[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12058-12062]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      WILLINGNESS TO ADMIT FAILURE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Garrett of New Jersey). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from 
Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) is recognized for half the remaining time until 
midnight.
  Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, it has been an interesting discussion of 
the issues of the day for the last hour or so by the opposing party, 
and certainly I am sure that to a large extent the remarks are 
heartfelt and are as a result of a distinct difference in opinion as to 
exactly where this country should be and how the leadership should 
actually be constructed.
  It is intriguing to me in a way as I sat and listened to the 
discussion about when the Members of the other side talk about the need 
for admissions of wrongdoing or failure. It would be so much more, I 
think, credible for them to approach this issue by first saying that we 
on the left have to admit certain things that we now know to be 
inaccurate.
  Let us start with the fact that the entire world has disavowed our 
economic theories of greater government control of the economy, of 
cooperation with foreign governments, especially those governments that 
were totalitarian in nature and Communist by design, but all of these 
things have failed and we know it and the whole world recognizes it. 
The fall of the Communist empire, as a result of the variety of 
strategies employed by the United States and by others, including the 
Pope, as a matter of fact, we now see that it was a house of cards that 
had no real basis in reality; that could not sustain itself; that 
socialism was not ever, ever able to deliver its promise of a better 
life for the people under its control; that greater government control 
of the economy, that larger government enterprises, that opposition to 
Communism, that all of these things were failures. It would be so much 
more credible for our friends on the other side of the aisle to 
approach this discussion of the need for willingness to admit failure 
had they started with that.
  Had they started with saying, you know what, we have tried, we for 40 
years, we had control of this body,

[[Page 12059]]

Presidency, it was a Democratic-controlled Congress, certainly for the 
majority of the 40 years prior to 1994, and we pushed the idea of 
greater Federal involvement in the lives of Americans. We did so 
because we believed it was right. We did so because we believed the 
theories that were supposed to be there to substantiate the claim that 
greater control of our lives by the government, even control of the 
means of production by the government, the things we call socialism 
today, those claims have now been proven to be false.
  It would be so refreshing to have them stand in front of the House, 
Mr. Speaker, and say we were wrong and we are willing to admit it; we 
are willing to admit that people do better throughout the world, as a 
matter of fact, not just in the United States. But throughout the 
world, it is the governments under which they live that are governments 
that espouse a free enterprise, a democratic kind of government that 
allows for individual liberty and individual enterprise. We were wrong 
to suggest that we should not confront Communism as forcefully as 
possible and that we should not, in fact, increase all of our Defense 
appropriations so as to essentially force the Communist empire to 
collapse under its own weight which is, of course, what we did, what 
Ronald Reagan proposed and it worked.
  Most of the leaders of the Free World, and even some leaders of what 
was in the past a totalitarian country, came to the United States for 
the purposes of paying homage to Ronald Reagan and admitted that his 
strategy and his ability to see what was good for America and what was 
good for the world was, in fact, the right way to go.
  Yet, never did I hear in the discussion here for the preceding hour 
that our friends were willing to concede the point that they were wrong 
and that the whole world knows it, and that people, every time they 
have had the opportunity, they voted to cast off totalitarian 
dictatorships and socialist enterprises.
  So, as I say, it would have been better, it would have been certainly 
more convincing had they come here first with an apology for all of the 
things that they have been espousing for the last half a century and 
now they know to be incorrect and failures of policies, but they did 
not do that. They just suggested that what we are doing today is wrong. 
Well, what makes us think then that what their view is of today is any 
better, any more correct, any more insightful, any more intuitive than 
what their view of what was yesterday and the world in which we lived 
up till today? Why should we trust them with guiding this Nation's 
future?
  I did not hear them disavow the principles upon which their party and 
upon which, in fact, the left has been relying for years and today 
only, only exists and are espoused in institutions of higher education 
primarily in this country but perhaps even around the world; but 
everywhere where the rubber hits the road, everywhere where people have 
to actually go out and make a living for themselves and their families, 
everywhere where people are struggling to overcome the kinds of 
government tyranny under which they may live, everywhere where that 
exists, people yearn for something quite different than what the left 
offers them.
  So that realization, that empirical evidence that we have to say that 
all of those ideas were wrong, that evidence has not yet manifested 
itself, and that realization of the error of their ways, it has not 
manifested itself in any of the rhetoric I heard tonight while I was 
waiting to deliver my remarks on, I should say, a totally different 
subject.
  Nonetheless, I thought I should comment on what is apparent to me to 
be at least a discrepancy in the testimony that was provided here by 
our friends on the other side of the aisle for the last hour.


