[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9149-9150]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1030
                 CORRECTING THE ENROLLMENT OF H.R. 1268

  Mr. LEWIS of California. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and 
concur in the Senate Concurrent Resolution (S. Con. Res. 31) to correct 
the enrollment of H.R. 1268.
  The Clerk read as follows:

                            S. Con. Res. 31

       Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives 
     concurring), That in the enrollment of H.R. 1268, an Act 
     making emergency supplemental appropriations for the fiscal 
     year ending September 30, 2005, and for other purposes, the 
     Clerk of the House of Representatives is hereby authorized 
     and directed to correct section 502 of title V of division B 
     so that clause (ii) of section 106(d)(2)(B) of the American 
     Competitiveness in the Twenty-first Century Act of 2000 
     (Public Law 106-313; 8 U.S.C. 1153 note), as amended by such 
     section 502, reads as follows:
       ``(ii) Maximum.--The total number of visas made available 
     under paragraph (1) from unused visas from the fiscal years 
     2001 through 2004 may not exceed 50,000.''.

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Simpson). Pursuant to the rule, the 
gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis) and the gentleman from Wisconsin 
(Mr. Obey) each will control 20 minutes.
  The Chair recognizes the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis).
  Mr. LEWIS of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I 
may consume.
  Mr. Speaker, the resolution instructs the enrolling clerk to correct 
a provision in division B of the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations 
conference report that was drafted incorrectly.
  The conference agreement included a provision to make available an 
additional pool of permanent resident visas only for nurses and 
physical therapists.
  Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 7 minutes.
  Mr. Speaker, ordinarily, on a piece of legislation like this, there 
would be virtually no debate and it would be passed routinely, but I 
think, for the good of the House, we ought to review exactly what we 
are doing here and why we are here doing it.
  As you know, last month, the supplemental appropriations for Iraq and 
other purposes was passed by the House and then passed by the Senate. 
On the Senate floor, the Senate saw fit to adopt an amendment, the 
purpose of which was to increase the number of visas for nurses by 
50,000. That is what it supposedly did.
  Now, after that was adopted on the Senate floor, the bill was 
conferenced. It passed this House some time ago, and the conference 
passed the Senate yesterday.
  Today, we are here with this concurrent resolution, and what does 
this concurrent resolution do? It raises the number of visas for 
nursing by 50,000. Why do we have to chew the same cud twice? Why are 
we here doing today what we thought had been done much earlier?
  I think it is very simple. We are here because the normal processes, 
the normal democratic processes of the House and the Senate have not 
been followed. We are here because, in an attempt to solve a debate 
within the Republican Caucus, extraneous material was added to the 
Iraqi supplemental which had no business being on that bill in the 
first place.
  What essentially happened is that after this amendment was adopted by 
the other body, the leadership of the majority party then essentially 
took away from the Committee on Appropriations the ability to deal with 
all of these immigration-related issues.
  Now, who dealt with them? I am, frankly, not sure, but I think it was 
Senator Frist's staff, and I think it was the leadership staff in this 
House. But we are not sure because it all happened behind some closed 
door. I am not sure what room it was in. But it happened somewhere, 
some place in River City.
  So now, we are here correcting that mistake. Why am I making a 
Federal case out of something like this? Well, it is very simple. The 
history of Congress has been written for decades, and each decade some 
scholar has noted that Congress works principally in committee. Woodrow 
Wilson wrote his great piece on the organization of Congress, making 
the point that Congress really ran in committees. We are here today 
because that committee system has been corrupted.
  What has happened is that we have ignored the fact that the reason 
for the committee system in the first place has been so that the House 
could use the specialized knowledge that people develop on each and 
every committee and put that knowledge to work in the consideration of 
every bill that goes through this House. Under normal processes, the 
Committee on Appropriations would have been dealing with all matters 
that were attached in the appropriations bill.
  Under normal processes, Senator Hutchison should have been allowed to 
have access to the language before it was arbitrarily attached to this 
bill. But when people tried to find out what was happening on 
immigration and other issues, they were told it is being taken care of. 
It is being taken care of.
  Well, it certainly was.
  Mr. Speaker, I simply take this time to make the point that there is 
a purpose for creating committees. There is a purpose for vetting these 
issues through the committee of jurisdiction because, through the 
years, committees learn their business. But when the normal business is 
side-tracked, when everyone except the powers on high are excluded from 
the rooms where decisions are being made, then you are going to have 
mistakes being made because nobody is smart enough to know everything 
about everything, despite what some people in the leadership in both 
the Senate and House seem to feel. Occasionally, the omnipotent can 
make a mistake. And if the committee process is followed, our chances 
of making those mistakes would be minimized.
  So all I want to say, Mr. Speaker, is that I am sure mistakes like 
this will occur in the future. And this is no

