[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 5830-5833]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1730
                           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, it's my privilege to be recognized to 
address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives.
  I've listened to the dialogue over the last, oh, 30 to 60 minutes and 
I'm a little bit surprised that some of the advocates for the 
comprehensive immigration reform bill wouldn't simply look at the 
impact on a lot of their friends and neighbors. We see the highest 
unemployment in the African American community. That's the direct 
competition that comes in if they grant amnesty on the Senate side. I 
ask the gentleman to reconsider that. The best thing that would be 
would be more jobs for people that are here that are Americans.
  I see the gentleman from Texas has arrived. Generally, there is a 
pretty good narrative that comes forth from the gentleman from the 
Beaumont area, so I would be very pleased to yield to the gentleman 
from Texas (Mr. Poe).


               Professor Richard Falk is in Fantasy Land

  Mr. POE of Texas. I thank the gentleman from Iowa for yielding some 
time. I want to address the House on a different issue tonight, but I 
do appreciate the time and letting me be off the subject that he was 
going to, and will, talk about momentarily.
  Mr. Speaker, as you know, there are people in Boston--and really 
around the world, and in the United States especially--trying to 
recover from the terrorist attack that took place in Boston. The 
Richard family laid their 8-year-old boy to rest, as did other 
families. As a father of 4 and a grandfather of 10, no parent or 
grandparent ever wants to see a child die in their youth, especially 
being murdered the way this young lad was.
  But meanwhile, in the halls of academia, Richard Falk, a professor 
and an official with the United Nations Human Rights Council, he blamed 
the terrorist attack on what he claims is American global domination--
and on the country of Israel, of all things. What an absurd comment for 
this so-called ``intellectual'' to make. The vile comments come only 2 
years after he personally was reprimanded by the United Nations for 
promoting fantasy-like 9/11 conspiracy theories.
  Mr. Speaker, why is Richard Falks still employed by the United 
Nations Human Rights Council?
  Can someone please explain why the United States also continues to be 
the largest funder of the United Nations, which gives radical wingbats 
like Falk a platform to spew their hate and anti-American rhetoric? I 
don't think the United States should be bankrolling the United Nations 
Human Rights Council. Let them find somebody else to foot the bill for 
this international institute of ingratitude.
  It's time for the elitist, uninformed like Mr. Falk to go, and it's 
certainly time for the United States to stop funding the Human Rights 
Council. We don't need to pay people like Professor Falk to hate 
America. People like him will do it for free.
  Meanwhile, let's try the Boston terrorists for their crimes against 
America; hold them accountable for murder. And don't try to blame 
America for the murder of America's children. Blame the killers.
  And that's just the way it is.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas for his message. 
It's one that I hope, Mr. Speaker, is well heard across America: You 
don't have to pay them to hate us. They hate us for free. They hate us 
for our ideology and for our success, for all of those reasons.

[[Page 5831]]

