[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 5]
[House]
[Pages 6585-6592]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              IMMIGRATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it's my privilege to be recognized to 
address you here on the floor of the United States of House of 
Representatives. And I know that there's issue after issue that comes 
before this Congress; some calculate those issues in the thousands. But 
I'm also aware that, across America, we talk about the things that we 
see in the news. The things that are in the news are the large topics 
that are emerging here in Congress.
  We've heard the gentleman from Texas speak about the Benghazi 
incident and how that is unfolding here, and another gentleman talked 
about the immigration issue, which is unfolding within the Senate and 
the Judiciary Committee as recently as today.
  I come to the floor, Mr. Speaker, to raise the issue of immigration 
and seek to, I think, more broadly inform yourself and those that are 
listening in, Members of the Congress, as well. And it strikes me that 
we have been through some intense debates here in this Congress on the 
immigration issue, and primarily that debate that took place starting 
in 2005, throughout the duration of 2006 and into 2007, when we saw 
tens of thousands of people come to the Capitol grounds and fill up the 
west lawn and call for amnesty.
  I recall in those days it was President George W. Bush that was 
promoting this policy. And I remember a discussion with his political 
director, I believe, the senior political adviser at the time, and he 
said to me, Well, if we didn't give them amnesty, would it be okay with 
you?
  And I said, Well, first let's define ``amnesty.''
  And he said, Well, it wouldn't be amnesty, for example, if we 
required people to pay a fine, or if we required them to learn English, 
or if we required them to get a job, or if we required them to pay 
their back taxes. And that was the language that emerged here in the 
middle part of the previous decade.
  It happens to also be reflective of the 1986 Amnesty Act, which 
Ronald Reagan signed. It was one of only two times that that great man 
let me down in 8 years of the Presidency. Once a term's not too bad. 
Ronald Reagan intended to follow through on the enforcement of the law 
and the securing of our border.

[[Page 6586]]

  I was an employer at the time. I remember the new rules that emerged 
from the 1986 Amnesty Act. President Reagan was honest enough and 
direct enough with the American people that he called it amnesty, and 
we understood that that's what it was.
  And we understood the purpose for it, and that was to get an 
agreement so that we could enforce the law and put away the immigration 
debate for all time by allowing the people that were illegally in the 
United States a path to citizenship of full residency status and the 
path to citizenship, and the trade-off was that would be the last 
amnesty. The promise that there would never be another one was the 1986 
Amnesty Act.
  There was something like 800,000 people originally that were to be 
the beneficiaries of this plan, and it turned out to be not a million--
3 million people. There was a substantial amount of document fraud, and 
there was a larger universe of people than was anticipated.
  Does anybody think today, Mr. Speaker, that this universe of people 
is not larger than that that's anticipated by the Senate version of the 
comprehensive immigration reform bill?
  Of course, honest people, objective people, they're not going to 
write into the bill that there's only going to be 11 million people 
that can be beneficiaries of this bill. Any kind of an amendment like 
that would put a hard cap on, would be a deal breaker in the United 
States Senate because they know that number's larger. History shows 
that number is larger. Data shows the number is larger. That's just the 
lowest number that they can, with a straight face, talk about, and it's 
in a calculated way to try to minimize the amount because it minimizes 
the opposition to this idea that has emerged.
  And I understand why it's there for Democrats, Mr. Speaker. I recall 
this debate. And as likely the year was 2006, I saw it live. I saw it 
on C-SPAN, but it took place right out here on the west lawn when then-
Senator Teddy Kennedy went before throngs of people, speaking through 
an interpreter, speaking Spanish through an interpreter, he said: Some 
say report to be deported. I say, report to become an American citizen.
  When I heard that, Mr. Speaker, I understood why he said that. This 
was his clarion call to say to all of them out there: We want to give 
you citizenship; and the deal is, you need to come and vote. Vote for 
those who advocate for handing citizenship over in exchange for the 
implied or implicit.
  And we know what has happened with the way that people have been 
divided, divided from Americanism into special interest groups by using 
the political science of victimology manufactured in the brain of 
Antonio Gramsci back in the earlier part of the 20th century, a 
contemporary of Lenin's who studied in Moscow and went to Italy and sat 
down and was jailed by Mussolini and wrote his prison notebooks. I've 
read nearly every word that he has published, Mr. Speaker.
  Antonio Gramsci was a brilliant man if you can accept the flawed 
premise that he started with; and the flawed premise was to accept Karl 
Marx's theory that they needed to defeat Western civilization and 
defeat the bourgeoisie and empower the proletariats. That was Marx's.
  Gramsci was critical of Marx's theory because he said Marx only 
isolated himself and focused on just economics, and he didn't believe 
that the Communist movement could succeed against free enterprise and 
Western civilization because the proletariats, the common people, the 
working people, needed the bourgeoisie for jobs, so there was an 
interdependency there.
  So he argued instead, if we're going to defeat them, we have to do 
the long march through the culture. We have to take on all of these 
principles that interconnect, that hold Western civilization, Western 
Christendom, as Winston Churchill described it, or Western Judeo-
Christendom, as I would describe it, those values that hold us together 
completely under assault, strategized by Antonio Gramsci, who was the 
President of the Communist Party in Italy from 1919 until 1926.
  And he was brilliant in his perception. He is the father of 
multiculturalism. He didn't use the word, that I could find, but he's 
the father of it.

