[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 855-857]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                THE WALL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Gohmert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it is Thursday evening in the House of 
Representatives, and I continue to hear friends, fellow Members of the 
House, and reporters in anguish over the issue of a potential wall 
between the United States and Mexico; so I thought it was worth looking 
at some information about Mexico--our closest neighbor to the south. 
The data should be recent.
  They have got nearly 120 million people in Mexico. The gross domestic 
product is around 2.1 trillion in pesos. They have 2.1 percent growth--
terrible. It is about like the Obama economy. The average income is 
around $17,000 per capita. Inflation is 4.0 percent.
  Yet, you look at the economics of Mexico in the world, and you think, 
wow. You look at their resources--extraordinary resources, just 
extraordinary resources. We know they have got hardworking people 
because we know, from the people of Mexico who have come to the United 
States, that people constantly indicate, gee, they are the best workers 
we have, these hardworking folks from Mexico.
  So you have got hardworking people in the nation of Mexico, and you 
have got incredible natural resources that have never been tapped--or 
not adequately tapped. We don't even know the full potential--oil, gas, 
copper. There are all of these different minerals that Mexico is 
supposed to have. You look at what people have done over the thousands 
of years--I mean, advanced civilizations. Why is Mexico not one of the 
top 10 or even top five economies in the world? It is listed 62nd in 
the world.
  They have got plenty of land. I can personally testify that they have 
some of the most beautiful terrain in the world--beautiful beaches, 
mountains,

[[Page 856]]

farming regions; just magnificent land, minerals, and hardworking 
people. Why is it 62nd in the world as an economy? That is an 
interesting question.
  It would seem to be because--from hearing people who have looked at 
Mexico and who have either tried to start a business there or who have 
looked at it to start a business there, to start manufacturing there--
of course, there are many who have set up manufacturing shops down 
there, but they are easily persuaded out of it if they can find a more 
suitable place. The reason it is often easy to persuade people to set 
up shop somewhere else is because of the drug cartels, the corruption 
that the drug cartels bring to Mexico.
  What is it the drug cartels are making billions of dollars off of 
that allow them to corrupt police departments? city governments? the 
Mexican border patrol? the Mexican military?
  Obviously, the people in all of the Mexican Government are not 
corrupt. I have met too many who want desperately to make the nation of 
Mexico one of the greatest in the world, and it is possible that could 
happen but not so long as the drug cartels are, potentially, the most 
powerful entities in Mexico. I mean, they are right next to the United 
States. They really should be one of the top, at least 10--if not the 
top five or the top three or four--economies in the world, but they are 
nowhere close.
  Drug cartels, we have found--and we know--make money, particularly 
off shipping illegal drugs into the United States. They have made a 
fortune off of it. I have heard from friends of mine in Texas who are 
in the drug enforcement business, both Federal and State. When the U.S. 
Congress took action to make it more difficult to get SUDAFED, which is 
used in the cooking of substances that are put together in order to 
create methamphetamine, that meth lab became much more rare, especially 
in east Texas, where I live, where we have got lots of trees, woods--
terrain where people can easily hide out, set up a lab, cook some 
methamphetamine, especially as developed during my time on the felony 
bench, where people in Texas learned how to cook methamphetamine, 
create methamphetamine with a cold cooking process that didn't subject 
them to quite the danger and didn't create quite the nasty smell that 
often got meth labs reported to the authorities.

