[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 5]
[House]
[Pages 6679-6683]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




         THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN LEGAL AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from California 
(Mr. Rohrabacher) for 42 minutes as the designee of the majority 
leader.
  Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, one of the things that makes America 
great is that our country is a country that--regardless of one's race, 
one's religion, or one's ethnicity--we, as citizens of the United 
States, make up a collective family, the American family; yes, a 
diverse family, but a family, in and of itself, composed of all the 
people, the great variety of people we have here from every part of the 
world who have come here to live in freedom and enjoy the opportunity 
and the liberty and the justice that America represents.
  Here, despite where one was born or whose one's parents are or when 
even one became a citizen, we are all equally part of that family.
  Just as many families across our Nation have come to discover, at one 
point or another, in a time when there are scarce resources, when you 
are going through perhaps an economic crisis or trying to avert an 
economic crisis, it is not unreasonable to provide for one's family 
before helping others.
  It is not selfish to watch out, thus, for our fellow Americans. It is 
not selfish to watch out for our fellow Americans above the well-being 
of foreigners, even foreigners who wish us well and, yes, foreigners 
who would like to become part of the American family; but, first and 
foremost, those Americans from every part of the world who are citizens 
of this country or, yes, who have come here legally in the attempt to 
become a U.S. citizen, their interest must be our first priority.
  Tonight, I draw my attention and the attention of my colleagues to 
the dire consequences that we face if many--and many people have been 
insisting that we do this--if we implement the so-called immigration 
reform which, of course, would legalize the status of those who are 
currently unlawfully living and working in our country.
  Just as we are a nation of immigrants, we are also a nation of laws. 
What the American people and my colleagues must keep in mind, while 
debating this issue of immigration, is the distinction between legal 
immigration and illegal immigration.
  Perhaps the thing that has disturbed me most in this debate is the 
attempt to blur the difference between the two, the difference, even to 
the point where statistics are being used to say: well, this is what 
immigrants have done for our society.
  No, the statistics are what immigrants have done, but that does not 
include the illegal immigrants that are part of the equation.
  No, illegal immigration is on a totally different plane. Legal 
immigration and illegal immigration are on totally different planes. 
Too often, we see these lines blurred, as I say, in this debate.
  I happen to be very pro-legal immigration, and there is no reason for 
most Americans not to lift their head up when we actually understand 
that our country admits more legal immigrants annually than all the 
other

[[Page 6680]]

countries of the world combined, totaling roughly a million legal 
immigrants every year.
  While our immigration system certainly needs reforming or making it 
more effective and more efficient in what it is doing, this controlled 
and open process of legal immigration has worked well for America and 
demonstrates the capacity for our people to have compassion and 
generosity towards other human beings, other people who would like to 
come here to be part of the American family--coming here while obeying 
the rules, coming here not thumbing their nose at our legal system, 
coming here with respect towards the rest of us by obeying the laws and 
the regulations that are necessary for someone to come here legally.
  Those folks have been wondrous, and, in fact, we all trace our roots 
back to people like this who came here and have contributed so much to 
the well-being of our country, and those million people who come here 
legally every year are a major positive asset to our country.
  Despite our generous legal immigration policy, it is estimated that 
anywhere from 11 to 20 million foreigners are unlawfully present in the 
United States today.
  While I certainly understand the positive motives and the essential 
goodness of the vast majority of these trespassers, of these people who 
are here illegally, it does not negate that they are lawbreakers, nor 
does it negate the economic and social consequences of inundating our 
country--far above that million-person mark of legal immigration, but 
inundating our country with a large number of people, thus causing a 
growing damage to the American family, to people who are here who have 
come here legally, and to our U.S. citizens.