                              {time}  1240

  He created the idea that if you could get people to identify 
themselves as victims and be in victims groups, then there will be more 
energy in a group with a common grievance than there would be in a 
group of just proletariats that needed a job and wanted a better way of 
life. So if you could get the focus of the grievance group intensified, 
then you could bundle the grievance groups up into a movement. 
Throughout all of that, you could break down Western Civilization, and 
you could empower the socialist state or the Marxist state. That was 
Gramsci's writings, Gramsci's teachings.
  Some of the people in this Congress actually do know about this man. 
I think I'm the only one that's actually attempted to read all of his 
works. But I see it emerge here in the immigration debate. It's part of 
the effort to divide people--Americans, the giant melting pot, the 
greatest success story of assimilation the world has ever conceived of.
  Why do people come to the United States of America? Because they are 
inspired by the image of the Statue of Liberty. And within that Statue 
of Liberty are the basic pillars of American exceptionalism in the 
minds of the people that see it. They're written into the Bill of 
Rights, most of them.
  Can you imagine being in a foreign country where you're suppressed, 
where you don't have the rule of law, where you don't have right to 
property and the right to keep the earnings from the sweat of your 
brow? In a country like that where you can't trust the press and 
there's not an open press, can you imagine getting that message from 
Radio Free Europe, for example, and realizing that in the United States 
of America you can have--if you can come here, come here legally--you 
can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to peaceably 
assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances. What a 
wonderful thing to be looking at from someplace in the world where they 
don't have those kinds of rights.
  That's just part of the First Amendment. And then you get to the 
Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms. Why? So that we can 
defend ourselves from tyranny. That was the one thing that guarantees 
the balance of the rights.
  And looking on down through: the property rights in the Fifth 
Amendment, the protection against double jeopardy, you get to face a 
jury of your peers, and then on top of that, these rights that are not 
specified, the authority of the Federal Government that's not 
enumerated, devolve to the States or the people respectively.
  This means we are an even freer country than we can imagine from 
reading the Constitution because some States are freer than others. And 
we compete with each other to offer that level of freedom: economic 
freedom, social freedom and the freedom to be free from a 16.1-ounce 
limitation on the size of your Coke, for example. You can move to 
another State if you don't like that rule--another city--if you don't 
like that rule that flows out of New York. That's an example of how 
this great laboratory of America inspired millions of people all over 
the world.
  So we didn't just get a random cross-section of people that came from 
Scotland or Germany or Italy or name your country around the world, not 
a random cross-section. We got the people that were inspired. These are 
the people that saw the Statue of Liberty.
  They had enough access to the real truth because we put the message 
out because maybe they were interactive with Americans that travel, 
maybe they interacted with American troops that went to liberate some 
people. We've always left a positive message wherever we have gone as 
Americans.
  An example of that, Mr. Speaker, was one that caught me by surprise, 
a very pleasant surprise. Several years ago, I went to a hotel in 
downtown Washington, D.C., to listen to a speech by

[[Page 6587]]

then-President of the Philippines, Gloria Arroyo. In that speech, as I 
listened, here is how it unfolded: She said, thank you, America. Thank 
you for sending the United States Marine Corps to our islands in 1898. 
Mr. Speaker, I know you must be thinking, what about the Army? She 
forgot about the Army, but the Army was there, too.
  She said, Thank you, also, for sending your priests and pastors to 
our islands to help restore and establish our faith. Thank you for 
sending 10,000 American teachers--if I remember right, she called them 
Thomasites--who taught the students in the Philippines the English 
language, the free-enterprise system, a sense of honesty and a work 
ethic, the American way of life and of being proud of being a worker 
and a producer and contributing to the GDP.
  She said that today there are 1.3 million Filipinos that because they 
have these skills of language, a work ethic and an understanding of 
free enterprise, they can travel anywhere in the world to get a job, 
and they send a lot of that money back to the Philippines. She told us 
where the percentage of their GDP came from. It came from foreign 
Filipino workers that contribute to the GDP of the Philippines and to 
the wealth of the Philippines because more than 100 years ago Americans 
went there, and we transferred American culture and civilization. It 
had a significant influence on the Philippines. And they are more 
successful today. That was her speech to us more than 100 years later 
to say thank you.
  So there is an image of what America was and an image of what I pray 
America still is. That's an image that is under assault by this 
philosophy of victimology that was created in the minds and in the 
writings of Antonio Gramsci. Think about how this thing flowed through. 
Marx wrote his ``Communist Manifesto,'' Gramsci created his 
multiculturalism and victimology, and he wrote and taught how you would 
use that to undermine our culture and civilization. And he talked about 
the long march through the culture: break down marriage, break down 
religious values, and break down truth. That's only three of about 25 
on the list.
  They have been doing that systematically. I see it come out of this 
side of the aisle every single day in this Congress. Most of them don't 
know they're doing that. They're just caught up and swept up in the 
movement of their political party.
  I hear the President reducing and lowering American values by his 
comments that take place in the public and in the press. Think about 
the things that he has chosen sides on. For example, when it was 
Professor Gates and Officer Crowley, Mr. Speaker, we know that, first 
of all, no President would engage in an incident like that, but he did. 
And he drove a wedge down between the issues of race.
  When Arizona passed their immigration law, S.B. 1070, the President 
had to do a profile of the type of person that he alleged might be 
impacted negatively by that bill when the bill itself specifically said 
that couldn't happen--down the lines of race and ethnicity again.
  Then we've got Tim Tebow who will kneel and pray to God on the 
football field. Meanwhile, we have a professional athlete that decides 
that he's going to announce his sexuality, and he gets a personal call 
from the President of the United States to highlight the sexuality of a 
professional ballplayer.
  These are ways that the culture gets undermined, where it gets 
divided. The people over on this side take their followership from that 
kind of leadership; and one notch at a time, one click at a time, 
American civilization, American culture, Western Civilization, Western 
Judeo-Christendom are eroded. They're carrying out a plan that has been 
put in place and thought out and advocated for almost now 90-some years 
ago. They don't know that they're doing it. They think somehow they're 
providing freedom.
  They always want change. They want to change everything that's in 
place, but there is no goal. If you would grant a wish list to the left 
and say if I had the power and the magic wand, and I would say, here's 
the magic wand, I will give you this: you've got all the rest of 2013 
to put together the list of all the things that you want to do to fix 
society, fix America, all the things that possibly could be done from 
the United States Congress, from the White House, from the judicial 
branch of government and throughout all of our States down to the 
lowest municipal judge in this country, or legislative body, city 
council, for example, give them their entire wish list, you've got all 
the rest of the year to put that wish list together, and come the 
stroke of midnight when the ball drops in Times Square, December 31 at 
midnight, I'm going to stroke the magic wand and you can have 
everything your political heart wishes for. But the deal is that now 
you've got to clam up forever and live underneath the rules that you 
spent the rest of this year writing.
  Mr. Speaker, we know how that would turn out. They would work day and 
night because they are hardworking people. They are smart people. They 
start with a flawed premise, but they are smart beyond that. They would 
work day and night to produce the longest, most complete, expansive 
list of all the things that the left would want. And it would be the 
destruction of Western Civilization in the end. But come midnight, if I 
gave them the stroke of the magic wand, then they would stay up the 
rest of the night trying to figure out how to argue that somehow they 
were cheated, that they really needed something else, that they left 
something out of the list.
  They're never going to live with the values they call for because 
there is no constant of truth for them. They undermine it. There is no 
constant of faith or values because it always has to be moving. It's 
got to be transformative to satisfy the people on the left.
  Those of us who come from the other side of the aisle, we believe 
there are eternal truths, that, for example, a sin 2,000 years ago is a 
sin today. We believe that there is such a thing as truth, there's such 
a thing as objective truth, and there's such a thing as sound science.

