colombia, the violent death rate in Colombia is 15.4 times 
higher than the violent death rate here in the United States.
  So it stands to reason that if you draw young men, some of whom are 
involved in the illegal drug trade, from a society that is far more 
violent than that of the United States, anywhere from 3 times to 15 
times more violent, you are going to see more violent crimes. You are 
going to see more murders, assaults and rapes. There are going to be 
more victims in the United States and more deaths. One couldn't expect 
anything else.
  That doesn't mean that we indict an entire country and all of their 
nationals because some of the citizens are violent. But that means we 
have more crime here because we are drawing a young men concentration 
from a more violent society, and a significant portion of those who are 
involved coming into the United States are those who are dealing in 
illegal drugs because the demand here for $65 billion worth of illegal 
drugs draws that in from those countries, and necessarily it has to 
come across our southern border.
  Mr. Speaker, I hope I have laid the foundation for my passionate 
belief that we need to reinforce our southern border by building a 
double fence/wall on our southern border because I don't believe that a 
virtual fence is going to deter $65 billion worth of illegal drugs.
  I have an understanding how powerful a magnet a $65 billion illegal 
drug market magnet is that draws those drugs into the United States 
with that kind of powerful profit incentive. They are going to be 
pushing against our southern border.

  When you go down there, and I sit there at night, and it is five 
barbed-wire strands, five strands of barbed wire, kind of a poor cattle 
fence, and they are going through one after another. And I can't quite 
count them all because it is pitch black, and I can only see the 
shadows, and I can hear the footsteps and the fence creak. And I can 
put my ear down to the post and listen to the fence stretch as they go 
through and kind of count.
  That is just one place, one location, one night, Mr. Speaker. But 
11,000 a night on average every night. The numbers of people pouring 
across and the illegal drugs that are a part of that, America's economy 
is paying a tremendous price. Our society is paying a tremendous price. 
The potential, the human potential of our young people is slowly being 
undermined and destroyed by the illegal drugs that are coming in.
  But the force of those drugs cannot be eliminated simply because we 
want to put in a virtual fence. We want to argue that we are going to 
put in ground-based radar and we are going to fly the unmanned aerial 
vehicles over the top. We will put some cameras in place, but some of 
that doesn't work in bad weather. Sometimes you can't get down there in 
bad weather to enforce.
  Each time I asked the Border Patrol, does it help to build a double 
fence/wall, their answer is generally, nothing you can do will reduce 
the need for the number of boots on the ground. That is an interesting 
response, Mr. Speaker.
  How is it that if we build physical barriers on the border, follow 
through and complete the commitment of the congressional mandate that 
the President signed, the Secure Fence Act, and build 854 miles of a 
double fence and roads, and tie that together with the technology that 
is necessary to supplement those physical barriers, how is it, if we 
build those barriers, we need more boots on the grounds, not less?
  I am going to say, good physical barriers reduce the numbers of 
Border Patrol that we need. I am suggesting that we reduce those 
numbers; I am suggesting that we can invest our money more efficiently 
on the southern border than we are. And the wisdom of a double fence 
and wall on that southern border, if analyzed economically, holds up, 
and it holds up this way.
  We are spending $8 billion on the 2,000 mile southern border from San

[[Page H6651]]