                           Immigration Reform

  Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, let me go on to the discussion of an issue 
that I have many times in the past tried to bring forward on this floor 
and an issue that I believe to be of enormous importance to the country 
and certainly an issue that I believe needs the attention and debate of 
my friends and colleagues in the Congress of the United States and 
certainly a reflection of the debate that goes on throughout the 
country every single day around water coolers in offices and on work 
sites throughout America and around dinner tables throughout America. 
That debate and that discussion revolves around the issue of 
immigration and immigration reform, and it has many, many implications 
for who we are as a Nation, where we go from here, and how successful 
we may be in trying to achieve whatever goals we establish for 
ourselves.
  It is connected to an even more significant challenge to the United 
States, and that is the reestablishment of the idea of exactly who we 
are, of what we are, what principles we espouse as a Nation, of what 
principles we can adhere to as a people.
  This part of the debate is an extremely important one, hard to bring 
up, hard to articulate. Certainly it is impossible to do so in a 
bumper-sticker fashion. It does require some degree of analysis that 
goes beyond the 30-second or 60-second sound bite, but I believe it to 
be a very important debate and discussion to undertake.
  If we are to believe the polls that have been taken for the last 
decade or more on the issue of immigration, Americans generally believe 
that, number one, we should, in fact, enforce the law against people 
coming here illegally. That means enforcing our borders, making sure to 
the extent possible that people do not come into this country without 
our permission, people do not come here that we do not know about, and 
that we make people come into this country through a normalized and 
legal process.
  The United States of America is unique in many ways. One way is that 
we accept more people into this country every single year legally, 
through a legal process of immigration and also temporary visitor 
status, than any country in the world. We are and have been always a 
beacon of light to the world, a beacon to which many people are 
attracted.
  It is peculiar, to say the least, that even with this policy, this 
very liberal policy of immigration and legal access into our country 
through temporary worker status, we still have and allow for millions 
of people to enter this country illegally. We do not know who they are. 
We do not know why they are coming. We do not know how long they are 
staying, and we do not know where they are once they are here.

                              {time}  2245

  Now, most Americans will say this is a bad policy to pursue, that it 
is not good for America, it is not good for our future, and that we 
should establish the concept of the nation-state and defend that 
concept with essentially defending our borders.
  Beyond that many people suggest, a majority of Americans even suggest 
we need to reduce legal immigration until such time we can get this 
problem under control. Every poll says that is what America wants. Now, 
a dilemma is then created by the fact that this is the will of the 
people, and it has been for a long, long time. It is not new; it did 
not just happen after President Reagan said he wanted a guest worker/
amnesty program and that created quite a furor. It has been the case 
for years that that is what the American people want. They want borders 
enforced, they want controls on immigration, and yet this body and more 
peculiarly, even cities and States throughout the Nation, which one 
would think would be more reflective of local citizen input than even 
the Congress of the United States, which we know has always been 
historically way behind the curve in terms of popular sentiment, but 
one would think that we would see reflected in city councils and State 
legislatures, one would think we would see far more of a reflection of 
the position that I have just described that is held by a majority of 
people in the country.
  The most difficult question we have to answer, why is that the case? 
Why do our elected officials seem to be paying little attention to what 
most Americans feel? There are a number of

