[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 125 (Thursday, July 20, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H3884-H3885]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ISSUES OF THE DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 9, 2023, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. 
Grothman) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I am going to address a topic I have 
addressed before this time earlier in the week, but it was brought up 
again yesterday in the Oversight Committee, entirely inappropriately. 
It is something that is brought up with each authorization bill or 
appropriation bill, and it is apparent that the other side of the aisle 
desperately wants a new bureaucracy dealing with what I will call 
preferences.
  It has been in the news lately because there was a Supreme Court 
decision saying that, for the first time in 50 years, in the United 
States, we could not discriminate or use--I guess they were primarily 
focusing on race but they could have used sex as well--in university 
admissions. It put an end to 50 years of discrimination at 
universities.
  It has also been in the paper because we have a Secretary of Labor 
appointed, not yet confirmed, that believes that this country was built 
on white supremacy, and we have a proposed new head of the Joint Chiefs 
who believes that we should cap the number of White male officers at 42 
percent.
  Of course, this gets into other areas as well that the Court did not 
touch. It gets involved in the area of government hiring. It gets into 
the area of hiring by businesses that do business with the government.
  I think a lot of Americans are not aware that if you have at least 50 
employees and do business with the government, you are required it 
submit a statement every year to the government called the EEO-1, 
listing the race and sex and the amount of money all your employees 
make.
  It also goes into play with government contracting. Frequently, 
government contracts are reserved for certain people.
  It will continue to be an issue as even after this decision, 
individual universities have gone down the path of not using tests for 
admissions. Historically, for example, to get into medical school you 
had to pass a test called the MCAT test. I had always felt when I was 
in my teens and twenties that we had the smartest kids go on to become 
doctors.
  But the medical schools are shifting away from tests, which are an 
objective measure of intelligence, and using things like essays to 
determine who the next doctor is.
  I want to make several comments about this preference idea and why it 
is so important, as we work through our authorizing bills and our 
appropriation bills, that we do not slide into this.
  First of all, for people who claim, like our Secretary of Labor, that 
we are a racist country, or a Eurocentric country, I want to point out 
that the most successful ethnic group in America today are people from 
India. The second most successful are people from the Philippines. 
Other groups like Chinese, Japanese, if you look at Latin America, 
Cubans are all more successful than the average American, at least 
judged by income earned.
  According to Thomas Sowell, the children of immigrants from the West 
Indies, the children of immigrants from, say, Jamaica or the Bahamas 
are more successful than the native-born.
  If all these people come here and are successful, why in the world 
would we want the government sticking their nose in and establishing a 
whole new bureaucracy?
  I also had an experience over the weekend with regard to the Hmong. 
The Hmong are perhaps the most--the largest number of so-called 
minorities in my district. I talk to a lot of the Hmong at their 
festivals. It is always enjoyable to be at their festivals. And, it 
gives me a chance to eat Hmong food, which allows me to become more 
used to very hot food.
  It is always enjoyable to see such happy people as the Hmong are in 
their festivals. They had a festival in Sheboygan last week.
  One of the things I like to ask the Hmong, since if there was ever a 
group that would have felt like a minority when they came here it would 
be the Hmong; obviously not European. When they came here they didn't 
know the language.
  I ask either the older generation how many children plus nieces or 
nephews they have and they all smile. When they get done adding it up, 
it seems like it is 30 or 40.
  I ask, have any of them had any trouble with the law? No. Do all of 
them graduate from high school? Yes. Do all of them have jobs? Do all 
those that have children, were the children all with the mother and 
father at home? The answer is yes.

                              {time}  1230

  I find the same thing when I ask the younger generation, and I ask 
them about their siblings or their cousins. They have to add up in 
their mind how many there are. There could be 30, 35, 40.
  All of them have had no problem with the law. All of them, when they 
have children, there is a father in the house. All of them are living 
the American Dream. Again, it drives home the idea that in America we 
do not have a problem in which we have a European class that is 
preventing other people from succeeding. Indeed, the new people who 
come here do better than the people who have been here all along.
  That would be one indication that we do not need these new 
bureaucrats running around labeling people by their racial background.
  The next thing I will point out that inevitably all of these programs 
have is what I will refer to as, ``stupid rules.''
  Let us determine, for example, who is Hispanic and in need of help. 
If my ancestors were in Spain, came to Cuba for

