[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 5089-5092]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. 
King) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address 
you here on the floor of the House of Representatives and take up the 
topic that has come to the forefront of the American discussion, and do 
so again.
  And that is that on the night of November 6, as people across America 
watched the election returns come in, there were many Republicans, 
people on my side of the aisle that watched with, I'll say, shock and 
disappointment, as the great predictions that Mitt Romney would be the 
next President of the United States fell by the wayside in swing State 
after swing State from the east coast. By the time it got west of the 
Mississippi, it was pretty clear the final result of the Presidential 
election.
  And many of the predictors, who are self-assigned experts on polling 
and politics and the decision of the American voters, had predicted 
that Mitt Romney would be President, that Republicans would win the 
majority in the United States Senate, that there would be a three-way 
majority between the House, the Senate and Presidency, and we could put 
America back on the right track.
  I hoped for that, Mr. Speaker. I prayed for that. I worked for it. 
But I watched as those election results came

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to be untrue, as we lost some seats here in the House and lost some 
seats in the Senate, and, of course, the President was re-elected that 
night.
  The plans of probably half, very close to half, of the American 
people had to be changed and altered, because we planned to put free 
enterprise back in place. We planned to repeal ObamaCare. We planned to 
do some other things.
  But one of the things we didn't really plan so much to do was take up 
the immigration issue in the 113th Congress. And even though 
immigration was hardly a blip on the Presidential debate that took 
place--and being from Iowa, Mr. Speaker, I will tell you that if it was 
debated in the Presidential race, it likely was debated in Iowa, likely 
debated in Iowa first, and likely debated in Iowa the longest.
  Yet as I tuned my ear to these issues, I didn't notice that it was a 
paramount topic or a significant plank in the platform of either Mitt 
Romney or Barack Obama, and I don't think the American people did 
either.
  Nonetheless, the election polls closed on the night of the 6th of 
November, and those results are clear. And the morning then of the 7th 
of November, some self-appointed experts woke up and decided--oh, 
probably they didn't sleep very well because it was clear that they 
were wrong on their predictions. And so how would they then describe 
why they were so wrong in their bold predictions, even as high as 60 or 
more Republican seats in the Senate, and Mitt Romney sweeping swing 
State after swing State?
  It didn't happen, of course, Mr. Speaker. How would they describe why 
they were so wrong?
  It didn't take them very long, after the sun came up, or maybe even 
before they went to bed that night, to decide they were going to tell 
the American people that the election loss--and I wouldn't characterize 
it as a loss--it was a failure to achieve the goals we had set, but the 
President maintained his seat in the White House. But that election 
loss, as they characterized it, came about because Mitt Romney said two 
words--``self-deport''--and that explains it all, almost as logically 
as the video explains the violence in Benghazi.
  No, it wasn't because Mitt Romney said those two words, and it wasn't 
because we had failed to achieve as large a percentage of the Hispanic-
Latino vote, although that number dropped off from about 31 percent 
that John McCain achieved, down to 27 percent, according to the exit 
polls, that Mitt Romney achieved.
  It wasn't even the low. The modern-day low percentage for Hispanic 
vote went to Bob Dole; and if my memory serves me correctly, that was 
at 22 percent.
  I noticed that as they began to spin the narrative that it was all 
about immigration, along with that came the position that many of the 
advocates had had for a long time. These were the people that were the 
promoters of--and I put it in quotes--``comprehensive immigration 
reform,'' and that's the language that emerged during George W. Bush's 
administration when they first advocated the amnesty, the modern-day 
amnesty that is a policy that much of it was written off of the 1986 
Amnesty Act that Ronald Reagan signed.
  But their argument was Mitt Romney would be President if he had just 
had a better outreach to the Hispanic vote. And so those of us that 
heard that, first I realized that the open-borders people have always 
had the agenda to suspend the rule of law and grant amnesty and the 
path to citizenship for people that came here illegally, many times at 
the expense of those who came here as legal immigrants. But it always 
was their agenda.
  So it was a pretty convenient excuse to analyze failed election 
results and put it all in the package of: if we had just passed 
comprehensive immigration reform. Now we must pass comprehensive 
immigration reform, or the party will become irrelevant electorally in 
the future, and we'll never win another national election.
  In fact, Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States, President 
Obama, came before Republican House Members in a conference about a 
month ago and said just that. He said that we would never win another 
national election if we don't pass comprehensive immigration reform.
  And here's the one that's the hardest to accept as being delivered 
with a serious look on his face, although I'm sure there had to be a 
little snicker in his mind. He said, to you Republicans, I'm trying to 
help you. The President said he's trying to help us by advocating for 
an amnesty plan, comprehensive immigration reform; and that's going to 
fix the problem of falling a little short in winning the Presidential 
election last November 6.