[[Page 12060]]

answers to that question. They are not necessarily pleasant to discuss, 
but they are true. That is for the most part we see legislatures and 
the Congress of the United States and even city councils that are very 
responsive to pressure and pressure groups and less responsive to the 
general will of the people if it is not reflected through these 
pressure group-type of organizations.
  For the most part, politicians in the United States have concluded 
that they can address this issue by essentially finessing it, by 
agreeing theoretically with people when they are in an atmosphere, an 
arena in which doing so would be to their political advantage. They can 
agree there is a problem with immigration and that we should do 
something about it and we should stop illegal immigration. Everybody 
will mouth the platitudes connected to that concept.
  But they believe also that they can finesse this issue by essentially 
using the rhetoric to mollify a certain part of their constituency 
while simultaneously doing things to attract another group; and these 
are very powerful groups in many ways, certainly very vocal groups 
which press for open borders, for relaxation of law enforcement, and 
have a totally different opinion about how this country should actually 
develop.
  For the most part, they are trying to serve two masters here. Most 
politicians are trying to serve two masters, and they have been 
successful in doing this in many ways because for the most part people 
in the United States when asked how do they feel about immigration come 
down on our side, but are not organized in political pressure groups 
designed to actually force politicians to acknowledging it. They are 
simply voters and citizens who go to work every single day and have 
other things on their minds.
  It is also true that the parties themselves, the Democrats and the 
Republicans, are both inclined to do exactly what I say that individual 
politicians do, and that is pander on the one side to immigration, pro-
immigration groups, and on the other side placate those people who are 
concerned about it, placate them through rhetoric, but not through 
action. They are trying to play this dicey game, and sometimes it 
works.
  We have seen throughout the land the development of a very 
interesting phenomenon whereby foreign countries have used their 
consular offices in the United States to lobby States and city 
governments to get them to accept for purposes of identification 
something called the matricular consular ID card that is given to a 
person not by the United States of America but by a foreign government. 
And then that government comes to an American city, county, or State 
and says please accept the card we give out as proper identification.
  Now of course Members have to understand that the only reason that 
the card is necessary is because we have millions and millions of 
people who are living here illegally. Those are the only folks to whom 
such a card would be important. If a person is here in this country 
legally, of course, they have a document which we have given them, a 
visa, a passport stamp, something that the United States of America has 
said this allows you to enter our country. Even if you are not here as 
a citizen, you are a legal alien resident. That is the term.
  So the only people who need the matricular consular are illegally 
present in the United States, and everybody knows that. The governments 
that are pushing it, and the cities and States that are accepting these 
things know that they are only helpful to people who are here 
illegally, and they are only helpful if a city or State agrees to 
accept that card, thereby making it very difficult for people who 
actually enforce immigration law in this country. Making it very easy, 
on the other hand, to live here if you are here illegally. You will get 
all of the benefits of anyone who is here legally. You will be afforded 
a variety of privileges that have heretofore been allowed only to those 
people who were citizens of the United States or at least here with the 
permission of our government. That is happening throughout the country. 
We have seen it. We have seen cities capitulate. We have actually seen 
cities, it is bizarre as you can imagine, we have seen cities that 
actually allow people to vote if they are not legal residents of this 
country.
  The Mayor of this city, Washington, D.C., the District, proposed this 
several months ago for D.C. He said that anybody who is here as a 
resident should be able to vote regardless of whether or not they are 
citizens. Again, if we put this up for a vote, a vote of the people, 
the specific issue to allow people who are here illegally to vote, how 
many places in America can you imagine that would pass? Maybe in D.C., 
that is true, but not too many other places in this country would say 
that is okay; but cities and States are doing it.
  In the next few days we will be debating a number of appropriations 
bills, one which will fund the Department of Homeland Security, the 
Commerce-State-Justice appropriations bill. I will offer a series of 
amendments to that bill. I will tell Members right now those amendments 
will fail on the House floor. They have done so in the past. That 
certainly will not stop me from introducing them again.
  But I suggest, every one of the amendments that I propose, if I 
proposed them to the American people in the form of some initiative 
process or some way to let all America vote, I know and certainly all 
polls tell us they would pass. One, I will propose that no city that 
has established a sanctuary policy, that is a policy that allows people 
to come into that city who are here illegally and be protected from the 
Federal Government's attempts to actually enforce immigration law, 
where cities that will pass legislation, pass municipal ordinances 
saying if a person is here illegally, that will not effect the way 
people are treated by their own police department. In fact, if police 
pick someone up for violating a law, robbery, rape, murder or going 
through a red light, if they find that person is here illegally, they 
will not report that to the Department of Immigration Control and 
Enforcement.
  Those laws are on the books in various cities throughout the country, 
and even States are undertaking similar types of proposals. Maine has 
recently declared itself, or is in the process of declaring itself, to 
be a sanctuary State.
  I am going to suggest in the form of an amendment to an 
appropriations bill that no city or State that adopts these kinds of 
policies should be able to obtain any of the grants that are available 
through the bill through the Department of Homeland Security.
  I have in fact done that in the past, and I think we got about 110 or 
120 votes, I cannot remember now; and it will probably not be much more 
than that when I introduce that amendment again.
  I have another amendment that says any city or State that gives 
illegal aliens driver's licenses will likewise be restricted from 
obtaining Federal funds under the act.
  It is amazing to think about the fact that we have States that are 
willing to do this and in fact have done this, provide people who are 
here illegally with the form of identification as close to a national 
ID as we have that will allow people to have access to every aspect of 
American life as a regular citizen would have, and make it therefore 
much easier for someone to be in this country illegally. That goes for 
the person who is here, quote, to only do the job that no other 
American will do, as if there in fact was such a job, and it also goes 
for the person who is here to kill every single one of us and our 
children. They can use that passport into American society that we call 
a driver's license just as well as the person who is only here to do a 
job no one else will do; and yet these things are happening, and I will 
go ahead and suggest that, in fact, my amendments will fail.
  I am going to do another amendment as soon as the bill for foreign 
appropriations comes to the floor, and that is just another way of 
saying foreign aid. When our foreign aid bill comes to the floor, I am 
going to introduce an amendment saying that the foreign aid to any 
country will be reduced by the

