[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 64 (Thursday, May 1, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H3400-H3403]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN LEGAL AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from California
(Mr. Rohrabacher) for 42 minutes as the designee of the majority
leader.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, one of the things that makes America
great is that our country is a country that--regardless of one's race,
one's religion, or one's ethnicity--we, as citizens of the United
States, make up a collective family, the American family; yes, a
diverse family, but a family, in and of itself, composed of all the
people, the great variety of people we have here from every part of the
world who have come here to live in freedom and enjoy the opportunity
and the liberty and the justice that America represents.
Here, despite where one was born or whose one's parents are or when
even one became a citizen, we are all equally part of that family.
Just as many families across our Nation have come to discover, at one
point or another, in a time when there are scarce resources, when you
are going through perhaps an economic crisis or trying to avert an
economic crisis, it is not unreasonable to provide for one's family
before helping others.
It is not selfish to watch out, thus, for our fellow Americans. It is
not selfish to watch out for our fellow Americans above the well-being
of foreigners, even foreigners who wish us well and, yes, foreigners
who would like to become part of the American family; but, first and
foremost, those Americans from every part of the world who are citizens
of this country or, yes, who have come here legally in the attempt to
become a U.S. citizen, their interest must be our first priority.
Tonight, I draw my attention and the attention of my colleagues to
the dire consequences that we face if many--and many people have been
insisting that we do this--if we implement the so-called immigration
reform which, of course, would legalize the status of those who are
currently unlawfully living and working in our country.
Just as we are a nation of immigrants, we are also a nation of laws.
What the American people and my colleagues must keep in mind, while
debating this issue of immigration, is the distinction between legal
immigration and illegal immigration.
Perhaps the thing that has disturbed me most in this debate is the
attempt to blur the difference between the two, the difference, even to
the point where statistics are being used to say: well, this is what
immigrants have done for our society.
No, the statistics are what immigrants have done, but that does not
include the illegal immigrants that are part of the equation.
No, illegal immigration is on a totally different plane. Legal
immigration and illegal immigration are on totally different planes.
Too often, we see these lines blurred, as I say, in this debate.
I happen to be very pro-legal immigration, and there is no reason for
most Americans not to lift their head up when we actually understand
that our country admits more legal immigrants annually than all the
other countries of the world combined, totaling roughly a million legal
immigrants every year.
While our immigration system certainly needs reforming or making it
more effective and more efficient in what it is doing, this controlled
and open process of legal immigration has worked well for America and
demonstrates the capacity for our people to have compassion and
generosity towards other human beings, other people who would like to
come here to be part of the American family--coming here while obeying
the rules, coming here not thumbing their nose at our legal system,
coming here with respect towards the rest of us by obeying the laws and
the regulations that are necessary for someone to come here legally.
Those folks have been wondrous, and, in fact, we all trace our roots
back to people like this who came here and have contributed so much to
the well-being of our country, and those million people who come here
legally every year are a major positive asset to our country.
Despite our generous legal immigration policy, it is estimated that
anywhere from 11 to 20 million foreigners are unlawfully present in the
United States today.
While I certainly understand the positive motives and the essential
goodness of the vast majority of these trespassers, of these people who
are here illegally, it does not negate that they are lawbreakers, nor
does it negate the economic and social consequences of inundating our
country--
[[Page H3401]]
far above that million-person mark of legal immigration, but inundating
our country with a large number of people, thus causing a growing
damage to the American family, to people who are here who have come
here legally, and to our U.S. citizens.
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The dire consequences are evident to average Americans who see the
decline in the quality of their schools, their neighborhoods--the
safety of their neighborhoods, yes--and their health care. Yes, even
their jobs. They can see the decline in the quality of the jobs that
are available to working people in this country. Not only are citizens
hurt by permitting illegals to cut in front of the line, but it is also
a slap in the face to those who continue to wait their turn to come to
America.
When we give in to trying to placate and trying to meet the interests
of people who come here illegally, it is done at the expense of those
people who are waiting in line and want to be American citizens and
want to obey our laws and want to come here legally. Yes, illegal
immigrants hurt the American people and hurt legal immigrants even
worse.
Earlier this year, President Obama's 2012 unilateral deferral of
deportation for certain illegal immigrants, essentially an amnesty
decree, caused huge delays for thousands--that is thousands who are
here legally seeking green cards, seeking to have government employees
do their job and to actually make the immigration system work. Our
government employees were servicing illegal immigrants at the expense
of legal immigrants. They got it totally backwards. And that is the
argument that we face today. It has a lot of things totally backwards.