Diego to Brownsville. That is $8 billion every year, and that money 
goes to pay Border Patrol, buy Humvees, depreciate the Humvees and 
support them, and pay for the retirement benefits, training and 
equipment and helicopters, fuel, gas for our Humvees, the whole network 
that is necessary to keep the Border Patrol up and running. That is 
where the $8 billion goes. That is $4 million per mile.
  Now, me being a contractor who spent my life building things and 
pricing things and sometimes designing construction projects, I bring 
this down to unit price. I have to calculate things in unit price.
  Mr. Speaker, what would I do? Say, for example, I live in the country 
in Iowa on a gravel road and the four corners come together right by my 
house. If I had a border on my west road that ran from my house, a mile 
west right down the middle of that gravel road, I don't care how far it 
went east or west, but if it was my job to contain that one mile, and 
if Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security came to me and 
said, Steve, we think you ought to control this border, would you bid 
that for us? It is costing us $4 million a mile and two-thirds or 
three-quarters of everybody who is trying to get across the border goes 
across and goes off into the United States. Can you give us a price to 
give us more efficiency, a lot more than a fourth to a third 
efficiency? Give us something close to 100 percent efficiency.
  So if you are a stopping a fourth of the people at $4 million a mile, 
one would think, to get 100 percent of them, if we spent $16 million a 
mile, maybe just maybe that linear equation would work out. I don't 
think it will, but that is one way of thinking about it.
  So I would look at it and say, Mr. Secretary, $4 million a mile, how 
about giving me a 10-year contract, and I can control the illegal 
traffic on this border.
  Now I have $40 million to work with; $4 million for that mile, 1 
year, times 10 years, a 10-year contract, $40 million. I would look at 
that and think, I am going to hire myself a bunch of Border Patrol and 
buy myself a bunch of Humvees, and I am going to drive them up and down 
that road and hope that they come across the people coming across the 
border at night. I wouldn't do that.
  I would have some people to guard the borders, yes; some people to be 
quick reaction responders, I certainly would. But I would look at that 
and say, if I make an early capital investment, if I built a wall on 
that border and a fence inside there a hundred feet, maybe another 
chain link fence inside that, I would set up some cameras and sensors, 
and it would be monitor-able from inside an air-conditioned office. 
Then I would have some Border Patrol to deploy if I needed them.
  But for $1.3 million, I could build this wall that I am about to 
build. And for the balance of another million dollars a mile, I could 
put in another fence and we could have a solid wall, double fencing, 
and we could have probably an access road to run along there, and we 
could shut off more than 90 percent of the illegal traffic, more than 
95 percent of the illegal traffic. In fact, I believe that we could 
tighten that down so tight there wouldn't be anybody coming across.
  I say that because, not only does it make sense, I have seen the 
effectiveness of it. I went to Israel, and I took a look at the fence 
they have constructed in Israel. They were being bombed on a regular 
basis by suicide bombers from the West Bank.