                              {time}  1250

  We should adhere to those things that are black and white and live by 
them, and we should debate the things that are gray. That's the 
difference between the right and the left.
  I believe that if you would grant that power that I've discussed, Mr. 
Speaker, to those on our side of the aisle, I could probably write you 
up a set of rules in the next 24 hours that I'd be willing to live with 
for the rest of the my life. And I think that society would gradually 
move itself back into an ordered forum that would allow human nature 
and the best of human nature to manifest itself in our families, in our 
faith, in our communities, in our work, and our rule of law. But what 
I'm watching here is the undermining of the rule of law with the 
immigration bill.
  This bill that is emerging now that's being debated in the Senate--
apparently there's one that's still hidden here in the House somewhere 
by a hidden committee--this is what the bill does, the Gang of Eight's 
bill: It grants instantaneous amnesty to everyone who's here in 
America, and it sends an invitation to everyone who has been deported 
in the past to apply to come back to America. And it makes an implicit 
promise that if you came into America after the deadline or if you can 
get into America--sneak into America--any time in the future, you will 
be legalized in the next wave of amnesty. It's only a matter of time. 
And we will never deport you as long as you don't commit a felony--or 
if you can mysteriously figure out which of the three misdemeanors 
would be so offensive that the Gang of Eight would want to send you 
back home again. That's the bill.
  So what do they do to get people to agree, to embrace this huge 
amnesty bill that is breathtaking in its scope and beyond the 
imagination of even the people in the Senate a year ago--it's what they 
wanted, but they wouldn't say it publicly. They never imagined they 
could actually talk about this broad and expansive an amnesty bill even 
a year ago.

[[Page 6588]]