While it is concerning that the President's actions appear to be
political--which is this effort that we saw to try to appeal to the
various segments of our population in order to conduct policy in the
interest of illegal immigrants--I am most troubled by the fact that,
basically, our President would defy the rule of law and congressional
intent by unilaterally granting preferential treatment to those
immigrants who are here illegally. And our President then, without
congressional intent or any rule of law behind it, actually shifted the
services of our government to service the needs of people who are here
illegally at the expense of those people who are here legally.
Nearly 4.5 million mostly legal immigrants are currently caught up in
the backlog of our bureaucratic immigration process. That is 4.5
million people who we need to be concerned about. They are part of the
American family. They have come here as part of those 1 million legal
immigrants that we have coming in, but yet they end up waiting
decades--years, and sometimes decades--to make sure that their papers
are processed so that they can become citizens.
The last thing we need to do--and unfortunately this administration
has been doing it--is shift over the work effort and the time and the
resources that are necessary to help these people who come here legally
become citizens, shift that over to trying to service those people who
are here illegally and have thumbed their nose at our law.
A policy which hurts those who follow the law and hurts those who are
U.S. citizens and then rewards illegal and dishonest behavior is going
to have some pretty bad consequences.
We are not fooled by the rhetoric--and no one should be fooled by the
rhetoric--that we need to have ``comprehensive immigration reform'' and
that it will in some way impact in a positive way what I have been
talking about this afternoon. What they really mean when they talk
about ``comprehensive immigration reform''--what they really mean--is
``amnesty.'' They don't want to use that word because the American
people learned what that was all about. What they are really doing is
rewarding those who have broken the law; and they do so at the expense
of American citizens and, yes, at the expense of those immigrants who
are here legally.
As the saying goes: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame
on me. Mr. Speaker, we have already been fooled once. Amnesty has been
tested, and it has proven to be a failed policy. In fact, it has served
only as a catalyst for chain migration, which has compounded many of
the horrific economic and social challenges that we face today.
So we have already had an amnesty in the past, and we know what it
has done to the challenges that we had then. It has made them worse.
And now we have ended up with, as I say, horrific economic and social
challenges.
I am, of course, speaking--when I talk about the amnesty of the
past--of the 1986 immigration reform bill, where Congress infamously
promised President Reagan that they would enhance border security in
exchange for an amnesty on the behalf of nearly 3 million illegal
immigrants then residing in the United States.
Needless to say, border security was never enhanced and, needless to
say, many more than the 3 million that we were supposedly talking about
were legalized through chain migration. And millions upon millions more
would continue to illegally flock to our country.
Why?
Because they saw that those people who had come here illegally ended
up becoming naturalized, ended up being put in front of the line of
those people who were waiting diligently in other countries to come
here legally. Thus, it created a major increase in the flood of
illegals into our country.
As common sense would dictate, the U.S. Government cannot continue to
send this type of mixed message, the message which basically says we
are going to reward that person who is here illegally by making him a
citizen, putting him through the process actually even before those
people who have come here legally, and anybody who gets here illegally,
we will reward them with citizenship. They will then have the rights of
Americans for education, for health care and the opportunities that are
abundant here for American citizens and legal immigrants.
Well, if we continue to say anybody who can get to this country
illegally or not is going to have those benefits, that is a mixed
message if we expect that illegal immigration is going to be halted or
in some way that the people overseas who are considering will hesitate
to come here. In fact, we are rewarding those who made it here. Without
expecting the legal immigration invasion of our country to increase, we
actually gave people the incentive to come here illegally.
Illegal immigration only dramatically jumped after the 1986 amnesty
deal, setting the path for our current predicament.
And what is our current predicament?
We have social and economic dislocation that is harming the American
people, especially middle class working people. Like after the 1986
amnesty deal, those admitted into the United States under a new amnesty
will surely have spouses, children, parents, even siblings back in
their home country with whom they will want to reunite. They will
insist on reuniting with--legally or illegally--those people who are in
the United States.