  Mr. Speaker, I came here to the floor tonight to talk about the 
immigration issue here in the United States Congress, primarily that 
has emerged in the United States Senate out of the Gang of Eight.
  We know that there are some of these policies that are being worked 
through in meetings behind closed doors in the House of 
Representatives. They seem to admit to those meetings, but they're not 
very public and we don't know very much about what they're talking 
about. I just get nervous when I see bills written in secret.
  The Gang of Eight wrote their bill in secret and popped it out last 
week or so, a little more, and we began to look through 844 pages. 
Surprise. Well, shortly after the bill was dropped, then the chairman 
of the Judiciary Committee in the Senate calls hearings and begins to 
do the fastest process that they can legitimately get done to try to 
move an immigration amnesty bill out of the Senate before it gets so 
many holes poked in it that it sinks of its own weight.
  I take you back, Mr. Speaker, to: How did we get here? What was the 
scenario? What's the path of immigration? I will go through the fast-
forward version, backing this up to 1986.
  In 1986, it became a political issue that we had too many people in 
the United States illegally. There was an effort made to resolve the 
issue and the effort was this:
  Part of the people in the argument said they wanted better border 
security and they wanted better immigration enforcement. The other side 
of the argument said we've got to do something to legalize people that 
are here that--I don't know if they used the language then if they were 
in the shadows or not. Those two arguments came together here in this 
Congress. And with Ronald Reagan sitting in the White House, he 
received significant pressure from the people around him that urged him 
to sign the 1986 Amnesty Act. Now, that was one of only two times that 
Ronald Reagan let me down in 8 years. But he accepted the arguments 
that the only way to get agreement on enforcement and to be able to 
respect and restore the rule of law was to make the people that were 
here illegally legal. The tradeoff was amnesty in exchange for 
enforcement.
  So, Mr. Speaker, the projection originally was 800,000 people in this 
country illegally that would get instantaneous legalization status, and 
then that number of course grew to 1 million. Roughly, that was the 
projected amount at the time that the bill was debated in Congress. We 
know that, instead, there wasn't 1 million people. It was 3 million 
people that ended up receiving amnesty from the deliberations in this 
Congress, the tug-of-war that came together, and it's a product of 
compromise. I would point out that compromise isn't always a good 
thing. This would be one of those examples.
  The compromise was, in exchange for the promise of future 
enforcement, Ronald Reagan would sign the bill to instantaneously start 
the process to legalize the people that were illegally in the United 
States. Sounds familiar. Well, he signed the bill in '86. What we got 
was instantaneous legalization of the people that were here--triple the 
number that was projected--and the effort to get law enforcement was 
undermined continually. It was undermined in a number of ways: through 
litigation, through lack of will. As it ground forward, the respect for 
the rule of law, especially with regard to immigration law, diminished 
in each year.
  As we've seen, the enforcement of our immigration laws has diminished 
in each administration, from Ronald Reagan through Bush 41, to Bill 
Clinton, to Bush 43, and now to Barack Obama. That's the path that has 
taken place.
  Just a year ago, the debate was: Would Congress pass the DREAM Act, 
the DREAM Act being the legislation that I'll say the chief advocate 
for it in the Senate has been Senator Durbin of Illinois. He has 
identified with it more than anyone else. But the DREAM Act is: those 
kids that came here, say, before their 18th birthday--and that goes up 
and down to 16, or on up to a little older than that. Those that came 
here when they were relatively young, maybe due to no fault of their 
own--theoretically, someone who was born 5 minutes before in a foreign 
country that was brought in by their parents as a little baby would get 
a legal status. And, by the way, in-State tuition discounts so they can 
go to college, get legal status, and be able to work in the country.
  In other words, it was amnesty for those young people who presumably 
came into this country not of their own will or perhaps not of their 
own knowledge that it was against the law to enter the United States 
illegally, or those that might have been brought into the country under 
a visa of one kind or another, overstayed their visa and didn't have a 
legal status anymore. In any case, the younger people given a path to a 
legal status and a legal green card here in the United States, that's 
the DREAM Act.
  A year ago, Mr. Speaker, it was not something that could pass the 
United States Congress. They long wanted to get the DREAM Act passed, 
but they could not because we stood on the rule of law and we said we 
are not going to reward people who break the law with, let's just say, 
a de facto scholarship to a university--and in California, it would be 
a free ride. I made the argument that how can you legalize people that 
are here illegally, refuse to enforce the law, the clear directive of 
the law, and have people sitting in a classroom in, say, California 
with a free ride while someone who has lost their husband or wife in 
battle in Iraq or Afghanistan, who finds themselves the sole 
breadwinner for their family, wants to go to California--I'll use as 
the example--and have to pay out-of-State tuition in a California 
institution, who is a widow or a widower of someone who has given their 
life for our country, they're sitting there next to someone who is in 
the United States illegally that gets a free ride because they've been 
declared a California resident.

                              {time}  1740

  I could never reconcile the huge inequity, the injustice of that 
idea, and neither could a majority of Americans or a majority of the 
United States Congress. That's why the DREAM Act wasn't passed. Just a 
year ago that couldn't be done.
  The President said on March 28 of 2010, when he was speaking to a 
high school group here in the Washington, DC area, they asked him: Why 
don't you just pass the DREAM Act by executive order, implement that? 
And the President's answer was: No, I don't have the constitutional 
authority to do so. That is a legislative branch activity. And he said: 
You're smart, you're educated, you know that in the three branches of 
government Congress' job is to pass the laws, my job as President, the 
head of the executive branch, is to carry those laws out and see to it 
that they are enacted and enforced, and the judicial branch is to rule 
on their constitutionality to tell us what the laws are understood to 
mean.
  That was the description that the President gave March 28, 2010. He 
said he didn't have the authority to implement a DREAM Act by executive 
authority. Congress wouldn't pass it a year ago; the President said he 
couldn't do such a thing constitutionally, March 28, 2010. And here 
we've come so far that in June or July--and I don't have those dates in 
front of me, nor committed to memory, Mr. Speaker--the President went 
back on his own advice, word, oath of office and counsel when they 
issued an executive memorandum.
  He held a press conference at the White House within a couple hours 
of the executive memorandum and said: We are going to legalize all of 
these people that are here within these age groups that fit the 
definition of the DREAM Act--an executive edict, not exactly an 
executive order, because it was only a memorandum between the 
Department of Homeland Security that they put out--and that they would 
follow this guideline. They created four classes of people that were 
defined by age and by status, but four separate classes of people 
created in this memorandum.

