[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12372-12378]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         DEFENDING THE HOMELAND

  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 60 minutes.
  Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, we have, I think, had an incredibly 
interesting hour preceding this and discussion of our efforts in Iraq 
and indeed around the world in the fight against terror.
  I want to talk a little tonight about our efforts to defend the 
homeland, essentially. Our efforts to deal with the fact that we 
recognize all the things that we have said up to this point in time, 
the last hour at least, have been rather ominous. They have been 
frightening in many ways because they lay out a situation for us that 
we cannot ignore, and that is this, that our enemies are willing; that 
they will go to any length to try and bring us down; that they are 
driven by a theocratic and ideological motivation that knows no bounds. 
They are fanatical.
  Unfortunately, every single day in the paper we see the fact that 
somebody has decided to commit another act of terrorism, blow 
themselves up or set off a bomb along the side of the road and kill 
Americans and kill Westerners and kill members of the coalition forces; 
and we recognize, as I say, that these people are fanatics. They are 
driven with a passion that knows no bounds. They will do anything 
necessary to advance their cause, anything.
  That includes, of course, bringing the war here to our shores. We 
have seen it happen. We also know that it is not just a possibility, 
that it will happen again. It is a probability. So we have been talking 
in more grandiose terms for the last hour about how to fight the war on 
terror.

                              {time}  2015

  I must tell you that I sort of reject or am concerned about the use 
of the word ``terror'' to describe the enemy, because it is an 
amorphous term. It does not really and truly let people understand 
exactly what it is and who it is we are up against. I believe that this 
is a war against fundamentalist Islam. It has been going on for a long 
time. It has gotten hot and cold. It has been fought in various places 
around the world and never been really very much at the top of our list 
of concerns because the oceans have separated us. This war has gone on, 
East against West, if you will, certainly fundamentalist Islam against 
Judeo-Christianity for now centuries. This is the latest iteration but 
it is much more dangerous than any other stage of this conflict 
because, of course, today's technology provides those folks with an 
ability to strike us regardless of the fact that we have oceans 
separating us.
  They do so by coming into our country. They come across undefended 
borders, both northern and southern borders of the United States. They 
come into Canada where their policy of immigration is so liberal, 
especially their policy toward people who claim to be refugees, is so 
liberal that I have only slightly jokingly said that Osama bin Laden 
could land in Toronto after having cut off his beard, call himself Omar 
the tentmaker and claim to be a refugee and the Canadian government

[[Page 12373]]