So that is why we have ended up in a situation where we hear people
say: Well, we have these people that we will never see in our family in
this other country. Well, the people who are saying that have every
right to go to that other country. It is as if someone who is in the
United States who is saying that we have to reunite the families--and
they are here illegally in the first place--that that is a reason that
we should legalize their status so that they can reunite the family
that has been left behind. No. The other option is people who are here
illegally should go home and be with their families that they left
behind. It is better for them to do that.
So this has really been a potential threat when we talk about family
reunification and the rest because there is a potential to triple the
number of people who are currently here in this country illegally.
Let's get that right--triple. If we give amnesty and we legalize the
status of those who are here illegally, we could be tripling the number
of people. We could be inserting this number of people into our system.
If true, this abrupt population swell will fundamentally change
America socially, economically, and, yes, politically, causing major
consequences that we can even see across the board. And you can see
what those consequences
[[Page H3402]]
will be because those people that now are swirling in the ranks of our
population will mainly be poorer people, people at the poorest end of
the economic level. We will be importing millions--tens of millions--of
poor people, increasing poverty in America.
The stress that would place on our social services is one thing, but
to our economy and what that does to the American people in the job
market would be horrendous. According to the nonpartisan Congressional
Budget Office, every 1 percent increase in the labor force attributable
to immigration tends to lower the relative wages of all American
workers. Let's get that straight. That is what happens when you have an
increase in the labor force by immigrants who come to this country.
That is why we want to limit it to 1 million people.
If we have 11, 20, 30, 40 million people coming in, we can expect
major decreases in the actual wages that all Americans receive. It is
going to impact the American wages. Surprise, surprise. When you have a
flood of illegal immigrants into a country, they are bending down the
wages, bending down the wages of the American people.
However, those who stand to lose the most are whom, when we say that
these people are mainly people from lower income levels? So what we are
talking about, the people who are really losing by legalizing the
status of illegals, by having a plan that would eventually bring tens
of millions of more people into our country and insert them into our
process, the people who are hurt the most are low-income, low-skilled
American workers.
One major study found that increases in immigration during the 1980-
2000 era resulted in an 8 percent decrease in wages for high school
dropouts and a 3 percent decrease in wages for the average American
worker. Well, this is hardly surprising. Well, for me, it wouldn't be
surprising.
During my college days, I was a janitor. I worked as a janitor. And
let's note, I worked as a janitor because I needed a job. I was
cleaning toilets. I was scrubbing floors. I was picking up trash. That
was not my desired job, but I needed the money.
Historically--right now--jobs such as these would be a steppingstone
for those who perhaps lacked an education or were trying to earn their
way through school. I was trying to help pay my education expenses. But
after decades of illegal immigrants who have been bending back the
wages and the businesses willing to exploit them, many of the jobs that
we are talking about, like janitorial jobs, no longer pay even the
wages that were paid in real dollars then.
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I have gone back and taken a look at what a janitor makes, and
janitors were making basically the same pay as I made back 40 and 50
years ago. Well, why is that? Our economy has quadrupled, maybe
tripled, in the last 40 years. How come janitors make exactly the same
amount of money?
They have been left out. They have been left out because the job of
janitor has been bid down. The wages for people who would be janitors
in our country have been bid down, bid down by people who flooded into
our country illegally willing to work for a pittance, willing to live
in homes where you have three or four families to a house that is only
supposed to have one family.
We have a situation where who is being hurt? It is that American who
would have had that job being that janitor--maybe working his way
through school, maybe not--who now can't take that job because it pays
so little. People say, well, how can we afford to take care of
buildings if you are going to have to pay a certain amount of money,
more money to those people who are taking care of the buildings?
Well, proportionately it is the same. The people who own the
buildings are making a bigger profit now at the expense of the fact
they are paying a pittance to illegals to take care of the building.
But also we can rest assured that technology would by now have
developed that would make the life of a janitor and the job of a
janitor much more efficient. You probably would have toilet bowl
machines that would permit one person to clean 100 toilet bowls a night
rather than 12 or 15, and that, then, would mean that the person
running that machine and making that machine would be an American
citizen or a legal immigrant who is earning a decent wage.
There is nothing wrong with having people who are working those jobs
earn a decent wage so that they could then raise a family and, yes,
maybe own their own little home some day. That is the way it used to
be. When you are a working person, then you can expect to earn enough
to maintain a decent standard of living. But we have a flood of
illegals coming in. Especially after we gave that amnesty, what we have
done is bid down the wages of the American people as tens of millions
of illegals are now present in our society.
