[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 201 (Wednesday, December 6, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H6204-H6206]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      ISSUES IGNORED BY THE MEDIA

  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. Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to talk about some 
issues that our press corps has not adequately covered. All of these 
issues will be brought to the fore sometime in the next 3 months, and 
well-informed citizens should have an opinion on them. That means that, 
to a degree, the press corps has to do a good job of educating the 
citizenry on these issues.
  The first issue I am going to talk about one more time is 
immigration. There is some time in the next 8 weeks in which an 
agreement is going to have to be reached regarding the huge problems we 
have on the southern border. These problems have been largely ignored 
under the Biden administration, and it is time that something be done.
  I want to recount right now that, in the most recent months, we are 
having about 240,000 people cross the southern border. Every month, we 
hit new records for that month. In October, we again exceeded where we 
were 12 months ago and 24 months ago.
  In addition to the fact that we have about 240,000 people crossing 
the southern border, we have a situation in which about 9,000 
unaccompanied minors, people under the age of 18, are coming here 
without either parent.
  We also have a situation where of the about 240,000 people who are 
crossing the border, about 60,000 are what they call got-aways. In 
other words, they have had no contact at all with the officialdom of 
the United States Government. Of course, these people are particularly 
dangerous because they haven't even gone through the perfunctory check 
that other people go through when they show up at the southern border.
  It should also be pointed out that the United States is not being 
pikers at all when it comes to allowing other people into this country. 
The American citizenry should know that, in the most recent year 
available, over 1 million people were sworn in as new citizens to the 
United States. This is the third highest on record at a time when we 
are following a year that was over 900,000. We are kind of in 
unprecedented territory for a 2-year period.
  When I was a child in the 1960s, by comparison, about 100,000 people 
a year were sworn in in the United States. We worked that way up in the 
1980s to be about 200,000.
  So, when we say 1 million people a year are being sworn in as 
citizens of the United States, we are really changing things in this 
country. As a result, nobody can say or should be able to say that we 
are not doing our fair share in welcoming more people into the United 
States.
  It should also be pointed out that the number of people who are being 
deported from this country is now a fraction of what it was a few years 
ago. In fiscal year 2019, about 270,000 people were deported. In the 
most recent year available, that number has fallen to 72,000.
  On one level, we are multiplying the number of people coming across 
the border by a factor of 10, and then once people come here and break 
the law or whatever, we are now kicking out or deporting about one-
quarter of the number that we were 4 years ago.
  The Biden administration has not cared about this at all. However, 
there are going to be multiple discussions with the Biden 
administration not only with regard to appropriations bills that are 
coming up but supplemental bills that are coming up.
  This is the biggest crisis facing America today. We are permanently 
changing the United States by allowing this many people to come across 
the border.
  I want to point out to the American public that John Adams said that 
our Constitution was fit for a moral and religious people and totally 
unfit for anybody else.
  Insofar as we are allowing people in our country who do not have a 
love of freedom and who want to turn their lives over to the 
government, we are going to ruin our country. It will no longer be the 
wonderful country that we grew up in. When we invite this many 
inappropriately vetted people, that is a definite concern.
  There is also a concern for the American Government. We are right now 
in a position where we are borrowing 22 percent of our budget. A 
significant number of people crossing the southern border are going to 
have to be taken care of by the Federal Government. They won't be able 
to find jobs. Not only will they not be able to find jobs, but they are 
coming here without complete families. Their children are going to be 
educated. President Biden promised during the 2020 election that he 
would provide free healthcare to people coming here illegally. We are 
doing that. That is also very expensive at a time when we don't have 
money for more.
  As a result, I think it is a situation that has to be cleaned up and 
finished before we pass any more of what we call supplemental bills in 
this Chamber.
  In particular, people are asking for tens of billions of dollars in 
aid to Ukraine. I think everybody would like to see them get that 
money, but at a time when we are having to flood money in to take care 
of people crossing the southern border, I don't think we have that 
money until that problem is cleaned up.
  I hope the American citizen is paying attention to this.
  Again, to summarize, 10 times as many people are crossing the border 
as there were 4 years ago. The number of people being kicked out, 
usually for breaking the law, being deported, is about one-quarter of 
what it was 4 years ago. The number of people who are being sworn in 
legally--when people say, oh, we ought to let some people here--there 
are over 1 million right now. We are near historical highs on that 
level.

