[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9325-9329]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




               STEMMING UNCONTROLLED ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Chocola). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from California (Mr. 
Rohrabacher) is recognized for half the remaining time before midnight, 
which is approximately 44 minutes.
  Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise to alert my colleagues to a vote 
that will be taken on the floor of this Congress next Tuesday. It is a 
vote that will mark a turning point for our country or will reflect a 
continued unwillingness by America's elected officials to do anything 
to protect us from the greatest threat to our national safety and well-
being.
  What am I talking about? Next Tuesday, there will be a vote on 
legislation that I have offered, H.R. 3722, which will attempt to 
protect us from a major decline in the quality of life and the quality 
of our health care due to the uncontrolled onslaught of illegal 
immigrants into our country and into our hospitals and emergency rooms. 
If left unchecked, illegal immigration will destroy the quality of life 
for many of our people.
  It is unforgivable that government has refused to act when the 
evidence is clear: millions of people are being permitted to stay in 
our country illegally, and it is having a horrendous impact on the 
standard of living, safety, and quality of life of average Americans.
  For tens of millions of Americans and legal residents, real wages 
have stagnated. The education of our children has been undermined, our 
health care resources depleted, and the safety of our streets and 
neighborhoods and, thus, the safety of our families compromised.
  This is not a back-burner issue. It goes to the heart of what America 
will be like tomorrow and, in some cases, it deals with a crisis of 
today. Yet, elected officials have remained silent about illegal 
immigration. Why? The American people need to ask themselves that 
question, because it is clear that the overwhelming number of the 
American people are troubled and enormously concerned about this 
onslaught of this uncontrolled, massive flow of illegal immigration 
into the United States.
  But why are our officials not acting? First and foremost, I believe 
that many elected officials have been intimidated from addressing this 
burning issue. When I say intimidation, what is that all about? Is that 
against the law? Well, no, one can be intimidated in a number of ways. 
I mean that our elected officials are afraid to address this issue 
because they are afraid to be called racists. They are afraid to be 
called hate-mongers.
  Let me note for the record today that I have been called many names 
when addressing this issue, and I believe that I have love in my heart 
for all of, not just our fellow citizens and legal residents, but I 
have love in my heart for other people. People who are malicious, 
people who are doing ill and bad things to other people, of course we 
do not love them. But the vast majority of people, even illegal 
immigrants coming into this country are wonderful people, and I have 
nothing but love in my heart for those people. But that is not the 
question of the day. We can be very caring about the rest of the world, 
but that does not mean we do not recognize that we have limited 
resources and that we can deplete those resources to the point that it 
will be harmful to our own citizens if we do not act responsibly.
  Furthermore, it is not hateful to use scarce resources to provide for 
one's family. If one is taking care of their family, if one works hard 
and has a certain amount of money, and even if there are needy people 
down the street, down the block, it is important to care for your 
family first. That does not mean you have any less love in your heart 
for your neighbors and the people down the street; but first and 
foremost, caring for your family is itself an act of charity and love.
  I am committed to doing something about the threat of illegal 
immigration, not because I dislike people and certainly not because I 
dislike people from other countries. Most people who come here, as I 
say, even the ones who come here illegally, are wonderful people. But 
we cannot take care of all of the wonderful people in the world and 
expect that it will not hurt our fellow Americans, in the same way that 
we cannot, as individuals and as members of a family, give away all of 
the family's money to people down the street who might need some help 
and not expect if we give away too many of those resources for it not 
to have a horrible impact on our own family and, indeed, hurt our 
family. We Americans, of course, are very proud that our country 
represents every race and religion. So it would not be that we have in 
some way something against people who are coming here from another 
country. In fact, we are all descendant from people who originated in 
other parts of the world, with the exception perhaps of the American 
Indians. Yes, we are a nation of immigrants and we are proud of it. And 
we are proud also that our country today permits more legal immigration 
into our country than all the other countries of the world combined.
  One million immigrants are permitted to come here every year, along 
with 400,000 refugees. With a population of 280 million people, we can 
expect that we will absorb this responsible number of immigrants. It 
has worked out for us well in the past, because the immigrants who come 
here legally need to be healthy, they need to be honest, and they need 
to be self-supporting; or they are not permitted to come here. We have 
no such controls on people who are coming here illegally, perhaps 
bringing diseases, perhaps criminal elements, perhaps terrorists.
  Tonight, however, I want to draw the attention of my colleagues to 
the dire consequences of not stemming the uncontrolled flood of illegal 
immigrants into our country. One can be for a responsible and a sizable 
legal immigration without then compromising a position that puts one 
totally against a flood of illegals coming into our country, especially 
the uncontrolled flood of illegals that we have been seeing in the last 
decade. Millions of illegal new-comers are arriving in our communities. 
Every day, tens of thousands more of them arrive. If they are sick or 
they are criminals or they are terrorists, we do not know. This is a 
catastrophe in the making. It will lead eventually, if left 
uncontrolled, to a destruction of the American way of life, the very 
way of life that has attracted all of our forefathers and -mothers here 
and has attracted the legal immigrants who come to our shores legally 
and come with respect for our law.
  The American people, they see what is happening. They can see what is 
happening in our cities and in our communities throughout the country. 
The American people see this, and they are seething with anger. Every 
poll shows that 60 to 70 percent of the American people are outraged 
that nothing is being done and their country is being taken away from 
them by an uncontrolled flow of people from other countries. Every time 
it comes to a vote, the American people express this cry for help to 
elected officials to do something about illegal immigration. 
Proposition 187 was the first time that that really came to a vote; and 
let me say, 10 years ago, no matter what people have heard about 
proposition 187, it passed in a landslide. It passed in a landslide 
when all of the major interest groups were against it, the major news 
media. All the name-calling you can possibly imagine was thrown at this 
little band of activists who put proposition 187 on the ballot. But 
even though an overwhelming number of voters voted for proposition 187, 
it was portrayed as some sort of a loss for the Republican Party, 
because Republicans