  And the tradeoff is this: we have to legalize people because they're 
saying that we have de facto amnesty. No. We have real amnesty, 
executive branch-created amnesty in America today. The President has 
refused to enforce immigration laws. He took an oath to take care that 
the laws be faithfully executed. That's his constitutional 
responsibility. Whether he agrees with the laws or not, it is his 
constitutional responsibility to take care that they are faithfully 
executed.
  When he was speaking to a high school here in Washington, D.C., a 
couple of years ago--the date was March 28, I'm not certain of the 
year--and they asked him, why don't you, by executive order, pass the 
DREAM Act that would grant legal status and an in-State tuition 
discount for those younger people that came into the United States and 
they're here illegally. His answer was, well, I don't have the 
authority to do that. Constitutionally, Congress has to pass a law like 
that. Because, as he explained to them, as a former adjunct 
constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago--I agreed 
with the explanation that he gave, which was: Congress passes the laws. 
It's up to the President to carry out or enforce those laws, and it's 
up to the courts to rule on what the laws mean. Now, that's a pretty 
compact synopsis, but I don't disagree with that. I think the President 
described it right. He said he did not have the power. His power was 
limited by the Constitution. Congress is empowered to pass immigration 
laws--that's what Congress has done from the beginning--and the 
executive branch's job is to enforce it.
  Shortly thereafter--that being roughly a year or so later--the 
President reversed his position and, I believe by his direction, the 
Department of Homeland Security spit out a memorandum that created four 
classes of people. These four classes of people were then summarily 
exempted from the enforcement of immigration law. And seven times in 
that memorandum they wrote the words ``on an individual basis.'' ``On 
an individual basis,'' because they know that by--I'll just say by 
consent and agreement, the executive branch can't prosecute every 
Federal violation. That's why they have prosecutorial discretion. It's 
also a matter of case law out there, if you want to accept that term, 
and I generally don't.
  But that directive, I'd grant, the executive branch has to have 
prosecutorial discretion to determine how best to apply the enforcement 
and prosecution resources of the executive branch. They can't prosecute 
every single violation. But prosecutorial discretion only is on an 
individual basis; it's not on classes of people.
  But the President, Janet Napolitano and John Morton created four 
classes of people and waived the enforcement of the law against those 
four classes of people. And now, to add insult to injury, these four 
classes of people that they decided they're not going to enforce the 
law against, the President created out of thin air a work permit so 
that they could work in the United States, presumably legally. It's an 
unconstitutional, lawless work permit that he has created out of thin 
air, but they are getting those work permits now to work in the United 
States because the President has crossed the constitutional line, that 
line between the executive and the legislative branch, article II--and 
has gone to article I and claimed authority.
  Now, when the Founding Fathers constructed this Constitution and they 
set up these three branches of government--often we're taught they are 
three equal branches; I would argue that, no, the judicial branch was 
designed to be the weakest of the three. But that point is not so 
important here, Mr. Speaker, but it's this: that this Congress passes 
the laws. The executive branch's job is to enforce the laws. The 
President has decided he can manufacture laws out of thin air and 
refused to enforce the laws on classes of people that he's created by 
memoranda. That, as far as I know, has not happened with another 
President. There are about five places where he has crossed the line 
into the legislative branch.
  Our Founding Fathers envisioned this: that if you set up--and they 
did; they set up three branches of government, each with its own 
constitutional power and authority, each with its own domain. They knew 
that there were gray areas in between. You can never write something 
precisely so that it is a very thin bright line. They did as good as 
could be done with the language that we have--I can applaud them for 
it, of course. But they envisioned that that grayer line that couldn't 
quite be bright enough between the legislative and the executive or the 
legislative and the judicial, that line and that triangle, for example, 
would always be defended by each side. They never imagined that the 
judicial branch would be able to claim so much authority over the 
executive or the legislative. They thought that the legislative branch 
would push back against the judicial branch of government, for example.
  In this Congress, I think it is not well enough informed on its 
constitutional article I prerogatives. So when the Supreme Court grasps 
legislative authority out of that that's granted in article I to 
Congress, seldom do we stand up and claim it back again. And we're so 
numb to this that when the President of the United States, the 
executive branch, reaches into article I and claims legislative 
authority, we can't get our back up in this Congress to put up a fight 
and tell the President that's an unconstitutional act, you crossed a 
line, and we're going to pull this thing back and put you back in line 
and make you keep your oath of office. Now, that's the structure that 
we have today. And we have some tools that we can use, but we have to 
have the will.
  Mr. Speaker, to bring this around to--I'll call it a sub-conclusion 
of this discussion--when you look through a constitutional analysis and 
you look at the maximum authority that could be grabbed by the judicial 
branch or the executive branch or the legislative branch, what's the 
restraint on that? Article I is really the strongest branch of 
government.
  The House of Representatives is reactive to the people. It's set up 
to be an election every 2 years so we can be reactive to the people. An 
example would be when people lost their good political judgment here in 
Congress and passed ObamaCare in 2010, we saw a wave election and 87 
new freshman Republicans came in. Every single one of them ran on the 
full repeal of ObamaCare. Every single one of them voted--as did every 
Republican after that--to repeal ObamaCare. That's just the House 
reaction.
  The Senate didn't transform itself to that extent in the last 
election. Part of that was also the vision of the Founding Fathers. But 
they always thought that there would be a tension between the branches 
of government, that each branch of government would jealously protect 
its power, and that as that little tug of war went on, those lines 
would be defined over time and by history by people defending their 
authority within their respective branch of government. They did not 
imagine that the United States Congress would capitulate lawmaking to 
the President of the United States and not draw a bright line and not 
have a fight. I am troubled by that, Mr. Speaker.
  Now we have a President who has manufactured his own immigration law. 
And now we have people in the United States Senate who are advocating 
this to this Congress because they declare that we have virtual amnesty 
in America today. It's not virtual; it's literal. The President created 
it. And I'm not suggesting that the previous Presidents did a very good 
job of enforcing the law, but they didn't manufacture immigration law 
out of thin air. This one did.

                              {time}  1300

  He created it. Now, the Senators and Members in this House also are 
advocating that there is de facto amnesty, and the only thing that we 
can do is conform the laws to the amnesty that the President has 
manufactured out of thin air. That's the same thing as conforming this 
Congress to an order by the Supreme Court.
  This Congress is the final answer on this. Whether it's a 
disagreement with

[[Page 6589]]