To this point, between 1960 and 2012, a time when America was
experiencing its highest levels of immigration, native-born workers and
legal immigrants lost an average of $402 billion in wages while native-
owned firms, meaning American-owned companies, profited by an average
of $437 billion.
So thus we have wages being depressed by illegal immigration that
actually lowered the amount of money by $400 billion in money that was
paid in wages, yet the people running the business or owned the
property were $437 billion richer. So what we have seen here is a huge
shift of wealth to whom? To upper-class owners of businesses at the
expense of the lowest level of Americans.
Now, how is our country a safe country? Our country is a safe country
because all of us who are part of the American family are doing our
part to protect our country. Those people at the lower end of the
economic sphere, they are the ones who join the military and go out and
defend us. They are the ones who obey the law. They are the ones whom
we rely upon in their good judgment to support the Constitution and a
rule of law. If they lose faith in the system, we will suffer greatly.
That is one of the things that is happening is that the poor people
are being left out. Actually, their standard of living is going down.
Of course, our friends in the other party have provided very lucrative
welfare abilities to people to be on the dole rather than giving them a
good job. At the same time, they are pushing for more government
programs to give the dole, to make people dependent and thus, I might
say, lose their dignity of being able to be self-sufficient. At the
same time, the folks on the other side of the aisle are pushing for
amnesty, for illegal immigration, that would bring in 40 million new
people, insert 40 million people, foreigners, into our system.
What is that going to do for the poor people of this country? Why are
the unions in our country not jumping up and supporting the rights of
their working people not to be having to face illegal immigrant labor
bidding down their labor? Over the last 50 years, there has been a
massive transfer of wealth going on, and yet at the same time we see
the business wages, business profits, going up and workers' wages going
down. Yet we have policies that seem to encourage it that don't make
any sense.
We have people who use the rhetoric of trying to care for America's
poor. The last thing they should be doing is bringing in 40 million new
foreigners--mostly poor--into our country.
Knowing this, it should be no surprise that Big Business has been a
consistent advocate of amnesty. Big Business wants cheap labor, and
this, I might add, is not being loyal to the American family. To be
loyal to the American family, no matter who they are, whether they are
poor Americans, working class Americans, we should be watching out for
each other.
Lower wages, however, are not the only negative impact of mass
illegal immigration into our country. Similar structural breakdowns and
strains can be seen in our education system. People in the lower income
parts of town are seeing their education system fall apart. We see the
health care system in our country falling apart. We see as well in a
variety of other institutions that people rely on that the strain of
millions of illegals--and they want to bring more in--is destroying
this social, this economic, and this infrastructure that our people
depend on.
All things considered, if amnesty were being granted to the 11 to 20
million illegal immigrants currently in
[[Page H3403]]
the United States, it would cost the American taxpayers an additional
$6.3 trillion over the next 50 years. At least 45 million foreigners,
mostly poor, would be inserted into our society.
Is that going to make America a better place? Are the working people,
the people who are part of the American family, going to be better off
because of that? Absolutely not. And the voices of the American people
need to be heard because we have people posturing as if they are doing
a favor for the less fortunate by advocating this amnesty for illegal
immigrants which would bring in tens of millions of more poor people
from foreign countries into our country.
With our national debt approaching $18 trillion, a budget deficit of
over half a trillion dollars and two unsustainable entitlement programs
that we need in order to maintain some sort of security for the
American people, Medicare and Social Security, these are currently on
the road to bankruptcy, and if we bring in these millions more people,
we can expect that the expenses of our government will shoot up trying
to provide benefits for people who now--by the way, now after making
them legal, they are entitled to those benefits.
Someone who is here legally is entitled to every benefit and
protection as people who are here who were born here. And if we
legalize the status of illegals, we are taking tens of millions of
foreigners who are here illegally and granting them the rights to all
those programs.
America cannot afford amnesty for those foreigners who are here
illegally. We must take care of the needs of the American family, of
American citizens, and of legal immigrants into our society who have
joined our family. Their interests have to come first over the
interests of--yes, and let me just say, there is no doubt that those
people who are here illegally in our country, the vast, vast majority,
90 percent or more, are wonderful people.
We should not fool ourselves into thinking that we can somehow take
care of all of the wonderful people in the world. We can't do it. As we
try to do it and try to open up our borders even more than the 1
million legal immigrants that we have, we are going to attract even a
bigger flood into our country which will put even more pressure on us.
