[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 121 (Wednesday, July 30, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H7118-H7120]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE IMPACT OF A POROUS BORDER
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Joyce). Under the Speaker's announced
policy of January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from
Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) for 30 minutes.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, one of my reasons for coming and taking
some of this time this evening was around a frustration I have had, and
I think this may be for a lot of us who are from a border State, who
have been watching both the press and a lot of our brothers and sisters
around this place speechify about immigration, about the border crisis,
and what is happening. If you are actually from Arizona, this isn't a
new issue for us. We have been bathing and living this for decades now.
I had that moment this last week, Mr. Speaker, where I realized maybe
the awareness in this body is starting to change to understand the
impact of a porous border and what it means to communities.
When I had one of my friends here from the Midwest come up to me and
ask me a number of questions because he had held a townhall--and it was
the first time he had had to face barrages of questions about
immigration, about the unaccompanied minors, about the populations
coming across the border, what were the potential threats, the disease,
the drugs--then I realized maybe I have partially had a
misunderstanding because, when I go home, the border is one of the key
questions we talk about because of the effects it has had on my home
State, in regards to education, incarceration, health care, and the
amount of the burden that my citizens in Arizona, my taxpayers, have
had to take on that ultimately were the responsibility of this Federal
Government.
I wanted to go through just a handful things, a couple of numbers
that we have found, talk about some of the mechanics that may be coming
at us tomorrow. I know many of us are going to have some different
views on legislation, where it takes us, but I want to get some of the
record straight here.
Do you remember, over the last 3, 4 years, particularly before the
2012 Presidential race, we kept hearing how secure the border was? I
remember my former Governor, Janet Napolitano, giving a speech telling
us that the border is more secure today than ever before.
Do you remember the rhetoric that the President was bathing in, in
early 2012, allowing himself to be called the ``deporter in chief''?
Well, Mr. Speaker, as we later found out--and we found out sort of
when many of the Democrat base activists started believing it and
started protesting the President, saying: How can our Democratic
President be the deporter in chief?
All of a sudden, the truth came out, and we found out that the Obama
administration had manipulated the way they calculate the numbers.
The previous administration, if you were a Mexican national--and this
is for the southern border--if you had been arrested within a couple
miles of the border, you were captured, taken back, and released back
over the border, then that did not count in the deportation numbers.
This President very conveniently apparently allowed them to redefine
the math.
There becomes one of our great frustrations. We have debates here on
this floor, and we realized how manipulated so much of the math is,
some of the underlying statistics that we will come down here and
quote, and we are holding the data, and we realize that we have we got
conned. We got played.
Mr. Speaker, if you are going to build public policy, and I don't
care if you are on the left or the right, you have to have an
administration that is willing to play the data straight. If you are
going to make public policy on public data, give us honest data.
That becomes one of our great frustrations, Mr. Speaker, because I
will even have my hometown newspaper quote numbers that we found out
months ago weren't correct, were manipulated. They redefined the math.
So just keep that in mind.
Just something that came across my desk just before I was walking
over
[[Page H7119]]
here, one of my county sheriffs--and you have to understand, in
Arizona, we have only 15 counties--our counties are big, but Arizona is
a small State relative to the rest of the country.
We are also the most urbanized State in the country, something that
most people don't understand. Most of our population lives in Maricopa
County and then the Tucson area.
So think, Arizona is the most urbanized State because the Federal
Government controls the vast majority of our land. It is also why you
have these incredible opportunities of a porous border because you have
distances where there is no civilization.
Our Pinal County sheriff was on the radio, apparently, today and had
a quote that we have had 123,000 illegals arrested in the Tucson
sector. I am assuming that is over this last calendar year.
I haven't been able to get a response on that one, but think about
that. Right now, so much of the national attention is the discussion of
what is happening along the Rio Grande, in Texas. Don't forget Arizona.
Don't forget what is going on in our State for so many years.
I had an economics professor years ago, that we had actually had this
discussion of if you were ever to try to truly understand the math and
how porous a border is, how would you build an economic model to truly
understand it?
He had this brilliant idea, and it still rings in the back of my head
because, multiple times, we have had this discussion of if we were
going to build a border enforcement bill before allowing anything else
to move in this body, do you have the border State Governors be the
ones to declare the border secure?
Well, do you really want to put that type of political pressure on my
Governor in Arizona, the Governor of New Mexico, small States where,
let's face it, some of the activist groups with their budgets could
manipulate our Governor's races, our elections? So what would be an
honest economic method?
My old professor had this one thing: look at the price of drugs on
the street, look at the price of certain types of labor; but he liked
the drug calculation because if illegal drugs that are being sourced in
other parts of the world and the price stays stable or is actually
going down on the streets across the country, particularly in
communities like Phoenix, which is often a distribution center, you
actually have an economic model to understand if the border is truly
secure.
Mr. Speaker, in conversations I have had with some law enforcement
over the last year, apparently, a lot of the illegal drug prices on the
streets in my community are stable or going down; but, yet, I had a
President who is willing to stand behind microphones--I had the head of
Homeland Security willing to stand behind microphones and declare the
border more secure than ever, but the underlying fact is, now, we know
we weren't being told the truth.