would immediately allow him entrance into Canada and, by the way, give 
him $150 for his trouble and tell him to come back in 6 months for a 
review of his case.
  We know that people have come into both Canada and into Mexico who 
are in fact terrorists. They are part of the fundamental Islamic 
terrorist organizations. They come into the United States among a flood 
of immigrants coming into this country, mostly illegally, across our 
northern and southern borders, most of them, of course, as we have said 
over and over, coming for relatively benign reasons, not coming 
necessarily to be Americans, not because they are hoping against hope 
to connect up with this thing called the American dream, to disavow 
their past allegiances, to ignore the country of origin, to break with 
the old and start with the new. No, no, that is not what is motivating 
most of the people who are coming into the country at this time 
illegally. They are coming simply for the economic advantage that the 
Nation offers.
  Of course, that is a very alluring reward and it is one that most of 
our grandparents had in mind when they came, also. But there was a 
great difference between the immigration of the 1900s, the early 1900s 
and late 1800s, not just in the type of people who were coming because 
many of them were coming also with the desire to cut with the old and 
attach to the new. That is something my grandparents talked about 
often. But they also were coming into a country that was quite 
different. As I have said on many occasions, the country into which 
they came was a country that required much of them. When they got here, 
they had two choices and only two choices. They could work or they 
could starve. There was nothing else. There was no social service 
benefit. There was no aid to families with dependent children. There 
were no food stamps. There was nothing that was provided to them but 
what their own labor could in fact develop and provide. As a result of 
that and the fact that you had people in the United States who expected 
people who came here to become Americans, you had a great deal of 
pressure on the immigrant community coming into the country, a great 
deal of pressure to integrate into the society. Sometimes that took an 
ugly tone and aspect but for the most part it happened in a relatively 
communal way.
  Immigrants came into our public school systems where they were taught 
in English. Their parents attempting to get better jobs recognized that 
one of the things they had to do in order to acquire that next step up 
the economic ladder was to learn English. In doing so, we saw that the 
pressure to integrate and to assimilate from our side and the pressure 
to integrate and assimilate from their side worked relatively well, so 
that out of all of the ghettos, the Italian ghetto, the Jewish ghetto, 
Hungarian, Polish, you name it, out of those ghettos that were 
scattered along our East Coast and some of our major cities in the 
Midwest even, out of them came a group of people that spread out over 
the country as Americans, losing, detaching their identity, detaching 
from their past identity and connecting with the new one.
  This was a different country, as I say, and to a certain extent 
people motivated by different reasons when they came. We have changed a 
great deal, of course, about who we are, and we have begun to become 
obsessed as a nation and a culture with the concept of multiculturalism 
and diversity.
  Recently I was told about a school in my district, a community 
college in Colorado, I believe it was Red Rocks Community College, 
where they had a diversity week that had been planned and booths would 
be set up to again explore and heap accolades upon the fact that we are 
such a diverse society. A group of students looking at the array of 
booths that had been set up realized that they did not find themselves 
represented at any of these different booths because they were simply 
Americans. They were not identifying with people who thought of 
themselves as something else before they thought of themselves as 
Americans. And so they went to the administration at the school and 
they asked if they could set up an American booth. After some 
consternation, they were allowed to do so. So you had among all of the 
other booths, and I do not know how they were named or how they were 
divided, but among all the booths talking about the different groups of 
people who are here, we had another one called the American booth.
  We have, of course, seen hundreds of examples of what happens in our 
schools and in our society in general when the media and the academic 
institutions are all devoted to focusing in on the issue of diversity, 
focusing in on all the things that separate us as a people and not by 
the things that hold us together. Diversity is a fine thing and we can 
enjoy it and we can explore it, but it cannot ever be the only thing 
that holds us together because, of course, it is oxymoronic to even 
think that that is a possibility, that diversity is our only commonly 
held value.
  Yet that is what is happening to us. That is what I see in the 
schools I go to. That is what I see continually being held up as the 
ultimate goal for all Americans, to be diverse and to worship 
multiculturalism. It is a cult that has developed around this whole 
thing. I call it the cult of multiculturalism because we have people 
that are driven and consumed by it to the point where anything that is 
said that suggests that American culture, that Western civilization has 
value, anything that even intimates that there is something about us 
that is admirable as a nation is looked upon with horror, with a sort 
of revulsion, with a great deal of angst when you talk about it. 
Somehow the cult of multiculturalism has gotten a lot of people to 
believe that the only way that you can appreciate or express your 
appreciation for any other culture in the world is to denigrate your 
own, is to say there is something wrong with us.
  Not too long ago, I went to visit a school in my district. It was a 
brand new building. The first classes had been in only for a few 
months. It was a high school in Douglas County, a very upscale county 
in Colorado, one of the fastest growing counties in the United States. 
I was asked to go to speak. I went. The entire student body, about 250 
because, as I say, the school had just opened, it was the first 
classes, about 250 students came into the auditorium to hear and their 
teachers lined up on the sides of the walls and we had an interesting 
discussion. After about 15 or 20 minutes, they started sending up 
questions. The first question they sent up, the first one I opened 
said, what do you think is the most serious problem facing the United 
States? I said, well, let me ask you a question and then perhaps I can 
answer that question for you. How many of you believe you live in the 
greatest nation in the world? A simple question, one that I think most 
people would assume would elicit an immediate and positive response. 
How many of you think you live in the best country in the world, the 
greatest nation in the world? Interestingly, after a moment or two of 
fairly uneasy silence, about two dozen kids raised their hand. The rest 
looked and even those that raised their hands looked at the teachers 
that were lined up on the wall and were leery about it. You could see 
this. Do not get me wrong. I am not suggesting that the other 200 kids 
in the auditorium were disagreeing with that necessarily. I did not get 
that feeling. But what I think I saw there was a group of students who 
had been completely and totally uneducated about who we are, what we 
are and whether or not there is any value here. Therefore, if they said 
yes to that question, who knows, somebody, a teacher, perhaps, seeing 
them do that, may have when they went back into their room asked them 
to explain why they said that and they had challenged them, almost 
certainly would have, and they could not defend it. That is the feeling 
I had. They were not intellectually armed with the ability to make that 
defense.
  I suggest to you that we could do this in any high school in the 
United States of America and we would get varying degrees of response 
but you would not, I think, for the most part be surprised to hear if 
we did this that a majority of