                              {time}  1720

  Well, there are a few facts that should be known, Mr. Speaker, and 
one of them is that, according to my team of staff as they sat on their 
BlackBerrys, Barack Obama received 8 million fewer votes than he did in 
2008 and Mitt Romney received 1 million fewer votes than John McCain 
did in 2008. That means there are 9 million people, at least, that 
stayed home--the electorate should have gotten larger--9 million people 
that stayed home altogether. Why were they not energized? Why didn't 
Barack Obama energize them? Why didn't Mitt Romney energize them? We 
need to know the answers to those questions just to begin this 
discussion.
  Another one would be, how important was the immigration issue to 
people in this country? Not important enough that the Presidential 
candidates would make a debate issue out of it or campaign on it. So it 
wasn't on the radar screen of the Presidential candidates, who have the 
most extensive and expensive polling of anybody in the country.
  So why was that an issue? I'd point out Republicans lost an even 
larger share of the Asian vote than they did the Hispanic vote, but 
what was the list of priorities that they had, and was immigration at 
the top? No, actually, it was fifth or sixth along the line.
  Like everybody else, we are all human beings and we're all deserving 
of respect and we're all created in God's image. But people think the 
same way, regardless of what their race or ethnicity. They want to take 
care of their families. They worry about jobs and the economy. They 
want to have safe streets. They want good education. They want 
opportunity. They should want lower taxes and less government intrusion 
into our lives. But that same poll yielded a bit of a surprising result 
to many of the advocates that had spun the yarn the morning after the 
election that the constituency that they were losing was, naturally, 
Republicans. Because I'll say this: we know they are good family 
people, they're good faith people, they're good entrepreneurs and they 
can start a business with less and make it go very, very well with that 
network of family and work ethic. That's what we see in front of us. 
But if you ask the question in a setting that is the perspective of a 
good and effective and thorough, objective poll, you'll find out that 
Hispanics are about 2-to-1 in favor of larger, more government 
involvement, more government services, which results in higher taxes.
  Well, that's the other party that advertises we need more government, 
more taxes, more government services. They do that because they are in 
the business of expanding the dependency class in America. They want, 
Mr. Speaker, more Americans to be dependent upon government, even if we 
have to borrow the money from the Chinese and the Saudis in order to 
provide these ``services'' because it empowers their electoral base and 
empowers them here in this Congress.
  We're on the other side of this issue, Republicans. We want to expand 
personal responsibility. We want to expand all of the human potential 
that we possibly can. We want this American vigor to be unleashed and 
to grow this economy and to grow our gross domestic product. They are 
two competing ideologies. One is John Maynard Keynes, who believed you 
could borrow money and hand it to people and ask them to spend it, and 
somehow that spending would create this giant, endless chain letter 
that would stimulate the economy. The other side comes out of the Adam 
Smith side, or you might