On occasion, we will go home, and we will hold townhall meetings and
discussion groups in the chambers, and some of the activist groups will
come and sit down with us and say: Why won't you do this? Why won't you
do that? Why won't you accept the Gang of Eight bill? Why won't you do
this?
You turn and say: How would you hand that type of policy, that type
of legislation to this administration? Do you really trust them? Do you
really trust the Obama administration to keep its word? Do you really
trust the Obama administration not to play games with the math? Because
we already have multiple occasions here where I can demonstrate to you
the math has been played you with.
So then I wanted to chase after something else that we came across.
How many speeches here, how many discussions, how many press
conferences, how many talking heads on evening cable have we seen over
the last month saying, oh, the unaccompanied minor issue, well, was a
surprise to all of us, we never expected this, if we had just known--
which is an amazing thing because I have a few documents here, and they
are budget documents, and we all know what goes into starting to model
and build budgets.
{time} 2115
Here is one. It is a newsletter from the United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops, and it was talking about some of the Catholic
services. They do wonderful work. They do it at some great prices. But
this was a newsletter from last November, so November 2013. On that
one, the Department of Homeland Security estimates more than 60,000
unaccompanied minors could enter the United States in 2014. It was out
there in writing.
Then we came across some other things that we found very interesting.
Here is actually from 4-13, so over a year ago, a number of budget line
items for the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services in regards
to unaccompanied minors. The original 2014 budget request they had been
working on earlier was going to be $494 million, and somehow on 4-13,
so well over a year ago, they knew something was wrong and they added
another $373 million to that budget line item. Yet earlier today, I
watched a Member of the other side get behind a microphone and tell me
how surprised they were.
So let me pull what we voted for last January. Unaccompanied alien
children, line item, and this was woven into the continuing resolution
we did last January, so you know the numbers were worked up months
before that. We went from the 2013 estimate, $376 million, to $868
million. That is what we pushed out of here in January.
So back to that whole trust conversation, as we put forward policy in
dealing with our crisis on our border, don't forget States like Arizona
that have had to take this on for years and had to carry the burden of
the cost as those here in the Federal Government, here in this bubble
that is Washington, D.C., looked at a small State like Arizona and
said: Stop making so much noise; you are bothering us. Stop telling us
one thing in your speeches, but we can find documents that show your
staff knew something very different.
Tomorrow we will have a piece of legislation to step up and deal with
parts of the border crisis. It is not a half a loaf. It is not a
quarter of a loaf. It is not an eighth of a loaf. It is sort of the
heel of the loaf. But for those of us in Arizona, I believe it does a
handful of things that we have been demanding.
I have a piece of legislation to put 10,000 National Guard troops on
the border, and I had a little fun with a couple of Members who have
been here for a long time. I had one Member who has been here for a
long time, and she was just outraged that we would want to put that
many troops on the border. So I said: But you supported this in 2006
and 2008 when we had Operation Jump Start, and I think at that time we
put 7,000 National Guard troops on the border as auxiliary services to
the Border Patrol.
So think of that, 2006 to 2008, who controlled this body? It was the
Democrats. We had a Republican President, and Nancy Pelosi was the
Speaker here. And it is fascinating, now we are a few years later, that
formula has flipped. We are proposing it, and the very people who
supported it a few years ago now are just appalled. The duplicity
around this place sometimes is stunning.
One of the things that I support that will be voted on tomorrow, it
is not just putting National Guard troops, if our Governor so will;
there will be money behind it, the ability to pay for it. One more time
asking States like Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, that if you are going to
step up and take these responsibilities that belong to the Federal
Government, you need to cover our costs. I don't think it is enough
money that is in the bill, but remember, this is short term. What is
going to run tomorrow is actually only between now and the end of the
fiscal year, which is the end of September.
Updating the 2008 language, we have heard a lot of discussion about
this. The reality of it is we have a White House, Department of
Homeland Security, I believe, that has already been manipulating the
actual language. If you sit down and read it, it had to do with those
who were being exploited and being brought across the border,
trafficked. This is a little different mechanically than someone who
goes out and hires a coyote or a family who takes their children and
hires the services.
But nevertheless, we have been told over and over, if we don't update
the 2008 law, our hands are tied by so many of our law enforcement on
the border. So we are going to do that.
[[Page H7120]]
There are a couple of other mechanics here, but I want to make it
perfectly clear for many of us--and hopefully I am speaking for many of
my supporters and friends and family and my State--this isn't enough.
It may be just the beginning.
I do hope we get the chance to discuss the one issue here that
continues to be a bit of friction. The President's deferred action,
many of our friends on the left keep trying to tell us that that had
nothing to do with what we are seeing at the border, but as we have
already just walked through the documents, once the deferred action,
referred to as DACA, had gone into effect, they knew the numbers were
coming. They were calculating. We now have some charts that much of
this crisis was being watched for months. It finally just became
overwhelming.
Illegal immigration--and legal immigration--work on incentives and
disincentives. We have created incentives. This President has created
incentives to break our laws, and until we step up with a number of
policies that change those incentives, I believe we are partially
chasing our tail here. We will do some good things. We need to step up
the quality of our law enforcement and our border enforcement, but we
also need an administration that we can trust, an administration that
will tell us the truth, and an administration that will actually follow
our laws.
With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________