[[Page 9150]]

great Earth-shaking matter, but I felt it appropriate to use this 
opportunity to point out that the House is continuing to day-by-day, as 
far as I am concerned, corrupt the processes of the House by having the 
House evolve into a system in which a few staff people somewhere on 
Capitol Hill make all of the decisions, and then the other committees 
are told, Just do what you are told. Get rid of it. Move it on. After 
all, we have got to run the trains on time. It does not matter what is 
in them, but we have got to run the trains on time.
  So that is why we are here today, Mr. Speaker. I hope we could all 
take a lesson from this.
  Mr. LEWIS of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Hostettler).
  Mr. HOSTETTLER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman of the Committee on 
Appropriations for yielding me time.
  Mr. Speaker, today I rise in opposition to S. Con. Res. 31. In the 
attempt to correct an error in drafting, this concurrent resolution 
would allow for 50,000 new green cards reserved for nurses and physical 
therapists. Green card status is permanent resident status. 
Accompanying spouses and minors also will be given permanent resident 
status and will not be counted against the 50,000 cap.
  If this concurrent resolution is passed, it will give 50,000 nursing 
and physical therapist jobs away to foreign workers and will be giving 
even more jobs away to accompanying spouses, as those with permanent 
resident status are granted work permits.
  The argument that the current drafting of the supplemental 
``recaptures unused employment-based visas'' from the past 2 years is 
false, since any employment-based visas that are not used are given up 
to meet the family-based visa quota for that year.
  A recent study by the Center for Immigration Studies found that 
``there is little evidence that immigrants take only jobs Americans 
don't want.''
  Another recent study conducted by the Center for Labor Market Studies 
at Northeastern University says that ``there is little empirical 
support for the notion that new immigrants are taking large numbers of 
jobs that American workers refuse to accept. There is direct 
competition between new immigrants and native-born workers for most of 
these jobs.''
  At a hearing I held last week as the Chairman of the Subcommittee on 
Immigration, Border Security and Claims, the minority witness, Dr. 
Holzer, testified that, due to cost containment in certain fields, ``10 
to 15 percent jobs in the United States potentially on the high end 
could face competition from engineers and computer programmers and 
others in India and China and other parts of the world.''
  If you have any nursing or physical therapy students in your 
district, consider that those students who will be graduating this 
spring will have to compete with 50,000 foreign nurses and physical 
therapists who will likely work for lower wages. We will have to answer 
to our constituent nurses and physical therapists who cannot find a job 
due to the influx of foreign workers in this field.
  Also, if we pass this concurrent resolution for nurses and physical 
therapists, who will be the next workers that we will displace? Will we 
add 50,000 more new visas to each supplemental, driving more and more 
domestic American-born workers out of a job?
  Today, I ask my colleagues to support their constituents, American 
workers who are in the fields of nursing and physical therapy, and vote 
against this concurrent resolution.
  Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes.
  Mr. Speaker, we now find ourselves in an even more interesting 
situation. The gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Hostettler) has just raised 
some substantive concerns about the bill, and those ought to be 
responded to.
  The problem is that, because of the way this has been handled, 
because you had a matter that was not under the jurisdiction of the 
Committee on Appropriations essentially dumped into an appropriations 
bill, this issue is not going to be dealt with on the substantive 
level.
  The issues raised by the gentleman might be very legitimate, but they 
should be debated in the forum in which they are supposed to be 
debated, and that is the Committee on the Judiciary. Instead, we have 
the Committee on Appropriations which is supposed to focus on budgets 
here dealing with a legal issue about which our committee has no 
particular expertise. So, once again, the process by which the bill is 
being considered today changes the House from being what it is supposed 
to be, which is the greatest deliberative body in the world, to a poor 
imitation of Daffy Duck.
  I again would urge that we give greater consideration to normal order 
around here if we do not want to rapidly descend into being the 
laughing-stock of the country.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
  Mr. LEWIS of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I 
may consume.
  Mr. Speaker, since this change is merely a technical item in nature, 
I urge swift adoption of this resolution so we can expedite enrollment 
of the bill and get it to the President for his signature today.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the motion offered by the 
gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis) that the House suspend the rules 
and concur in the Senate Concurrent Resolution, S. Con. Res. 31.
  The question was taken; and (two-thirds having voted in favor 
thereof) the rules were suspended and the Senate concurrent resolution 
was concurred in.
  A motion to reconsider was laid on the table.

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