                              {time}  1345

  The dire consequences are evident to average Americans who see the 
decline in the quality of their schools, their neighborhoods--the 
safety of their neighborhoods, yes--and their health care. Yes, even 
their jobs. They can see the decline in the quality of the jobs that 
are available to working people in this country. Not only are citizens 
hurt by permitting illegals to cut in front of the line, but it is also 
a slap in the face to those who continue to wait their turn to come to 
America.
  When we give in to trying to placate and trying to meet the interests 
of people who come here illegally, it is done at the expense of those 
people who are waiting in line and want to be American citizens and 
want to obey our laws and want to come here legally. Yes, illegal 
immigrants hurt the American people and hurt legal immigrants even 
worse.
  Earlier this year, President Obama's 2012 unilateral deferral of 
deportation for certain illegal immigrants, essentially an amnesty 
decree, caused huge delays for thousands--that is thousands who are 
here legally seeking green cards, seeking to have government employees 
do their job and to actually make the immigration system work. Our 
government employees were servicing illegal immigrants at the expense 
of legal immigrants. They got it totally backwards. And that is the 
argument that we face today. It has a lot of things totally backwards.
  While it is concerning that the President's actions appear to be 
political--which is this effort that we saw to try to appeal to the 
various segments of our population in order to conduct policy in the 
interest of illegal immigrants--I am most troubled by the fact that, 
basically, our President would defy the rule of law and congressional 
intent by unilaterally granting preferential treatment to those 
immigrants who are here illegally. And our President then, without 
congressional intent or any rule of law behind it, actually shifted the 
services of our government to service the needs of people who are here 
illegally at the expense of those people who are here legally.
  Nearly 4.5 million mostly legal immigrants are currently caught up in 
the backlog of our bureaucratic immigration process. That is 4.5 
million people who we need to be concerned about. They are part of the 
American family. They have come here as part of those 1 million legal 
immigrants that we have coming in, but yet they end up waiting 
decades--years, and sometimes decades--to make sure that their papers 
are processed so that they can become citizens.
  The last thing we need to do--and unfortunately this administration 
has been doing it--is shift over the work effort and the time and the 
resources that are necessary to help these people who come here legally 
become citizens, shift that over to trying to service those people who 
are here illegally and have thumbed their nose at our law.
  A policy which hurts those who follow the law and hurts those who are 
U.S. citizens and then rewards illegal and dishonest behavior is going 
to have some pretty bad consequences.
  We are not fooled by the rhetoric--and no one should be fooled by the 
rhetoric--that we need to have ``comprehensive immigration reform'' and 
that it will in some way impact in a positive way what I have been 
talking about this afternoon. What they really mean when they talk 
about ``comprehensive immigration reform''--what they really mean--is 
``amnesty.'' They don't want to use that word because the American 
people learned what that was all about. What they are really doing is 
rewarding those who have broken the law; and they do so at the expense 
of American citizens and, yes, at the expense of those immigrants who 
are here legally.
  As the saying goes: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame 
on me. Mr. Speaker, we have already been fooled once. Amnesty has been 
tested, and it has proven to be a failed policy. In fact, it has served 
only as a catalyst for chain migration, which has compounded many of 
the horrific economic and social challenges that we face today.
  So we have already had an amnesty in the past, and we know what it 
has done to the challenges that we had then. It has made them worse. 
And now we have ended up with, as I say, horrific economic and social 
challenges.
  I am, of course, speaking--when I talk about the amnesty of the 
past--of the 1986 immigration reform bill, where Congress infamously 
promised President Reagan that they would enhance border security in 
exchange for an amnesty on the behalf of nearly 3 million illegal 
immigrants then residing in the United States.
  Needless to say, border security was never enhanced and, needless to 
say, many more than the 3 million that we were supposedly talking about 
were legalized through chain migration. And millions upon millions more 
would continue to illegally flock to our country.
  Why?
  Because they saw that those people who had come here illegally ended 
up becoming naturalized, ended up being put in front of the line of 
those people who were waiting diligently in other countries to come 
here legally. Thus, it created a major increase in the flood of 
illegals into our country.
  As common sense would dictate, the U.S. Government cannot continue to 
send this type of mixed message, the message which basically says we 
are going to reward that person who is here illegally by making him a 
citizen, putting him through the process actually even before those 
people who have come here legally, and anybody who gets here illegally, 
we will reward them with citizenship. They will then have the rights of 
Americans for education, for health care and the opportunities that are 
abundant here for American citizens and legal immigrants.
  Well, if we continue to say anybody who can get to this country 
illegally or not is going to have those benefits, that is a mixed 
message if we expect that illegal immigration is going to be halted or 
in some way that the people overseas who are considering will hesitate 
to come here. In fact, we are rewarding those who made it here. Without 
expecting the legal immigration invasion of our country to increase, we 
actually gave people the incentive to come here illegally.
  Illegal immigration only dramatically jumped after the 1986 amnesty 
deal, setting the path for our current predicament.