[[Page 12374]]

students chose not to raise their hands in support of that concept. And 
some would be doing it because they do not believe it is, but in fact 
there are other cultures' ideas or cultures and nations as good if not 
better than the United States and so why should they be so chauvinistic 
to express a desire to explore the greatness of America.
  And so we talked a little bit about that. Actually the principal came 
up to me at the end and was concerned about it. Remember, he had only 
been there a couple of months himself. I certainly do not blame him. As 
a matter of fact, I was very encouraged by my discussion with him. He 
was concerned about what he saw. He had read a book that I had read and 
we talked about it at length. It was called ``Clash of Civilizations'' 
by Samuel Huntington. Mr. Huntington has a new book out now that I will 
be mentioning in a minute or two. We were talking about this 
phenomenon, of what is going on in the United States, about how 
difficult it is now for us as a nation to really think about who we are 
and where we are going and what it is we are trying to accomplish and 
whether or not it is worth it. It is easy for us to react viscerally 
when we are attacked. When we see planes crashing into buildings and 
thousands of Americans dying, we react viscerally.
  I will never forget reading about what was happening on a street in 
Boston where there had been several flags flying, none of which were 
American flags, up to September 11 and then right afterwards on this 
street in Boston, there appeared something like 50 American flags and a 
bunch of others.

                              {time}  2030

  And every single week since September 11, there are fewer and fewer 
American flags flying there. In fact, now we are back to the original 
number of other flags being flown on this particular street, and we 
have sensed that there is a loss of, I do not want to say enthusiasm 
for this war, for our actions in it, but we can tell it is diminishing; 
and you really have to ask yourself whether or not that is the reason 
that it is happening, is that it is partly a result of our own 
unwillingness to, number one, understand who we are fighting. That is, 
it is not just a terrorist, that it is an ``ism,'' fundamentalism, 
Islamic fundamentalism, and that it is threatening our way of life. It 
is threatening us, that the people who hold the beliefs that we call 
Islamic fundamentalists are people who will come here, and who are here 
and who would kill every single one of us and our children, because we 
do not fit with their view of the world.
  If we do not see this and we do not think of it and it is just this, 
quote, war against terror, we can easily lose, I think, the willingness 
to continue in the pursuit of the goals which I said in the earlier 
hour I believe to be admirable.
  I worry about the issue, and I talk about immigration, and I talk 
about what is happening inside our country, this cult of 
multiculturalism; and people suggest that it is confusing to them to 
understand how we connect the two, but I think it is relatively easy. 
It is simple.
  The cult of multiculturalism is problematic. It is propped up by 
massive immigration and by just the political forces that are arrayed 
in the United States for open borders, for sort of a new world order.
  I will never forget having a discussion in Mexico with a gentleman by 
the name of Juan Hernendez, who was the head of something called the 
Ministry for Mexicans Living in the United States, which I thought at 
the time was a strange name for any sort of ministry. I asked him maybe 
2 years ago what it was about, and he said, Well, it is to increase the 
flow. And I said, The flow? He said, Yes, the flow of people into the 
United States, of Mexican nationals into the United States. I said, Why 
would you want to do that? He said, Well, Congressman, it is pretty 
simple. Well, first of all, we have a population of people in Mexico 
between the ages of 18 and 25 that has doubled in 10 years. He said, 
The unemployment rate for that particular group of the population is 
about 40 percent. That is a very unstable situation. Moving them north 
where there are jobs, that is good for us, relieves the problems that 
we have here in terms of unemployment.
  He said, then of course a secondary benefit as a result of this 
movement of people, and he just kept calling it migration instead of 
immigration, he said, And the good thing that happens as a result of 
this migration is the fact that all those people who go send money home 
to Mexico.
  In those days, that was 2 years ago, it was about $13 billion a year. 
It is closer to 15 or $16 billion dollars a year now, and reports just 
came out a little bit ago. By the way, they are called remittances. 
That is what the term is to describe the dollars flowing from the 
United States to countries outside our borders, and the remittances now 
comprise about $30 billion flowing to Latin America alone, somewhere 
around 40 to $45 billion going out over the rest of the world, in 
total, I should say. This is an enormous, enormous amount of money; and 
it accounts actually for more than 10 percent of the gross domestic 
product of at least seven or eight countries out there.
  In Mexico it is more significant than any foreign investment 
whatsoever, than any corporations investing in Mexico. It is more 
significant than tourism dollars. It is second only, in terms of the 
dollars coming into the country, to Pemex, the country's oil company, 
governmentally owned oil company.
  So he said, This is an enormously important thing for us, moving our 
unemployment north, having them employed, and sending money back. But 
there was something else that he mentioned. He said, And besides that, 
having lots of Mexican nationals in the United States, and, by the way, 
he did not distinguish legal or illegal nationals in the United States 
and he did not care and he told us it did not matter to him, that that 
distinction was not important, just moving people north was the goal of 
the Government of Mexico.
  Again, when we talk about what is different today about immigration 
policy, what is different today about what is happening in the world, I 
guarantee my colleagues in early 1900s, late 1800s, few, if any, 
governments around the world were actually pushing their people into 
the United States, were actually encouraging the depopulation of their 
own country.
  But now Mexico is not alone in this. Now Guatemala, El Salvador, 
Honduras, all kinds of countries are pushing us constantly to open our 
borders. They are always talking about the need for us to relax our 
immigration policy. Remember, they relaxed their immigration policy not 
one iota. Mexico and all of these countries have a very strong 
immigration policy. If one sneaks into their country, they are in big 
trouble. They will go to jail if they are found there without the 
proper documents.
  I have visited the detention camps in Mexico. They are not nice 
places. They are not places where people are given nice uniforms, 
shoes, clothing, a bunk, chess tables, checker tables, basketball 
courts. And what I am describing of course are the detention centers 
that we provide in the United States. Free medical care. By the way, 
one comes into the detention center and the first thing they do in the 
United States is get a physical, a dental and medical exam. Anything 
that is wrong with them we will take care of. They have actually turned 
themselves in in order to take advantage of the medical.
  Again, it is not really much of a joke, but I am amazed at the irony 
of the fact that there are two groups of people in the country that can 
get all of the free medical attention they need, and those are people 
who are in prison and people who are here illegally. They have access 
to all of the medical facilities in the United States. Even when we 
arrest them for being here illegally, we provide them mental and dental 
treatment. If they have bad teeth, we will take care of it. If they 
have cancer, we will send them to an oncologist. One can get an MRI. 
There are huge machines that are not available to people in my own 
district, that cannot afford that kind of medical help. But we provide 
it to people who are coming