[[Page 12061]]

amount of money that is flowing from this country, from the nationals 
of the foreign country who are working here, anybody who is working 
here and sending money back to the country of origin, and that is 
called remittances, that is how we refer to the dollars sent back from 
people working here for the most part illegally, and taking money out 
of our communities and not allowing that money to go to work to create 
jobs and improve the economy of the communities in which the folks here 
are living, most of them communities in desperate need of economic 
stimulus; but those dollars are flowing to people in countries outside 
of the United States.
  We had a report not too long ago that that number, the number of 
dollars that flow just to Latin America, not to the rest of the world, 
just to Latin America is about $30 billion a year.
  There are several countries in the world that have more than 10 
percent of their gross domestic product made up from remittances from 
the United States of America.

                              {time}  2300

  I suggest, Mr. Speaker, that if foreign aid is the simple transfer of 
wealth from one country, in this case America, to another country, that 
we can do it better through remittances than through writing a check to 
a corrupt government that will skim off almost all of the dollars 
before they ever get to anybody who actually may need them. So as a 
result, I think we should punish those countries for the economic 
policies they have adopted that have caused the populations in their 
country to despair and to be subjected to impoverishment. We should not 
reward the thugs that run these countries. We should stop giving them 
money and we should say, okay, we know you are getting billions of 
dollars a year from the United States going straight to people who are 
certainly in need in your country, so we will not be giving you that 
money in foreign aid anymore, we will just allow the flow of 
remittances to make up for that.
  Most of the countries in the Western hemisphere that have been 
lobbying so hard to get the United States to maintain an open door 
policy toward immigration, in fact, the elimination of borders, it is 
interesting, many people have asked me why it is in fact that Mexico 
and Guatemala and El Salvador and a number of these countries have been 
so adamant about getting us to open our borders to their nationals. 
There is a reason, Mr. Speaker, and it is not just simply because they 
want to see the people in their country prosper. It is because they 
want to see the people in their country become the source of revenue 
for the folks in their own country. They recognize that they can 
maintain their power more easily if the masses are being provided the 
sustenance they need through the remittances that are coming from the 
United States, then they can rely on the foreign aid that we send them 
to go into their pockets and to prop up their regime. I think we should 
reduce that. I think we should stop that. I will propose an amendment 
to the foreign ops bill to do exactly that.
  If we put that amendment to the country, Mr. Speaker, is there anyone 
in this room, is there anyone on either side of the aisle that really 
and truly believes that would fail in the eyes of the American people? 
No, of course not. We all know it would pass overwhelmingly if the 
American people were allowed to vote on it individually. It will fail 
here in this body. But I will continue to do that. I will continue to 
offer amendments of this nature. I will continue to talk about the need 
to do something about immigration and immigration control because I 
believe it is perhaps the most important domestic policy issue we face 
as a nation.
  As I said at the beginning of my remarks, Mr. Speaker, the issue of 
immigration and that sort of thing does not just revolve around the 
issue of jobs although it is enormously important to America. It is a 
fact that we are importing massive numbers of low-skilled, low-wage 
people who in fact hold down the wage rates of low-skilled, low-wage 
American workers, making it even more difficult for them to ever work 
their way out of the cycle of poverty. It is absolutely true that that 