                              {time}  1945

  By drying up so many of the meth labs, we were told it is going to be 
a great day for America. We dry up the meth labs by making it tougher 
to get Sudafed because you have to ask, give your driver's license, and 
you are restricted to a very limited amount of Sudafed. We were told 
that is going to dry up drugs. Methamphetamine is going to be a thing 
of the past. We will cut it to next to nothing.
  Well, it is true. It is not as widespread as it used to be, but I am 
told that more pure drugs with much more devastating results and much 
more addictive are coming up from Mexico in greater numbers, greater 
quantities. It is even worse than it was when methamphetamine was being 
cooked because of the purity of the substances and the addictive 
nature. Also, as a result of drying up so much in the way of 
methamphetamine, we have much more of the heroin epidemic crossing 
America.
  Additional drugs have come from Mexico across our porous border that 
seems to have grown during the Obama administration dramatically. Why? 
Because our border has really not particularly been all that enforced.
  It turns out that it is not just other drugs that are coming across 
our border. Since we have been able to eliminate so many meth labs, 
especially in Texas, we see stories like this one from Bob Price, 
January 5, ``Feds Seize Nearly $7M in Meth At Texas Border.'' That is a 
story about the seizure of methamphetamine at two international border 
bridges in south Texas in 1 week. The Customs and Border Protection, 
CBP, that was assigned to the World Trade Center International Bridge 
in Laredo, this article reports how they had caught two drug 
traffickers with 200 pounds of crystal meth in one vehicle, and that 
was December 22, 2016.
  We also know that the border security under this administration has 
become just almost nonexistent. We had an article from January 12, 
today, from McAllen, from Fox News, entitled, ``Cartels, Smugglers 
Exploit Border Wall Fears Ahead of Trump Presidency.'' So apparently 
they are using this time before President Trump is sworn in next week 
to scare people into coming now. Bring your drugs now. Come illegally 
now into the U.S. before Trump becomes President.
  I guess it is a bit akin to Iran. After holding American hostages for 
over a year under Commander in Chief Jimmy Carter, became so scared of 
a tough, independent-minded Ronald Reagan coming into office, they let 
those hostages go on the very day he was sworn in. So they didn't risk 
him taking military action against them.
  This is another story from Jessica Vaughan, January 2017, that 
reports that ``ICE Deportations Hit 10-Year Low.'' This is January 
2017. DHS has hit a 10-year low in deportations.
  We see stories about how border control is almost nonexistent on our 
southern border, stories that expectation of amnesty is attracting 
immigrants to our U.S. border.
  Here is another story from January 10 by Brittany Hughes, ``Border 
Agents Catch Another Wave of Illegal Aliens From Cuba Amid Escalating 
Spike.'' I have been told, when I am down there, they are seeing more 
and more Cubans coming across the Mexican border of all places.
  So the insecurity--not mentally--of the United States, but the actual 
insecurity of the United States because of our vulnerability to people 
that hate us and drug cartels that want to make billions of dollars by 
hooking people on drugs that they will deliver, has reached insane 
levels. That is probably part of the reason that Donald Trump was 
elected President by an avalanche in the electoral college.
  If you look at the counties that voted for Hillary Clinton and you 
look at the counties that voted for Donald Trump, it becomes very clear 
that the Democratic Party in the United States has basically become a 
fringe party. They won the fringes: West Coast, East Coast, part of 
Florida, part of the northeast, Chicago, Detroit, some of the northern 
cities, the southern valley of Texas. I mean, it is a fringe party. 
There are a few exceptions inside the country, but basically the rock-
solid interior that the American people make up--in what some refer to 
as fly-over country in America--voted rather solidly for Donald Trump.
  Here are numbers from the CIA World Factbook on Mexico:
  Crude oil exports, a 2015 estimate, had 1.199 million barrels per 
day. Country comparison to the world, 13.
  Crude oil imports, 11,110 barrels a day. Crude oil, proved reserves, 
9.7 billion barrels, and that is just proven reserves.
  If you look at natural gas from a 2014 estimate, 44.37 billion cubic 
meters. That is supposed to be 19th in the world, but when you consider 
how productive they could become once they began fracking, using more 
advanced technology, then you find out that, wow, this is a nation--the 
nation of Mexico--that really should be one of the top 10 economies in 
the world.
  What is the excuse that it is not? It has hardworking people, natural 
resources that most of the world could only envy. Why is it not one of 
the top 10? We keep coming back to the drug cartels and the corruption 
that they have brought to Mexico and the billions of dollars that are 
generated by the drug cartels.
  As we have talked about here in the House, the border patrolmen tell 
me--I have been there all night--there is not a single inch of the 
U.S.-Mexico border that is not controlled by one of the drug cartels 
and that nobody should cross the border unless they have paid the drug 
cartels, have the drug cartels' permission.
  I have seen firsthand how it works. They will send a group across the 
river with coyotes in rafts when they are down on the Rio Grande. That 
keeps the Border Patrol busy. At another place, they send people with 
drugs.

[[Page 857]]

  I have been there and seen their lookouts, climbed up on perches 
where they can watch. When the Border Patrol goes by, they know they 
won't be back for a while, so they get surprised when I drive by in the 
middle of the night.
  They are all over the place around our southern border. They are 
making billions of dollars. Whoever came up with the business model for 
the drug cartels that you could make such massive amounts of money 
bringing drugs illegally into the United States, it was really a 
business genius. But it would take a business fool in the United States 
to allow the kind of model that Mexico has set up for its drug business 
to even get a foothold in the United States.
  As I have mentioned, one of the Border Patrol told me that the drug 
cartels call the Department of Homeland Security their logistics. They 
bring their drug dealers. They bring their drug traffickers. They bring 
their prostitutes. Unfortunately, girls are being forced, often, into 
drug trafficking or human trafficking, and they are going to be used as 
prostitutes to make money for the drug cartels. They send them across.
  As a border patrolman said, they send them across, and then DHS here 
in America becomes their logistics. We ship them wherever they want 
them to go in the United States. All they have to do oftentimes is just 
have--I have seen them--a Xerox copy of the address where they are 
supposed to go, and DHS puts them on the bus--sometimes flies them, but 
usually buses--and ships them off to a city where the drug cartels want 
them to set up shop.
  I have been there in the middle of the night when border patrolmen 
will ask how much they paid to be brought in illegally to the U.S. Some 
of the Spanish speakers in our Border Patrol are really incredible as 
they drill down and get answers to their questions that are not always 
on the list that DHS tells them to get.
  ``How much money did you pay?'' They would say, ``Well, you didn't 
have $6,000, $7,000, $8,000. Where did you get that money?''
  ``Well, I was able to get $1,000 from somebody in the U.S., $1,000 
from somebody in Mexico or Guatemala.''
  ``Well, what about the rest?''
  ``They are going to let me pay that out after I am in the United 
States.''

