[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 18]
[House]
[Page 24066]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          IMMIGRATION CONCERNS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, in yesterday's Congress Daily published by 
the National Journal, there was an article stating that some of the 
Nation's largest high-tech companies are pushing for a big increase in 
the H-1B visa program. This is the program that grants visas to so-
called skilled foreigners such as computer specialists, engineers, and 
technical medical researchers. This program already allows 65,000 
foreigners each year to come in and take some of the best jobs this 
country has to offer.
  Now, these giant corporations are waging what Congress Daily 
described as an ``intense lobbying'' campaign to get 30,000 to 40,000 
more of these foreign workers, and this goes on every year and has 
undoubtedly let in hundreds of thousands or even more over the last 
several years.

                              {time}  2350

  This, of course, is on top of the many millions of illegal aliens we 
already have here, probably at least double or triple the ten million 
illegals the government estimates are here based on what I have read 
and heard and seen.
  I realize the H1-B program is a way to get here legally, and I do 
commend those involved for at least going through the proper legal 
channels. But over the last 16 years since I have been in Congress, I 
have had many parents and grandparents bring me their college graduate 
children or grandchildren who cannot find good jobs. And these are 
good-looking young people with very good grades.
  All over this country there are many thousands of college graduates 
who cannot find good jobs so they work as waiters and waitresses and go 
to graduate school or more often law school. Sometimes people with 
masters degrees or even PhDs are having trouble finding good jobs. Our 
unemployment is low, but our underemployment is terrible. Yet we bring 
in many thousands more foreign workers each year while we continue to 
send huge numbers of good jobs to other countries with our astounding 
$1 million-a-minute trade deficit.
  Many years ago I read that our government estimated that half the 
people of the world wanted to come here to live. Consistent with that I 
read in the last few months that half of the people in the world have 
to get by on $2 or less a day and do not have a second pair of shoes. 
We simply cannot take 3 billion more people in to this Nation, 
especially over a short period of time. Already our schools and 
hospitals are overrun with illegal immigrants in areas near our 
borders.
  God has blessed every nation in this world with either natural beauty 
and natural resources and usually both that could make those countries 
rich if they had a free market, free enterprise system. However, all 
over this world people have fallen for the myth that government can 
solve all problems, and they have either voted in or had governments 
forced on them that were liberal, left-wing or socialist. And all over 
this world all big government has done is to ruin economies and wipe 
out the middle class.
  Big government means a few elite rulers at the top, a huge 
underclass, usually near starvation, and almost no middle class. Today 
with many of our trade and immigration policies, our own big government 
is slowly wiping out our own middle class to try to benefit a small 
number of huge multi-national companies. The big giants are growing 
bigger in large part because of government favoritism, government 
contracts, tax breaks, free land. Big government, though, really only 
helps extremely big business and the bureaucrats who work for the 
government. Everyone else gets the crumbs or the shaft.
  There really cannot be such a thing as big government conservatism. 
That is an oxymoron. Only in a very small government, truly free market 
system does the little man or a person without great capital have a 
real chance.
  Big government liberalism, while always claiming to help the little 
guy, has actually been the best friend extremely big business has. And 
this proposed expansion of the H1-B program is just another example of 
this big government, big business duopoly that is in the long run 
bringing down American small business and our great middle class.

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