[[Page 12375]]

here illegally, as opposed to what the other countries in the world do 
for people who sneak into their country. If I sneak into Mexico and I 
am found there and I cannot prove that I am a Mexican citizen or that I 
have a visa, if I am in Mexico or Guatemala or any other place almost 
on the Earth, if I say I am sorry, I do not have the documentation, can 
I send my children to the schools in Mexico or Guatemala or Honduras or 
France or anywhere else in the world, of course not.
  Can I expect to be treated if I am there with some disease and they 
know I am there illegally? No. Can I get a driver's license in any 
country in the world if I am there illegally? Of course not. Any 
country but one. Can I get social service benefits if I am in any other 
country in the world illegally? Of course not. Yet all of these 
countries demand from us a policy that says, Open your door, we want 
in, we will benefit. The government benefits as a result of the fact 
that you are so stupid that you do not secure your own borders, and, by 
golly, we do not want you doing it.
  And as I mentioned, Mr. Hernendez said that the other good thing 
about the movement of massive numbers of Mexican nationals into the 
United States was that, in fact, he said, They will influence your 
government's policy vis-a-vis Mexico, just their presence, he said. 
Just the numbers, he said. That is certainly true, absolutely true, and 
it was so candid. It was so refreshing to have somebody actually say 
what we all know to be true, but so many people want to skirt that 
issue. Why do Members not find it bizarre or peculiar at least that the 
President of Mexico or the President of other various other countries 
in Latin America are demanding that we simply open our borders?
  And they are doing many things to try to force us to do that. They 
are trying all kinds of diplomatic ways of doing it. They are, 
interestingly, even using the issue of treaty relationships, 
extradition treaties, in order to pressure us to open our borders. 
Mexico has decided that they will not return anybody to the United 
States who is wanted here for a crime for which they could be sentenced 
to death. Not too long ago they decided to expand that definition of 
cruel and unusual punishment to anybody who could possibly be sentenced 
to life in prison. That is cruel and unusual punishment. Let me tell 
the Members if they have ever been around, as I say, a Mexican prison, 
they would suggest it is a lot fewer years than life in prison that 
could be described as cruel and unusual in that system. But, 
nonetheless, that is their position. And now we have got hundreds, in 
fact, even thousands of people having committed murders in the United 
States, fleeing to Mexico to seek protection of the government.
  David March, a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff, was pulling over a 
gentleman in the streets of Los Angeles not too long ago, and when he 
walked up to the car, this person in the car shot him in the torso. He 
fell to the ground. The guy got out of the car, put two bullets into 
his head, waved some sort of gang sign, got in and drove off. He is now 
in Mexico. Everybody knows where he is. Everybody knows where this 
gentleman is. They will not extradite him. By the way, we found out 
that he had twice before come into the United States illegally, twice 
before was returned to Mexico, and of course, because the borders are 
porous, just turned around and walked in. And by the way, there were, 
as I understand it, outstanding warrants out on him at the time for 
violent crimes.
  Now Mexico knows exactly where he is, will not send him back. And 
when we ask why, they say it is because the court said that they cannot 
send people back for cruel and unusual punishment. Here is the truth of 
the matter: they will not send him back until we liberalize our 
immigration policy with them.
  There are now 600 warrants out in California alone, in the Los 
Angeles County area alone, 600 warrants, murder warrants, out for 
people who fled to Mexico; 300 more in the rest of the State, almost 
1,000 people alone from Mexico spread cross the United States. Who 
knows how many thousands of other people have sought the protection of 
the Mexican Government after having committed heinous crimes here. And 
Mexico refuses to do anything about it, while simultaneously demanding 
that we open up our borders.
  It was impressive that Mr. Hernendez would say what he said. He went 
on, by the way, to say something at the very end of the conversation 
that startled all of us. There were three Members of the Congress 
there. And again his candid response to our questions was just really 
quite amazing. When we all suggested and I suggested that I thought the 
actions by his government could actually be called aggressive actions 
against another country, using their people, using their immigration 
and our immigration policy to actually try to change America, he said, 
Congressman, in a relatively condescending way, You know what? It is 
not two countries. It is just a region.
  Maybe so, in his mind anyway. And in the minds of many people here in 
the Congress, certainly in the administration I know there are people 
who believe that is the case that borders are no longer of any value, 
they are irrelevant, and they only serve to impede the flow of goods 
and services and people; and the sooner that we essentially get rid of 
them and move toward a European Union model, the better we are.