[[Page 5832]]

  And the President manufactured a work permit out of thin air, Mr. 
Speaker, just simply made it up. All of the visas that exist in law, of 
course, are a product of Congress. And it's our exclusive authority to 
define immigration law. It's the President's job to enforce the laws 
that are on the books.
  Now, the previous President had the opportunity to veto immigration 
law. It's all signed into law and it is the law of the land. The 
Constitution is the supreme law of the land. The President violated the 
Constitution and his own definition of congressional executive and 
judicial authority when he issued this executive memorandum that 
granted this legal status under the DREAM Act principles. That 
happened, I would say, June or July of last year.
  Now we've come a quantum leap. As we go forward, we put together a 
meeting and organized the effort to take the President to court on that 
issue. You cannot have a President that's going to legislate by 
executive edict. But he did do that; and that case, Mr. Speaker, has 
worked its way through the courts. And I'm here to announce in the 
Congressional Record the results.
  The name of the case is Crane v. Napolitano. This references the lead 
plaintiff as Christopher Crane, who is the president of the ICE union, 
the Immigration and Customs Enforcement union. He has been a stellar 
individual on this. He stood boldly and strongly, and he's taken the 
threats and the buffeting that comes from all sides of this argument. 
He's testified before Congress. He has stood at a press conference and 
asked to be recognized to ask questions of Senators over on the Senate 
side. And he has flawlessly walked his way down through this thing by 
standing for the rule of law and for the Constitution and his own oath 
to uphold the law, as we have taken that oath here in this Congress to 
uphold the Constitution.
  This decision that came down yesterday from a Federal District Court 
in Houston in the case of Crane v. Napolitano, there were 10 points 
that were made in this litigation, Mr. Speaker. Nine of the 10, the 
judge found clearly down on the side of those who support the 
Constitution and the rule of law and rejected the executive branch's 
argument that they had prosecutorial discretion to decide who to 
prosecute and who not to prosecute.
  Time after time the judge wrote: When Congress writes in statute the 
word ``shall,'' shall means shall. It doesn't mean may; it means shall. 
That means that when an ICE officer picks someone up and identifies 
them as likely to be in violation of immigration laws, they shall be 
placed in deportation proceedings. That's a ``shall'' that's in the law 
that was upheld by the Court yesterday in their decision on this 
multiple-page decision. So nine of the 10 components of the argument, 
several of which I made early on after that issuing of the executive 
edict last year, nine of 10 were upheld.
  The 10th argument was one that the President sent it back to the 
executive branch and said: your argument is so illogical and baseless 
and convoluted and tied to footnotes, go back and rewrite your 
argument. But the implication or the tone of that is once that's 
rewritten, he's probably going to find it. I guess I don't want to put 
words in a judge's mouth. I'm optimistic about how that final component 
of the ruling will be.
  In any case, it's almost a 100 percent resounding decision that says: 
Barack Obama and his appointees cannot write immigration law out of 
thin air. They can't do so by executive memorandum, they cannot do so 
by edict, they cannot do so by executive order. Congress writes 
immigration laws, Mr. Speaker, and the President's job is to take care 
that those laws be faithfully executed. He has not done that. He's 
defied his own oath of office. The Federal Court has ruled on the side 
of article I, legislative branch of Congress. We will see the impact of 
this decision.
  I think, Mr. Speaker, that now it's time for the Gang of Eight to 
reassess as a result of this lawsuit. It's time for the open-border 
advocates in this Congress to reassess as a result of this lawsuit. 
They had concluded, the people on my side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, 
appear to have concluded that Republicans didn't win the elections they 
anticipated winning last November. On the morning after the election, 
some of our otherwise wise folks on our side of the aisle concluded 
that Mitt Romney would have been President-elect if he just hadn't said 
two words, ``self-deport,'' and so now there has to be an effort to try 
to, let's say, start the conversation with select groups of people 
across the country that would require that amnesty be passed to ``start 
the conversation.''
  Mr. Speaker, I would urge all of those to reassess the situation and 
think about this. They were seeking to conform to the President's edict 
on his DREAM Act life. They were seeking to adjust U.S. law under the 
premise that the President refused to enforce existing law, and the 
only way that we could get law enforcement would be to conform to the 
President's wishes and rewrite the law and conform it to the 
President's political agenda.
  I thought from the beginning it was a ludicrous position to take, to 
accept an idea that the President can, first, write a law by executive 
edict; and, second, Congress has to conform. Now, I've seen it happen 
and participated in it in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, when we have a 
piece of legislation and it finds its way over to the Supreme Court and 
the Supreme Court comes down with a ruling, and then Congress takes a 
look at the language of that Supreme Court's ruling, and we will bring 
a piece of legislation to conform with a directive from the Supreme 
Court. I think that's an appropriate thing for us to do, provided we 
agree with the Supreme Court's decision and it's clear, logical legal 
analysis. When we have done that, I've agreed.
  An example would be the language on partial-birth abortion that 
banned it. The first time it went to the Supreme Court, the Supreme 
Court ruled that the definition of ``partial-birth abortion'' was too 
vague. So we went back and fine-tuned that language, passed it out of 
the Judiciary Committee, passed it out of the House and the Senate, 
President Bush signed it, and it was upheld when it found its way back 
again before the Supreme Court.

