[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 109 (Friday, June 28, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H4436-H4438]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      CRISES FACING AMERICA TODAY

  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, we had a debate last night, and, 
obviously, a lot of Americans are discussing public policy. I want to 
address what I consider the three greatest crises facing America today, 
only one of which was brought up by the press last night.
  The one brought up by the press last night, which cannot be 
overstated, is the crisis at the border. I was disappointed that last 
night, people did not talk about the size of the crisis.
  We are in a situation right now in which we have about a quarter of a 
million people crossing our border every month. Under President Trump, 
that number, depending on the month, was between 5,000 and 10,000 
people.
  We have gone from 10,000 to over 200,000 people coming here last 
month, and I think the press should be doing a better job of describing 
the size of that crisis.
  I think they also have to do a better job of questioning the amount 
of legal immigrants that are coming here.

  Some people are under the impression or seem to be under the 
impression that people coming to this country, and as a result, 
changing this country is only on the southern border.
  Actually, we have almost a million people a year, depending on the 
year, 850 to 950,000 people coming here legally.
  It is not impossible for people to come here, and I think there ought 
to be more focus on the 900,000 or 950,000 people who are sworn in 
every year as Americans.
  I also think there ought to be more focus, depending on the month, on 
the 7,000 to 9,000 unaccompanied minors coming in this country.
  For those of us who watched the debate last night, President Biden 
tried to weigh in on supposedly people kept apart from their parents. 
That was for a short period of time because their parents committed 
crimes.
  Here we have between 7,000 and 9,000 people coming in every month who 
are unaccompanied by either parent. As a result, I think it is possible 
that they will never see their parents again, but the press does not 
emphasize or talk about what should absolutely be discussed in this 
country, that being, should we continue to allow children in this 
country without either of their parents present.
  If we are going to do it, what is going to become of those children 
because we do know that, depending upon your source, tens of thousands 
of these children are not only in this country without their parents, 
but we don't even know where they are.
  I think we have to talk a lot more about what is going on at our 
southern border and talk a lot more in specifics as to do we continue 
to allow unaccompanied minors in this country, and exactly how many 
people coming into this country described as illegally should be 
allowed.
  We should talk about the fact that we have a new program under 
President Biden in which 30,000 people a month, or 360,000 people a 
year, are being let in through the parole program if you are Haitian, 
if you are Cuban, or if you are from some Central American countries. 
Another significant way America is changing is not being addressed.
  The next issue that I would like to talk about, we had a hearing 
yesterday touching upon the idea of racial preferences or racial breaks 
in employment, be it government employment or be it employment in 
businesses that do business with contractors.
  It seems strange that in America we have programs based on the theory 
that we have a huge amount of racism in America.
  We live at a time in which the wealthiest Americans or the wealthiest 
group is people from India; the second wealthiest group, in the sources 
that I find, Philippines; third wealthiest group, Chinese. People from 
Cuba are doing very well. People from other countries in the Caribbean 
are doing well. There is this drumbeat that America has a horrible 
racist past or a horrible racist present, which I just think is not 
true all.
  We have to ask about the motivation of people who keep these programs 
coming in which we identify people by where their great-great-
grandparents come from.
  There recently was a book that came out called ``America's Cultural 
Revolution'' by a guy by the name of Christopher Rufo, which kind of 
confirmed my worst suspicions.
  The reason why we are taking almost all of these immigrant groups and 
trying to give them preferences is that the goal is to divide America.
  There is a small but determined number of progressives in America who 
would like to permanently change America, have a different form of 
government.
  These people have been around in America in the thirties and the 
forties and the fifties. They have certainly been around in the 
sixties.
  During most of this time, they felt the way to overthrow America or 
permanently change America was through

[[Page H4437]]

a class system, and they wanted to turn everybody against the wealthy 
people and have a revolution based on this, and we would have a new or 
different kind of government.
  Well, eventually in the seventies or eighties, they gave up on that. 
They realized that wouldn't work. The American middle class is too 
strong. Americans love their freedom too much.
  They were not going to be able to succeed in giving us a different 
form of government by breaking people down into how much money they 
were making.
  It came to some of them that one way we could destroy America is 
create friction via race. In the early eighties, they decided that is 
what they were going to try to do, and they would go through America's 
institutions, the first institutions being the institutions based on 
education.
  Again, it seems to me absurd that of all countries in the world, you 
could divide America or make America unstable based on race.
  There are other countries in which there are racial or religious 
divides that really divide the country. In India, you look at the Hindu 
and the Muslim. In Nigeria, you look at the Hindu and the Muslim. In 
Iraq, you look at the Shiite and the Sunni.
  You can even look at a country like Canada, which has problems 
because you have the English speakers and the French speakers or a huge 
number of countries in Africa, which are broken down by racial Tribes.
  America is such a great melting pot. We all get along so well. As 
just mentioned, people come here from all around the globe other than 
Europe and succeed wildly.
  It seems bizarre that anybody would say the way to break down America 
is to divide based on race, but that is what they are trying to do.
  Another example of a lack of racism in America is if you look up the 
new people who come to America, who are sworn in as new citizens, and 
they have these ceremonies in Wisconsin every month in the city of 
Milwaukee. I have attended several of them.
  At least none of the 10 countries that we allow to come in here and 
get sworn in as American citizens are European countries. They are 
countries from southeast Asia. They are countries from the Indian 
subcontinent. They are countries from all over Latin America.

