[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 6]
[House]
[Pages 8066-8072]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           IMMIGRATION ISSUES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
60 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be 
recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of 
Representatives and the privilege to also have the gentleman from 
Missouri (Mr. Akin) yield to me as he delivers the leadership hour 
presentation on the economic situation here in the United States and 
the opportunity to say a few words on that particular subject. And I 
may revert back to that subject, Mr. Speaker.
  However, I would shift this subject a little bit over onto a subject 
matter that seems to be on the minds and lips of Americans all across 
this country. I have had the privilege to travel to some of the corners 
of America in the last few weeks and had my conversations in the coffee 
shops and in the restaurants and in city halls and in meeting places, 
and I was a little bit surprised that--I had had the perception that in 
my district immigration becomes an issue that is very much front and 
center, and I expect that's going to be the case in States like 
Arizona, California, Texas, those States that are border States, New 
Mexico, where you have a large number of illegal border crossings. But 
I didn't expect it would be the case in the Northeast, for example, and 
other places across the country to the intensity that it was.
  I found that at every stop someone would bring up immigration. And it 
reminded me of the times in 2006 and in 2007 when this Nation debated 
immigration intensively and constantly at every stop, even to the point 
where, as much as I like to talk about it, and as interested as I am in 
the subject, and since I am also the ranking member of the Immigration 
Subcommittee it's my job, Mr. Speaker, but in my town hall meetings in 
'06 and '07, in many of them I set the rule that we were going to talk 
about everything except immigration until we had dealt with everybody's 
concerns and issues. And then we would go to immigration to finish the 
time that we had left. And invariably, we would get to immigration and 
it would burn all the time that we had left because the American people 
are very intense on the immigration issue.
  And we watched as Frank Luntz did a focus group, or at least one that 
I could see down in Arizona, he just came back from that recently, and 
we watched how that group itself was divided between themselves, with 
very intense emotions, most of them full of frustration and anger about 
the immigration issue, not in complete agreement on what to do.
  It seems as though the Hispanics in America are where you find the 
objections to the enforcement of immigration law, the most vocal ones. 
And yet we also know there is a large number of Hispanics that many of 
them have been here for hundreds of years, their families have been. 
But I will submit that that doesn't get anybody anything.
  I just shook the hand of an individual down at the Turkish reception 
tonight who is a naturalized American citizen as of about less than 3 
weeks ago. And I would express this, that for any of us to argue that 
our ancestors have been here since the beginning of the Republic, the 
Daughters of the American Revolution, for example, and I am glad that 
they maintain those traditions. And it means a great deal throughout 
the families. And we understand that we have obligations that are 
generational that pass along because of the culture and the heritage of 
the family and the duty to our country.
  But I recall standing in the Indian Room in the Old Executive Office 
Building as Emilio Gonzalez, the director of the Department of 
Citizenship and Immigration Services, gave a speech at a naturalization 
ceremony there which I attended for that purpose. And when he said to 
those gathered that were about to take the oath to become naturalized 
American citizens, he said, Look out that window. Look out that window. 
And when you look out the window, you look out at the White House 
itself and you see the vast south lawn and the south side and the west 
side of the White House. And he said, I want you to know two things. 
One of them is from this day forward you are as much an American as the 
person that lives next door. And he pointed to the White House, where 
President Bush lived at the time.
  He said, when people ask you where are you from, don't tell them that 
you are from Turkey or France or Mexico or Canada or wherever it may 
be. Tell them you are the first American. That you are an American and 
you are the first American, and you are as much American as the man 
that occupies the White House today. That's the right sentiment for 
this country for legal immigration. That's the way we should think 
about new Americans, in every bit as good a standing once they take 
that oath of citizenship and go through their naturalization process, 
in every bit as good a standing as someone born to the 10th generation 
of Americans that might be here.
  But each of us has a different set of history, a different set of 
family memories that were taught a little bit differently, but we need 
to tie together under this American banner and this American history.
  And so the idea that we are going to see students that are sent home 
from school because they are wearing the red, white, and blue on a day 
that's supposedly Mexican nationalist day, a day that's Cinco de Mayo, 
a day that's not celebrated to any significant extent even down in the 
city in Mexico where the Mexicans won the victory over the French, but 
celebrated here in the United States. Started up as a promotion. I 
think it was a beer distributor that actually began the celebration of 
Cinco de Mayo here in the United States, whatever that is.
  Mr. Speaker, I don't take issue with the celebration of a holiday 
that makes people proud of their culture and their heritage. If that 
were the case, then I couldn't celebrate St. Patrick's Day, which I 
also recognize isn't celebrated so intensively in Ireland itself, but 
here it really is. And there are some real parallels here. It's the 
people that reject the American flag and reject the American culture 
that I take issue with, not the new Americans that are here that are 
proud of being and becoming Americans by choice.
  But we have a big decision to make in this country. And this 
immigration debate has gone on for a long time. And it centers on this: 
it centers on the idea that the people that came across the border 
illegally should somehow be granted citizenship or a path to 
citizenship, if that's their goal, and somehow it turns into a reward 
for breaking the law.
  Now, we need to recognize, Mr. Speaker, that there are hundreds of 
millions of people across this globe, and perhaps billions, that would 
love to come to the United States and become Americans. And they are 
waiting in line in the right way. They are respecting our laws. And I 
will submit that the people that respect our laws will make better 
citizens than those who have broken our laws. And our argument here in 
this country comes down

