The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2428-H2434 on March 12, 2007.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the privilege and the honor to be recognized here on the floor of the United States Congress this evening and the chance to pick up where some of my colleagues left off here. But I pretty much had my say about Walter Reed, and I support and endorse the remarks that were made over the last 60 minutes, and I intend to move on to another subject matter here.
I do just simply want to restate that the care that they are provided is good and it is solid. And as I talked to patients at Walter Reed, Bethesda, Landstuhl, continually, they are very, very grateful for the quality of the care. We have some of the best experts in the world treating some of these kinds of injuries; and to look them in the eye and see the level of their commitment, you just know that they are giving it everything that they have.
I am not hearing patient complaints about the care, but about sometimes the timeliness of the recordkeeping and the timeliness of the treatment that is there.
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There will be always be things that fall through the bureaucratic cracks, and it is our job to try to seal those cracks up and do the best job that we can. I think we are going to get that done. Certainly, though, I want to make sure that America, Madam Speaker, understands the commitment that is made on the part of the medical care providers for our military men and women, and that is what we must do in order to support their effort and support their sacrifice.
Madam Speaker, I came to the floor tonight to talk about an issue that I have been here before to raise, and hopefully I will be back again to raise, and that is this broad, overall immigration issue that has captured the debate field in the United States for the last 3 years or more. And what brings me to the floor tonight is a sense that there is a growing effort on the part of the White House, on the part of the Senate and on the part of some here in the House, to build a kind of a critical mass coalition that would bring what they would call a comprehensive immigration reform bill through the Senate and then quickly over here to the House, which I would consider to be a steamrolled or a stampeded bill, something that we don't know what is going on behind the scenes, or there has been hardly anything leaked. And I believe it is their effort to try to get enough Members, a majority, and that would be something or a filibuster proof majority in the Senate and a significant majority here in the House to buy on to a policy that they have never seen, one that is not in print yet, or at least not filed, not dropped, in the fundamental sense, but only get people, people, and I mean Members and Senators, to sign off conceptually, and say I conceptually endorse a comprehensive immigration reform bill.
Well, first, Madam Speaker, the American people need to understand that when the word ``comprehensive immigration reform,'' when that phrase is used, that means we don't like to admit amnesty. But comprehensive is a substitution for the word ``amnesty.'' It has been that way for 3 years. It will be that way until this debate is maybe over for this cycle.
But I recall when the President gave his first immigration reform speech was January 6 of 2004, 3 years and a couple of months ago. There he brought out a lot of the same things that he is standing for now. And the President says that he is opposed to amnesty. But I will say that Ronald Reagan signed a bill that Ronald Reagan called amnesty that is very much the kind of policy that is being advocated by the White House.
I am greatly concerned about this moving so quickly with so little information that the American people would not have an opportunity to weigh in, would not have an opportunity to call and write and e-mail and fax their Senators and their House Members to be able to try to move the center, I guess, of the Republican and Democrat House of Representatives and the Senate.
And so it is important that I call upon Members, don't sign off on something till you read the fine print. The devil is in the details. The devils were in the details last year when the Senate moved their immigration reform bill and the details turned out to be tens of millions of people. Just a small detail, Madam Speaker, of tens of millions of people that would be legalized and granted amnesty in about a couple of decades period of time. That is the backdrop. That is the foundation of this.
I have a lot to say about this, but I also recognize the gentleman from Texas who has been on this floor for a while has some things he would like to say about it, and I would be very happy to yield to Judge Carter as much time as he may consume.
Mr. CARTER. I thank the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) for yielding to me. And I appreciate him joining me in the previous hour in our discussion of Walter Reed and the health care for our soldiers and our veterans and how important that issue is.
But I guess, at least in the State of Texas, if what I hear in my town hall meetings is anything to be compared, I think the issue of what is happening on our borders and what we are going to do to resolve the issue of immigration is a topic that has never failed to come up, now, in the past 3 years at literally, every occasion at which I have held a town hall meeting; and I generally hold between 17 and 25 a year with the addition of the new tool of the telephone town hall. I held one of those less than 3 weeks ago for an hour and a half.