[[Page 9326]]

by and large had supported and identified with proposition 187.
  Let me note that there are people in this body, such as the gentleman 
from California (Mr. Gallegly), who represents many areas in which 
there are Americans of Mexican descent who represent a majority of 
areas in his district, but the gentleman from California (Mr. Gallegly) 
tells me that many of the cities where the majority of the population 
are legal immigrants and where Americans of Mexican descent hold a 
majority, that many of those communities voted by majority in favor of 
proposition 187.
  Many people are afraid, even with that staring them in the face, the 
evidence that Mexican Americans, like everyone else, feel that their 
way of life is being threatened and their standard of living and their 
families are being threatened by illegal immigration. Many people still 
hesitate, thinking that they might be insulting our American citizens 
who happen to be of Mexican descent. Well, there is no Californian that 
does not respect our Mexican American and Hispanic fellow citizens and 
legal residents.
  California is, by its very name and by the names of our cities and 
our streets and our culture, deeply influenced by the Hispanic culture 
and by the Mexican American culture that has been part of our State 
since before it was a State, and we are proud of that as Californians. 
We are proud of that. And yet many people are afraid to be called a 
racist. They are afraid to be called racist or hate-monger; they are 
afraid that that might make some people who are right down the street 
from us, our next-door neighbors or others, feel that we have something 
against them.
  Well, turning one group of honest citizens against another in order 
to keep the flow of illegal immigration into our country has worked to 
intimidate people, but it is a dishonest tactic; and we will hear it 
over and over again. I would alert my colleagues and the American 
people to pay no attention. The real hate-mongers and the real people 
who are engaged with racism are the ones who would suggest that we 
cannot deal with problems like illegal immigration unless we can call 
each other names.
  Well, I would suggest that today the situation has gone so far down 
the road toward disaster that we have got to come to grips with this 
illegal immigration flow, or there is going to be irreparable damage to 
our country and to our people.

