[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 35 (Thursday, March 11, 2010)]
[House]
[Page H1342]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              THIRD FRONT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I bring you news from the third front. 
The battle wages for control of the border, and I'm not talking about 
the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan where the Taliban runs back 
and forth at will to commit crimes in Afghanistan and then goes and 
hides in Pakistan. No, I'm bringing you news from the border, the 
southern border of the United States, which is very violent.
  In Reynosa, Mexico, right across the border from the Rio Grande River 
in Texas, recently the U.S. consulate closed because of the violence on 
the border. In fact, Americans are prohibited from being in that 
consulate office because of the kidnappings, the murders, the 
shootings, the Old West-style events that are taking place on this 
border town south of our border.
  The inconvenient truth is there is a battle for the border that is 
taking place in our own country. Across the southern border of the 
United States the drug cartels, all in the name of money and their 
financing of illegal activities, including organized crime and 
violence, and working with the coyotes--those people, for money, that 
smuggle people into the United States--are seeking control of our 
border so that they can bring in drugs and people. It seems as though 
drugs and people are coming into the United States and going south are 
money and guns.
  Someone has said recently that the northern border is porous and the 
southern border is porous. But at the northern border all you've got to 
do is walk across; on the southern border you can shoot your way across 
into the United States. But be that as it may, we have a problem. It's 
an inconvenient truth that we spend time on other issues besides 
national security of our own borders, and it seems to me that we ought 
to solve this problem.
  But before we do this, we now hear this talk again, this talk by 
those who don't live on the border about, well, let's just give 
everybody that's in the country illegally a little amnesty. Amnesty for 
all is what they say. But these individuals that preach amnesty are 
ignoring the obvious: if we grant amnesty, that means all of the 
criminals that have come into the United States--like drug dealers, 
like those bandits that come here to commit crimes--they get that free 
amnesty as well. And they get the permission to stay here in the United 
States, not just those people that come here trying to seek a better 
life and to work.
  Some have estimated that in our county jails and our prisons up to 20 
percent of the people incarcerated are in this country from foreign 
countries. And yet we want to grant amnesty to all of these people? 
Amnesty has proven in this country it doesn't work; it encourages 
people to come here illegally.
  So what should we do? We should do three things and we should do them 
in this order: the first thing we do is secure the border and mean it 
when we say we will secure the border. If necessary, we should have our 
military on the southern border of the United States so that people 
don't cross into this country illegally without permission of the 
United States. We have given lipservice to border security, and we 
haven't solved that problem.

                              {time}  1400

  You tell me, Mr. Speaker, that the greatest country that has ever 
existed, the greatest country militarily that has ever existed, the 
strongest country that has ever existed in the history of the world 
can't protect its own borders? I think not. We can do it, but we don't 
have the moral will to do it, and we have to make the decision that we 
will secure the Nation's border. The first duty of government is 
national security.
  After we secure the border, we've got to deal with the immigration 
problem. The legal immigration system we have now is a disaster. It has 
been a disaster since the fifties. It is time to set that aside and to 
draw up an easier model, a more efficient model, a business model that 
solves the issues of immigration, a model that makes it more 
streamlined, efficient, and secure so that, when people come into the 
United States legally, we know who they are and so that we keep up with 
who they are--whether they want to be here as citizens, whether they 
want to work, whether they want to be tourists, or whether they're 
coming over here just to visit somebody.
  Solve the border problem first. Solve the immigration problem second. 
Then deal with the problem of the 20 million-plus people illegally in 
the United States. We can solve that problem, but we can't solve that 
problem until we deal with the first two. It is time for the government 
to do its job. The duty of government is to protect us, not to give our 
country away to other people who want to come here illegally.
  So, right now, the border war continues--controlled by the drug 
cartels, controlled by the human smugglers who wish to make money and 
who profiteer from illegal activities on the southern border of the 
United States. We owe it to the citizens of this country, and we also 
owe it to the citizens of the countries which are south of the United 
States to secure the border, to fix the immigration issue, and then to 
deal with the issue of the illegal immigrants who are here.
  And that's just the way it is.

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