[[Page 8067]]

to this: grant amnesty to people that broke our laws, reward them for 
breaking our laws because there is an argument that we must capitulate 
because we can't enforce the laws that we have.
  Mr. Speaker, it is not the case that we can't enforce the laws that 
we have. And it is not the case that enforcing those laws would be 
ineffective in resolving this immigration problem that we have in this 
country. The problem we have is our administration lacks the will to 
enforce the law. And it isn't just the Obama administration and it 
isn't just Secretary Napolitano who have demonstrated a lack of will in 
enforcing immigration law. This goes back through several Presidents.
  I would take us back to 1986, when President Reagan signed the 
Amnesty Act of 1986. And it was to provide amnesty for a million people 
that were in the United States illegally. And by the way, President 
Reagan was honest enough to call it the amnesty bill when he signed it. 
It was one of the very few times that President Reagan I will say let 
me down on something that I thought was philosophically wrong. And I 
remember disagreeing with President Reagan in '86 when he signed the 
amnesty bill. And I didn't consider that I would end up in the United 
States Congress some less than 20 years later to my arrival here and 
there would be an argument about what was amnesty.
  It wasn't any question about what amnesty was in 1986. Ronald Reagan 
admitted the bill was amnesty. But he said he had to sign the bill. In 
order to get control of the borders, in order to enforce the law, he 
had to sign the amnesty bill. Now, that was his calculation. And I 
don't think he liked it philosophically, and he probably came to a 
conclusion that he didn't have a choice. Whatever the rationale was, he 
signed the bill. He called it amnesty. No one argued it was amnesty. It 
was to be a million people.
  But the fraud and the corruption, the people that gamed the system 
tripled the number. And those who received amnesty in '86 were closer 
to the number of 3 million than they were the number of 1 million that 
was supposed to be the amnesty to end all amnesties that was going to 
put this away. And the only way we could get control of our borders in 
1986 was to give amnesty to the people that were here and enforce the 
law against the employers and tighten the border and make sure that 
there wouldn't be a magnet for people to come into the United States.
  And so, Mr. Speaker, what happened was the enforcement that was 
stronger, far stronger under Dwight Eisenhower, that diminished from 
Dwight Eisenhower's time on was stronger under Ronald Reagan than it 
was under the first Bush administration, and it was stronger under the 
first Bush administration than it was under President Clinton. And I 
recall my frustration with each of those Presidents and their lack of 
will to enforce immigration law.
  And under Bill Clinton there was an accelerated effort to naturalize 
a million people into the United States. And I will say legal or 
illegal, as the anecdotes came to me. And I have talked to some of 
these people. They told me that they understood that they would be 
fast-tracked to citizenship, but they were to vote for Bill Clinton for 
President. That's what I heard from some that came through my district 
that I have sat down and talked with. And I don't know the specific 
data on that; I only know the anecdotal data. But if one shows up and 
tells me that, it's a pretty sure bet that there are quite a few others 
that had that same idea.
  So a million were accelerated through naturalization in 1996, and a 
lot of them voted for Bill Clinton. And a lot of frustration was built 
among those of us who respect our borders, the sovereignty of the 
United States, the need and the obligation to defend the borders, and 
who respect the rule of law and do not want to see it subverted or 
eroded, especially intentionally and willfully by an administration 
seeking to produce a political gain.
  And then, Mr. Speaker, from the Clinton administration, we 
transitioned into the Bush administration, George W. Bush, a man who I 
personally like and respect and admire, and found a couple of things to 
disagree with along the way, and this was one of them.
  Well, it's odd for me, Mr. Speaker, to stand here on the floor and 
speak to the issues that I disagreed with with Ronald Reagan or the 
issues that I disagreed with on George W. Bush, but I saw a lack of 
enforcement of our immigration laws during that period of time under 
the George W. Bush administration as well.

                              {time}  2130

  And there was, in the second term of the Bush administration, there 
was a concerted effort to try to bring our--to try to bring 
comprehensive immigration reform to bear. ``Comprehensive immigration 
reform'' was the fancy term for ``amnesty,'' and the debate about the 
meaning of amnesty ensued then. And rather than simply admit the 
meaning of the word ``amnesty'' and admit that comprehensive 
immigration reform really is comprehensive amnesty, the debate ensued 
about what amnesty was.
  So the American people had to submit to a cacophony of different 
definitions of amnesty, and continuously the argument was made that, 
well, whatever it was they wanted to do to provide amnesty wasn't 
amnesty. I recall that discussion about, well, what if they pay a fine 
for $500 and they promise to learn English and they promise to pay 
their back taxes, couldn't we give them a path to citizenship? And 
that's not amnesty, is it, because, after all, you charge them a fine. 
It's, well, if you're going to sell a path to citizenship for $500, I 
will have to call that amnesty.
  And if someone promises to learn English, that's an obligation of the 
naturalization process. You have to prove proficiency in both the 
written and spoken word of the English language to be naturalized as an 
American citizen. Now, I know they get a little sloppy with that, and 
some of the people that are naturalized just aren't so very good when 
it comes to the spoken or written word of English. And you'll notice 
that at a naturalization ceremony when it comes time for people to 
stand, they may not recognize what that means. And I have heard 
different directions that have gone out to the crowd, and some sat 
there without responding, even though it was the most significant and 
pivotal moment of their life.
  Well, I'm surely proud of those who step up and want to become an 
American and who are determined to assimilate themselves in the broader 
overall American culture, which has a lot of subcultures in it, 
admittedly, Mr. Speaker.
  But we saw the enforcement of immigration diminish over these 
administrations that I've talked about from Dwight Eisenhower all the 
way to Barack Obama. And with Barack Obama, it's different than it was 
under the Bush administration. The Bush administration actually 
accelerated it and began to enforce the law at least more aggressively 
than they were in the last couple of years. It was, I believe, an 
effort to convince the American people that they were committed to 
enforcing immigration law. And I don't know if their heart was ever in 
it, but I believe it was at least, at a minimum, an effort to establish 
a record and a standard that they would use enforcement so that the 
rule of law could be reestablished, and then upon the establishment of 
the reestablishment of the rule of law, might possibly be able to pass 
an amnesty bill that the American people would accept.
  I think it was a political miscalculation. I think it was a mistake 
for George W. Bush to give his amnesty speech that he gave on that 
January 5 or 6 of that year, sometime about January 5 or 6 of 2005, I 
believe it was. I think it was a mistake for the President to do that. 
I think that he should have first come out with a standard of we're not 
going to ask the American people to establish a new policy and grant a 
path to anything, to guest worker, or path to citizenship, or more of a 
permanent green card status until--unless and until we can establish, 
as a Federal Government, that the rule of law and the law enforcement