                              {time}  2245

  What else, of course, has prevented us from dealing with illegal 
immigration? It is not just a fear of being called a name and racist, 
et cetera; although that is a powerful factor. There is another factor 
involved, and that is, there are some enormously powerful interest 
groups who believe they are benefiting from this massive flow of 
illegal immigration into this country.
  Who am I referring to? I am referring to big business who want to 
ensure that they keep wages down and suppress wages, and I am talking 
about the liberal left wing of the Democratic party who believes that 
they will exploit illegal immigrants for their own electoral purposes, 
that they can politically exploit them.
  So we have two groups of people who want to exploit illegal 
immigrants: big business and the liberal left wing of the Democratic 
party, both trying to exploit these helpless people who come to our 
shores.
  These powerful forces obviously do not represent the interests of the 
American people. First of all, let us note this. It is estimated that 
if illegal immigration is unchecked, and everything else being equal, 
the population of our country will jump from 280 million people today 
to 420 million people just a few decades away. Is that in the interest 
of any American to have that kind of crowding, that type of incredible 
increase in the number of people that we have to deal with and the 
demand on our scarce resources? That is what will happen if we leave 
illegal immigration, with millions of people coming in every year, and 
let it go unchecked. If that is going to happen we are going to end up 
with a half a billion people here in the United States of America.
  Why are we letting it happen? There has been a lot of other things 
happening, and people know this is attributed to this massive flow of 
illegals. Yet we continue to let those things happen. Wages, for 
example, are being held down. There is no doubt about it; there are 
some people who benefit from low wages, the people who own the 
companies, people who want servants, et cetera. But most people, most 
Americans, are damaged by the product of illegal immigration, and I 
might add this keeping down of wages is changing the demographics in 
our society, thus changing the American way of life.
  Let me note, it is a big lie that illegal immigrants are only taking 
jobs that Americans will not do. No, that is the great lie that is 
being used to justify this influx into our country, which is bringing 
down the wages of all of our people. No, no. Americans will do just 
about any job, but they will not do it at the pay level certain people 
are offering those jobs at. The pay level in our country for certain 
jobs, yes, Americans will not take that, but if we did not flood our 
country with illegal immigrants, those jobs would have to pay more 
money to get them done.
  A good example of this is a job that I held when I was in college. 
When I was in graduate school, I held the job of a janitor. Yes, I 
cleaned toilets, and there is nothing wrong with that type of work. In 
fact, it is very honorable work. Any work where you are taking care of 
your own needs and being self-sufficient is honest work and dignified 
work.
  During this time period after I, of course, got done with that job, 
that was 30 years ago, the GNP of our country has dramatically 
increased. We have had a tremendous increase in the GNP of our country, 
in the wealth of our country. This is a much richer country now than it 
was when I was cleaning toilets as a janitor, but if you look to see 
what janitors are making today in real terms, in real money, they are 
making almost exactly the same pay as I made when I was working as a 
janitor.
  So why is it that the country can be so much more prosperous, there 
is so much more wealth here but the people working in regular jobs and 
more lowly jobs are not making anymore money? Where is their share of 
the prosperity we have enjoyed?
  Their share is being gobbled up at one end of the spectrum by wealthy 
people and being gobbled up by government, I might add, and 
bureaucracy, and who is not getting it are the average working American 
people.
  They say, well, no one would have taken that job as a janitor now. 
Yes, they would have taken that job had we not had a major influx of 
illegals in to take this janitorial work. What would have happened? 
They would have had to pay someone, like myself when I was in college, 
more money to do that job, and then you can bet that somebody would 
have invented a janitor machine, a toilet cleaning machine that would 
have cleaned the potties, maybe 100 potties. A man or a woman might be 
earning $50,000 a year to do a janitorial job.
  There is nothing wrong with paying someone those type of wages for 
that type of work. As I say, any honest work is dignity, and the law of 
supply and demand will determine how much wages are paid, but instead 
of having one man working a machine, working technology to keen up our 
buildings and our bathrooms, we instead have opted in the society to 
bring in illegal immigrants, give them the jobs, but there are now five 
or six of those people and they are living in substandard housing with 
families that are deprived and are bringing the standard of living of 
their neighborhood down. These are people who are not living the 
American dream but, instead, are living the type of nightmare that they 
left in their home countries where there are very poor people and very 
rich people.
  So what we have done, instead of giving working people in America an 
avenue of earning enough money to buy their own home, we have created a 
new class of poor people. Is that working for the interest of the 
American people of our country? Is that what we want?