And once again, the people of Texas are concerned about the issue of the illegal aliens that have invaded our country. And they are concerned about who is coming, and what are they going to do, and what are we going to do to resolve this problem?
I have a Hispanic Council. The gentleman from Iowa knows that Texas is a State that you would put down as a Hispanic State. In fact, I believe we have now, over 50 percent of the people in Texas are Hispanic. The difference between Texas and some other parts of the world is we have lived with Hispanic neighbors all of our history. I mean, our culture is a kind of a combination of West and Mexican culture. It is the Southwest culture. It has a lot of the influence of Mexico in the Southwest culture. If you don't believe that, come on down to Austin; let me feed you the best Mexican food on Earth.
This is what is going on in Texas. We have lived with our neighbors like this all of our lives. When this issue cropped up I decided I wanted to form a Hispanic Council in my district. And we talk about issues, of course, immigration, the border, these are issues that are primary we discuss. But we made ourselves a promise that we were going to look at the world, all the world of litigation, legislation, and international relations, not just the immigration issue. But we always discuss the immigration issue. And at least my council, which has a membership of folks that are, some of them first generation American citizens, most of them second or third or fourth generation American citizens. All of Hispanic descent, most of whom are from Mexico, although there are some from other places. And we have a let your hair down, no holds barred discussion. And overall, my Hispanic community, recognizes there is a problem and realizes we have to come up with a solution, and they are supportive of a solution that is within the law.
And I think that is important because, quite frankly, the reason we have a crisis, I would tell my colleague from Iowa, is because we haven't been enforcing the laws we have got and we haven't been enforcing them since 1986 when we cranked out the amnesty program under Ronald Reagan. The key to the Reagan amnesty program being a success was enforce the law. And administrations, Republican and Democrat, have not done it. I mean, those are the facts.
You know, one thing about history, it is history. You can try to write it a different way, but the reality of history is there is only one history and that is the truth of what happened.
And what happened was we didn't enforce the laws. And as a result, we went from a trickle across our southern border and our northern border to a six-lane highway bumper to bumper invasion. And that is what we have been facing now in the last 4 or 5 years.
I would say, I have met with the White House on numerous occasions and been a very big critic of making sure that we got border enforcement. I will say, we are doing better at the border. We are not there yet, but w are doing substantially better. The numbers are down. The catch and release program and the ending of the catch and release program, although not 100 percent, but it is better than it was when it was 100 percent catch and release. We are detaining people. And there are those who want to stop us and there are those who call us inhumane. And, in fact, in my district, one of the real things that we desperately needed was a place to care for families that cross the border. And we had no facility that was family friendly. They built a family friendly, or remodeled a correctional institute to make a family friendly center to hold illegals with children, people who come in this country illegally with children. And it is in my district. It is 22 miles from my home in Taylor, Texas. That thing has come under fire from our neighbors to the south who are sort of San Francisco-like, we would call them, in their views and they have been picketing this facility and claiming it is inhumane. I was there when they started remodeling this facility. I was there two-thirds of the way through the remodel, and so I went back the last month, the last week we were there during the President's Week, and I toured that facility.
I have the expertise of having built two juvenile detention centers as a judge. I was the chairman of the Juvenile Board from its inception in Williamson County until I retired, so until I retired I was the only chairman the Juvenile Board ever had in Williamson County, now a county of about 300,000 people. And so I was in charge of the board that built our first William S. Lott Detention Center, back when we were a lot smaller county. We are probably the second fastest growing county in the Nation every year of the last 20 years. And so now we have built a much larger, 4 or 500-bed facility, the second one, the Williamson County Juvenile Detention Center.