  I mean, it seems almost ridiculous that someone would say that 
America has a racist problem or are so euro-centric when the vast 
majority of people who we allow to become citizens are not of European 
decent.
  Another thing that makes it so strange or shows how divisive the left 
is trying to be is they do all they can to tell as many people as 
possible that they are being picked on and should view themselves as a 
separate ethnic identity.
  How do they do that? They do it by giving preferences, be it in 
government contracting, be it in government employment, based on race, 
regardless of how well you have it otherwise.
  Here in America, people pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion will 
say that if my grandparents came here from India, and I am in the 
process of inheriting $20 million, I still get preferences.
  When I go to the ballot box, presumably, I should be looking out for 
other people from India or be looking out for other people of Japan and 
not just voting as an American.

                              {time}  1300

  Another example of this is their bizarre idea of trying to define 
people by where they come from. I will give you an example. Right now, 
if somebody comes here from Spain, they are not considered a picked-
upon minority, but if somebody with Spanish ancestors spends three or 
four generations in Cuba, they are considered to be Latin Americans in 
need of special help.
  Obviously, I don't think the average American could tell the 
difference between somebody who came here from Spain or somebody who 
had Spanish ancestry who went through Cuba, but in the eyes of DEI 
specialists, in an effort to get as many people as possible walking 
around with a chip on their shoulder, in an effort to ingratiate 
themselves to as many different people as possible, their rules are 
such that if you are of Spanish descent but your ancestors spent a 
couple of generations in Cuba, we need to give you special privileges 
as far as government contracting, government hiring, and being hired by 
companies that do business with the government.
  It is something that I think we have to bring up more. I think it is 
something that should be a topic in America. We recently added a new 
group to get preferences for government contracts or get preferences in 
government hiring, and that is a group of people called North Africans 
or Middle Easterners.
  Again, even though immigrants here from Iran do very well, are very 
great people, and, as a result, succeed overwhelmingly in America, the 
Biden administration has said that if you come here and your ancestors 
are from Iran, Egypt, Morocco, or Gaza, quite frankly, you will be 
treated as an aggrieved minority and will be given preferences over 
Americans who are already in the United States.
  We should discuss whether that was the right thing. The incompetent 
American press corps has hardly publicized that. I go home and explain 
this to the people back home. They ask why they never heard of it.
  They never heard of it because the American press corps isn't 
particularly competent, but that is something that should have been 
discussed.
  It should have been discussed at the debate last night. The press 
should have said: Are you in favor of the policy that if an immigrant 
comes here from Iran, Syria, Gaza, or Morocco, they will be given 
preferences over the native-born Americans when it comes to government 
hiring, working for government contractors, or being the beneficiary of 
a government contract, or, for that matter, being the beneficiary of a 
government grant?
  I strongly encourage the press corps to educate Americans on what is 
going on here and to see whether we should continue with this policy.
  I mentioned for a second, by the way, people who are working for 
companies with a government grant. Very few people know that if you 
have a company that does business with the government and you have at 
least 50 employees and do $10,000 of business with the Federal 
Government, you are required to fill out a form every year listing the 
racial background of every one of your employees together with their 
compensation and job description.
  The purpose of those forms is so that the government can look at them 
and perhaps cause trouble for you if the answers on the form are not 
what they like. Again, if you are working, say, for a company like 
General Motors, which I am sure does a lot of business with the 
government, most people do not know that they are required to fill out 
a form every year listing the race, sex, and compensation of every 
employee. Is that something we should be doing?
  As a result, it means that when it comes to hiring, promoting, or 
letting people go, your race will play into how those decisions are 
made. I think that is something that should be discussed more.
  We had a hearing on some of this the other day. I do not think 
America can remain the great country that it is if we are teaching our 
immigrant groups particularly that they should be asking for or 
expecting something based on their racial history, not to mention it 
does not deal with merit.
  Inevitably, if you are saying that you are not going to pick the best 
person, that you are going to pick persons by their background, and 
that you are going to lower the quality of engineers, lower the quality 
of product that these companies put out, lower the quality of our 
medical professionals, what have you.
  It is time to get rid of this stuff. Most of these rules began to be 
put into effect in 1965 under Lyndon Johnson, so we have lived with 
them. I think the companies are more afraid of them now, but we have 
lived with them for 55 years. It is time to put an end to these 
programs.
  One more comment as far as the effect it is having on the native 
born. There was a study done not long ago of 88 companies in the S&P 
200. When they got done looking at the number of people hired during 
2001-2002 in those companies, 74 percent were non-White.
  What does that indicate? If almost none of the new hires were White, 
it indicates to me that the companies were