the Supreme Court, whether it's a disagreement with the executive 
branch, the House and the Senate operating together envisioned by our 
Founding Fathers would be: we'll sort this out if we have to in the 
end.
  When there's a constitutional clash and a tug of war, that's sorted 
out by the people expressing their judgment in the ballot box. That's 
how you eventually resolve serious constitutional crises. So, we have a 
constitutional serious concern. I'm not to the point where I say it's a 
crisis at this point.
  But, Mr. Speaker, the President has conferred de facto amnesty? No, 
he's conferred literal, actual factual amnesty. And now we have people 
that can't think through this constitutionally, so they declare we have 
to conform with the President's will, wish, or whim. I suggest, no, we 
have a lot of ways to restrain the President, and I will not go into 
that today.
  I do want to talk about how poor a decision it is to declare that all 
people in the United States illegally can stay here unless they commit 
a felony, or those three mysterious misdemeanors that can't be 
identified at this point, or those that have been deported apply to 
come back in. If you're not guilty of a felony of some kind, we'll 
bring you back to America. That's the ``we really didn't mean it'' 
clause. And the third one is all of those who are here after the 
deadline and who can get here after the deadline, never fear, because 
there is no one who has not committed a felony, nor not committed those 
three serious mysterious misdemeanors, who is going to be subject to 
removal from the United States under this President or under the Gang 
of Eight's bill. That's what we're dealing with.
  So, the rule of law, which is the core issue here, it is an essential 
pillar of American exceptionalism, is under assault by people in the 
Senate and in the House, and the President of the United States, 
obviously, who has blown a great big hole in it by his own executive 
actions. The rule of law.
  Now, all those people that are sitting around in the countries of the 
world that are inspired by the Statue of Liberty that want to come 
here, many of them are subject to an arbitrary ``no rule of law'' where 
they can be stopped and frisked in the streets and where the police can 
squeeze some dollars out of you just under the threat that you've got a 
speeding ticket, whether you were or whether you weren't, not a place 
to defend yourself. They don't think they get justice in a lot of the 
courts in the world, they don't get justice in the streets, they don't 
have freedom of speech, they don't have freedom of religion. And they 
want to come here because everyone is equal under the law.
  Do you remember the statue, Mr. Speaker, of--and it's tricky to say 
statue here as a Member of Congress. Usually, we say statute. But I'm 
talking about, actually, a statue of Lady Justice. She's holding the 
scales of justice and these scales are balanced, they're even. You see 
the pots hanging from the chains on either side. Generally, when you 
see her, she's wearing a blindfold, because we have equal justice under 
the law in the United States.
  The image of Lady Justice also attracts good people to come to 
America because they understand the image of the Statue of Liberty 
says, freedom, the lamp of liberty shining bright, for all who will 
come here legally. And Lady Justice blindfolded, equal justice under 
the law for everybody under the law here in the United States.
  To waive the law and to give people a pass and to grant them a path 
to citizenship for--what is their one virtue that they have? They have 
access under this thing to all of the welfare systems and benefits that 
we have in the United States of America today.
  Now, I can do this little quiz test, and, if it were fill in the 
blank, most Members of Congress wouldn't get this right. There are more 
than 80 different means-tested Federal welfare programs in the United 
States, more than 80.
  One hundred years ago--let's just say at the turn of the previous 
century--we were not a welfare State. When people came here to America 
and shuffled across the great hall at Ellis Island where my grandmother 
did--and I know the exact date that she did that; I believe I've stood 
in the same spot where she did--when they came here, they had to show 
that they had a means to support themselves, that they were physically 
healthy enough to work and able to. They were checked physically to see 
if they happened to be transmitters of contagious diseases at the time.
  Even though they were filtered and checked and sorted before they 
boarded the ship on the European side of this generally, when they 
arrived at Ellis Island there still were 2 percent that didn't meet the 
evaluation, and they were sent back to their home country. Still, after 
the filter was put in place and they arrived here, 2 percent got put 
back on the boat and sent back again.
  We wanted to have a country then--we were a rational country then--
that had an immigration policy that was designed to enhance the 
economic, social, and cultural well-being of the United States of 
America. What's wrong with that, Mr. Speaker? Every other country that 
I know of has a policy like that.
  I met with the Canadians yesterday, and I asked them, could I 
emigrate to Canada, could I meet the standard? They were diplomats, so 
they didn't exactly say no. But I asked them a whole series of ways and 
they absolutely could not say yes, unless I married a Canadian.
  Now, I'm not likely to do that. I've been married for 40 years, and 
I'm real happy with the wife I have. By the way, I love living in the 
United States and having an opportunity to try to turn this country 
into an even better place.
  But here's the standard that they have. They give you points up 
there. They want you to be young, they want you to have language 
skills--that means speak English--they want you to have some capital, 
some education, and some jobs skills, some earning capacity. Those are 
the criteria that they use in Canada. These are also similar to the 
criteria in the United Kingdom and in Australia.
  No one has the massive immigration, even as a percentage of their 
population, that we have here. I've sat on the Immigration Committee 
for more than 10 years. I've gone to hearing after hearing. I've gone 
through reams of documents and reports and studies.
  Here is some of the under oath testimony from just a few years ago:
  Under our legal immigration policy, if you're going to measure the 
merit of the applicants to legal immigration into the United States and 
you score it according to the merits of the individual applicant, only 
between 7 and 11 percent of our legal immigrants are even scored on 
their ability to contribute to America. All of the rest of them are 
coming through on something that doesn't have anything to do with their 
ability to contribute to this society. Seven to 11 percent is all. So 
89 to 93 percent of legal immigrants are going to come on something 
other than merit: family reunification, asylum, visa lottery program, 
to give you a few. And that's legal, not counting the illegal, which is 
40 percent visa overstays and 60 percent illegal border crossings.
  What kind of a country would turn its borders over to anybody that 
could cross them and turn over its legal immigration system to 89 to 93 
percent, something other than some way of measuring how they contribute 
to this country?
  So the evaluation is this: that they must conclude--people on that 
side, people in the Senate, too many people on this side--that every 
individual has an equal ability to contribute to our society. Well, 
that's not true.
  Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation gave a presentation of his 
study yesterday morning for an hour. It was riveting. I have the 
executive summary of that here, Mr. Speaker, and I have gone through it 
carefully before his presentation so I was up to speed.
  Here's a point that he made--and I've made this point into The 
Congressional Record as recently as this week--that the libertarian 
approach to this is just let labor decide how it's going to move across 
borders, that goods and services and capital should all flow the same 
way, that we should have an open borders policy so that if

[[Page 6590]]

business needed labor they could attract it from anywhere and put it to 
work wherever they wanted to, the free flow of labor, just like the 
free flow of capital or the free flow of materials or finished goods.
  Now, Milton Friedman made it very clear that an open borders policy 
cannot coexist with a welfare State. And that State that we had back at 
the turn of the previous century that my grandmother arrived here 
within, we were not a welfare State, we were a meritocracy. The Statue 
of Liberty meant something then, and it meant that you have an access 
to God-given liberties, constitutionally defined liberties, and that 
you had the chance to achieve all you could achieve, succeed all you 
could succeed, and be able to keep a reasonable share of the fruits of 
your labor.