                              {time}  2245

  They'd blow themselves up and blow up some women and children and 
men, too, didn't matter to them so long as they could take somebody 
with them. And so for the Israelis to protect themselves from those 
kind of attacks, they put a fence in place. And some places it's 
doubled; some places it's a little more than that. There are some watch 
towers and guard towers. They have some wire on top. They have sensors. 
Some of the sensors that they have are classified so they don't let the 
enemy understand how to defeat it.
  But the fence structure that they put in place in Israel has been 
nearly 100 percent effective, and so I hear people here in this 
Congress will say, why do you want to build a fence and how tall do you 
want it to be? And I say, well, I'd put mine up 12 feet tall here, and 
then I'd put a wire mesh fence inside that's taller yet. Oh, 12 feet 
tall; if you do that, somebody's just going to build a 12-foot ladder 
and they'll climb over the top.
  That is what you call a red herring, Mr. Speaker, and in fact, there 
have been very, very rare anyone could defeat the fence in Israel, and 
however tall you make the fence, yes, you can make a longer ladder. But 
there's always another way to defeat the people who think that's the 
easy way. It's one of the reasons to make it double because we can 
interdict them in between. And the sensors pick up the efforts, but if 
you don't slow them down, they charge across the border and scatter out 
across the desert. You can chase some of them down, but you cannot 
chase them all down, Mr. Speaker. And so fences and walls are 
effective. They have been proven to be effective, and they're cost-
effective as well.
  So let me just submit that that $40 million contract for that 1 mile 
for 10 years, the $4 million a year, for less than $3 million I can put 
in a concrete wall and a wire fence and I can put in sensors. And then 
I'd sit back and monitor that mile from my office with little warning 
devices on it and I'd have somebody on 24 hours a day. I'd have people 
on call and maybe somebody patrolling it in intermittent cycles, but 
we'd shut that mile down, and we could shut that mile down for an early 
capital investment of less than $3 million. And you'd only have $37 
million left over for the balance of the 10 years to pay yourself a 
minimum number of border patrol and somebody to monitor the sensor 
devices that you have.
  We can put this together, but what we're doing is burning up a 
tremendous amount of taxpayer dollars at $8 billion a year to get a 
fourth to a third efficiency when we can get 95, 96, 98 percent 
efficiency by investing in a structure instead.
  Now, if we do that, we put a barrier in place that's very, very 
difficult to defeat, not impossible but difficult, and so the drug 
smugglers that are trying to get here, they are going to decide they 
don't want to try to go through there. They're likely to try by air 
again or by sea or some other method. In any case, we'll dramatically 
reduce the amount of illegal drugs on the streets of America, at least 
for a time, until they find another way to defeat us.
  We have our choice. We can either work to defeat the illegal drug 
smugglers and try to keep those drugs off the street or we can 
capitulate. I'm not willing to capitulate, and I'm not hearing anybody 
in this Congress stand up and say that they want to legalize the 
illegal drugs.
  And so I think we need to fight them, and I think this is the place 
to draw the line. This is the battle line, and it's on our southern 
border. I've talked to the Mexican senators about it. I believe they 
understand, and they're doing some things on their side to help out.
  That's one of the battles that we have. We have a number of other 
battles, Mr. Speaker, and so it takes us, though, to this idea that 
legalize illegal drugs and then you don't have an illegal drug problem. 
That makes sense, doesn't it? But I'm not willing to go there, and we 
aren't in this Congress either. But the President and the open borders 
lobby have taken the stand that they think that we can't control our 
border, our southern border in particular, unless we legalize the 12 to 
20 million people who come in here illegally.
  Now, I continually ask the question of the representatives from the 
administration as they march forward before the Immigration 
Subcommittee, explain this to me, how is it that you can't enforce the 
law until we give amnesty to 12 to 20 million? How is it that if we do 
grant this amnesty or grant a legal status to 12 to 20 million people, 
how is America safer? If you want to bring people out of the shadows, 
and never mind they came here to live in the shadows, that's a function 
of sneaking into the United States and getting jobs illegally. When 
they were in hiding, that's living in the shadows. When you try to 
bring them out of the shadows, why would they come out? What kind of 
people would come out of the shadows? It would be those that are 
guaranteed amnesty. Those undesirables are not going to come out

[[Page H6652]]