So when I went into this controversial holding situation that we have got there in Taylor, I was looking for the kind of thing that we put our juvenile offenders into. And, you know, juvenile offenders are not, under the law, criminal offenders. It is a very special category of the world. And so I looked at the classrooms, which, quite frankly, were better than the classrooms that my son and my daughter-in-law teach in at Round Rock High School, and I am pretty proud of the classroom that they teach in at Round Rock High School. They were very well managed. The teachers were bilingual and very, very compassionate.
There was a glitch, bureaucratic glitch that caused some of them not to be taught long enough. But now they are meeting the Texas educational standards. They have recess, they have a playground, the rooms are decorated. They have done the best they can to make it juvenile friendly. And I figure if it is good enough for juveniles, it is certainly good enough for their parents.
But there is a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, and I am certain that our crisis is not over on that facility. But why did we have to build that facility? Because there were coyotes in Mexico who knew that if, for sure, if you were caught and you had a child in your possession, they had no place to house you, no matter where you came from. And 97 percent of the people in that Taylor facility are OTM, other than Mexicans. They knew if you had a kid they couldn't detain you. And so we had to have some way to detain. Those things are improvements. But that is the kind of, this is a very complicated situation. And you are right, it is not something that calls for a quick easy fix that suits certain people's political agenda. It needs to be analyzed and it needs to be done, I still say, as we secure the border and get the confidence of the American people that we care about what is going on, and we are getting there. We need to come up with a way to identify people so we know who has the right to work and who doesn't have the right to work in this country. Then our work program, with those who are here with no pathway to citizenship, in my opinion, and then a work program for those that want to come in legally to work in a legal system, work for a period of time and go back type of system, and finally rework our immigration and naturalization laws to where they work, they are workable. And at that point in time, if you have violated the law, and you want to go for citizenship, you reapply from the nation you come from and you get in line like everybody else with some kind of penalty for having broken our laws. That makes sense. That is not something we should throw in in a quick laundry basket full of clothes, everything mixed up, and it will all work it out. We will work it out later, because, my friend from Iowa, ask the people that are in the trenches that are dealing with this immigration problem at ICE and other places. They are overwhelmed now. If you throw the 7 to 20 million that are hiding out in this country back on their shoulders to deal with, what are they going to do if we don't think this out logically?
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They are going to be more overwhelmed. And when a government system is overwhelmed, it just stops working. And that is what we are experiencing in the United States today. You can't blame these people. When they have got a pile of a thousand applications on their desk and you walk through the door with 10,000 more, they are going to say, I can't do the thousand, I sure as heck can't do the 10,000.
So I think it is really wonderful that the people in this Congress are willing to keep bringing this issue to the floor and reminding the American people that we care, because there are those of us who care very, very compassionately about this issue. We can do it and we can do it right. And when it is done right, justice will prevail. I have been in the justice business all of my life, and I have been in the justice business as a judge for almost 21 years. I believe that what we owe all people who reside in this country is justice. Justice occasionally requires responsibility for your actions, and these are the kind of things we need to think about as we address this problem.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas.
As I listen to you talk about this, Judge, and you live down in that territory where it has been part of your life and the flow of our life, from my background in the work that I have done, there have been some times in my life when there was something that was so complicated, so convoluted and so unpredictable in its elements and so many hypotheticals that came out of each of those elements that no matter how hard I tried to chart a course through that and lay out contingency plans on, I call them if-then formulas which you can put on a spreadsheet, if then, we will do that; if that happens, then we will do this. And it threads through the whole equation.
This immigration issue is so complicated, so unpredictable and has so many hypotheticals that I contend that it is impossible for a body of 100 Senators or 435 House Members or a President to chart a course through that and be able to put law in place that deals with all of the contingencies and ends up with the kind of product that if we can even agree on what that is, we could not get there. It is beyond human ability to put that into a law and make that work; too many hypotheticals.