occurs. No one suggests that massive importation of cheap labor has 
helped the low-income wage earner in America. Nobody suggests that. 
Even the most devoted pro-immigration lobby never suggests that it 
helps the poor in America. It increases the number of the poor. In 
fact, when we do our surveys every year about people living in poverty, 
it is amazing, but a huge percentage, somewhere near 90 percent of 
those people whom we now identify as in poverty in the United States 
are people who are in fact noncitizens of the United States. It is also 
true that those people who have dropped out of the job market, who have 
had a harder and harder time to actually get a better job and crawl 
their way up out of their particular situation have been negatively 
affected and that job is made much more difficult by the massive number 
of people who are here illegally or by immigrants here legally or not. 
So it is an important issue.
  The fact that we export all of our high tech jobs to India and other 
places while simultaneously importing very high tech, very capable 
people to take the place of American workers because they will work for 
less and that in turn holds down the wage rates of middle-income 
workers in this country, all of those things are true.
  We will certainly see and do see as we look around the country the 
economic effects of open borders. It does benefit multinational 
corporations, that is true. It does not benefit the people who in fact 
work for them or the nations in which those multinational corporations 
exist or call home. Few corporations today can even be thought of as 
being American corporations. In fact, I think it was Ralph Nader sent a 
request to all of the huge corporations in America asking them to begin 
their board meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance. Few even responded 
but those that did were irate that he would suggest such a thing, 
suggesting that there is no allegiance to a nation state, that their 
allegiance is to a corporate bottom line. And if that bottom line can 
be enhanced by ignoring the needs of the country in which they are 
housed, that is okay, they are going to do it because that is exactly 
what they are constructed for.
  So it is true that this issue is a jobs issue. It is certainly true 
that this issue is a national security issue. As I said, there are 
people who are coming into this country hidden among those who are 
coming here for relatively benign purposes but there are people coming 
in to do us great, great harm, undeniably true. We have found some here 
already. We have arrested them. Some of them we have been able to 
actually take out of circulation not necessarily because we can 
immediately bring them to trial on the basis of espionage or some sort 
of allegation that deals directly with their support of terrorism but 
because they have violated immigration laws. That is the first thing we 
go to. They are here illegally. It is nice we have something to use and 
it is nice that we would actually use it, but the fact is that even 
these things are not as important in totality as the issue I discussed 
earlier, and that is the very difficult problem we are going through in 
America with identifying who we are.
  There is a great book that has just come out. It is in fact called 
``Who Are We?'' It is by Samuel Huntington. I consider him to be an 
enormously talented observer of the American political and social 
scene. He has written other books, one called ``The Clash of 
Civilizations'' that I have read several times over. I am about halfway 
through ``Who Are We?'' I find it to be a fascinating read. I believe 
that that is the ultimate question with which we are dealing, who are 
we? Where are we going? What is it we are going to try and accomplish 
as Americans? What does it mean to be an American?
  Our students in our classrooms throughout the country are being fed a 
steady diet of anti-Americanism, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt. 
This diet includes a revision of history that creates a picture I think 
totally and completely incorrect and certainly skewed that would show 
American history and Western civilization itself as