[[Page 8068]]

personnel whose job it is to enforce immigration law will be enforced, 
and that those who break the law would do so with the expectation that 
they would be confronted by the law and punished in proportion to their 
crime.
  And I will also submit, Mr. Speaker, that a nation that doesn't have 
a border can't declare itself a nation. We must have a border. We must 
define the border, and we can't call it a border unless we defend the 
border. And on our side of the border, the law must prevail and justice 
must be blind, and it has got to be enforced by the people who are paid 
to enforce the law. If they decide not to do that, they are subverting 
our very civilization.
  Many of the people who come here come into the United States because 
they live in a country that doesn't have the rule of law, a country 
that has corruption, a country that's always spiraled downward into 
third worldism, a country that probably can't be brought up to a--what 
I will say is a successful, modern, civilized nation within our 
generation, this generation of man. Many times it's hopeless to think 
of it with the level of corruption and the lack of rule of law.
  Can't have that happen in the United States of America. Justice has 
been blind in America, and the rule of law has been firm, and it's been 
evenhanded, and it's been rigid throughout centuries.
  So Arizona recognized that there were Federal immigration laws that 
were not being enforced, despite all of the Federal officers that 
worked the border in Arizona, the lack of will, the lack of will that 
comes from the top, from the President of the United States to the 
Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security right on down the line 
through the Border Patrol and U.S. Customs and Border Protection 
personnel. You can go into the station at the Border Patrol and you can 
read the mission: We're going to get operational control of the border, 
to put it in the short version. The mission sounds good. But the 
mission has got to be in the heads and the hearts of the people who are 
carrying it out, and that's got to come from the top.
  I listened last week to a speech that was delivered here at the 
American Enterprise Institute by General Petraeus who received the 
Irving Kristol Award there that evening, and it's a very respectable 
honor that recognizes the contributions of a very respectable man, 
Irving Kristol. And General Petraeus is a very fitting recipient of 
that reward.
  And from memory, he made three points. As he left Iraq, and where I 
had first met him in 2003 where he commanded the 101st Airborne at 
Mosul, I think it's important to note that General Petraeus, even then, 
they swept in and liberated the northwest quadrant of Iraq and the 
Mosul region and a couple of other provinces there. That was around 
March 22, in that period of time. By mid to late May, General Petraeus 
had held an election in Mosul. That's 2003. They elected a governor, a 
vice governor, and I met with them and also a business representative 
in Mosul.
  He promoted very effectively liberty and freedom and a version of 
democracy there that could be carried out in that country. And I asked 
him, How did you have an election? How did you know how to do that? He 
said, We didn't know how. We just knew we needed to have one. We needed 
to have local representatives that we could deal with.
  It was interesting that General Petraeus set the governor and the 
vice governor at the head of the table. He sat on the side of the table 
to send the signal that the Iraqis were running the show even then, 
even within months of the time that they had been liberated.
  Well, General Petraeus' speech last week laid out three steps along 
the way to success, and they were points that he made as he holed up at 
Fort Leavenworth there in Kansas, not that far from me, I would add. 
And he and others that he gave significant credit to wrote the COIN 
language, the counterinsurgency booklet that was so well published and 
distributed across the country. Over a million copies have been 
distributed, and I've read fair parts of it.
  But he laid out this point that first you've got to get the big 
things right. You've got to articulate the mission. You've got to plan 
the mission. The mission's got to be right. It's got to be understood. 
You have to get the big things right. Then you've got to market it and 
sell it to the people who have to carry it out. That's step number two. 
Step number three is see to it that the mission is carried out, right 
down to the details.
  But first, you've got to define the mission, and then you have to 
market the mission to the people who are going to carry it out, and 
then you have to follow up to make sure that the mission is carried out 
down to the details.
  Well, the mission that we have in border security and immigration 
enforcement in America is not clearly articulated. Congress can pass 
legislation, which we did in the Secure Fence Act that establishes that 
we're going to build 854 miles of double fencing, in some cases triple 
fencing, and that the Secretary of Homeland Security had to certify 
when they had operational control of the border. Operational control of 
the border. And there's a good definition in the Secure Fence Act that 
defines ``operational control of the border.''
  But it suffered an amendment to it over in the Senate that weakened 
the Secure Fence Act that was Duncan Hunter's major effort here in the 
House of Representatives. The definition of ``operational control of 
the border'' was reduced and subverted. And the result was that the 
mission that Congress laid out for the border protection personnel 
altogether was ill defined because of the squabbles from within.
  So we weren't able to get the big thing right, the first thing right. 
We were not able, as a Congress, to define the mission. Even though we 
tried and we voted on it here in the House and we passed a very clear 
mission, but it was subverted over in the Senate, and it's been 
undermined by some of the people on the border.
  And the effort to require that before you could build a fence you 
have to negotiate with the local political subdivisions and local 
people, and that local includes the people on the south side of the 
border? I don't think there's any merit to going to Mexico and asking 
them if we can protect our border. That's just an added mission that 
undermines the mission.
  So what we have are custom border protection personnel, border patrol 
agents, ICE agents, others along the border, including our National 
Parks personnel that are swimming upstream against a high tide of 
illegal people and drugs pouring through there. Maybe they understand 
the mission, but they do not believe, nor do they have the confidence, 
that the higher-ups will support them.
  And so they are out there every day, punch the clock, do their shift, 
do what they can do, plug the hole here, plug the hole there. But there 
isn't anyone in this administration from the White House on down that 
has defined how we actually accomplish this mission of controlling our 
borders and shutting off illegal immigration in America.
  Now, I don't think it happens to be all that complicated, Mr. 
Speaker. I think you have to have the will.
  And so the first thing to do is shut off the bleeding at the border. 
And as Congressman Phil Gingrey from Georgia so articulately said, and 
I'm confident he's worked--he's a doctor. I'm confident he's worked in 
the emergency room. He said, when somebody comes in that's a victim of 
an accident and they wheel him in on the gurney and they're bleeding 
all over the place and they're bleeding all over the floor and bleeding 
from several places in their body, he said the first thing that you 
don't do is grab the mop and the bucket and start to clean up the mess. 
The first thing you do is stop the bleeding. Get the patient stabilized 
and get it under control. And once you get it stabilized, then you can 
worry about cleaning up the mess. Well, we have a lot of discussion 
about what to do about cleaning up the mess, and we don't have a lot of 
discussion about what to do to stop the bleeding.