                              {time}  1310

  By the way, that took place also before we had an income tax, Mr. 
Speaker--no welfare state, no income tax, a meritocracy, and 2 percent 
got sent back because they didn't meet the standards of being able to 
sustain themselves in this society. I would also think there would be a 
few who made their way through who didn't.
  In 1900, there was no welfare state; there was no income tax; and we 
had an immigration policy that was large, and it was so large and the 
numbers were so great that even then we needed low-skilled and 
unskilled labor back before we had, let me say, the technical 
development that we have in our economy today. We did need those 
laborers then. We needed people to work on farms. We needed people to 
build railroads and to construct our roads and our highways.
  Today, in the United States of America, the highest unemployment 
rates that we have are in the lowest skilled jobs. So when you see 
double-digit unemployment, go find the job that requires the least 
amount of skill, and I can point to you the highest amount of 
unemployment.
  What kind of a nation in its right mind would want to then increase 
the numbers of the people who are more likely to be unemployed and 
further suppress the wages of people in those job categories, those 
low- and unskilled job categories, when we're living in a welfare state 
that has to sustain these families that cannot possibly earn their own 
way in this society?
  Culture has changed, the economy has changed, and because it has 
changed, we should be keeping up with what has taken place and 
understand that it's different today than it was in 1900.
  For the most part, this Congress acts like, well, everybody who came 
here was a contributor to our economy and our society, so there is no 
limit to the number of people who should come here. I ask them 
sometimes: How many people should be coming into the United States 
legally and illegally altogether? What would your annual limit be? 
Would you cap that somewhere along the line? What should the population 
of the United States be in the next decade? in the next generation? in 
the next half a century? They cannot answer that question. They will 
not answer that question.
  In fact, in a hearing on Ellis Island in that year that I mentioned--
I believe that was 2007, April 15 if I'm not mistaken--they had a 
demographer come testify as an expert witness to explain to us how it 
works, that because baby boomers are getting older and they will be 
accessing the retirement benefits of Social Security and Medicare that 
we needed to import a lot of people into America to pay that Social 
Security. So that was the argument of the demographer, and it was also 
the argument of the economist. If I remember right, he was one of the 
lead economists out of Stanford University.
  I asked both of them: What is the optimum demographic by decade or by 
generation? What should the size of the population be? Is that a 
perfect column when you stack them each decade of population up? Is it 
perfect?
  The demographer hadn't thought about what was optimum. He just came 
to tell us what we needed to do, which was to import a lot of people to 
pay into our Social Security and Medicare because, at some point, it 
would go the other direction. We know that. It will go bankrupt. The 
economist, as I remember, from Stanford made the argument also that we 
can't sustain Social Security and Medicare unless we import a whole lot 
of people because our birth rate has been going down.
  So I asked him the obvious question that, Mr. Speaker, I'm confident 
you'd be asking yourself right now, and that is: Who is going to pay 
for the Social Security and Medicare of those people who we would bring 
in to pay for ours? What's the solution for the next generation?
  The answer that I got was essentially that there wasn't an answer for 
that. That's a problem for the next generation to deal with. This is a 
generational issue, Mr. Speaker, and it has a lot more to do with what 
America looks like in the next generation and the next generation than 
it does about what happens here in the next decade.
  Now, it's curious the Senate bill scored as it might be. I've heard 
the report of Doug Holtz-Eakin that it's going to be an economic boost 
to our society. You've heard that from the Gang of Eight. It's curious. 
Why do they kick this out 13 years? Why do those who would be legalized 
under amnesty in the 13th year then become citizens? It's because they 
will have access to the welfare state at that period of time. It gets 
us past the budget window of 10 years so they don't have to account for 
what it really does. Robert Rector accounts for what it really does. 
His numbers are appalling, and he has the most refined and careful 
study that has ever been done on this.
  I would take issue with anybody in the Gang of Eight or with anyone 
who has advocated there is an economic equation that shows this as a 
plus and tell you that you have to calculate this for the lifetimes of 
the people who are affected by it because, if it's a net cost, it's a 
net cost. I believe I wrote that number down. I know the net number, 
but the net number is this: they will draw down a little over $9 
trillion in benefits; they will pay something like $3 trillion in 
taxes; and there is a net cost to legalizing here in America of $6.3 
trillion over their lifetimes.
  These numbers are broken down, and I have looked at the Rector 
studies in the past. I know this man. He would not leave himself 
exposed to an illegitimate mathematical calculation or criticism, and I 
haven't found people who have been able to level one against his 
numbers, but that's the general number. Here is a statement that is in 
here that is worthy of putting into the Congressional Record, Mr. 
Speaker. He is speaking of the universe of the 11 million, which I 
believe more than doubles if this bill becomes law.
  He says: ``At every stage of the life cycle--'' and he means that of 
this universe of 11 million ``--unlawful immigrants, on average, 
generate fiscal deficits.'' That would be benefits that exceed taxes. 
``Unlawful immigrants, on average, are always tax consumers; they never 
once generate a `fiscal surplus' that can be used to pay for government 
benefits elsewhere in society. This situation obviously will get much 
worse after amnesty.''
  That statement stands. It stands clear and it stands strong, and it 
stands true in every single year of their presence in this country.
  So with regard to the argument that this is an economic thing that we 
must do, I hear Republicans say it's because there's work Americans 
won't do. Well, I've done a lot of work that some Americans won't do, 
but I've never found work that I won't do. I've never found work that 
my sons won't do or work that our construction crews won't do. We are 
there taking care of some of the things that some have to do, and it's 
legal people who are doing the work for our company, which I sold to my 
oldest son several years ago.
  I've had them out working in temperatures that were 126 degrees heat 
index. I've worked out there. I've worked 2 days in a row when it was 
60 below windchill, driving sheet piling across a swamp because it was 
freezing, and we didn't have to mat the dragline. We worked in 186 
degrees temperature range and heat index and cold index, windchill 
index.
  We've done all of this work, and it grates on me to hear anybody say