                              {time}  2045

  The next iteration of that movement in the United States or on the 
North American continent will be the Free Trade of the Americas coming 
up here for a vote at some time, we are not sure when, they are still 
negotiating, but that is what in store.
  It is always couched in the language of ``free trade.'' Certainly I 
came here as a free trader. I am more and more concerned about the 
implications of free trade, and especially the immigration implications 
of free trade, certainly the job implications of free trade.
  But, that is where we are moving toward, this concept, this world of 
just a region and not nation-state. The idea of the nation-state is 
old, anachronistic, and harmful, in that we should not be teaching our 
children that there is something unique about America, because, after 
all, we are soon going to sort of expand our horizons and we will not 
be thinking of things like the nation-state any more.
  I worry about the degree to which that clash of civilizations that 
Samuel Huntington talked about can be won by the West if we become more 
and more confused about who we are, about what it is we are trying to 
accomplish in the world and why who we are matters.
  This is Mr. Huntington's latest tome, it is called Who Are We? Who 
Are We? It has only been out for a short time. I have gotten about 
three-quarters of the way through it on plane flights back and forth 
from my home in Denver to Washington.
  It is a fascinating read, and I certainly would recommend it to 
anyone out there who is interested in this kind of an issue, because he 
asks a very important question: Who are we? He talks about the 
implications of massive immigration into the country and how this 
exacerbates the problem of trying to figure out in fact who we are, 
when internally, as I say, we have changed ourselves.
  The cult of multi-culturalism tells our children, and certainly tells 
immigrants coming here, they should not connect to anything we think of 
as an American ideal; that we are just a culture, just a place on the 
planet, we are all just residents. That is what it is, we are just 
residents here, with no other significance; and that soon all 
boundaries, all borders will be gone, and we will all be joining hands 
and singing Kumbaya.
  Well, it will be out of tune, I will tell you that, and I do not 
believe for a moment that that is the world, that that kind of 
idealistic impression of where we could be, is where we indeed would 
go.
  I believe that the concept of the nation-state is important. I 
believe that the United States of America is unique in many ways. It is 
certainly unique in that it is the only country, when it was

[[Page 12376]]