So what I will submit is that we need to take this, as you suggested, one step at a time. I am for let's go ahead and get things under control at the border. Stop the bleeding. As Dr. Gingrey has often said from Georgia, we have got to stop the bleeding before we can decide how we are going to stabilize the patient and give him rehab. That is step one. And we started on that, as you said. I have been down to look at that. In fact, a couple weeks ago I went down there and helped build some wall with Secretary Chertoff down south of Yuma on the border. It occurred to me that probably the only person in America that actually has gone down on the southern border and put border fence up with Chris Simcox or the Minute Men, and then turned around and welded steel wall on the border was Secretary Chertoff. I don't think those two guys are going to get together and do this together. I had the privilege of doing it on different occasions with each of them. But we can control this at the border; in fact, we must. And if we can't do that, then all the rest of the policy we talk about goes for naught.
And another fundamental principle that I stand on is that of all the discussions that come out of the House and the Senate and the ideas about guest worker, or temporary worker, how we will give them a card, how that all might work; how you do background checks on people and then legalize them here, I don't hear anyone address what you do with those that don't come forward. Because those that come forward with a clean background record, they would then get their pass to either guest worker card or a path to citizenship, depending, they might feel pretty comfortable if all they did is come into the country illegally and that this government should write up a law, which I would oppose, that would be amnesty, too. But those that have a criminal record beyond that, those that have run afoul of the law for whatever reason, they are not coming out of the shadows because they don't want the hook of the law in them, they don't want to go off to prison and they don't want to be deported.
So we will not be uncovering the bad elements of society by trying to do background checks on people. And those elements of society, those slackers that don't want to come forward for whatever reason, those that have reasons not to come forward, they still remain in the shadows an illegal core in this civilization, and the only way you get them out is to actually send people back home again.
So I submit that we should use all of our local law enforcement. We should end all sanctuary policies. The local police force, county sheriffs, the highway patrol, the Texas Rangers, all those folks that are involved in law enforcement at all levels, and have them cooperating at all levels.
I grew up in a law enforcement family. And it was not something that we could have conceived of, but there would be a city police officer that would be prohibited from cooperating with a Federal officer on a law in this Nation because it happened to be Federal law as opposed to a city ordinance. So by that rationale, city police would only enforce city ordinances and State highway patrol and State officers, DCI or whatever, could only enforce State laws and then Federal officers could only enforce Federal laws. And I don't know what the county sheriffs are going to do except maybe they are just going to serve warrants and papers.
So we need to cooperate on all levels and we need to reestablish the rule of law.
Mr. CARTER. If the gentleman would yield, I absolutely agree with that. And as law enforcement, we have learned how to cooperate over those jurisdictional boundaries. There is no reason in the world why we can't cooperate over jurisdictional boundaries with the Federal law enforcement officers, also. It can be done. We have done it in Texas, we have done it across the country. We can do it with the immigration issue.
And I do agree with you, also, that no one is talking about what do you do with the people who don't? That has to be addressed, also. If we are going to hold out a carrot of a work permit for people to come out and turn themselves in and report and file whatever pre-procedures this Congress establishes, we have to have a stick for those who don't; that if we don't, it won't work.
I am not for pounding anybody, don't misunderstand me. My whole point is the carrot and the stick policy is law enforcement, the way we do some things in law enforcement. And it is important that we have that. If you don't, there are going to be serious ramifications for not joining and trying to solve this problem.
And those people that are in this country illegally out there tonight, if they are listening, I hope they know that whatever this Congress does, and I am with you, as it works out this thing logically and putting a focus on each element as we move along, not a big trash basket, when we do, we put together a program, we expect you to participate. And if you don't participate, I think there should be serious consequences.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas. And I know that there are some people in this Congress and across the country that will say, well, what about two sticks and no carrots. We may hear about that from the gentleman from Virginia, Mr. Goode, who I would be happy to yield as much time as he may consume.
Mr. GOODE. Madam Speaker, it is an honor to be here with Mr. King; I appreciate the time he has allotted to me.
I want to thank him for his hard work in combating illegal immigration and the many problems that such brings to our country. I know today he had a forum over at the Woodrow Wilson Institute and had to slug it out with others who did not concur with his views.