[[Page 8069]]

  So here are the places where the bleeding exists so we can do 
something to stop it. First on the border is this. We have had--and I 
don't know that I have confidence in the numbers in the last--during 
this administration. They're telling me that they have fewer 
interdictions at the border; therefore, that shows there are fewer 
border crossings. I suspect that if you just stopped enforcing the law 
you would have fewer interdictions on the border. They've never given 
me a real number of how many come across the border and how many are 
stopped in their attempt to cross the border.
  But I do a lot of asking, and we do have testimony before the 
Immigration Subcommittee. We have numbers such as this, that we have as 
many as 4 million illegal border crossing attempts a year, as many as 4 
million. Now, some of those could be people trying more than once. In 
fact, I know it is.
  And when I asked the Border Patrol what percentage of those attempts 
are you able to stop? On the record, they'll say, We think about 25 
percent. But when I go down to the border and I ask those who are 
engaged in this on a daily basis what percentage do you stop, they will 
look at me. And I'll say, 25 percent? They'll look at each other and 
laugh and they'll snicker and they will say--the most common number I 
get is it's more like 10 percent that we stop on their way across the 
border. And some will tell me it's 3 to 4 percent, but I've never had 
anyone tell me in private that they think they stop 25 percent or 20 or 
15. I can't think of a number above 10 percent, but I can think that 
the number that I most often hear is 10 percent.
  So if we have 4 million illegal border crossings a year and we stop 
10 percent of that, that's not a very big number, Mr. Speaker. And it's 
not very good efficiency on what we need to be doing down there on the 
border.
  We need to look at this from this standpoint: What would you do to 
stop the bleeding? Number one thing, shut the border off. It's not that 
hard to figure out. Why can't we do that? Someone said it's only 2,000 
miles, as if that's a vast, undefendable territory, and it's not. Look 
at the territory that we're defending in places like Iraq and in 
Afghanistan, for example. A lot of that border is really easy to 
defend.