[[Page H3885]]

a couple generations, and then moved to the United States, they would 
be considered Hispanic in need of help. If my ancestors lived in Spain 
and came to the United States, they would not need help. They would not 
be considered a group in need of preferences.
  If you are, for example, one-quarter Native American and one-quarter 
Hispanic and the rest, say, English or German, you would, again, be 
considered a minority.
  A minority that needs help, even though nobody in your life even knew 
what your ancestry was, but according to the diversity bureaucrats, you 
get to check off a box and are in need of special help.
  There are a variety of reasons they claim we need affirmative action, 
one of them is to make up for past injustices, but all of these ethnic 
programs or whatever we want to call them, apply to people who just 
moved to the United States. Does it make any sense to say someone who 
moved here directly from Morocco or Nigeria or Haiti gets preferences 
when they had nothing bad happen to them in America?
  As a matter of fact, it is even more ridiculous than that. They get 
preferences over the native born. For the purposes of filling out the 
form, if I move here from Peru and I am not even a citizen, but I have 
a green card, I get preferences over a person who has lived in America 
all along. That is, obviously, a potential for a lot of divisiveness.
  Along these lines, there are two rationales. One rationale is, we 
have to make up for past injustices, which makes no sense when you are 
giving preferences to people who just moved here. The other one is 
supposedly to show diversity.
  Now, let's look at our examples again. If I moved here or my 
ancestors moved here from Cuba, I don't know any Spanish, I have never 
been to a Spanish-speaking country, and I have grown up in a northern 
suburb in the United States. What diversity do I bring to any company? 
What diversity do I bring to any school? I bring no diversity at all. I 
don't know why that is not talked about by people who want to push 
these programs.
  As I mentioned, these programs also affect grants given or who gets 
government contracts. The government sticks their nose in, and if a 
husband owns a business, he is penalized. If a wife owns the business, 
that may be considered good in creating diversity. Is that fair? They 
both have similar backgrounds.
  It does encourage lying and crookedness in America as you run across 
people who put their business in the wife's name so they can get the 
government contract, but is that something we want to do? I don't think 
so. Nevertheless, that is an inevitable result of this diversity.
  The next question that has to be brought up is for a lot of jobs, 
probably for the vast majority of jobs, is ethnic diversity really 
something that matters?
  If we are hiring a new engineer, if we are hiring a new brain 
surgeon, does it matter whether you are from China or Cuba or Morocco 
or Poland? You want the best person, the one who has done best in 
school, the one who has demonstrated just an innate intelligence to do 
these jobs. Diversity or where your ancestors came from does not help 
as well.
  Now, let's look at another big reason why it is important that the 
Republican Party fight these diversity bureaucrats every step of the 
way. These diversity bureaucrats have to justify their job, and to 
justify their job, they will do things like have little classes in 
diversity in their businesses or colleges or governmental areas.
  These diversity bureaucrats, to justify their existence, will tell 
young people, or older people, that there is a huge amount of racism in 
America, and they need the diversity bureaucrats to even things out.
  This is one way to destroy America.
  You are going to cause people to walk around with a chip on their 
shoulder who should not be walking around with a chip on their 
shoulder.
  Worse, you are going to be dividing America. One of the things that 
has made America so great is, out of many, one--E Pluribus Unum.
  The diversity bureaucrats want to go the other way. They do not want 
people from all around the world considering themselves one united 
group. The diversity bureaucrats want to take what was one united 
group, tear it apart, and have people angry at each other or fighting 
with each other. This does not work anywhere else in the world.
  When I read about elections in other parts of the world, one thing 
that makes them so contentious, sometimes violent, is that the 
elections become a contest between two different groups.
  Look at what has happened in Sri Lanka over a period of years between 
the two big groups there. What has happened in Nigeria between the 
different tribes there. Of course, in the 1970s, it wound up there were 
tens of thousands of people dying as the ethnic groups or the tribes in 
Nigeria separated and wound up fighting.
  Why in the world would we want elections in America to be a contest 
between groups? That is sadly what these bureaucracies are going to 
want.

  I will close with a couple anecdotes, so people back home know what 
is going on in America.
  I know somebody who worked for a manufacturing firm and that 
manufacturing firm had four engineers. They all were men. They had to 
hire a fifth engineer and they were told by the diversity firm they 
contracted with that their fifth hire had to be a woman.
  It didn't matter if they had found a perfectly good candidate for the 
job. They were afraid that the government would come in and penalize 
them in some fashion or audit them if the next person was not a woman. 
It clearly is not right.
  The same company was going to hire a new person in management and 
their first four or five members of management were all of European 
descent. They were told they had to go out of the way to hire somebody 
who wasn't European in management rather than just taking the best 
person that they could.
  I don't think most Americans would agree with that sort of thing, but 
that is what has been going on in America for the last 50 years. I 
strongly encourage the Republican Party to draw a line in the sand.
  Joe Biden wants to insert these diversity bureaucrats in all 
government agencies, and they will stick their nose in hiring 
decisions, in promoting decisions. They will stick their nose in who 
gets grants around the country.
  This is a way to divide America. America has become the greatest 
country in the world by viewing people as individuals. We should keep 
viewing people as individuals. We do not need diversity bureaucrats 
throughout our government.
  I encourage all Members of this body to treat everybody equally and 
look at everybody as an individual, not as a representative of where 
their ancestors came from years and years ago.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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