of the shadows, Mr. Speaker. They're going to stay back there and 
they're going to run their drug trade and they're going to push their 
wives and their kids to go to work, and they're going to sit back and 
work in the black market. They're not going to come forward. We will 
not get people to come forward that are afraid that they will not be 
granted some kind of amnesty.
  But the President's idea on this and the open border lobby's idea on 
this is somehow, if we grant amnesty to the 12 to 20 million people, 
then we can focus our law enforcement resources on the bad apples, a 
huge human haystack of humanity, 4 million strong pouring across our 
southern border every year. And in that haystack of humanity are the 
needles called terrorists and criminals, drug dealers, undesirable 
elements, people that no society wants in them. And if we legalize that 
huge human haystack of humanity, somehow it makes it easier to find the 
needles that are in it.
  But I'll submit, Mr. Speaker, that those needles are not going to 
come out into the open unless they can be guaranteed some legal path, 
and those who will be legalized, and I reject that concept of 
destroying the rule of law and legalizing people that have broken our 
laws, but those who would be legalized would then get themselves a card 
where they could travel back and forth across the border at will.
  Now, I would ask, does the administration and the open borders lobby 
expect to see more or less border crossings if you legalize people that 
are here illegally? Are they going to go back and forth more? Are they 
going to go back and forth less? I'll submit they'll go back and forth 
more because they have their illegal passage that they do now; they 
will still have that option. Of course, they will have the option of 
the card that says now you can go back and forth at will.
  So we'll have more crossings across the border rather than less. When 
you have more crossings across the border, there are more opportunities 
to bring contraband across the border, more opportunities for 
terrorists to smuggle through, more opportunities for criminals to take 
advantage of the situation.
  And so I can't believe that there's a rationale in this argument that 
if you legalize 12 to 20 million people, if you legalize them, somehow 
America is safer. They're not any different people than they were 
before. They're the same people. They're just travelling back and forth 
more than they were. They're still hiding the drug smugglers within 
them. The crime will still take place, and the rationale that you won't 
have as much illegal smuggling going on or we can solve a big portion 
of the illegal problem, the rationale is the same rationale that says 
legalize illegal drugs, then you don't have an illegal drug problem. 
Legalize illegal aliens, then you don't have an illegal alien problem.
  That's as far as the rationale goes, but it surely does not solve the 
law enforcement problem, and no one in the administration can explain 
that to me, at least to the point where I could understand it, and I 
honestly tried, Mr. Speaker.
  So the rule of law is at stake. To grant amnesty is to grant a pardon 
to immigration law-breakers and reward them with the objective of their 
crime. That's the fairest, most balanced definition of amnesty. It's 
one that holds up against the criticism.
  The rule of law is the most essential element of American 
exceptionalism. If we didn't have the rule of law in America who would 
come here? They're leaving the other countries because they don't have 
the rule of law and they don't have the right to property and they 
can't be treated equally under the law and are not equal under the eyes 
of the law.
  But the rule of law says that everyone, every man and every woman, is 
equal under the eyes of the law, and that if you're going to be held 
accountable for a crime, you're innocent until proven guilty; and 
justice for a poor man is the same as justice for a rich man. That's 
the rule of law. And that's one of the essential pillars and the most 
essential pillar of American exceptionalism.
  But I don't know how many of those who are beneficiaries of the 1986 
amnesty plan I've talked to who say I'm for this amnesty, you need to 
grant a path to citizenship for people who came here illegally, and I 
ask them why, and they say, well, it was good for me; it was good for 
me, it was good for my family.
  But just that fact alone is surely not justification enough to tear 
the rule of law asunder and throw it over the side, Mr. Speaker. This 
rule of law is a precious commodity, a precious pillar of American 
exceptionalism, and if it's destroyed, we will never reach a glorious 
destiny in this country.
  It's essential that we preserve the rule of law, and if we grant 
amnesty to 12 to 20 million or more, that will attract another 12 to 20 
million, but regardless, the family, the friends, the progeny of the 
recipients of amnesty will be strong advocates for amnesty in coming 
years. If they get a path to citizenship, they will run for office. 
They will advocate for it. They will support candidates who advocate 
for amnesty, and they will continue to destroy this rule of law. 
America will never be the Nation that we have been again and never 
become the Nation that we can become because we will have almost 
knowingly and willfully sacrificed the rule of law on the alter of open 
borders because some businesses want cheap labor and they see an 
advantage in that. And some people want cheap labor and cheap votes, 
cheap votes on the left side, cheap labor more on the right than on the 
left but it's on both sides, and you put that coalition together, and 
the squeeze that comes on American society and culture is the squeeze 
on the middle class. That's another pillar of American exceptionalism 
is the middle class.