[[Page 9327]]

This is on top of, I might add, of course, the legal immigrants that we 
permit in, a million legal immigrants and 400,000 refugees every year.
  Pressure is being felt throughout our society because of this massive 
flow of illegals into our country. I am suggesting millions of people 
are coming here every year illegally, and we are not doing anything 
about it, and the pressure is being felt. We can see it. The American 
people can see it. They can feel it, but nowhere is that more evident 
than in the providing of health care for our people.
  Obviously we can feel it in other areas. We can feel it in the area 
of education. We have seen that in education, the quality of our 
education in California is going down. Everyone talks about class size 
in California. They are taking illegal immigrants out of the equation. 
In California, class size is not going up. You take the illegal 
immigrants out of the formula in California, education is doing very 
well, and our teachers would have time to teach our own students and 
give them a quality education; but no, we are permitting that to be 
eroded. For the average person out there who depends on educating their 
children in the public schools, we have permitted illegals to come in 
in order to help people who live in gated communities and send their 
kids to private schools. So education is being affected.
  Our criminal justice system is being affected. We can see that 
throughout California as well, and health care is being affected.
  Emergency health care is something that all of us depend on at one 
time or another. We just heard before us a few minutes ago by some of 
my Democratic colleagues talking about all these uninsured Americans, 
and there are uninsured Americans who do not have health care in this 
country. I have a piece of legislation aimed at trying to make sure 
that we do not put the status of illegal immigrants above our concerns 
for our own American citizens who do not have health care. My bill, 
H.R. 3722, will come to grips with an element that has just been put 
into our system unbeknownst to most American people.
  What we did not know and what most people do not know is that a 
provision was slipped into the Medicare bill of a few months ago that 
passed through this House, and this provision established a $1 billion 
fund to compensate American hospitals for providing emergency health 
care to illegal immigrants. Let us make this clear: $1 billion of 
Federal money going to compensate hospitals for providing emergency 
care to illegals. Thus, we have officially opened the door to our own 
Treasury and to the taxpayers' money of providing services for illegal 
immigrants into our country.
  We are providing this and it is $1 billion to start off with, and you 
can imagine that 10 years from now we are talking about 10s of billions 
of dollars, and we are talking about attracting more and more people 
here to the United States of America in order to get health care for 
their families.
  We cannot spend money providing health care for people who come here 
illegally and not expect that we are not going to have even more people 
come here illegally to get that health care. It does not take a genius 
to figure that out. We have seen what has happened. We have seen this 
flow continue. We had an amnesty back in 1986. That amnesty was 
supposed to say there will be no amnesties after that. What happened? 
What happened was a dramatic increase in illegal immigration into our 
country.
  The American Hospital Association reports that there were $21 billion 
in uncompensated health care services provided last year, and illegal 
aliens amount to 43 percent of those who do not have health insurance 
in this country. So 43 percent of all these people we are talking about 
that do not have health insurance are illegal immigrants. That is about 
$9 billion we are spending already for illegal alien health care. Yet 
we have established a fund that will provide health care for illegal 
immigrants' emergency health care.
  What does that do? What does that mean? That means that we have 
created a perverse incentive for our hospitals to take care of the 
illegals who end up coming to their emergency center and treating the 
Americans and legal residents who come there, who do not have health 
insurance, as second class to the illegal immigrants. We have got the 
priorities totally backwards, but that message is not going to be lost 
on people overseas. They know they can come here and get that health 
care.
  We all remember Jesica Santillan. She was an illegal alien who died 
after receiving not one, but two, heart and lung transplants in North 
Carolina. The Santillan family paid $5,000 to be smuggled across the 
border to get here to have care, care that they knew would take a long 
time to get if they could ever get it at all in Mexico.
  There are American citizens who desperately need organs, and they are 
being knocked out of line by a family who broke the law to come here. 
Yes, that was a nice, little girl and that family's a very nice family. 
We hear stories in the newspaper every day about people who come here 
from China and elsewhere in order to get their families treated by 
America's health care providers. Yes, that touches your hearts, but let 
us be fair to the American people.
  This is depleting our health care dollars that should be going to our 
own senior citizens. If we cannot provide medical care for our senior 
citizens, we cannot provide them medicines, how is it that we can 
provide $1 billion to treat illegal immigrants and then we are going to 
get more of them?
  My bill will come to grips with this particular issue, H.R. 3722. It 
is meant to deal with this travesty. If passed, it will signal to the 
leadership that the American people no longer will stand for this type 
of providing services for illegal immigrants.
  What does this bill do? It requires that hospitals ask questions that 
they are going to ask anyway. The hospitals are opposing my bill 
because they said it is going to add all kinds of questions that you 
have got to ask. No, I have got to tell you this. In order to get those 
funds to get compensated for treating those illegals, what we have got 
to do is ask questions anyway. My bill provides almost no extra 
paperwork. When you hear that argument, it is a lie.