[[Page 6681]]

  And what is our current predicament?
  We have social and economic dislocation that is harming the American 
people, especially middle class working people. Like after the 1986 
amnesty deal, those admitted into the United States under a new amnesty 
will surely have spouses, children, parents, even siblings back in 
their home country with whom they will want to reunite. They will 
insist on reuniting with--legally or illegally--those people who are in 
the United States.
  So that is why we have ended up in a situation where we hear people 
say: Well, we have these people that we will never see in our family in 
this other country. Well, the people who are saying that have every 
right to go to that other country. It is as if someone who is in the 
United States who is saying that we have to reunite the families--and 
they are here illegally in the first place--that that is a reason that 
we should legalize their status so that they can reunite the family 
that has been left behind. No. The other option is people who are here 
illegally should go home and be with their families that they left 
behind. It is better for them to do that.
  So this has really been a potential threat when we talk about family 
reunification and the rest because there is a potential to triple the 
number of people who are currently here in this country illegally. 
Let's get that right--triple. If we give amnesty and we legalize the 
status of those who are here illegally, we could be tripling the number 
of people. We could be inserting this number of people into our system.
  If true, this abrupt population swell will fundamentally change 
America socially, economically, and, yes, politically, causing major 
consequences that we can even see across the board. And you can see 
what those consequences will be because those people that now are 
swirling in the ranks of our population will mainly be poorer people, 
people at the poorest end of the economic level. We will be importing 
millions--tens of millions--of poor people, increasing poverty in 
America.
  The stress that would place on our social services is one thing, but 
to our economy and what that does to the American people in the job 
market would be horrendous. According to the nonpartisan Congressional 
Budget Office, every 1 percent increase in the labor force attributable 
to immigration tends to lower the relative wages of all American 
workers. Let's get that straight. That is what happens when you have an 
increase in the labor force by immigrants who come to this country. 
That is why we want to limit it to 1 million people.
  If we have 11, 20, 30, 40 million people coming in, we can expect 
major decreases in the actual wages that all Americans receive. It is 
going to impact the American wages. Surprise, surprise. When you have a 
flood of illegal immigrants into a country, they are bending down the 
wages, bending down the wages of the American people.
  However, those who stand to lose the most are whom, when we say that 
these people are mainly people from lower income levels? So what we are 
talking about, the people who are really losing by legalizing the 
status of illegals, by having a plan that would eventually bring tens 
of millions of more people into our country and insert them into our 
process, the people who are hurt the most are low-income, low-skilled 
American workers.
  One major study found that increases in immigration during the 1980-
2000 era resulted in an 8 percent decrease in wages for high school 
dropouts and a 3 percent decrease in wages for the average American 
worker. Well, this is hardly surprising. Well, for me, it wouldn't be 
surprising.
  During my college days, I was a janitor. I worked as a janitor. And 
let's note, I worked as a janitor because I needed a job. I was 
cleaning toilets. I was scrubbing floors. I was picking up trash. That 
was not my desired job, but I needed the money.
  Historically--right now--jobs such as these would be a steppingstone 
for those who perhaps lacked an education or were trying to earn their 
way through school. I was trying to help pay my education expenses. But 
after decades of illegal immigrants who have been bending back the 
wages and the businesses willing to exploit them, many of the jobs that 
we are talking about, like janitorial jobs, no longer pay even the 
wages that were paid in real dollars then.

                              {time}  1400

  I have gone back and taken a look at what a janitor makes, and 
janitors were making basically the same pay as I made back 40 and 50 
years ago. Well, why is that? Our economy has quadrupled, maybe 
tripled, in the last 40 years. How come janitors make exactly the same 
amount of money?
  They have been left out. They have been left out because the job of 
janitor has been bid down. The wages for people who would be janitors 
in our country have been bid down, bid down by people who flooded into 
our country illegally willing to work for a pittance, willing to live 
in homes where you have three or four families to a house that is only 
supposed to have one family.
  We have a situation where who is being hurt? It is that American who 
would have had that job being that janitor--maybe working his way 
through school, maybe not--who now can't take that job because it pays 
so little. People say, well, how can we afford to take care of 
buildings if you are going to have to pay a certain amount of money, 
more money to those people who are taking care of the buildings?
  Well, proportionately it is the same. The people who own the 
buildings are making a bigger profit now at the expense of the fact 
they are paying a pittance to illegals to take care of the building.
  But also we can rest assured that technology would by now have 
developed that would make the life of a janitor and the job of a 
janitor much more efficient. You probably would have toilet bowl 
machines that would permit one person to clean 100 toilet bowls a night 
rather than 12 or 15, and that, then, would mean that the person 
running that machine and making that machine would be an American 
citizen or a legal immigrant who is earning a decent wage.
  There is nothing wrong with having people who are working those jobs 
earn a decent wage so that they could then raise a family and, yes, 
maybe own their own little home some day. That is the way it used to 
be. When you are a working person, then you can expect to earn enough 
to maintain a decent standard of living. But we have a flood of 
illegals coming in. Especially after we gave that amnesty, what we have 
done is bid down the wages of the American people as tens of millions 
of illegals are now present in our society.
  To this point, between 1960 and 2012, a time when America was 
experiencing its highest levels of immigration, native-born workers and 
legal immigrants lost an average of $402 billion in wages while native-
owned firms, meaning American-owned companies, profited by an average 
of $437 billion.
  So thus we have wages being depressed by illegal immigration that 
actually lowered the amount of money by $400 billion in money that was 
paid in wages, yet the people running the business or owned the 
property were $437 billion richer. So what we have seen here is a huge 
shift of wealth to whom? To upper-class owners of businesses at the 
expense of the lowest level of Americans.
  Now, how is our country a safe country? Our country is a safe country 
because all of us who are part of the American family are doing our 
part to protect our country. Those people at the lower end of the 
economic sphere, they are the ones who join the military and go out and 
defend us. They are the ones who obey the law. They are the ones whom 
we rely upon in their good judgment to support the Constitution and a 
rule of law. If they lose faith in the system, we will suffer greatly.
  That is one of the things that is happening is that the poor people 
are being left out. Actually, their standard of living is going down. 
Of course, our friends in the other party have provided very lucrative 
welfare abilities to people to be on the dole rather than