                              {time}  1750

  That's okay, and it's an appropriate and proper thing for this 
Congress to do--to conform our legislation to a Supreme Court decision 
when it's a proper one. But when the President defies the law and the 
policy established by the United States Congress and makes up his own 
as he goes along by executive edict and press conference and for 
Congress to accept the idea that the President of the United States 
directs us, either implied or literally, to conform the law to the 
President's wishes, I would remind all of those people who happen to 
think that, Mr. Speaker, that we each have our own franchise.
  Our oath is to uphold the Constitution. It's not to conform to the 
President's whims or wishes. It's to represent the best decisions for 
this country and to represent the people in the districts that we 
represent. We owe them our best judgment and our best effort, but we 
don't owe anybody an obligation to conform to the President's wishes, 
will, or whim. That has to only conform with our best judgment, 
individual best judgment, collectively measured here in this Congress--
House and Senate.
  So I think that a Congress that would be willing to give up its 
legislative authority and let that power go over to the executive 
branch by conforming the idea of amnesty that the President has brought 
forward in his edict I think our Founding Fathers did not imagine. They 
did not imagine that this branch of government would be so willing to 
give up this power. Our Founding Fathers imagined that each branch of 
government would jealously guard the power that's granted it within the 
Constitution in the three separate branches of government. They 
expected that Congress would assert its authority in competition with 
and in a static tension with the President and with the courts. The 
courts, by the way, were designed to be the weakest of the three 
branches of government. That's a longer discussion.

[[Page 5833]]