                              {time}  2300

  What we have done is we have asked for a photo to be taken or a 
fingerprint, and one other question to be asked: Who was your last 
employer?
  And I might add that my bill also says that if that last employer of 
this illegal who is now in the emergency room to get care, if he has 
not taken the due diligence to even make a telephone call to verify 
that this employee is here legally or not, and that system will be in 
place in 2005, well then that employer is required to pay the bill, not 
the taxpayers. The employer will pay that health care bill for being so 
arrogant as to try to hire a guy, probably not even paying his taxes 
and not giving him any health insurance.
  So, number one, it suggests the hospitals have to take a minimum of 
attention to collect a fingerprint or a picture of this person, and 
enough information, as well as a few minor questions that they ask 
anyway, and that that information be provided to the Immigration and 
Naturalization Service and the Department of Homeland Security, and 
that we expedite deportation of that person who is here taking hundreds 
of thousands of dollars of health care away from our people.
  If that person is here illegally, they should be deported; and that 
information should be available. But the hospitals are not required to 
do anything else than that which is minimal. It will not cost them time 
or money. And right now, by the way, these hospitals report abuse, 
spousal abuse, child abuse. That is all reported. They can do this. 
And, as I said, we require the employer then to pay for it if he has 
not taken due diligence.
  Most importantly, this bill limits the amount of health care that we 
are going to provide illegal immigrants if they come to the emergency 
room and expect treatment. This is the all-important provision. Today, 
we have people coming from all over the world here

[[Page 9328]]