  We have been building this Nation on an ever broadening and an ever 
more prosperous middle class. An opportunity if you're an uneducated 
person with some ambition, maybe you get out of high school and you 
decide I don't want to go to college, it's not for me, but I want to go 
punch a clock and work my way up at the factory or at the meat plant or 
whatever it is, I want to make a good enough living that if I don't 
even move up the ladder, if I don't ever do that, I can still buy a 
modest home and I can still raise my family and send my kids off to 
school with expectation of a better life. That's been a foundation of 
the American dream, an ever broadening and ever more prosperous middle 
class.
  Today, cheap labor has destroyed the opportunities for the 
undereducated, the high school graduate or the high school dropout 
that's an American citizen. They can no longer go punch a clock and 
feed their family and pay for a modest home because wages have been 
driven down so cheap. The people that are at the top of the scale 
believe that they will never have to compete and neither will their 
children ever have to compete with the cheap labor that's been poured 
into this country. They will live in gated communities, and they will 
send their children off to Ivy League schools and they believe they'll 
always have that foundation and that capital base to make their gated 
communities, and the guarded society will be the destiny for all of 
their progeny.
  But the middle class can't hope for that. The middle class has been 
diminished in its numbers, and it is a percentage of society, and the 
relative prosperity has been diminished significantly. And the 
unemployment among the underskilled Americans has grown in direct 
proportion to the amount of unskilled labor that's coming here 
illegally to take on the jobs.
  Mr. Speaker, I'm for the rule of law. I'm for the middle class in 
America. I'm for opportunity for everyone, no matter what their 
education level is. We simply have to have a policy here in the United 
States that favors Americans. And the rationale that says that we are 
going to be a Nation that is somehow or another the relief valve for 
all the poverty in the world needs to take into account that there's a 
limit to the number of people that can live in the United States.
  And those who advocate for open borders, I ask the question, how many 
are too many? Where would you draw the line? They will never engage in 
that debate because they know they lose the minute they try to put a 
number down. They will say that it should be on supply and demand, this 
economy. And so if there's a demand for more labor, we ought to bring 
in more labor.
  If we're going to be the relief valve for poverty in the world, Mr. 
Speaker,

[[Page H6653]]

there are at least 4.6 billion people on the planet with a lower 
standard of living than the citizens in Mexico, at least 4.6 billion. 
Are we going to open our gates up at our ports of entry and bring the 
people in, any willing traveler, might be the way the President would 
phrase it? And the answer to that should be no.
  We can have compassion in a lot of ways, and one of them is to 
promote the American way of life around the globe. Be proud of who we 
are, be proud of our culture, be proud of our civilization, be proud of 
our history, be proud of the sacrifice of our Fore Fathers, be proud of 
the sacrifice of our current generation that's so proudly defended us 
around the world in the last 5 years.
  But we needed to preserve our destiny. We need to reject amnesty, Mr. 
Speaker, and so I think that it's essential that we build the wall and 
we hold together the rule of law and we preserve the middle class and 
remember who we're about and what we are as a people.
  By popular demand, I have occasionally demonstrated the construction 
of a wall so the people can understand, Mr. Speaker, how it can be 
done. I sat down and created a design for a concrete wall because I 
believe that it's harder to breach a concrete wall than it is a steel 
fence, and I think it's cost-effective.