  The Gang of Eight, though, brought their bill out. What is it, Mr. 
Speaker? It is this:
  It is amnesty first. It instantaneously legalizes everybody that's in 
the country illegally with a few tiny, little exceptions, and that's if 
we run across them randomly and if they happen to have committed a 
felony or three misdemeanors. Other than that, it instantaneously 
legalizes everybody who's here illegally whether they committed a crime 
of illegally crossing the border or whether they overstayed their visa 
or whether they committed the crime of document fraud. Those kinds of 
things are just simply not enforced by this administration. They are 
treating immigration law as if it's a secondary crime.
  An example of that would be, if you've got States that say that you 
can't pull somebody over for not wearing their seatbelt, but if they're 
speeding and if it happens to be they're not wearing their seatbelt, 
you can write the ticket for that. That's kind of the equivalent of 
what's going on here.
  The President essentially issued this edict that, if somebody is 
guilty of a felony and if they're unlawfully in the United States, then 
we will go ahead and deport them; but otherwise they would get similar 
treatment as, oh, let's say, the President's aunt, who was adjudicated 
for deportation and who lived in the country illegally for years after 
that. Finally, she surfaced again, and they granted her asylum status. 
If they'd sent her back to Kenya, she would have apparently been 
subject to kidnap and ransom, so they gave her asylum. I guess it's an 
undecided case with the President's Uncle Omar, who was picked up for 
drunken driving. He had already been adjudicated for deportation. We 
would know if he were anyplace other than still in the United States of 
America.
  The law didn't apply to the President's relations, and I guess in 
order to conform with that, the President would like to exempt 
everybody from the same law that his family has been exempted from. I 
disagree. Congress writes the laws, and the President's job is to carry 
them out.
  In this Gang of Eight's legislation, it's instantaneous amnesty for 
almost everybody, and that is breathtaking in the magnitude of it. They 
say 11 million. I say 11 million, 12 million, more likely 20 million. 
Here is what I would guarantee you, Mr. Speaker: if they move 
legislation out of the Senate and if it does come to the House, along 
the way, if any of us introduce an amendment that would cap the 
legalization number at their estimated number, they will never support 
such an amendment because they know it's a lot more than 11 million 
people. It's instantaneous amnesty for 11 to 20-or-more million people, 
but that's not good enough for them.
  They also had to write into the bill that, if you have previously 
been deported and if you find yourself waking up in a country that 
you're legal to live in, we still send an invitation through this bill 
that you should apply to come back into the United States because we 
really didn't mean it, Mr. Speaker. We didn't really mean it, the idea 
that people were deported for violating immigration law. If they'd like 
to reapply, unless they have a felony conviction or three misdemeanor 
convictions, they're going to give them a path to come back to the 
United States. So this isn't just amnesty for those who are here now. 
This is amnesty for those who have been sent home as well--an absolute 
open-door policy.
  And the trade off is--what?--amnesty first for the promise of 
enforcement. It's the same thing that came along in 1986 and multiple 
times since then--amnesty for the promise of enforcement.
  The promise of enforcement is that Janet Napolitano is to produce 
within 5 years a plan to get 90 percent operational control of the 
critical sectors of the border that she designates, the 90 percent of 
those that we see, of course, because you can't count those that you 
can't see. So they want to be able to catch 90 percent of those that 
you can see. We don't know if they're going to turn their eyes the 
other way, but here is what I know: we are never going to see the 
enforcement side of this. It's amnesty first, a promise of enforcement 
second. That has never worked.
  If they were serious, they would go to work and secure the border, 
shut off the jobs magnet, restore the respect for the rule of law. We 
would know in this country if there were respect for the rule of law 
restored, and at that point, I'm ready to sit down and talk. I'm ready 
to have that conversation but not absent the reestablishment of the 
rule of law, and that means border control, serious border control. 
We've got the resources to do it, Mr. Speaker. It's not that we don't 
have it.
  We're spending over $6 million a mile on the southern border. You can 
build a four-lane interstate across Iowa cornfields for $4 million a 
mile. You can buy the right-of-way; you can engineer it; you can design 
it; you can do the archeological and the environmental; you can grade 
it; you can put the drainage in; you can pave it; you can paint it; you 
can shoulder it; you can seed it; and you can put fences on it--all of 
that for $4 million a mile through Iowa cornfields. You cannot convince 
me that we couldn't take about a third of that $6 million a mile and in 
a few years build the finest, most sophisticated barrier along our 
southern border.
  We can take some lessons from the Israelis, for example, who get a 
99.9 percent efficiency rate at their border barrier. They do that 
because their lives depend on it. So do ours in a lot of ways, Mr. 
Speaker. It's not that hard to build infrastructure and add to that 
infrastructure the sensory devices so that we can actually get the 
warning signals when people do get across such a barrier. We can do all 
of that. We can do it with the resources that we have. We can do it 
well up into the 90-some percentile of efficiency with the money that 
we have, and we can shut off the jobs magnet.
  All we need to do is pass the New IDEA Act. IDEA, the Illegal 
Deduction Elimination Act. It clarifies that wages and benefits paid to 
illegals are not tax deductible. It lets the IRS come in. Under their 
normal auditing process, they would run the employees through E-Verify. 
When they'd run the employees through E-Verify, then we would give the 
employer safe harbor if they'd use E-Verify. That's a nice, comforting 
thing. Each employer would want to have that. If the IRS concludes that 
you've knowingly, willingly, or neglectfully been employing illegals, 
they would rule that wages and benefits paid to them are not a business 
expense. That means, out of your Schedule C, that money comes out and 
goes over into the gross receipts again and shows up in the bottom line 
as taxable income, and your $10-an-hour illegal employee turns into a 
$16-an-hour illegal employee, and it becomes a prudent business 
decision on the part of the employer to use E-Verify to clean up his 
workforce.
  So there are two simple things, Mr. Speaker:
  We can provide that border security with the resources that we have 
by adding infrastructure, by adding and utilizing technology in 
addition to--and I have not said 2,000 miles of border fence--a fence, 
a wall and a fence. We just build it according to the directives of the 
Secure Fence Act and keep building it until they stop going around the 
end. We shut off the jobs magnet and restore the rule of law. Then 
let's have a conversation, Mr. Speaker; but until then, I'm going to 
stand on defending the rule of law.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________