                              {time}  2145

  It's not very difficult terrain. It's wide open desert on both sides 
where you can see a long ways. And we are spending $12 billion on the 
southern border every year to protect it. That works out to be, a 
2,000-mile border, $6 million a mile. That's when you add up the cost 
of the Border Patrol, customs and border protection, the Humvees and 
the pensions and the payroll and all the fuel and the gas and 
everything that goes into this, and a support network of helicopters, 
et cetera, it adds up to around $12 billion, and that's $6 million a 
mile.
  Now I don't know the most current numbers that we've had on what it 
takes to build an interstate highway or a four-lane highway, but it's 
not $6 million a mile. The cost to defend the southern border, and I 
think it's probably less than half of that price, Mr. Speaker, at least 
in some of those older numbers that I've looked at, but for the cost of 
what we're spending to defend the southern border, we could pave a 
four-lane highway for 2,000 miles a year every year. This is every 
year. $6 million a mile.
  Now I ask myself, if Janet Napolitano came to me and said, 
Congressman King, I want to contract this border control with you, and 
I'd like to give you a mile to start out. And it's just a mile that 
looks like the gravel road from my house west that nobody lives on for 
a mile, or it's a mile of open desert, and I'm going to give you $6 
million to see to it that nobody crosses that mile for a year. Now on 
second thought, since the government does these budgets over a 10-year 
period of time, give me a 10-year contract to guard a mile of border 
and give me $60 million to watch that border for 10 years, a mile of 
it.
  Mr. Speaker, I will submit, $60 million would be more than adequate 
to seal that border up so nobody got across my mile. I would guarantee 
it. I'd bond it. I'd be willing to watch you dock my pay if anybody got 
across and got away. And if I'm in the private-sector business 
industry, I'm not going to create this huge enterprise of hiring people 
and putting Humvees underneath them and all of the trappings that go 
along with that. Yes, you need some. We need some boots on the ground. 
We need to protect and defend them and give them good equipment. And we 
know that their lives are on the line every day. And we've got to 
respect them and appreciate them and pray for them. But, Mr. Speaker, 
building empire with boots on the ground isn't the only way to solve 
this problem. In fact I will submit it's not the most cost effective 
way. The most cost effective way would be to do what a businessman 
would do. If Janet Napolitano handed me $60 million and said, Guard 
that mile for 10 years, you can bet that I would put up, not just a 
fence; I would build a concrete wall. And I would put some wire on top 
of that wall, and I would have a road, and I'd have a wire fence behind 
that road, and I would have cameras and monitors and vibration-sensing 
devices. I would have all of the electronics necessary to send me 
signals if anybody came and tried to get over, under, around, or 
through that wall. And so would anybody else that would do a cash flow 
calculation on how best to defend the border. Well, anybody except 
Boeing, for example, who spent a lot of money down there, a lot of 
money convincing this Congress that they should accept a virtual fence 
and that virtual fence so far has been a bust. And as much as I 
appreciate and respect Boeing when it comes to airplanes and tankers, 
the job down there on the border, they've got some making up to do. We 
would have been better off if we had spent a couple million dollars a 
mile to build the concrete wall that I designed and put the wire on top 
of there and build the sensory devices and build a road behind that and 
then put a fence in there so that there would be a zone that if you got 
over the concrete wall, you took some other equipment to get over the 
fence that's there, and we could defend it. We could patrol it. That's 
what we needed to do. For a couple of million dollars a mile, we could 
set that system up. And that leaves $4 million a year left over.
  Now it doesn't mean that I'm going to be able to do all that without 
hiring people and paying wages to guard that mile, but let's just say 
we spent $2 million a mile to put in a wall and a fence and a road and 
some sensory devices. That still leaves $4 million left over for that 
year to hire some help, buy a few Humvees, get some radios, some 
uniforms, some pension plans, all these things that go into it.
  So I will submit that it's cash flows, Mr. Speaker, to build a wall, 
build a fence, because it reduces the number of personnel necessary, 
and it's far more effective. It is far more effective from a cash flow 
standpoint, from an American taxpayer dollar invested standpoint, to 
put the infrastructure in place, to maintain the infrastructure.
  And we had the Corps of Engineers come out with some wild number that 
it would cost something like $50 billion to maintain the fencing on the 
southern border. It was a ridiculous number. And there were no numbers 
to back that up, no numbers to support it. It was a wild number that 
they pulled out of the sky. I build things. We do Corps of Engineers 
work. Well, I have in the past. I am now out of that construction 
business. But I designed a concrete wall that one could put the footing 
in with the slip form and drop in precast panels and put the wire on 
top, lay the sensors in there and build that thing, and it wouldn't 
take us much to put together a crew that could build a mile of that a 
day.
  Now that would be not the kind of all-hands-on-deck effort that you 
see in, oh, a Manhattan Project or a NASA project, or even the kind of 
effort that they're using to put out the leak in the gulf right now. 
This is just a little old construction company that would set the 
system up and toss those panels in, set them in with a crane, one after 
the other right on down the border. It's not that hard. And it's not 
that expensive. And it is very effective. And it lets the

[[Page 8070]]