[[Page 6682]]

giving them a good job. At the same time, they are pushing for more 
government programs to give the dole, to make people dependent and 
thus, I might say, lose their dignity of being able to be self-
sufficient. At the same time, the folks on the other side of the aisle 
are pushing for amnesty, for illegal immigration, that would bring in 
40 million new people, insert 40 million people, foreigners, into our 
system.
  What is that going to do for the poor people of this country? Why are 
the unions in our country not jumping up and supporting the rights of 
their working people not to be having to face illegal immigrant labor 
bidding down their labor? Over the last 50 years, there has been a 
massive transfer of wealth going on, and yet at the same time we see 
the business wages, business profits, going up and workers' wages going 
down. Yet we have policies that seem to encourage it that don't make 
any sense.
  We have people who use the rhetoric of trying to care for America's 
poor. The last thing they should be doing is bringing in 40 million new 
foreigners--mostly poor--into our country.
  Knowing this, it should be no surprise that Big Business has been a 
consistent advocate of amnesty. Big Business wants cheap labor, and 
this, I might add, is not being loyal to the American family. To be 
loyal to the American family, no matter who they are, whether they are 
poor Americans, working class Americans, we should be watching out for 
each other.
  Lower wages, however, are not the only negative impact of mass 
illegal immigration into our country. Similar structural breakdowns and 
strains can be seen in our education system. People in the lower income 
parts of town are seeing their education system fall apart. We see the 
health care system in our country falling apart. We see as well in a 
variety of other institutions that people rely on that the strain of 
millions of illegals--and they want to bring more in--is destroying 
this social, this economic, and this infrastructure that our people 
depend on.
  All things considered, if amnesty were being granted to the 11 to 20 
million illegal immigrants currently in the United States, it would 
cost the American taxpayers an additional $6.3 trillion over the next 
50 years. At least 45 million foreigners, mostly poor, would be 
inserted into our society.
  Is that going to make America a better place? Are the working people, 
the people who are part of the American family, going to be better off 
because of that? Absolutely not. And the voices of the American people 
need to be heard because we have people posturing as if they are doing 
a favor for the less fortunate by advocating this amnesty for illegal 
immigrants which would bring in tens of millions of more poor people 
from foreign countries into our country.
  With our national debt approaching $18 trillion, a budget deficit of 
over half a trillion dollars and two unsustainable entitlement programs 
that we need in order to maintain some sort of security for the 
American people, Medicare and Social Security, these are currently on 
the road to bankruptcy, and if we bring in these millions more people, 
we can expect that the expenses of our government will shoot up trying 
to provide benefits for people who now--by the way, now after making 
them legal, they are entitled to those benefits.
  Someone who is here legally is entitled to every benefit and 
protection as people who are here who were born here. And if we 
legalize the status of illegals, we are taking tens of millions of 
foreigners who are here illegally and granting them the rights to all 
those programs.
  America cannot afford amnesty for those foreigners who are here 
illegally. We must take care of the needs of the American family, of 
American citizens, and of legal immigrants into our society who have 
joined our family. Their interests have to come first over the 
interests of--yes, and let me just say, there is no doubt that those 
people who are here illegally in our country, the vast, vast majority, 
90 percent or more, are wonderful people.
  We should not fool ourselves into thinking that we can somehow take 
care of all of the wonderful people in the world. We can't do it. As we 
try to do it and try to open up our borders even more than the 1 
million legal immigrants that we have, we are going to attract even a 
bigger flood into our country which will put even more pressure on us. 
What we are doing in that case is hurting our fellow Americans.
  Even if these people are wonderful people who come here legally and 
they are seeking opportunity, I am sorry, we can't take care of the 
whole world, and we can't tell the world that whatever good person 
comes here illegally we are eventually going to give them amnesty and 
they will be eligible for all our programs.
  There is an argument about what are called the DREAMers, young people 
who were brought here by their parents. They didn't come here 
voluntarily. Their parents brought them here when they were 2 or 3. And 
now they don't have legal status. There are a lot of obstacles in their 
way. They want those obstacles removed. They want themselves to be 
legalized. But do you know what will happen if we do that, if we say 
that a young person going to school because they are young and they 
have been brought here by their parents, what is going to happen? What 
will be the message if we do that?
  If we legalize the status of just the DREAMers, we are telling the 
people throughout the world, man, when you come here illegally to the 
United States, make sure you bring your children. We are telling people 
throughout the world, bring your children to this country so we can 
take care of the needs of your children.
  We have needs of our own children in the United States of America. 
And they are wonderful kids out there that we care about, but we have 
to care about our own kids first. People who have come here legally 
have that right. They are part of our family. American citizens are 
part of our family. But the well-being of children from foreigners in 
various countries throughout the world has to be second on our list, 
down on our list, way down as compared to the well-being of our own 
people.
  Yes, if we take care of the DREAMers, what is going to happen is we 
will be encouraging a mass flow of young people into our country. 
Younger people who are in school, we will have to take care of their 
education, et cetera. That is not right. You can't give the incentive 
to people to come here and expect that we are not going to have many, 
many more people coming here. We will have many more DREAMers coming 
here if we legalize the status of those who have been brought here 
illegally by their parents.
  This issue continues to be presented as a humanitarian imperative, as 
something that without cost we could help these people among us. We can 
do that without cost? There is nothing without cost. We are being 
presented that we can have an amnesty as if it is not going to cost the 
American people. It is costing us right now. What we have done in the 
last 20 years to ignore this influx of illegals into our country has 
already caused great damage to the well-being and the standard of 
living of American workers at the lowest level.
  People say they think they are appealing to Mexican Americans by 
being for amnesty for illegals. The hardest-hit community in America, 
perhaps the hardest-hit, and certainly minority communities, including 
Mexican Americans, they know where their jobs are going. They know when 
they have a job and an illegal comes across the border from whatever 
country, Asia or Mexico or Honduras or Ireland or wherever they are 
coming from, if they are taking the job of an American, the Mexican 
American community is the hardest-hit. Their education funds are the 
hardest-hit. Their neighborhoods are the hardest-hit.
  That is why I believe that Americans of Mexican descent are patriots. 
They are part of the American family. And that is why I do not believe 
that they want to legalize the status of every illegal that has poured 
into our country. It hurts their families more than anyone.
  So what we need to do now is make sure that as we discuss legalizing 
the status of illegals, of amnesty--they don't want to call it that, 
they want to