[[Page H6205]]

  I hope the American press corps reports these numbers. They should 
certainly be in the paper. It should certainly be in the paper when 
eventually we get new information on the number of people who have come 
into this country in November.
  Mr. Speaker, all you have to do is look on television to see it is 
getting worse and worse. That is an issue that not much attention is 
being paid to.

  The next thing I want to talk to the American public about is what we 
call appropriations bills. Here in Congress, if things are done right, 
we do not pass one budget at the end of the year. We pass 12 separate 
bills as we divide the government into 12 separate agencies.
  There are disagreements between the House and the Senate regarding 
each one of those bills. However, one of the things that touches all of 
these bills is the degree to which the Federal Government is going to 
get involved with diversity regarding what we could call affirmative 
action--or an obsession with judging people by their race or judging 
people by their gender. This is a debate that is going to be had 
between the Republican-led House and the Democratic Senate right down 
the line.
  We have had a situation where we have been identifying people by race 
since Lyndon Johnson really kicked this into gear in 1965. At that 
time, companies that had at least 50 employees and did over $100,000 of 
business with regard to the Federal Government had to submit 
information annually to the government.
  As a practical matter, it meant that businesses were advised to pay 
attention to race when they hired somebody, when they promoted 
somebody, and when they let somebody go.
  It also meant that the Federal Government was paying attention to 
race and gender when government contracts were let, and we have a 
bureaucracy that is advising American big businesses that are doing it 
in-house.
  Right now, President Biden's goal is to greatly increase these roles 
of bureaucrats when hiring decisions are made in Federal agencies so 
that when we do government contracting and government grant writing, we 
are paying increasing attention to where people come from or where 
their ancestors came from.
  In another area, the Biden administration is currently trying to set 
up a new ethnic group to get preferences or special consideration, and 
that is the group called Middle Eastern and Northern African people.
  It is a little bit unusual, but the American citizenry should be 
aware of this. They should be aware that the government is currently in 
the process of adding this group to the number of people who are going 
to get preferences. Before they do that, there should be an open debate 
of whether this is necessary or not.
  It is kind of interesting in that I read some information on this 
topic. Historically, I think the reason for this type of thing was the 
feeling that people had been taken advantage of or were not given a 
fair shake in the past. Right now, people who are considered Middle 
Eastern and North African actually make considerably more than the 
native-born American. American median household income across the board 
is slightly under $100,000 a year. Middle Eastern and North Africans 
are making about $115,000 a year.
  Mr. Speaker, even if you buy into the idea that the American 
Government should be looking at people not on the basis of who they are 
today but on where their ancestors came from, we are really not in a 
position where we can say that these people have been put upon or not 
been treated very well.
  When I go home and talk about these issues, I find that almost no 
people that I know are aware that we are about to add Middle Eastern 
and North Africans to the affirmative action mix, which means, of 
course, the American press corps is not doing its job. It is kind of a 
fundamental change in a given group if they apply for a government job, 
if they apply for a government grant, or if they are getting a 
government contract. If there are going to be preferences, then it is 
something that should be openly discussed on editorial pages, on talk 
radio, and what have you.
  I think the American press corps has largely hidden this fundamental 
change in the way we do things, and it is time we have an open debate 
with regard to this.
  It is a little bit interesting because other groups that are 
supposedly subject to discrimination or supposedly are different also 
do better than the average American. Right now, the wealthiest subgroup 
of Americans are Indian Americans. Also very wealthy are people from 
the Philippines, people from China, and people from Cuba. All of these 
people, in the mythology of the left, are people who are apparently 
being discriminated against, but actually, they are doing better than 
the average American right now.
  I wonder why we would set up a bureaucracy to keep track of what 
these people are doing or making sure they somehow get preferences.
  A debate is going to be had throughout putting together these 
appropriations bills, and in each one of the bills, that debate will, 
to a degree, focus on whether President Biden gets his new committees 
or commissions in every government agency doing all that he can to 
highlight differences between people and judge people by where their 
ancestors came from.