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say the Austrian economic side, that believes that you need production 
on the production side of our economy for it to grow and has less 
emphasis on the consumption side, and if you let people invest capital 
and get a return on that capital investment, they will do their best 
and contribute and the economy will grow. That's a competing philosophy 
that's different between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans want to 
empower the individual. And to empower the individual, you have to 
respect and appreciate and encourage this free enterprise economy that 
had built the United States.
  Mr. Speaker, if you take a naturalization test there are a series of 
flash cards, a stack of them that you can get from Citizenship and 
Immigration Services so that a legal immigrant can study to be 
naturalized as an American citizen. These glossy flash cards are read, 
and they will have on them questions like, Who's the Father of our 
Country? Snap it over and it's George Washington. Who emancipated the 
slaves? Republican Abraham Lincoln. Actually, it just says Abraham 
Lincoln on the other side, Mr. Speaker. What's the economic system of 
the United States of America? Flip that flash card over and it says 
free enterprise capitalism.
  This is not a secret. We want people to be empowered by freedom, by 
God-given liberty, not dependent upon some political party that's going 
to hand out the largesse of government at the expense of other people 
and actually at the expense of borrowing money from foreign countries 
to drive us into debt of now nearly $16.8 trillion in national debt.
  So the cynical effort to expand the political base erodes the rule of 
law, erodes free enterprise, puts America in debt. So now that the 
babies that were born today in the United States of America owe Uncle 
Sam more than $53,000 each. That's what we have and that's what we're 
dealing with. And we have a country that we need to pull back from the 
brink of bankruptcy. We're moving in that direction under I think good, 
strategic leadership here in the House. We have a budget that we've 
approved that balances. And it's too long for me. I don't want to wait 
that long--10 years. But meanwhile, the President's budget balances 
exactly never and drives us deeper and deeper into debt and raises 
taxes, Mr. Speaker.
  So how do we bring out the greatness of America? The greatness of 
America was described by Ronald Reagan when he talked about the shining 
city on the hill. But Ronald Reagan never spoke about the shining city 
on the hill as being our destiny. He spoke about it as the America that 
we were and presumably the America that we are. I will argue that our 
job is to refurbish the pillars of American exceptionalism, to 
strengthen us in all of those pillars. We know what they are. They're 
very clear. Many of them are in the Bill of Rights. Freedom of speech 
is a pillar of American exceptionalism. I'm exercising it at this 
moment, Mr. Speaker. Freedom of speech, religion, the press and 
assembly; the right to keep and bear arms; the right to face your 
accuser in a court of law and be tried by a jury of your peers; single, 
not double jeopardy; the right to property; the right to see that the 
enumerated powers that are exclusively to the United States Congress, 
those other powers devolve to the States or the people respectively. 
Those are some of the pillars. I mentioned free enterprise capitalism 
as another pillar of American exceptionalism. But wrapped up within 
this, within this Constitution that I carry in my jacket pocket, is the 
supreme law of the land, our Constitution, and we would not be America 
if we didn't have all of these pillars that I have described and also 
have the rule of law.
  Now why would thinking people that were elected to come to this 
United States Congress and make good value judgments and good policy 
judgments, why would they be so willing and some of them eager to 
sacrifice the rule of law in an effort to cynically reach out and ask 
for a vote? Why would someone vote for someone who's willing to 
sacrifice the rule of law? It defies my logic application, Mr. Speaker. 
And amnesty is a sacrifice of the rule of law. And once you give it, 
once you grant it, it's almost impossible to restore it.
  I remember when Ronald Reagan signed the Amnesty Act of 1986. And I 
was not in politics at the time. I was operating my construction 
company that was 11 years old at the time, raising three young sons, 
struggling through the farm crisis decade of the eighties. But I'm 
watching the news, and I'm seeing this debate take place that we have 
800,000 to a million that are in the United States illegally. 
Generally, most of them at that time came across the southern border 
and stayed. And there was such a big problem that we needed to address 
it--800,000 to a million that were here illegally then.
  So Ronald Reagan, I think under great persuasive pressure from some 
of the Cabinet members around him, conceded that he would sign that 
1986 Amnesty Act. And when he did that, my frustration level went over 
the top. I believed that in spite of all the pressure that was brought 
on Ronald Reagan as President, he would see clearly that you can't 
sacrifice the rule of law in order to solve a problem that came about 
because of not enforcing the law, and that the promise of enforcement 
in the future was not going to be upheld adequately to compensate for 
the amnesty that they were granting in that bill.
  Now the promise was this: every employer was going to have to fill 
out for each applicant an I-9 form. That I-9 form had--I gave it 
shorthand and called it name, rank, and serial number, but other data, 
too, of the job applicant. I remember my fear that the INS, the 
Immigration and Naturalization Service of the time, would come into my 
office and go through my files and audit me and make sure that I had 
every I-9 form exactly filed right, and I want to make sure I didn't 
miss it with anyone.

                              {time}  1730

  We religiously followed the new 1986 Amnesty Act requirements that 
there would be I-9 forms. We expected that there would be enforcement 
and penalties for employers that violated that because the premise was 
the Federal Government, enforced by the Justice Department at the time, 
would be there to audit employers and enforce the rule of law. That was 
the full-blown premise that came with Ronald Reagan's signature on the 
Amnesty Act of 1986.
  I don't have any doubt that Ronald Reagan intended to follow through 
on the enforcement of the Amnesty Act. I can tell you that I followed 
my part. I've still got some of those records in my dusty files back 
there somewhere. Many other employers were concerned that they would 
not be able to follow the letter of the law. It didn't work out that 
way. They didn't show up in office after office, company after company. 
And after 20 years of the Amnesty Act that was 800,000 to 1 million. 
Because of document fraud and just a misestimation of the numbers, that 
800,000 to 1 million became 3 million people that were granted amnesty 
in that act that was signed by Ronald Reagan in 1986.
  Now, what did we learn from that, Mr. Speaker? And those who fail to 
learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Well, I have this 
document that's written by Attorney General Ed Meese, who was Ronald 
Reagan's Attorney General at that period of time and charged with 
enforcing the immigration law that was passed in Amnesty in '86. This 
is an op-ed that he wrote, published in Human Events on December 13, 
2006. Among his dialogue here is this--and I'll read some of it into 
the Record, Mr. Speaker. I think it's worth our attention. It's 
Attorney General Ed Meese writing of Ronald Reagan's Amnesty Act.
  From the article, he says:

       Illegal immigrants who could establish that they had 
     resided in America continuously for 5 years would be granted 
     temporary resident status, which could be upgraded to 
     permanent residency after 18 months and, after another 5 
     years, to citizenship. It wasn't automatic. They had to pay 
     application fees. They had to learn to speak English. They 
     had to understand American civics, pass a medical exam and 
     register for military selective service. Those with 
     convictions for a felony or three misdemeanors were 
     ineligible.


[[Page 5092]]


  Mr. Speaker, this language is almost verbatim the language that was 
plugged into the 2006 Amnesty Act and into what is likely to come out 
of the Senate.
  I would be happy to yield for an announcement.

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