Border Patrol concentrate on those areas where they would be going 
through and going under and going around. And it would reduce that 
traffic dramatically, especially concrete, because you don't cut 
through that with a torch or a hacksaw; you have to have a concrete 
saw. And I don't know one that doesn't make noise or vibration, so we 
would have those kind of sensors that are there.
  And to those people that will argue that if you show me a 20-foot 
wall, I'll show you a 21-foot ladder--oh, I think it was perhaps Janet 
Napolitano that said, if you show me a 12-foot wall, I'll show you a 
13-foot ladder, that has got to be the weakest, most specious argument 
I've ever heard. I've heard people on both sides of the aisle that will 
make that argument.
  And so I asked the question of the chief of the Border Patrol at a 
hearing at Ellis Island a few years ago; that if we can build an 
impermeable barrier from heaven all the way down to hell that no one 
could go under, no one could go over, and no one could get through it, 
how many Border Patrol does it take to man that impermeable barrier for 
our southern border? The answer that I got back was, It still takes 
boots on the ground. In fact, it still takes more boots on the ground, 
because that's the argument.
  Well, I want enough boots on the ground. I want enough Border Patrol. 
I'm ready to put the National Guard down there again and guard that 
border. I'm ready to turn that southern desert into a training ground 
for Afghanistan and Iraq. We should have done that a long time ago. 
That all makes sense to me.
  But if you follow what I've said, an impermeable barrier all the way 
from heaven to hell--that you couldn't dig under and you couldn't go 
over the top--the full length of 2,000 miles on our southern border, 
how many people does it take to watch that? I know. It's hypothetical 
and it's theoretical, but the answer within those parameters, Mr. 
Speaker, is zero. It takes nobody to watch the impermeable barrier that 
they can't go under and they can't go over. That means it takes zero 
personnel to watch something like that. That's the hypothetical answer 
that needs to come.
  Now we know we don't have that kind of a barrier. We know we can't 
build that kind of a barrier. But my point that I'm making for those 
who would willfully deny the utter logic of this is that the better the 
barrier, the fewer the personnel. And I don't argue that we have to 
build 2,000 miles of border fence and control. We just build it where 
they are crossing the most and we keep building it, building the length 
of it, until they stop going around the end. If that's 2,000 miles, 
then it's 2,000 miles. If it's 854 miles as described by the Secure 
Fence Act, then it's 854. But that kind of barrier makes the personnel 
we have more effective; it allows us to get control of our border. It 
can force all traffic through our ports of entry, and that's what we've 
got to do. And we've got to beef up our ports of entry, beef up our 
surveillance and our technology at our ports of entry so that we can 
catch those drugs and the illegal people and the contraband that's 
going through those ports of entry. That's part of our job. We can do 
that.
  Now under this plan that I've laid out, with the money we have, we 
could easily build all of the barriers on the border that we deem are 
appropriate and effective and useful and we should and must do that, 
and we still have money left over for the personnel that we have, and 
we'll be more effective in what we do. We can shut off the bleeding at 
the border.
  The next thing that needs to happen, Mr. Speaker, is we've got to 
then shut off the jobs magnet. And some of that can be done at the same 
time. There's no reason we can't do it simultaneously. This effort on 
the part of the Obama administration to steer away from enforcing 
against illegal workers but go against the actual employers without 
bringing the illegal workers into this--when I say that the raids in 
Postville were inappropriate, unjust, maybe they'll argue that they're 
racially motivated. I'm out of patience with people that play the race 
card the first time. You can deal them out a deck, and out of 52 cards, 
somehow they will lead with the race card every time as if the race 
card is trump. Well, the rule of law has got to be trump, and the rule 
of law is justice is blind. Justice is blind and does not regard race 
as a factor. The Arizona law prohibits the utilization of race as a 
sole factor when it comes to evaluating reasonable suspicion. And these 
officers know what reasonable suspicion is.
  I happen to have written the reasonable suspicion law in Iowa with 
regard to workplace drug testing. It's very similar to the Arizona 
statute and the definition that they are utilizing, which is Federal 
case law on reasonable suspicion. And in 12 years in Iowa, even though 
we're not using law enforcement officers to define a reasonable 
suspicion, what we're doing is asking the employer to designate an 
employee--the employer himself or herself or an employee--as their 
specialist in drug abuse in the workplace. And if they see behaviors 
that are erratic, that are indicators of drug abuse--maybe the look of 
their eyes, their pupils, the dilation of the pupils, maybe erratic 
work habits, showing up late, production going down, things of that 
nature, let alone accidents where people can get hurt or killed--they 
just simply say to that employee, I have a reasonable suspicion that 
you're using drugs, and you need to go into the nurse's office or 
downtown to the clinic right now and provide a urinalysis, and we will 
test it and find out if you're abusing drugs.
  In 12 years, we haven't had a constitutional issue, we haven't had 
any litigation, I haven't heard a complaint about one person being 
unjustly targeted under reasonable suspicion for race or any other 
cause. Or even because of personalities. And you have to know, Mr. 
Speaker, that even in Iowa there are companies where that personnel who 
manages the ``reasonable suspicion'' definition, whose job it is under 
Human Resources to do that evaluation and make the call, that 
individual, yes, they're trained, but surely we would have one that 
would be a racist like all of these cops in Arizona have been described 
to be, by the people who oppose this Arizona immigration law. Surely 
there would be one that would have a personality disagreement with an 
employee, and they would like to get even with them by making them go 
take a drug test at will. But none of those objections have been 
raised.

                              {time}  2200

  So it's hard for me to accept the idea that trained law enforcement 
officers--it might be the janitor or the nurse or the truck driver 
that's pointing his finger at an employee and saying, You go take a 
drug test. That's what's going on in Iowa without complaints or 
objections. In Arizona, these are trained law enforcement officers 
whose training is being focused because of an executive order of 
Governor Jan Brewer, and they are very sensitive to these issues. They 
understand this law, and they're going to understand it even more 
before it goes into effect in August. A lot of them are Hispanic 
themselves. And to presume that law enforcement officers are racist and 
racially motivated is a division among the American people that's 
caused and perpetrated by people who would sow seeds of discontent and 
distrust and untruth and dishonesty for political gain. That, Mr. 
Speaker, is what's going on in Arizona.
  The law that they passed in Arizona is a law that mirrors Federal 
immigration law. It directs local law enforcement to enforce 
immigration law, and it also allows the citizens of Arizona--it gives 
them standing to sue if the local government is not enforcing 
immigration law to the standards defined.
  Now, I understand that law enforcement thinks they're in a squeeze, 
that they might be sued because they will be accused of discriminating; 
and on the other hand, they might be sued because they didn't 
discriminate. That might be what we've already heard down there. But 
it's my experience that when you bring a law like this--and I've had 
that experience happen to me at least two times in other circumstances. 
One is the drug testing

[[Page 8071]]