[[Page 12062]]

being inherently evil, something out of which nothing good could come. 
A textbook I remember picking up in a junior high I was in in my 
district, this was a couple of years ago now, started out, the chapter 
on American history, as Columbus came here and destroyed paradise.

                              {time}  2310

  That was not in italics. It was not just a quote they were going to 
then analyze. That was the way the textbook portrayed Columbus's trip 
and his landing here on our shores, on the shores of North America. 
That kind of thing where we have made it very confusing for Americans 
to even understand or identify who, in fact, or what we are, combined 
with massive immigration where that same message is given to people who 
are not necessarily coming here, by the way, to become Americans but to 
simply achieve a greater economic level of existence and prosperity, 
which certainly is an admirable and laudable and understandable goal. 
But it behooves us, I think, to change the way in which we teach our 
children, the way in which we discuss this issue of multiculturalism, 
which has gotten to the point where it becomes almost a cult and that 
anything that is said to suggest that American culture, that American 
history, and that Western Civilization is, in fact, worthy of analysis, 
worthy of allegiance, anything that suggests that is determined to be 
sort of against the grain; and it is certainly not going to be accepted 
by academia as a legitimate subject matter.
  I recently had the opportunity of going to a high school in my 
district where 250 students were asked to assemble. And we talked for a 
while, and one of them asked me a question. They sent these questions 
up. And it was written out, and it said what do I think is the most 
serious problem facing America today? And I said, Before I answer that 
question, let me ask you something: How many in this room, 250, 
approximately, students, how many in this auditorium would agree with 
the statement that you live in the greatest country in the world? And 
about maybe two dozen raised their hands, and they did so sheepishly, 
the ones that did. It was none of that immediately hands go up, sure, 
of course, naturally, we live in the greatest country in the world. 
That did not happen.
  And they looked along the walls where their teachers were lined up in 
this auditorium, and I could see in their faces that they were 
concerned. I am not saying that the ones that did not answer were 
suggesting that they did not like America, hated America. I am just 
saying that they did not have the slightest idea, they had absolutely 
no intellectual ammunition to defend themselves if they were to 
postulate that, in fact, America is the greatest country in the world. 
They were not taught anything that would lead them to that. In fact, 
they were taught things that would make them feel very sheepish and 
sensitive about making that kind of statement.
  That is what I consider to be the real issue with which we are 
involved and which we should be debating: changing the way in which we 
look at ourselves, changing the way in which we teach our children 
about who we are, and certainly changing the way in which we try to 
bring immigrants into American mainstream, which today does not exist. 
Today we tell them they should stay separate, keep a separate language, 
even keep political affiliations with countries other than the United 
States. This is all done to our great and long-lasting disadvantage. It 
is a very serious issue, one that, as I say, requires more time and 
attention and analysis than can be given during a 30-second or even 1-
minute ad during a political campaign. But it is the reason why I do 
come to the floor as often as I do to try to raise the issue.
  I could be, of course, 180 percent off course here. I could be 
totally wrong. But I believe with all my heart that at least this 
deserves the debate, that this body should afford it, and that this 
arena would be the perfect place for that to occur.

                          ____________________