[[Page H4438]]

going out of their way, due to the pressure to be all DEI, to not hire 
White people. I do believe somebody should look into this further and 
see why only 6 percent of the new hires were White.
  The next issue that was not debated last night, but it is what I 
thought, was the number one issue facing America when I ran for this 
job 10 years ago--sadly, we are not talking about it--when you talk to 
people my age, they uniformly feel that America is not as great a 
country or as favorable a country to live in as the country we grew up 
in.
  When you ask them why, one of the top two or three reasons--
frequently, the number one reason--is the breakdown in the family. The 
breakdown in the family did not just happen. There are people who have 
never wanted the old-fashioned nuclear family to succeed or be dominant 
in the United States.
  This goes back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who wrote at length 
about the fact that they wanted to get rid of the family. They wanted 
the dominant unit to be the government. They wanted the government to 
raise people. They wanted the government to brainwash people or teach 
people how to think. It is, unfortunately, apparently not uncommon for 
people in American universities to follow or be a little bit entranced 
by the writings of Marx and Engels.

  As a result, we see Americans, say, in the 1960s, some of the leading 
feminists, some of the people involved in the Black liberation 
movement, were outright opponents of the old-fashioned nuclear family. 
Angela Davis was an example of somebody well known by people of my age 
who was a very important revolutionary figure in the 1960s who 
eventually came out for the breakdown of the family.
  There are right now approximately 78 programs in which your 
eligibility for the program is based on the income level of your 
household. Due to the way they calculate poverty, it means that if you 
have one decent wage earner in the household, you probably aren't 
eligible for these programs. This means, as a practical matter, if you 
have one parent, frequently the mother, in the household, she is 
eligible for all sorts of benefits--free housing, free food, free 
healthcare, and free Pell grants to go to college. If she would marry 
someone with a decent income, she would lose all of these benefits.
  Another benefit that can easily be $6,000 to $8,000 is the earned 
income tax credit. If she decides to work a little, she also may be 
eligible for free daycare.
  You add up these benefits, and it is not unusual to find 
hypotheticals in which someone can be penalized by $25,000 or $30,000 
in tax-free income if you decide to be married. Conversely, you can 
lose $25,000 or $30,000 if you decide to be married.
  This is a problem that has been pointed out since Senator Moynihan in 
the late 1960s, so nothing has been done about it. The rate of children 
born without a mother and father at home has skyrocketed since the 
middle 1960s when these programs were put into effect.
  As a matter of fact, usually what we do is throw more money into 
these programs. In the current budget that Congress is working through 
for the year beginning October 1, President Biden did try to increase 
the number of these programs, which, in other words, is to put more of 
a bribe on people to not live in what they call the old-fashioned 
nuclear family.
  By the way, another group that does not like the nuclear family or 
what they describe as the so-called Western-prescribed nuclear family 
was the original founders of Black Lives Matter. It is shocking the 
number of people who work in this Chamber who were happy even after 
Black Lives Matter came out against the nuclear family and who would 
stand by it, who would attend rallies with those signs out there. It 
just shows the power of people who have this antifamily agenda.
  In any event, I am very interested in, when the new Congress is sworn 
in next January, what the new President who will work with that 
Congress thinks about the huge marriage penalties we have in our 
society. Seemingly, in this country, we seem to have a goal of having 
more and more people raised in single-parent families rather than 
married couples.
  A variety of problems come from this. There are wonderful children 
raised by all parents, but statistically, it would be better in many 
cases, probably most cases, to have both a mother and father at home. 
The current system, which frequently discourages, in particular, the 
father from being at home, takes away the purpose in a lot of these 
men's lives.
  I think a lot of the problems we have in society--depression, crime, 
drugs--can be attributed to the fact that the American Government today 
seems to not want to give men a purpose in life by encouraging them to 
be part of an old-fashioned nuclear family.
  In any event, I ask the press corps, as they cover the Presidential 
race, to see where the candidates stand on the idea of racial 
preferences. Should we continue to say, for example, that if somebody 
is one-quarter Peruvian, they, therefore, can fill out the form and say 
they are an aggrieved minority? I wonder, do they agree with the idea 
that immigrants who come here from Iran or Gaza are immediately 
entitled to preferences in government employment or preferences in 
hiring by corporations? I would like to know that.
  I would like to know where the candidates stand on the huge marriage 
penalties we have in effect, which appear to be put in place by people 
who do not want children raised with both parents at home. Do they plan 
on doing something about it? I would like to know because it is one of 
the biggest problems we are facing in America. It is not talked about.
  Then, when it comes to illegal immigration, I would like a little 
more discussion of numbers. If we are going to begin to take people 
outside the normal pathway to become a citizen, how many people should 
that be every month? Should it be 5,000 a month, like we had under 
President Trump? Should it be 200,000? Should it be 300,000? Should it 
be over 400,000? I don't know, but I think the press should try to nail 
down the candidates on that.
  In any event, those are three issues that I think a competent press 
corps would be putting out there in the newspapers so that people can 
analyze those issues and decide which way the government wants to 
handle each one of those issues.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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