started in the 1770s, it was the first country ever started on the 
basis of ideas alone.
  That is enormously important for us to think about. It was not a 
group of people who were necessarily held together by ethnicity; it was 
not a group of people held together because a king or monarch had drawn 
a circle or lines around a particular chunk of land and said this is a 
country.
  Our country started because of a set of ideas. It is true, for the 
most part, the people here at the time were much more homogenous than 
today's society, but we were able to sustain the ideas and ideals of 
America because the people coming here and the people here in a way 
forced that assimilation and understanding and acceptance. They said if 
you are going to be here, you have to speak English and you have to 
think about yourself as an American first, and you cannot have a thing 
called dual citizenship.
  Today there are millions, I saw an estimate not long ago of 10 
million Americans, who carry dual citizenship. It spiked right after 
Mexico allowed Mexican nationals to claim dual citizenship also. Our 
neighbors to the south are wonderful people, and it is important to 
understand that in order to debate this issue successfully and with any 
degree of hope that we can be successful in moving the public policy of 
this country in one way, it is important to know that you should never, 
ever, ever come to this issue with animus in your heart for any people 
or Nation or ethnic group. It is not a racial issue in the slightest.
  The people who argue this, or on the other side of this debate, will 
constantly try to change the discussion and change the debate to some 
sort of racial thing. They do that usually when they run out of all 
intellectual argument, and that is the last arrow in their quiver, 
racist, xenophobe, ethnocentricity, all of these things that are 
epithets that most people in this room would certainly shrink away from 
and would resent being called. No one wants to be called those things.
  The hope of our opponents in this issue is they will, by using those 
terms, they will eventually shift the debate away from the real issues, 
as to who we are, where we are going and how we are going to get there 
as a Nation, as one group of people held together by a common set of 
ideas. Instead of that, we will want to talk about personalities and 
cast aspersions and make people think less of you because of what names 
you are called.
  But it has nothing to do with that. At least it certainly does not 
have anything to do with that in my heart or mind. But it is a strong 
desire to see us think about these issues in a rational way, and begin 
to think about the importance of establishing and reestablishing 
borders, securing those borders, not just because we know people are 
coming across for the purpose of doing us great harm, but also because 
it will help us begin to once again think about who we are and 
determine whether or not in fact we are worthy to be here and be the 
light shining to the world that Ronald Reagan so eloquently described 
us as.
  There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that guarantees our success as 
a civilization; nothing. Certainly older ones, certainly ones that were 
more expansive, had more of a far-flung empire and thought of 
themselves as impervious to any sort of aggression, are gone, they are 
below the sands of time, and the people living in those civilizations 
that are long since gone certainly thought to themselves for the most 
part that they were going to be there forever.
  There is nothing that says we will achieve that. There is nothing 
that says we will achieve another 50 years of preeminence in the world 
if in fact we lose sight of who we are, if we cannot answer this 
question that Samuel Huntington asks.
  So we have to attack this from many angles, and I try to talk about 
it, as well as I can anyway on evenings like this, try to encourage 
people to think about these issues. And simultaneously we have to 
address the more mundane aspects of it. Will we increase the number of 
Border Patrol? Will we actually use the military assets that we have to 
secure our borders? Will we go to other countries around the world and 
tell them that we need them to help us secure our own borders, just as 
they secure theirs, and encourage them to stop trying to change America 
in order to benefit their own situation, and to begin thinking about 
how they can internally change who and what they are to accomplish what 
we have.
  As long as we allow ourselves, as long as we allow America to be the 
pressure valve, the release valve, for the world, for the Third World, 
there is very little pressure there left to push back and say to 
countries, you have to figure out a way to do this yourself, and do it 
internally.
  We have to tell our local politicians, again, this is the mundane 
aspect of it, this is the coming down to the nitty-gritty aspect of our 
discussion about this rather heady topic sometimes, and that is what we 
have to tell our State and local officials that they have the 
responsibility, and that responsibility is to help maintain the 
integrity of the United States of America; and that when they pass 
idiotic laws, like sanctuary city laws, or when States like Maine 
declare themselves to be sanctuary States, that all of the misguided, 
gooey, sort of idealism that may have gone into the discussion and may 
have gone into the decision-making process in order to get them to that 
point is not going to help us in the long run, and it is going to in 
fact hurt us.
  It is very difficult. The Federal Government has a rather 
schizophrenic history of dealing with the issue of immigration. 
Sometimes we tell the old INS to go out there and do their job; to go 
into work sites and find people who are working illegally; to find the 
employers who are in fact employing people who are here illegally. So 
they do it. They did it in Georgia a few years ago, they did it in 
Nebraska, in the packinghouses of Nebraska and the onion growers in 
Georgia. And they were immediately, immediately, excoriated by Members 
of the Senate from those States, and certainly Members of the House in 
those States, and told to stop it, knock it off; you are bothering our 
producers and our business interests.
  So the INS said, I was just trying to enforce the law. They were 
told, well, the law is good to talk about. It is not good to enforce 
it, so forget about it.
  Then we get mad and we say, how can it be that we have got 13 to 15 
million people in this country illegally, we have got 400,000 or 
500,000 actually ordered deported who simply walked away, they are out 
there somewhere? Every time we pick someone up who is now arrested or 
alleged to have plotted some act of violence against the United States, 
in the last few days you have been reading about this, all of these 
people, of course, are here illegally.
  How did they get here? What is going on? How come Homeland Security 
did not protect us? They get a lot of mixed messages from this body and 
the other body. It is very difficult for them to figure out what 
exactly it is they are supposed to do. And we have to commend every 
single man and woman who works day and night trying to defend those 
borders.
  I have visited the northern border and the southern border many 
times. I have commended those people who work in those jobs, thankless 
jobs, frustrating jobs, because they know that for every one person 
that they stop from getting into this country illegally, two or three 
are getting by them. Sometimes they are getting by because of the 
stupid bureaucratic policies we have in place, and sometimes just 
because they are overwhelmed.
  When the President makes a speech, as he did in December, and holds 
out the possibility of amnesty, and although he does not like calling 
it amnesty, of course, that is exactly what it was. When he holds that 
carrot out there, what do you think is going to happen? We are going to 
be flooded by people trying to get into this country.
  Of course, the numbers have gone up dramatically in the last 6 
months. Why? It is strange. How could this happen? I will tell you why. 
The Border Patrol was actually taking surveys, why are you coming? 
``Amnesty.'' This is a word they learned. ``I am coming for amnesty.''