illegally. They arrive at the emergency room and they say, you have got 
to take care of me. I just mentioned this young lady, this young girl 
from Mexico who we spent millions of dollars on, and then her family 
ended up suing the hospital for heart and lung transplants. No. Under 
my bill, the hospitals will not be required to do anything except treat 
anyone who comes in for a life-threatening condition.
  If an illegal immigrant is there and they want to have leukemia 
treatments or treatments for genetic problems they have been carrying 
all their life, the hospital only has to treat that patient to the 
point that that patient then can get to an airport or get to a 
transportation system that will take them back to their home country to 
be treated for that disease there. That is where they should be 
treated, instead of having our hospitals being forced to pay hundreds 
of thousands of dollars for leukemia treatment, for example.
  There was a fellow in my congressional district who came here from El 
Salvador, and he was dying of leukemia. He received $300,000 worth of 
treatment for leukemia. That $300,000 comes from the money available to 
take care of our children. It comes from the money that is available to 
take care of our seniors. Imagine, $300,000. It is a crime to permit 
someone who has come here to this country to deplete our resources like 
that.
  Now, we are going to have a chance to vote on this next Tuesday; but 
it is not going to happen on its own, because H.R. 3722, which is the 
bill, is going to be the target of every interest group that you can 
imagine that wants to keep the flow of illegal immigration coming into 
this country. But the American people need to know that H.R. 3722, my 
bill, which will be on this floor next Tuesday, is going to be voted 
on. And the decision that is going to be made is the decision that we 
have limited health care dollars in this country; so are we going to 
spend them for illegal immigrants or are we going to try to get control 
of this situation so our health care dollars are going to our own legal 
residents and our U.S. citizens.
  Is that hateful? Is that racist? Is that a horrible thing for people 
who care about other people to do? I say that that is the loving thing 
to do. I say that you can have love in your heart and try to be 
responsible. We know that if we try to do everything for everybody, we 
will end up not being able to do anything for anybody. We have seniors 
right now that cannot afford their medicines, yet we are talking about 
spending billions of dollars to take care of illegal immigrants.
  Now, the only way that I got this vote to the floor, the only way 
that this bill, H.R. 3722, was permitted to come here to the floor for 
a vote was that they needed my vote. The leadership in the House needed 
my vote on the Medicare bill.
  I voted for the Medicare bill because I felt that our health care had 
evolved now so that a lot of people who depended on operations and the 
type of things covered by Medicare in the past now took care of these 
problems by using pills and medicine. So we had to evolve so we could 
help people get those pills and medicine as they get to be older. Well, 
that bill only passed by one vote as it went through the House. And I 
voted for that and I am proud of that.
  Then it went over to the Senate and that is where they stuck this 
provision in, this provision of a billion dollars, which is of course 
an installment. Ten years from now it will be $20 billion. We know 
that. So they stuck this provision in, and on the way back they did not 
have enough votes to pass the Medicare bill. That is why there is a 
miracle that is going to happen here next Tuesday.
  They needed my vote in order to get the Medicare bill passed, and I 
said I cannot vote for this with this provision in here. I already 
voted for it when it was not in; I cannot vote with it in here. Unless 
it is mitigated, I cannot vote for this bill, and the bill was going to 
go down. The leadership said, what do you mean by mitigated. I said, I 
need to bring a bill to the floor that will undo the negative impact of 
the money that we are going to provide for illegal immigrants' health 
care in this bill. They said, you have a deal. We will let you bring 
this to the floor and the people of the United States will be able to 
hear the arguments and your colleagues will be able to vote up or down 
on the legislation that you have in mind.
  That is how this bill came to the floor for a vote. The American 
people have to be involved in deciding this issue when this bill comes 
onto the floor on Tuesday. H.R. 3722 is very easy to understand. It 
means limited health care dollars are going to go to illegal 
immigrants, or it means that we are going to try in some way to 
restrict the use of our limited health care dollars in the servicing of 
illegal immigrants.
  As I say, we have a situation in this bill that goes to the cost of 
illegal immigrants as well by making sure that our hospitals no longer 
feel compelled to provide extensive services, like cancer treatments 
and genetic engineering and bypasses and things to help people who are 
not in a life-threatening situation. We cannot afford to do that for 
illegal immigrants. We cannot afford to do it.
  First of all, it is unfair to our own U.S. citizens to have a fund 
that will compensate hospitals for taking care of illegal aliens who do 
not have health care insurance, but then we are not doing that for our 
own citizens who do not have health care insurance. That is wrong. It 
is immoral, and it is wrong.
  We need to make sure when the illegal immigrant is there that we do 
not end up spending massive amounts of money. The only money that 
should be spent is in case that person, his or her life is in danger at 
that moment. We cannot afford anything else. There are some people who 
believe that we can do everything for everybody. They never vote 
against any spending in this body. They vote for any new government 
program. I do not know how they can think they are being responsible, 
but they do.
  I can tell you right now, we cannot be the HMO of the world. If we 
try to be the HMO of the world, and we attract people from all over the 
world, which we are doing now, and taking care of all their maladies 
and all their health care problems, we will be doing so at the expense 
of the American people.
  Yes, illegal immigration is out of control. It is dramatically 
hurting our way of life. We have wages that have been kept down so some 
of our people cannot afford health insurance, and now we are taking 
care of illegals and not their health insurance. We have people now who 
come to this country and will work and not pay taxes, so that means 
they are not getting health insurance, they are not paying taxes, and 
that means doubly that we end up paying for their bill.