law that brought out people that were aggressively opposed to it and 
accused that it would be setting things up for discrimination based on 
personalities, race or any other reason.
  And then when we passed the official English law in Iowa that took 6 
years to get there--finally it became law--there were a lot of 
objections from some of the more liberal members of the Latino 
community. I sat with them, and I listened to their voices over and 
over again. But of all the fears that they voiced over all of those 
months and years, there hasn't been a single report that's come back 
since then that anybody was disparaged or discriminated against because 
someone said to them, Well, English is the official language of the 
State of Iowa.
  And so these fears didn't come to fruition there. The same kinds of 
arguments that were made in Iowa as are being made in Arizona today on 
their immigration law, the same kinds of arguments over the official 
language of English, the same kinds of arguments that were being made 
in Iowa over the reasonable suspicion language on Iowa's drug testing 
law, none of those fears came to fruition under official English or 
under the drug testing reasonable suspicion in Iowa.
  And I can't stand here tonight, Mr. Speaker, and allege that any of 
those fears will come to fruition in the State of Arizona, but I can 
with great confidence predict that there will be far, far less going on 
that reflects the fears of the objectors of the Arizona immigration law 
than are predicted by the people that are demonstrating in the streets.
  I think that my friend and former colleague, Tom Tancredo, got it 
right when he said, You can judge their fear of the effectiveness of a 
law by the level of hysteria that they demonstrate. They're not 
demonstrating against an injustice or something that is really 
unconstitutional. They're demonstrating because they're afraid the 
law's going to work, that it will be enforced, and it will actually be 
effective, and it will clean up a lot of the illegal immigration in 
Arizona, the 460,000 that they say are there, and I suspect it's 
significantly more than that.
  And when you have across this country some of the cities that decide 
they want to boycott Arizona because Arizona said we want to help the 
Federal Government enforce immigration law, that's a reason not to buy 
something from Arizona? That's a reason not to go down there for a 
convention? I think, Mr. Speaker, it's a reason to go. I think we ought 
to get together and take a bus and go to Arizona and spend some money. 
Don't have a boycott--have a buycott. I might go down there and pick up 
some items from Arizona and bring them home just to express to the 
Arizonans my solidarity and appreciation to them for stepping up to 
enforce a law that the American people support, this Congress has 
passed, it's on the books, that President Obama took an oath of office 
to uphold and still willfully refuses to do so through his 
subordinates, such as Janet Napolitano.
  And I might also point out, Mr. Speaker, that tomorrow Attorney 
General Eric Holder comes before the House Judiciary Committee. And as 
he comes before the Judiciary Committee, there will be a whole series 
of discussions and questions that will be brought out, I am confident. 
Eric Holder took a look at the Arizona law, and I think was responding 
to a direction from the President of the United States to see if he 
could find anything unconstitutional about the Arizona immigration law 
or something that was unlawful about the Arizona immigration law. So 
that tells me that they didn't know the Constitution very well, and 
they probably thought there was something in there that made all 
immigration law the exclusive jurisdiction of the Federal Government. 
Well, that's not true. It does say in the Constitution that it's the 
Federal Government's job to protect us from invasion, and it also says 
in the Constitution it's the Federal Government's job to set a uniform 
practice of naturalization.
  Now, you can tell that I drew a bit of a hesitant blank there. But 
let me see, article I, section 8 says ``establish a uniform Rule of 
Naturalization.'' So that would be what it says in the Constitution, 
Mr. Speaker. Those are the two references that we have to immigration 
in the Constitution, but it doesn't make immigration law exclusive to 
the United States Constitution and the Federal Government. There's 
nothing in the Constitution that excludes the States from enforcing 
Federal immigration law or writing their own. It just can't supersede 
Federal law.
  And there's a case that is U.S. v. Santana-Garcia that establishes 
the precedent that it is implicit that local government law enforcement 
has the authority to enforce immigration law in the United States. It's 
implicit in that decision U.S. Government v. Santana-Garcia. Santana-
Garcia was that side of the case, up against the United States 
Government.
  So anybody that puts on a gun and a badge and a uniform and provides 
for the safety and the security of the American people and has pledged 
to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States ought to 
know that when you take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the 
United States, that means also the laws that are written within the 
parameters of that Constitution. It's implicit. When we take an oath 
here to this job as a Member of the United States Congress, preserve, 
protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, as the 
President does--so help him God--it doesn't mean his interpretation of 
the Constitution as he sees it. It's not a growing, moving, changing 
document, as Elena Kagan believes. It's a document that is firm, and 
it's fixed, and it's rigid. And it's the text of what it says and what 
it was understood to mean at the time of ratification of either the 
broader document, the base document of the Constitution, and also the 
amendments as they were ratified.
  The local law enforcement still has a responsibility to step up and 
help enforce immigration law. It isn't a hands-off thing. They don't 
sit there and look around and think, Well, let me see, the State Bank 
of Tucson was robbed, and I'm a State highway patrol officer. So I will 
chase down the bandits who robbed the State Bank of Tucson because 
that's my job. But, oh, I pulled him over, and I was wrong. It was a 
mistake. I didn't even have reasonable suspicion. They actually robbed 
the National Bank of Tucson. No jurisdiction here. I have to let them 
go. Let the Federal officers go collect those robbers who robbed the 
National Bank, but the State Bank, of course, might be their 
jurisdiction.
  And then the city police officers, what do they do? Do they refuse to 
enforce speeding laws that are not perhaps the city ordinance? Does the 
county sheriff only serve papers and refuse to enforce the ordinances 
of the city when they're blatantly violated in front of them? No and 
no. Our law enforcement officers in this country have always cooperated 
with each other throughout the levels of law enforcement to the extent 
that they can do that in order to produce an effective enforcement of 
the law. That is how it has been. That is how it shall be. That's how 
it shall be in Arizona.
  Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County has been enforcing those laws 
for a long time now, and he's taken the heat from Eric Holder, and that 
I think implicitly comes from President Obama. And Janet Napolitano, 
who knows him well, made remarks that would imply that she had come to 
a conclusion that there were biased violations of people's civil rights 
under the enforcement of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. There is no basis for it, 
but they stirred up enough furor that a few of the American people 
began to believe that there was a basis for it. I went down and took a 
look at Tent City down in Phoenix. And if I remember my numbers 
correctly--and this is from memory, not from notes, Mr. Speaker, so 
it's subject to correction--but about one-third of the inmates in Tent 
City were there because they were illegal, and about two-thirds of them 
were there for other reasons. A peaceful group of people. They're there 
in striped uniforms, and they do get some pink underwear. It's not the 
nicest place, and it doesn't need to be

[[Page 8072]]

the nicest place. We don't want to advertise it as a place to come back 
to. It's a place to leave and not come back to. That's why we have 
jails.
  But this situation in Arizona, we've got to stand with them. I stand 
with Governor Brewer. I stand also with Representative Pearce in 
Arizona for the work that he has done. And he is very, very articulate 
in stepping up to defend immigration law. I encourage and look forward 
to making a new effort to establish a new fence and barrier on the 
border, one that works out to be a cash flow.
  And I also look forward to moving legislation in the aftermath of 
this November election that adopts the New IDEA Act. The New IDEA Act 
is the legislation that I have introduced in the last couple of cycles, 
and there aren't very many new ideas under the sun. It takes a little 
audacity to declare a bill a new idea, but I think it is a new idea.