[[Page 12377]]

  I said when the President gave the speech that even if that bill he 
has proposed, even if that concept does not become law, the fact is 
that it has already done great damage.
  You are not going to hear a debate about this issue during the 
campaign, because, for one thing, I will tell you what happened on our 
side. The reaction to the President's speech was overwhelmingly 
negative by most Americans, Democrats and Republicans. So you are not 
going to hear much about it anymore.
  On the Democratic side they also know that their position and the 
position of Mr. Kerry is that of open borders, of greater immigration. 
The only thing wrong with the President's plan they said is it did not 
go far enough. They also know that that is not really the message that 
is going to attract a lot of voters to their party.
  A certain segment they want to placate, pander to, both sides, so we 
will use it in selected venues, but we are not going to be talking 
about it during the debates, because this is just not something either 
side really wants to bring up, because it attracts very few people when 
you start talking about amnesty, when you start talking about the fact 
you are willing to open the borders and you are not willing to actually 
look at the issue of immigration in any detail and any depth.

                              {time}  2100

  But we need to do that. That is exactly what we need to do, is to 
look at this issue in detail and in depth. It is more important than 
just the jobs issue, although that is enormously important, especially 
if you are one of the men and women who has lost their job as the 
result of the importation of massive numbers of cheap labor and then 
sometimes not so cheap labor, higher-priced labor in the field of 
technology, but lower priced than when you were doing the job. If you 
are some of the hundreds of thousands of people who have been thrown 
out of work by H1B visa recipients, people who have come here primarily 
from India; again, good, hard-working people, nothing against them or 
who they are, but they came here. Why? Because they will work for less.
  The President said he wants to make sure every willing worker meets 
up with every willing employer. And I keep thinking, now, you really do 
not mean that, Mr. President. Because really there are billions of 
willing workers out there, and they are willing to undercut whoever is 
here working; and the people who are the most affected by this, the 
most negatively affected immediately are, of course, low-income earners 
in this country whose wages have been held down because of the massive 
numbers of people coming here, low-skilled, low-wage workers.
  This does not accrue to our benefit ever at any place, at any time. 
It does not accrue to our benefit from the standpoint of the ``taxes'' 
these folks pay, because I assure my colleagues, they soak up a lot 
more in revenue in the provision of service and in the creation and 
maintenance of the infrastructure necessary to support millions of 
people who are here illegally. They soak up far more dollars there than 
they ever provide through the tax system which, of course, is a 
progressive tax which says if you make very little, we take very little 
away. Not only that, we will not only not take very much money away if 
you do not make much; we will give you some money.
  So now, the greatest scam going is coming here to the United States, 
filing income tax forms, getting false Social Security numbers, filing 
forms, listing a whole bunch of people on that form who are your 
children, and the IRS will give you an ITIN, an Individual Taxpayer 
Identification Number, for each one of those children who are 
ostensibly, supposedly in some other country, but you claim them, you 
can have them, you claim them; and you of course pay no taxes because 
you have so many deductions, and you in turn get an earned income tax 
credit.
  So it is not a net benefit to the country in any way I can think of. 
We have plenty of diversity. We really and truly need to start thinking 
about what holds us together as a Nation and not what splits us apart. 
And we have to stop kowtowing to the other countries around who see us 
as the sugar daddy who will keep them in power, keep their corrupt 
governments in power by allowing dollars to flow back into those 
countries by the people they have essentially helped shove into the 
United States of America. And I mean that literally, sometimes with 
buses hired by the Government of Mexico to bring people to the United 
States, sometimes just to the border, let them off, walking into the 
border, into the desert. That is how much their government cares about 
them. Or how many of them perish.
  Then of course we are told it is our fault that people are dying in 
the desert. And I keep saying, now, wait a minute, wait a minute. Just 
tell me, what have I missed here? How many people, how many people have 
actually died coming into this country through a port of entry? How 
many have starved to death or died of dehydration or had some other 