                              {time}  2000

  It becomes clear very quickly that, once again, this business model 
that the drug cartels have includes getting people in rafts where the 
Rio Grande River requires a raft, or just getting them across in 
unguarded areas, or areas where we need a wall and don't have one, 
getting them across, and then getting DHS to send them to the city 
where they want to set up shop as drug traffickers, human traffickers.
  What a business model. You get the Federal Government of the United 
States to help you set up your business machine, your business model in 
the United States. They are shipping your employees around the country 
to different cities. Yes, it is normally under the guise of: I have a 
relative there, here is the relative's address. They are going to take 
care of me.
  Perhaps you get delayed and have to wait for an immigration judge 
that was appointed by Eric Holder to give you a notice to appear for a 
hearing 4 years later, a year, 2 years later, and then you can go on to 
the city where the drug cartels want you to finish paying off what you 
owe them for getting you into the United States.
  So to have a business model that requires your workers to pay you is 
extraordinary, but that is what drug cartels are able to do when you 
have a willing Obama administration here in the United States that will 
help you set up your drug cartel mechanism here in the United States. 
That is what has been going on.
  In the meantime, back in Mexico, you generate so much money by having 
your workers pay you to work for you, and getting billions of dollars 
from the drugs that are sent into the United States, hooking people 
here in America, making them reliant on and addicted to drugs that 
destroy their lives. So basically the drug cartels get a two-for. They 
destroy the human infrastructure of the United States with poison that 
some would say, well, that is another name for illegal drugs. And then, 
in the meantime, you have got all of that money coming to you, and you 
use that money to buy off police. Thank God there are some stand-up 
police in Mexico that can't be bought. But if they go too strongly head 
to head with the drug cartels--we have seen the pictures--they can end 
up with their head on a pike as a message. We have had chiefs of police 
that were killed when they refused to kowtow to the drug cartels, and 
so the message becomes pretty clear.
  It seems to me that the biggest reason that Mexico--with 
extraordinary people and extraordinary natural resources, a beautiful, 
fantastic country, a location that is just incredibly advantageous 
because they have got shipping that can go out on the West Coast like 
we do to the Pacific, shipping on the East Coast into the Caribbean, 
the Gulf of Mexico, ready access to North American markets, ready 
access to South American market, what an opportunistic location for 
Mexico. Yet, they struggle so far behind most nations, or so many 
nations in the world. Dozens and dozens, 60 or so, are before them 
because drug cartels have such a powerful part in Mexico itself.
  So there are many Americans, especially friends of mine across the 
aisle here, who think it is an absolute outrage to talk about building 
a wall between the United States and Mexico. There are some Mexican 
officials that think it is an outrage to talk about building a wall 
between the United States and Mexico.
  Now, some of those Mexican officials think it is an outrage because 
they haven't thought through the magnificence that may arise in Mexico 
once we have secured the border between Mexico and the United States 
and we can slow the drug trafficking to a trickle. So the drug cartels 
will not be looking at billions of U.S. dollars; they will be looking 
at thousands; and if they are extremely powerful, maybe millions. But 
if we get that down to thousands, then the Mexican people will be able 
to have control without corruption, without massive pockets of 
corruption, without a drug cartel that can buy soldiers, buy police, 
buy chiefs of police, and buy mayors. Again, thank God it is only a 
small part of Mexico, but it keeps Mexico suppressed from the great 
economic power that it could be. And the potential is all there.
  You build a wall, then you shut down the drug cartels. And when they 
only have thousands of dollars to bribe police instead of millions or 
billions of dollars, then law and order will prevail and the drug 
cartels will not, and we will have the most extraordinary neighbor to 
our south all because we followed the example in Mending Wall, and we 
had a wall between us that we kept up, we took care of, we shut down, 
helped Mexico shut down the drug cartels by being a good neighbor, 
enforcing the border, and the standard of living in Mexico spirals 
upwards through the sky. The power Mexico would have as a nation in any 
international organization will be extraordinary, and the United States 
will reach an unparalleled relationship as a neighbor. That is worth 
building a wall for.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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