                              {time}  2210

  But I think it is a New IDEA. And New IDEA stands for the New Illegal 
Deduction Elimination Act; New IDEA.
  What it does is it recognizes that there are agencies out there that 
are pretty aggressive in enforcing their turf. I have noticed that the 
IRS is pretty aggressive in enforcing their turf, the Internal Revenue 
Service. So I asked myself, of all of these agencies, which one would 
be the most aggressive. It comes back to me that the IRS would be 
useful people. It is like when you go to have a pickup game and you 
start choosing up sides. I look across here and I think, Who do I want 
on my team if I want to get something done? If I am going to have to 
defend the border, give me the military first. They will get the job 
done. I don't want to get into the argument about the Army, Navy, Air 
Force, Marines, or Coast Guard. They all get the job done. So if I were 
to chose, I would say first give me the military. Let us go to the 
border and let's seal the border with the military. They will get the 
job done.
  Then I would look around at who else would I like to pick for my 
team. Of all the government agencies, if I want somebody to help me 
enforce immigration law, would I pick somebody from the EPA? No. They 
would stand in the way. Would I pick somebody from the USDA? No, not 
likely. But of all of those agencies, maybe somebody from the 
Department of Homeland Security. Yes, but at the top they are not given 
a very defined mission. It looks as though their mission is being 
subverted by the Secretary, Janet Napolitano. So I would pick the IRS 
for my team because they are effective. They are good at doing what 
they do.
  Here is how I would bring the IRS into this effort to help control 
immigration law. This legislation, the New IDEA Act clarifies and 
establishes the wages and benefits paid to illegals are not tax 
deductible for income tax purposes.
  And so let's just say you have an employer that has been paying a 
million dollars a year out to a good number of employees at a rate of 
$10 an hour. That million dollars a year is tax deductible because it 
is a business expense like electricity, heat, fuel, or merchandise that 
is purchased for resale. All of those things are business expenses. New 
IDEA clarifies that the wages and benefits paid are not tax deductible. 
So the IRS would come in, and during the course of their normal audit, 
they would take the list of employees, punch the Social Security 
numbers of those employees into the E-Verify database, and if it comes 
back that they are not lawful to work in the United States, the IRS 
would take those wages and say, Sorry, employer, this million dollars 
is not tax deductible for you.
  So it goes from the expense side, pushed over into the column that 
makes profit. If you calculate that profit, at the time I did this, it 
was 34 percent corporate income tax rate, and you add the interest and 
penalty, the effect of that million dollars denied as a tax deduction 
becomes an addition of about $6 an hour. So your $10 an hour illegal 
becomes a $16 an hour illegal because of the audit of the IRS. And, by 
the way, it is required to grant safe harbor to an employer who uses E-
Verify in a legitimate, reliable way. So we give the employer safe 
harbor if he uses E-Verify. We give the IRS the authority to deny that 
deductibility if they are not able to work lawfully in the United 
States. And we put interest and penalty on there as well as the tax 
liability. Your $10 an hour illegal becomes a $16 an hour illegal. And 
what will happen all across this country is 8 million illegals will be 
looking for work, and there will be 8 million jobs that will open up 
for American workers, lawfully present people who can work in America 
with a green card or American workers.
  That solves about half of our unemployment problem right there, and 
it legitimizes the employers and gives them something they can count 
on. There are some things that need to be cleaned up with that, in 
addition, Mr. Speaker.
  Another one is E-Verify must be changed so employers can use it on 
legacy employees, that means current employees, and also use E-Verify 
with a bona fide job offer, rather than the law right now requires the 
employer to hire the worker and then find out whether they are legal or 
not. By that time, the employer has invested training in them and they 
have passed up somebody else to fill that job. So they will have 
somebody there for perhaps a week, they will have to pay them, and so 
the employer ultimately has to break the law to find out if they are 
breaking the law. They need to be able to use E-Verify with a bona fide 
job offer. They need to be able to use E-Verify to verify those legacy 
employees that work for them now, their current employees.
  We can do all this. We can seal the border with a concrete wall and a 
secondary and a tertiary fence where it matters. We can put sensory 
devices there. We can build a road to patrol it. We can put cameras up 
and monitor it. We can man it effectively; in fact, more effectively 
with fewer personnel than we have if we build the barrier. We need to 
shut off the jobs magnet in the interior. We can do that by enforcing 
current law and by passing E-Verify to establish that the IRS is part 
of a team member that would be required to cooperate with the Social 
Security Administration and with the Department of Homeland Security. 
So the right hand, left hand, and middle hand all knew what the other 
was doing.
  It is pretty simple to solve this problem. It has been solved in 60 
minutes, Mr. Speaker, and if anybody has any questions, they can easily 
visit my Web site, Steveking.com, where I will be happy to answer any 
questions that might come up.
  Meanwhile, I appreciate your attention on this subject matter, and I 
yield back the balance of my time.

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