kind of thing befall them coming through the right way. Nobody, of 
course.
  There is a way to come into this country. It is absolutely safe. It 
is called a port of entry, and it is called with our permission. If you 
choose to come some other way, some bad things could happen to you; but 
it really is not our fault, no matter how bad they want to make us feel 
that this is happening. We take a million and a half people a year 
legally. We take another half a million or so through a visa process. 
We are the most liberal country in the world when it comes to taking 
people in here legally. And yet, of course, many millions more come 
illegally. Why? Because of course we have people here who want to 
employ them. We have the cheap labor crowd. We have people on the other 
side of the aisle who see this as a source of votes. So we see this 
then that of massive immigration, a source of votes over there, a 
source of cheap labor over here. That is why we cannot get any sort of 
an agreement.
  I am going to have, Mr. Speaker, several amendments for the bills 
that are coming up this week, especially the Homeland Security bill, 
and I am going to try to amend the appropriations bills saying that any 
State or locality that actually provides sanctuary for people who are 
here illegally, refuses to help the INS, or now the Bureau of 
Immigration and Control and Enforcement, refuses to help us enforce the 
law; by the way, it is already right now on the books. In 1996 we 
passed a law saying that, in fact, it is illegal for States or 
localities to prevent the flow of information to the INS or from INS.
  Of course, unfortunately, there is no penalty, so people are doing it 
all over the place. Cities accepting the matricula consular, telling 
any national living here that they can have all of the benefits they 
want by simply showing a card that is given to them by a foreign 
government, not by the United States. Giving people drivers licenses, 
giving people who are here illegally all kinds of benefits that had 
been heretofore allowed to go only to people who are citizens. But 
remember, that concept of citizenship is under attack. It means 
nothing, it means nothing to many people in this country, and if it 
means anything at all, it is a negative connotation: citizenship.
  So we teach our children that they should not be citizens of the 
country; they should be citizens of the world, if anything. And we do 
this, again, as I say, we pursue this kind of bizarre social policy at 
our peril. And when I introduce these bills, we will see just how far 
this pressure has gotten us. We will see the fact that this cult of 
multiculturalism truly has infected even this body. Because I will 
suggest that no city or State that gives a driver's license should be 
able to get a grant from the homeland security.
  I am going to eventually try to do the same thing with the 
transportation bill and say that they cannot get Federal funds for 
highways if you give illegal aliens drivers licenses. It will go down. 
I did this last year. I think we got about 122 votes. We will see, 
maybe we will gain a little, maybe we will lose a little. Yet if we 
were to ask every single American how they would vote on this, without 
exception I know

[[Page 12378]]

how it would come down. My amendment would win overwhelmingly. But in 
this body, again, held captive by the cult of multiculturalism, it will 
go down.
  I am going to offer an amendment later on to the appropriations bill 
for foreign operations, which is the bill that we use to provide money 
to foreign governments, the foreign aid bill. I am going to say that 
any country that is receiving remittances from the United States, that 
the amount of remittances coming to that country will reduce the 
appropriation we have for them in the foreign aid bill. Because after 
all, if foreign aid is simply the transfer of wealth from one country 
to another, it is happening through remittances and probably a lot more 
effectively than providing it by way of a check to a foreign 
government, oftentimes corrupt government that pockets the money 
themselves. Again, put that out to a vote, Mr. Speaker, and I suggest 
to my colleagues that without exception, it would be overwhelmingly 
passed by the people of this country.
  It will not go far here, at least not this time. Maybe the next time, 
maybe the time after that and the time after that. Because I guarantee 
my colleagues I will bring it up as long as I can, as often as I can, 
in every venue that I can. In every bill that I can try to attach 
something to, I will, because I want the debate to occur, and I want 
the American people to see just how far we have moved away from their 
idea of what America is all about, to the one of the elites, what we 
think America should be all about. Just a region, after all, not a 
separate country.
  They are wrong, and as long as I have breath and I am able to express 
an opinion on this floor, I will state that. They are wrong.

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