                              {time}  2015

  Before I move on from this topic, I should point out that these 
people self-identify. Insofar as you hear that diversity is important 
to have a well-running company or a well-running government agency, in 
order to buy into that, the government, in determining whether or not 
you are a member of a preferred group, allows you to be a member of 
that group if you are maybe only a quarter or a half of that ancestry, 
which seems a little bit unusual.
  You can be, for example, a quarter Mexican and have yourself 
classified as a person bringing a diverse view to the world, even 
though you perhaps have never set foot in Mexico and grew up in an 
average American suburb and even if people didn't know that you had a 
different background.
  I think in a desire to cause more importance for this occupation of 
these diversity bureaucrats, and in an effort to drive up the number of 
people who supposedly need help from the government, we allow people to 
self-identify. People who are one-half or one-quarter members of a 
group get preferences of that group.
  We allow the fiction to come into play that even though you have 
never stepped foot in the country of your ancestors--somebody comes 
here from the Philippines, and their grandchildren never step foot in 
the Philippines. They know very little about the country, but for 
diversity's sake, we are supposed to make sure we have a given number 
of people who apparently have the Filipino-American viewpoint of the 
world.
  I think that is something that ought to be discussed, as well, before 
we continue down this path and give the Biden administration any more 
victories in these appropriations bills by hiring new bureaucrats to 
enforce the new laws.
  These bureaucrats, people with majors in diversity, are not all hired 
by the government. They have become increasingly common in large 
industry. I think they are afraid of lawsuits or whatnot, so big 
businesses hire these people and decisions as to who is going to be 
hired are increasingly made in big business to meet the targets that 
these diversity specialists give people.
  Of course, it can result, first of all, in hard feelings as people 
are judged not by their skills but, to a certain extent, by their 
ancestry.
  I have talked before about what happens in other countries where we 
have affirmative action. Hard feelings develop over time. Sometimes 
they result in civil wars, as they did in Sri Lanka.
  In any event, I think the efforts that the Biden administration is 
making to bring in new groups and to increase the apparent number of 
people who are advising our government agencies as to who to hire, 
before this goes up, it ought to be subject to an open debate.
  It is not being debated. I think it is not being debated because the 
mainstream media has not explained to the American public the huge role 
that these groups play or these occupations play in personnel 
decisions, both in private businesses and in the government.
  The other thing that I want to bring up is kind of a leftover from 
President Biden and his last State of the Union Address.

[[Page H6206]]

  President Biden has talked about his respect for members of the trans 
community, and he has done what he can to highlight them in a positive 
light.
  I want to bring to the public's attention a book I have read, ``When 
Harry Became Sally,'' in which a discussion is made as to how we should 
handle people who come out as transgendered, particularly when they are 
young.
  I think it is of interest when our society is deciding how to deal 
with these people in school, to deal with them medically, what the 
compassionate thing to do is. I think one thing that is not brought up 
enough when we talk about the transgender situation is that, left to 
their own devices, over about 90 percent of the young people who 
identify as transgender work their way out of it.
  I don't think it has been adequately reported in the news media that 
other countries that went through this transgender situation just like 
America--I am talking about Great Britain, Sweden, Norway--have all 
backed away from embracing transgenderism in young people, which can 
include not just puberty blockers but things up to and including 
physical surgeries, having body parts removed even while people are 
minors. I think even a lot of people who have this done when they are 
adults regret it.
  Nevertheless, the mainstream media and our President have largely 
encouraged people down this path and say they are fighting for them, 
giving people, I think, still more attention.
  Mr. Speaker, when you consider that over 90 percent of the people who 
begin down this path break their way out of it, you would have to say 
that positive attention is going to slow down the decision of so many 
young people to stop going down the transgender path.
  I don't think this has adequately been talked about in the media. 
President Biden and his Department of Education are doing what they can 
to try to force acceptance of this lifestyle on school districts. By 
forcing it on people, they have to realize they are going to create a 
situation in which more young people wind up doing medical things, some 
of which are irrevocable, cannot be undone.
  I hope that President Biden will change his mind on this. I wish he 
would stop highlighting this community in a positive light because when 
you do that, I believe, you are causing people who are going to change 
their minds to not change their minds. One has to look at the long-term 
effect these people are having, particularly when you consider that 
over 90 percent of the people will not continue down that path unless 
perhaps they are encouraged to do so by people like the President of 
the United States.
  In any event, those are three issues that I think we read about in 
the paper. I think only one side of all these three issues is too often 
presented, but I leave you, Mr. Speaker, with statistics on the number 
of people crossing the border and whether we can continue down 
this path. I also leave you with a little bit of information as to the 
increasing role these race specialists play in society and a little 
more information regarding the efforts by the President and his 
administration to, I would argue, encourage people to go down the 
transgender path.

  Mr. Speaker, these are my comments for the week, things that I hope 
the press corps picks up on a little bit to educate the public.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________