                              {time}  2310

  Who are we really subsidizing? We are subsidizing the employers of 
these people who are basically not only exploiting them, they are 
exploiting the taxpayers. The people are getting filthy rich by hiring 
people who have come here illegally and not providing them any health 
care and not having them pay taxes to make up for the services they are 
consuming here. This has to be stopped. It is bringing down the wages 
of our people and it is destroying the American way of life.
  We cannot sustain millions of people coming into this country without 
harming our own people. Wake up, America. We can do something about 
this, but we have got to take a stand.
  Next Tuesday, it will be very easy to understand, except there is 
going to be all kinds of rhetoric about the burden of paperwork that we 
are going to put on the hospitals. By the way, there is no burden of 
paperwork unless the hospital wants to be compensated. H.R. 3722 will 
not require the hospitals to do anything if they do not want the 
Federal dollars to compensate them for taking care of that illegal 
immigrant.
  If they want to opt out, there is no burden. But if they want 
compensation, they are going to have to ask certain questions to prove 
this person was illegal to get compensation. My legislation requires a 
minimal amount,

[[Page 9329]]

maybe an extra 30 seconds, enough to snap a Polaroid shot and ask who 
the former employer is. That is it. All they are doing is putting this 
information into a computer that is available to the Immigration and 
Naturalization Service, and then the legislation requires our 
government employees at the Immigration and Naturalization Service to 
look at that information and they will analyze it and they will begin 
deportation against an illegal immigrant.
  Why should we do this? First, some will say it will mean more people 
are not getting treated in our society. There will be more sickness in 
our society.
  Let me note that if Members want to see sick people coming to 
America, let everybody in the world know if you get to America, you are 
going to be treated. You are going to get free health care. They are 
going to bring their kids here with polio and everything else because 
they know their family will be treated in the United States of America. 
If we want to spread disease in our society, let us make our society 
the HMO of the world, and that is what we are doing here today.
  No, this is not an imposition on the hospitals. They can opt out if 
they want. It is no more bother than what they are already doing. For 
example, child abuse cases go to the police. They make a report to the 
police; or some spousal abuse case, they do that already. No one is 
complaining about that. But let us compare what illegal immigration is 
doing to those situation.
  This illegal immigrant from El Salvador who died with leukemia and 
taking with him $300,000 of U.S. tax dollars with him, how bad is that? 
Is that awful? The girl in North Carolina, we spent $5 million on her. 
Why is that bad?
  Today if that guy would have lived and gone into a drugstore or 
liquor store and stolen a couple hundred bucks, he would be in jail. If 
one of our people, our citizens, goes into a store and robs it of a 
couple hundred dollars, that person is going to jail. But instead, we 
are taking people who have entered the United States illegally or have 
overstayed their visas and are just here illegally, and we are 
permitting them to consume hundreds of thousands of dollars, taken 
directly from our pockets; and the money available for providing 
services, we are permitting them to take this money. They are stealing 
from our society, but their accomplices are the people in our 
government who refuse to come to grips with this grave threat to our 
society.
  We all know that we have a threat here to the institutions, our 
health institutions and to our schools. We also know that with illegal 
immigration out of control, we do not know if these people are 
terrorists, if terrorists are coming here. We have to come to grips 
with this.
  We have to look in the mirror and say we are proud to be a country 
that is made up of every race and every religion. We are proud to be a 
Nation of immigrants. We are proud that we have more legal immigration 
in our society than any other country in the world, but we are not 
going to be browbeaten and called names in light of our generosity, 
simply for doing things that are responsible in protecting our own 
citizens and legal residents.
  We have got to watch out for each other. We have to care for our 
other fellow Americans more than people who have come here illegally. 
If we do not, no one is going to stand in line and go through the 
process of legal immigration.
  This is a situation that threatens our way of life. We have to 
proceed with love in our hearts, but we have to proceed with 
determination to turn the situation around. Next Tuesday, Members of 
Congress have got to know that their constituents will be judging them 
on their vote on H.R. 3722. No one should be fooled by any smoke that 
is blown into the air to try to confuse people on the issue. This is 
the issue of using scarce health dollars for illegal immigrants versus 
using those dollars for American citizens and legal residents.
  People need to have their voice heard in Washington, D.C. Elected 
officials need to come to grips on this, and we need to have more votes 
on this than simply those votes that are required whenever there is 
some type of arrangement made because votes are needed on another piece 
of legislation.
  There are good people on all sides of this issue. There are good 
people who are concerned about large numbers of illegals. We have 12 
million illegals in this country, but we have to be more concerned with 
American citizens and legal residents.

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