What we are doing in that case is hurting our fellow Americans.
Even if these people are wonderful people who come here legally and
they are seeking opportunity, I am sorry, we can't take care of the
whole world, and we can't tell the world that whatever good person
comes here illegally we are eventually going to give them amnesty and
they will be eligible for all our programs.
There is an argument about what are called the DREAMers, young people
who were brought here by their parents. They didn't come here
voluntarily. Their parents brought them here when they were 2 or 3. And
now they don't have legal status. There are a lot of obstacles in their
way. They want those obstacles removed. They want themselves to be
legalized. But do you know what will happen if we do that, if we say
that a young person going to school because they are young and they
have been brought here by their parents, what is going to happen? What
will be the message if we do that?
If we legalize the status of just the DREAMers, we are telling the
people throughout the world, man, when you come here illegally to the
United States, make sure you bring your children. We are telling people
throughout the world, bring your children to this country so we can
take care of the needs of your children.
We have needs of our own children in the United States of America.
And they are wonderful kids out there that we care about, but we have
to care about our own kids first. People who have come here legally
have that right. They are part of our family. American citizens are
part of our family. But the well-being of children from foreigners in
various countries throughout the world has to be second on our list,
down on our list, way down as compared to the well-being of our own
people.
Yes, if we take care of the DREAMers, what is going to happen is we
will be encouraging a mass flow of young people into our country.
Younger people who are in school, we will have to take care of their
education, et cetera. That is not right. You can't give the incentive
to people to come here and expect that we are not going to have many,
many more people coming here. We will have many more DREAMers coming
here if we legalize the status of those who have been brought here
illegally by their parents.
This issue continues to be presented as a humanitarian imperative, as
something that without cost we could help these people among us. We can
do that without cost? There is nothing without cost. We are being
presented that we can have an amnesty as if it is not going to cost the
American people. It is costing us right now. What we have done in the
last 20 years to ignore this influx of illegals into our country has
already caused great damage to the well-being and the standard of
living of American workers at the lowest level.
People say they think they are appealing to Mexican Americans by
being for amnesty for illegals. The hardest-hit community in America,
perhaps the hardest-hit, and certainly minority communities, including
Mexican Americans, they know where their jobs are going. They know when
they have a job and an illegal comes across the border from whatever
country, Asia or Mexico or Honduras or Ireland or wherever they are
coming from, if they are taking the job of an American, the Mexican
American community is the hardest-hit. Their education funds are the
hardest-hit. Their neighborhoods are the hardest-hit.
That is why I believe that Americans of Mexican descent are patriots.
They are part of the American family. And that is why I do not believe
that they want to legalize the status of every illegal that has poured
into our country. It hurts their families more than anyone.
So what we need to do now is make sure that as we discuss legalizing
the status of illegals, of amnesty--they don't want to call it that,
they want to call it comprehensive immigration reform--that we keep in
mind these things could have a dramatic, negative impact on the well-
being of American people. Whose side are we on? That is what you have
got to ask.
What are the answers to this? Let me just say that solutions are not
easy, but I would suggest there is a simple but not easy solution. We
should make sure that anyone who comes here illegally does not get a
job. We need to E-Verify all the jobs that are here in the United
States to make sure they are not going to illegals, and they should be
going to Americans or legal immigrants. And we should make sure that no
illegal immigrant or the immigrant's family receives government
benefits, whether it is health care or education.
I don't believe in deportation, actually. I think deportation is the
wrong tactic. But unless you are going to--the President, obviously,
didn't fulfill his obligation for deportation, but he didn't take
another step that would then deter illegal immigration. The step to do
it is no deportation. It is dehumanizing. No sweeps through people's
community. But don't give jobs and benefits that belong to the American
people to foreigners who are here illegally. That is the solution.
They will go home. They will go home in peace. They have our well
wishes. But they are not going to have our jobs and our scarce
resources that should be going to the American people.
{time} 1415
I would ask my colleagues, as this discussion on the legalizing of
illegal immigrants takes place, that we be honest with each other, and
yes, that we be compassionate, but that our compassion is aimed at the
American people and legal immigrants and not just compassion for those
who come here illegally.
No matter how wonderful people these people are, we have to consider
the American people first.
Mr. Speaker, with that, I yield back the balance of my time.
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