Judge Carter was here. I also want to thank him for his hard work on this issue, and for recognizing the need to secure our borders.
First, I wish to commend the Mayor and Council of Hazelton, Pennsylvania for their courageous stand in defending the sanctity of Hazelton, the well-being of its citizens, and the integrity of the rule of law. The courage of this community should spur this Congress to be resolute in standing for the security of our Nation.
By setting forth the city's determination to impose penalties of those who rent to illegal aliens and requiring employers to verify the legal work status of potential workers, the leadership of Hazelton is speaking for a majority of Americans who know and believe that strict measures must be employed if we are to secure jobs for workers who are here legally, if we are to preserve the traditional culture of our Nation, and if we are to be protected from criminal illegal aliens.
Further, Hazelton's action to stipulate English as their official language is a step that this Congress should also take in order to prevent our Nation from becoming divided into splinter groups that hunker down in the assertion of their individuality rather than becoming a part of a great melting pot that Americans have cherished for over two centuries.
Hazelton is now defending itself against the legal challenges of the ACLU and others. Hazelton should know that it is supported by millions of Americans who know that its cause is just.
I would also like to mention, Madam Speaker, the movie ``Borders,'' which was showing in the Cannon Office Building last week. It is produced by Chris and Lisa Burgard. Lisa hails from Pittsylvania County, which is in the Fifth District of Virginia. We were honored to have in attendance Mr. and Mrs. Robert Duvall and Mr. Ron Maxwell, who starred and directed ``Gods and Generals.'' We also had some Members of Congress to witness this film. Hopefully this film will be showing in theaters across the country in the near future. It illustrates the need for a secure fence along our southern borders.
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March 12, 2007--On Page H2430 the following appeared: Lisa hails from Pennsylvania County, which is in the?
The online version should be corrected to read: Lisa hails from Pittsylvania County, which is in the
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The criminal activity along our border with Mexico is rampant. The coyotes and the drug dealers bring people across on a regular basis, bringing drugs with them, paying them to smuggle in the illegal drugs so that the main ones are not caught with the drugs on them. This is just an example of the illegal activity that a secure southern would prevent.
Last week, Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne from Idaho, spoke about a fence that he saw on national land along our border with Mexico. He told how it is believed that the drug cartel would jump that fence at night.
When we talk about a fence that will secure our border, we cannot be lulled into thinking that you can have a woven wire or one fence that would keep our borders secure. We must have something akin to the triple fence that exists between San Diego and Mexico. You have a fence, then a roadway for the Border Patrol to ride up and down, then you have a large barrier in the center, you have another roadway, and then a third fence.
The Secretary told about how the drug cartel would get these great drivers who would jump that fence with inclines and keep on going. I dare say, even if you had someone like Dale Jarrett or Bobby Labonte, they could never jump the San Diego fence. It would be mighty tough to tunnel under it, too. And Mr. King, I know you have illustrated that fence here on the floor. That is the kind of fence that will keep them out. And that is the reason a number of persons oppose this fence and do not want to see it funded because it will do the job.
You mentioned amnesty, Mr. King. You are right on the money. We cannot afford to have amnesty in any way. We have a great country in the United States of America; various beliefs, different religions, tremendous tolerance. We cannot afford to be swamped and sunk by the invasion of illegals into this country.
Just the talk of amnesty means more illegal entry. Those that come in illegally say well, let's go and stay just a few years. If we can go and stay a few years, we are going to get to stay forever. In the 1980s, they gave those that came and stayed a while amnesty. In the 1990s they, meaning our government, gave those that came and stayed for a while amnesty. And those that come across now, every time the body on the other side of this Capitol talks about amnesty, more want to come. When they hear the President say we are going to create a new guest worker program with a glidepath to citizenship, more want to come because they know. And the sidewalk talk is correct, if we can get there and stay just a little while, we are going to get a blue card, a red card, a green card or something, and we are going to have our glidepath to citizenship. And we will have ridden around a system. And everybody that is playing by the rules and waiting in line, well, they are just foolish. We broke the law, we got away with it, and they are giving us amnesty.