[[Page 6591]]

there's work Americans won't do. As Americans, we are not too good to 
do any kind of work that's necessary to do. We might be a little too 
smart to do some of that kind of work for too little money and too 
little in benefits; and when we flood the labor supply into the no- and 
low-skilled jobs, that lowers the wages; it lowers the benefits; and it 
reduces the numbers of Americans and pushes them out on to our welfare 
state.
  For example, there is a study that I read several years ago that was 
done in a residential area of Milwaukee. They went in and surveyed a 
36-square block residential area, six blocks by six blocks. They went 
into every home and interviewed them and measured the type of family 
that was there--the ages, the jobs they did, et cetera. In 36 square 
blocks, this was a neighborhood of Milwaukee where African Americans 
had moved up from the gulf in the thirties, at the end of prohibition, 
to take the jobs in the breweries and in those things that were 
economically developing in Milwaukee area at the time.
  They were good jobs. They moved up there for good jobs. They bought 
homes in the neighborhoods, and they raised their families there. Three 
generations later, from, say, the 1930s until the late nineties when I 
read this report, they had gone from a good work ethic and a mobile 
family that had moved for a good job and had set up their homes there 
to where there wasn't a single employed male head of household in the 
entire 36-block residential area.

                              {time}  1320

  And the article that I read lamented that we couldn't bring jobs to 
them. What kind of a free market society--don't they believe in the 
free flow of labor and capital? Can't people at least within the United 
States go to find a job? Now they believe we should move jobs to people 
rather than let people move to jobs. Why don't people move to jobs? 
Because we're a welfare state, because we've had 80 different means-
tested welfare programs here in this country.
  Steve Moore wrote these words years ago when he was with Cato, and I 
cut it out and laminated it. It isn't an exact quote, but I'll get the 
theme down, Mr. Speaker. He said:

       If you pay people not to work, they won't work. If you pay 
     women to have babies, they'll have babies. If you pay them 
     more if there's not a man in the house, there won't be a man 
     in the house. He might come back and visit, but he won't be 
     registered as living there.

  Whatever you pay people to do, they will do. If you pay them not to 
work, they're not going to work.
  There are 80 different means-tested Federal welfare programs. I can 
go through some of the list, but there isn't anybody in this Congress--
and I would charge that no one in America can give you that list from 
memory, which I think proves that there's no one that understands how 
all of these 80 programs interrelate with each other or how people act 
or react because of those programs. It's just that one bleeding heart 
decided this was a good idea and got it put into law, and another one 
manufactured that one.
  Now we have a jigsaw puzzle of welfare programs and a welfare state, 
and we have advocates for the welfare state who also advocate for open 
borders. Why do they do that? I'll take this back to Teddy Kennedy's 
statement:

       Some say report to be deported. I say report to become an 
     American citizen.

  It's a political equation for many of the people on the left. They 
understand that they get votes out of this deal. The people that get to 
vote out of this deal will know who they need to vote for.
  I've talked to those who saw their citizenship process accelerated in 
1996. A million people got moved into an early naturalization process 
in that period of time.
  I've talked to people that were beneficiaries of the 1986 amnesty 
act. They all understood where the political leverage was on this. The 
people in the 1986 amnesty act say, It was a good idea; it was good for 
me; it was good for my family, and I think we ought to give it to 
everybody. And the people in 1996 who had their citizenship 
accelerated, they knew that it was implied who they were to vote for in 
the reelection in 1996.
  We've seen African Americans moved into a monolithic voting block. 
Part of that is--let's see. I just suggest, Mr. Speaker, that the 
people on the other side of the aisle understand how to divide people 
down their lines of race, ethnicity, national origin. It's the 
grungiest type of victimology: convince people that they're victims, 
that somehow the man is oppressing them, and the only way you get even 
with that is income redistribution.
  So they push for higher tax rates and more wealth distribution, which 
discourages the entrepreneur. It discourages the worker. And now it's a 
public discussion about whether it's smarter to work or smarter to 
collect welfare, because the welfare dollars go up higher and the 
reward for moderate skills, let alone the low-skilled and no-skilled 
jobs, gets lower. And the competition for those jobs gets greater by 
the people that are in the United States illegally who are living on 
less than it takes to sustain them, and they are also accessing 
benefits. That's all in this report, Mr. Speaker.
  From my perspective, I'd like to have a network, a support system 
that keeps people from falling through the cracks. I'd like to have a 
welfare system, a food stamp program, a way to help people out so that 
we can bridge them over through the hard times. I'd like to have them 
do Welfare to Work again.
  There was only one of those 80 means-tested welfare programs that was 
actually Welfare to Work. That was TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy 
Families. What happened? The President of the United States waived the 
work requirement arbitrarily, unconstitutionally, where it is 
specifically written into the bill that it couldn't be waived. He 
waived it anyway and decided that we're not going to enforce the work 
requirement in the one single welfare program of the 80 that actually 
required work.
  A lot of people think that welfare was transformed and people on it 
are required to move towards work. No, unless the States have a way 
they're doing that in a more effective way than I'm hearing about. In 
the Federal Government, there is no longer a work requirement. There is 
an incentive not to work, and we're watching more and more families 
become the second and the third and maybe even the fourth generation 
who have lived on these programs.
  Where do they learn their work ethic? Where do their children learn 
their work ethic? Who's pushing them? Who's showing them the rewards 
and pride of being industrious and productive and creative and the 
responsibility that we have to the broader society?
  Each one of us has a little cell in a giant spreadsheet. That giant 
spreadsheet has over 300 million cells in it, people, Americans living 
here. We have skills that are God-given and gifts. And, yes, we are a 
product of our genes and our environment, and the product of that 
together makes us who we are. But we have a responsibility to 
contribute to the broader society and understand where we fit in that 
giant spreadsheet, and we have a responsibility to work, earn, save, 
invest, and leave this world a better place than it was when we came, 
and hopefully raise our children with those values to be even stronger 
and even better than the values we were raised with.
  This huge hammock that used to be a safety net that we call the 
``welfare system'' is eroding that. The contempt for the rule of law 
that spills out of the debate in the United States Senate and here in 
the House of Representatives erodes our American way of life. How do we 
think that we can move America beyond the shining city on the hill to 
another level of our destiny at an altitude higher and better and 
clearer and more pure and more industrious and more productive with 
more freedom and a better example for Western Judeo-Christiandom if 
we're going to continue to reward people for not contributing to that 
value in their single cell in that spreadsheet of over 300 million 
Americans?
  We've got a responsibility to use these gifts that we have. Let's go 
to work. Let's strengthen our values. Let's strengthen our families. 
Let's