                              {time}  2300

  But I want to describe what I have designed here.
  Whenever we build for a fence or a wall, we need to have a foundation 
underneath it. There will be people that will try to dig underneath it, 
so I designed a slip-form concrete form.
  This would go in a trench. You would set a trencher in here with a 
specially made grading machine that would trim this out and pour this 
concrete footing with a notch in it, trench and pour the footing as you 
go, so the hole didn't have a chance to cave in. As we poured this we 
would just drive the machine along and it would be trenching and 
pouring concrete, so there would be a cured foundation for the wall 
that would be completed as the trench and slip-form machine moved on.
  This is what it looks like from the end. This would be what it looks 
like from the top, the notch in the top, and that groove there, it will 
be obvious where I put that. So as that trench is moved along, and the 
foundation of this wall sets like this, then I would bring in precast 
concrete panels. These panels would be about 13\1/2\ feet tall, and 
they could be about any width, but proportionately it looks like 6 to 8 
feet. We could go wider, we could go 10 feet.
  Perhaps once this was cured, even the next day, come along with 
truckloads of precast concrete panels. They would sit on the truck like 
this, pick those up with a crane, swing them into place, set them down 
right into the notch of the foundation. Just this simple.
  It would take a little bit longer, but not appreciably longer to 
throw this all together in this fashion. It would be constructed 12-
foot high precast panel, slip-form concrete wall. It would look a lot 
like that. I would set that down within about 3 feet inside the border. 
I put some wire on top here, stabilize this thing and provide it as a 
deterrent.
  With concrete, you can mount anything on top for sensors. You can do 
cameras, vibration, motion detectors, you could mount any kind of new 
technology on top of this concrete. It wouldn't be possible to take a 
cutting torch through here. If you brought a concrete saw in to cut a 
notch through it, the noise and the vibration would be transferred down 
the wall, and our sensor devices would likely pick it up, or we could 
deploy some Border Patrol to that location.
  But as you could see, I would go inside also another 100 feet, and I 
would put a mesh fence up, even taller than this, so that there will be 
essentially a no man's land in between the wall and the fence.
  There are a lot of designs that would work. This is only one design, 
but I designed this and put the structure of this together, and I can 
put the estimate together too. This can be installed for about $1.3 
million a mile.
  Now, somebody was complaining about the cost of this. What is it, 
gold plated? Well, you can build a four-lane Interstate for about $4 
million a mile, but that's what we are paying the Border Patrol to 
watch the border right now.
  Now, I appreciate the work that they do, and I respect the work that 
they do, and I support them. They need better tools to work with. This 
is one of them that can be helpful. This is one of the components, or a 
version of fence and wall is one of the components to the Secure Fence 
Act.
  This Congress has mandated that that fence be built, and we 
appropriated money to it last week to the tune of $1 billion. The year 
before, we appropriated $1,187,565,000 just to round it out to even 
dollars. We appropriated about $2.2 billion to building the Secure 
Fence Act, and that includes money for technology, for virtual fence, 
as well as real fence.
  We need to stop the flood at our southern border. We need to 
dramatically slow the flow of illegal drugs across that border. It will 
reduce the amount of crime perpetrated and committed against Americans. 
It will save lives. It will save at least hundreds of lives. It will 
probably save thousands of lives.
  It will be cost effective, and it will send a message that America is 
a sovereign Nation that will protect its borders, and that we will 
direct traffic, human traffic and contraband, through the ports of 
entry. We will need to beef up our ports of entry. We need to have more 
Customs and Border Patrol people there, and more sophisticated devices 
there.
  But if we can't stop the bleeding at our border, there is no amount 
of enforcement that we can do in the interior that will be effective. 
The best description I have heard is the description by Dr. Phil 
Gingrey, a Congressman from Georgia, who has worked the emergency room. 
His description is if you have a patient come in the emergency room 
when they are bleeding all over the place, and they are bleeding from 
multiple wounds, and they are bleeding all over the floor, the first 
thing you don't do is grab the mop and the bucket and start to clean it 
up. You stop the bleeding. That's what you do.
  We have a tremendous amount of bleeding on our southern border. We 
have got to stop the bleeding, stabilize the patient, and then we can 
have a debate on how to clean up the mess. It is a tremendous mess here 
in the United States, because the Federal Government hasn't enforced 
the immigration laws to the level it needs to, and that has been an 
open permission slip that has been granted now to a number of the 
employers who have taken advantage of it. They have hired the cheap 
labor.
  The third thing is birthright citizenship, automatic citizenship that 
is a magnet for 350,000 pregnant mothers every year who come here to 
have their children in the United States. It's not a constitutional 
right, it's a practice to grant them citizenship here because they are 
born in the United States. Those things work against our sovereignty. 
Those things work against the middle class, those things would be 
against the rule of law.
  I am going to continue to advocate that we construct this double 
fence of wall on the southern border, that we complete it and we follow 
through on the congressional mandate, and we insist that the 
administration follow through. We need to do border enforcement first, 
employer enforcement second. When we get those things done, we will 
have stopped the bleeding and shut off birthright citizenship as the 
other bleed. Then we could have a debate in this Congress about how to 
clean up the mess, and it is one, one tremendous mess.
  That's my advocacy, that's my policy, that's where I stand.
  I appreciate the privilege to address you tonight.

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