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Illegal immigration has swamped our hospitals. It has jacked up health care costs for Americans not only in the southwestern United States but all across this land. We want to do something about health care costs. Shut off illegal immigration, and you will get a benefit.
I have been to community health centers which have gotten significantly increased funding over the last 5 to 8 years. Community health centers serve those primarily who have little or no assets and who have little or no insurance. They don't question whether someone may not have the wherewithal or whether someone is in this country illegally or not. They see someone needs health care assistance, and they get it. A big impact on community health systems is illegal immigration. A big impact on free clinics is illegal immigration.
Social services, now, they say there are some rules against providing them for illegal aliens. But, again, the check system at the local level is not there. And there would be some if they did like Hazelton, Pennsylvania. They are saying you are being too harsh. Well, a lot of illegals have left Hazelton, Pennsylvania; and if we had more Hazelton, Pennsylvanias around this country, we would have a lot less problem.
Corrections, illegal aliens, a huge negative impact on local jails and local prisons. A huge impact on the State prison systems all across the country. Last year the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons testified that out of 189,000 Federal prisoners, 50,000 were illegal aliens. And I think you figured it at about 28 percent.
I surely hope the illegal alien population in the United States is not that high. It is high and it is growing. We got to 300 million much quicker than anticipated. A huge strain on our energy, a huge strain on many aspects of our society.
Let's stop illegal immigration and improve America. Our policy towards illegals needs to be clear: keep them out, direct them back, and save America.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Virginia for a clear message.
The American people appreciate straight-talking, clear messages. There have been far too many of these messages that are muddled and confusing, and those muddled and confusing messages cause more problems with more people coming across the border. And I am not hearing people stand up and say it would be wonderful if everybody could wake up in their own country one day in a legal fashion and not have to look over their shoulder and rebuild their own nation, rebuild their own society, rebuild their own economy.
I had this conversation with the ambassador to the United States from Mexico. And I say, If you encourage your people, the vitality of your nation, to come here to the United States, who is going to be there to reform Mexico? Who is going to be there to rebuild Mexico? And he had to concede that is no way to run a country.
At this point, Madam Speaker, I would be very happy to yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Jordan).
Mr. JORDAN of Ohio. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
The gentleman mentioned his recent trip out to the Mexican border in the State of Arizona. I had the pleasure of accompanying you on that trip and found that very insightful.
As we begin to move into this debate this session of the Congress, I think it is important that we keep some principles in mind. And, hopefully, these principles, I think, if they are followed, will help us arrive at the right public policy decision. And I think there are just three key ones.
And the first one is and it has been mentioned by the previous speakers this hour, but the first one is we have to focus on security first. As we discovered down at the border with Secretary Chertoff, it is important that we secure the border and we do that first. I think the former Speaker of the House has made the statement, does an antiballistic missile defense system make a lot of sense when a terrorist can rent a truck and drive it across the border? That is an important thing. It is about security.
When we were down there on our visit, a few things stuck out in my mind, and the American people understand this. The first is how real this problem is. As the gentleman from Iowa knows, we were in a helicopter flying out along the border, and the pilot came over the intercom and said, Look out the window right there and you will see some aliens attempting to cross right now. And we literally saw approximately 20, 25 people coming across. We were flying right along the Mexican/United States border, and we saw 25 people trying to cross the border illegally, and they attempted to hide under a tree. There wasn't much cover out in the desert, as the gentleman remembers, but there they were. And they had the clothes on their backs and jugs of water in their hands and they took off running back to the border. But it just reinforced in my mind what the American people need understand about how real this problem is.
The second thing that I think I came away with from that visit is the fence is working. As the gentleman from Virginia pointed out, where they are constructing it right now is having an impact. And obviously the strategy of our Secretary of our government is to put the fence up first in those areas where it is going to have the best and greatest impact, and that is in the urban areas. And it is working, and it is a double fence, as the gentleman talked about. And it is making a difference.