[[Page 6683]]

call it comprehensive immigration reform--that we keep in mind these 
things could have a dramatic, negative impact on the well-being of 
American people. Whose side are we on? That is what you have got to 
ask.
  What are the answers to this? Let me just say that solutions are not 
easy, but I would suggest there is a simple but not easy solution. We 
should make sure that anyone who comes here illegally does not get a 
job. We need to E-Verify all the jobs that are here in the United 
States to make sure they are not going to illegals, and they should be 
going to Americans or legal immigrants. And we should make sure that no 
illegal immigrant or the immigrant's family receives government 
benefits, whether it is health care or education.
  I don't believe in deportation, actually. I think deportation is the 
wrong tactic. But unless you are going to--the President, obviously, 
didn't fulfill his obligation for deportation, but he didn't take 
another step that would then deter illegal immigration. The step to do 
it is no deportation. It is dehumanizing. No sweeps through people's 
community. But don't give jobs and benefits that belong to the American 
people to foreigners who are here illegally. That is the solution.
  They will go home. They will go home in peace. They have our well 
wishes. But they are not going to have our jobs and our scarce 
resources that should be going to the American people.

                              {time}  1415

  I would ask my colleagues, as this discussion on the legalizing of 
illegal immigrants takes place, that we be honest with each other, and 
yes, that we be compassionate, but that our compassion is aimed at the 
American people and legal immigrants and not just compassion for those 
who come here illegally.
  No matter how wonderful people these people are, we have to consider 
the American people first.
  Mr. Speaker, with that, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________