[[Page 6592]]

protect the rule of law. Let's not tell ourselves that there's a goal 
here of political expediency, that somehow because a couple of talking 
heads woke up the morning after the election and concluded that if Mitt 
Romney had just not said the words ``self-deport'' he would be the 
President of the United States today and so now we have to pass a 
comprehensive immigration reform bill in order to send a message to 
start a conversation so that in the next election or some subsequent 
election a Republican can win a national election again.
  Who comes to that conclusion? There's no data out there that supports 
that. That's just simply a belief that has been created and it's self-
perpetuating, but it cannot sustain itself when you look at exit polls, 
when you look at public survey polls.
  Yes, I know a good number of people that they're talking about. I 
know people who are here legally and illegally who have got a good work 
ethic. They're good entrepreneurs. They're good family people. They've 
got values that are a credit to the United States of America, although 
they broke the law to get here. They've got values that are a credit to 
our country. I know some of them, and I see those faces. I can see them 
in my mind's eye, and I can see it in the children that come to our 
schools.
  There's a school in my district that's 85 percent minority, and 65 
percent of them came to school on their first day not speaking English. 
It's never the kids' fault. It's never their fault. It's our fault. 
It's the fault of the adults that are supposed to be running this 
country, protecting and restoring the rule of law. That's the 
responsibility.
  But this is not going to be fixed by the legislature. It's not going 
to be fixed by the United States Congress. We can't pass a promise to 
enforce the borders and trade it off for perpetual amnesty and think 
somehow we've got a deal that's going to make this a better country and 
now we can restore the rule of law. We cannot. The only way you can 
restore the rule of law is to enforce the law.
  The President has decided that he will refuse to enforce the law, and 
it makes it clear to me--and it should be clear to everybody in this 
country that is watching this issue--that this is not a legislative 
problem. The legislature cannot fix the problem that is of the 
President of the United States making his refusal to abide by his own 
oath of office and take care that the laws are faithfully enforced. It 
is an executive branch problem. We can do some things to rein him in, 
but it's very difficult with the majority and the Senate being run by 
Harry Reid.
  So, practically speaking, Mr. Speaker, it's up to the American 
people. The American people have to be well-informed. They will draw 
good judgments when they're well-informed. The American people need to 
speak up. I hope the American people don't need to rise up to answer 
this and say: Our ancestors came here. We came here. We followed the 
law. We got in line according to the law. We didn't ask for amnesty. We 
went forward and received our naturalization papers after we had met 
those qualifications.
  I've spoken at a good number of naturalization ceremonies. It's a 
very rewarding experience to do so.

                              {time}  1330

  The people that came here the right way that followed our laws are 
the ones that respect our laws today. The people that had disrespect 
for our laws, if they're rewarded for breaking them, how much respect 
will they have for any of our other laws? Will they be like the 
President to pick and choose the law that he likes? I suggest, no. Lady 
Justice is blind. Not only blind, it doesn't matter what economic 
status or what cultural status you might have or how much influence you 
might have in your community, justice is blind before the law.
  Also, we need to make sure that all laws are applied to all of us 
equally, that we don't exempt people from them, reward them for 
breaking them. In fact, Robert Rector put it this way. He said everyone 
who would be given amnesty under this--this 11 million that I think is 
20 or more million--their only claim to all of these welfare benefits 
and the benefits of living in American society and civilization, their 
only claim, is that they broke our laws.
  So the definition of ``amnesty,'' Mr. Speaker, is this: to grant 
someone amnesty is to pardon immigration law breakers and reward them 
with the objective of their crime. That's what amnesty is.
  The proponents of the 844-page bill, the Gang of Eight in the Senate 
and the secret committee in the House, they understand that. They 
understand it; that's why they keep denying their bill is amnesty. 
There's no rational analysis that says otherwise, Mr. Speaker.
  And so I urge the American people, through my counsel with you in 
this speech, to take a good look at the Rector study. The Heritage 
Foundation released it this past Monday at 11 a.m., and it's titled, 
``The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. 
Taxpayer,'' dated May 6, 2013. That good study will inform a lot of 
Americans.
  We're going to have another immigration debate, and I'm going to 
suggest that the American people in their sound judgment will come down 
on the side of the rule of law, the Constitution, and what's good for 
the best long-term interest of America, the best economic, social, and 
cultural benefit of the United States of America, with passion and with 
compassion for all people who should live with God-given dignity.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________