The other thing that is making a difference out there is our National Guard, our good men and women in the National Guard who are helping build that same fence where I know you welded and we all had a chance to do a little welding there. They are providing more eyes to see the illegals as they attempt to cross, and they are helping with that fence. But security has to be priority number one, as we think about the policy that makes sense for our country.
The second principle that has to guide this debate, and, again, it has been highlighted already, is the idea that our country is great because we have a lot of great principles that were there at the founding and are still present today. One of those fundamental principles that makes America the greatest Nation ever is the concept that the rule of law matters. And when people willingly, knowingly violate the rule of law, there have to be serious consequences. And that is why amnesty as a policy makes no sense for people who willingly and knowingly violated the law.
And, finally, the third thing I would point out, and I think sometimes as we focus on making sure we are securing our borders and following the rule of law, one of the things that seems to get left out in the debate is we should welcome people, we should welcome immigrants who want to come here legally. I mean, immigrants have always been a great treasure to this country, have always added to the greatness of this country. And for those folks who want to come here and learn our culture, learn our language, learn English, we should welcome them.
And who can fault people who want to come to the freest, greatest Nation in history? So if they want to do it the right way, the legal way, we should work on a policy that also helps the bureaucracy work better to help those people who want to be a part of the American culture and want to be a part of this great country.
Madam Speaker, this is the greatest Nation in history. And for people who want to come here for the right reasons, we should welcome them here. If these three principles drive our policy, I think we are going to get at the right policy and I hope we do, but it has to be driven by these three principles, and security has to be of paramount importance.
And I appreciate the gentleman from Iowa's leadership on this issue and others here in the United States Congress.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Jordan).
I did appreciate the privilege to travel with you. And there is some extra value in that, and that is you see what it is that people notice and you understand what their priorities are and you begin to understand how people rearrange their priorities and the basic values that come together. And you have heard some of these basic values flow out from Mr. Jordan here this evening, Madam Speaker. And I look forward to a lot more of these kinds of events in helping to shape policy for the American people.
I look at this overall immigration policy that we have, and I think there are some great big blanks out there and questions that are asked and not answered, seldom asked and never answered. The first question that one should ask is, Is there such a thing as too much illegal immigration? Or let me put it this way: Is there such a thing as too much immigration? And if the answer to that is ``yes,'' then you need to divide that between legal and illegal. And for me illegal immigration, any of it, is too much. All immigration should be legal. We shouldn't tolerate illegal immigration, and we surely should not reward it with an amnesty plan, which I believe is being worked on right now in the offices over in the Senate and perhaps on the House side, preparing to reach that kind of an agreement between the House and the Senate and the White House to quickly bring a bill that we don't have time to scrutinize and time to debate thoroughly.
If you look at what happened last year, there was mistake after mistake after mistake made in the Senate's version of the bill. And first they had a bill on the floor that would have legalized between 100 and 200 million people. And then there was, I believe, a Bingaman amendment that reduced it and put a cap on one or two of those categories that took that number down under 100 million. Different numbers came back and forth. The Senators voting on that didn't know how many numbers they were talking about. You could ask them point blank, and they would not answer. But the best numbers, the most reliable numbers came from Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, and the numbers that I saw there near the end of that debate were 66 million people that would be brought into the United States under the policies that exist and the ones that the Senate would have added in their reform bill that they passed last year. A lot of that same sentiment; 66 million people, Madam Speaker.
And so I went back and looked, and I wondered how many people were naturalized into the United States legally in all of our history. And it turns out that we began keeping records in 1820. Not at the beginning, but in the 1820s. The numbers were small prior to that. They were small in 1820. And we tracked this thing up until the census of the year 2000. So between 1820 and the year 2000, the complete totals that we have, the number is 66.1 million people have been naturalized into the United States in all of our history. And this Senate version of the bill last year would have matched the pot all in one fell swoop. And they did this all with a straight face, Madam Speaker.
I recall the amnesty in 1986 that Reagan signed, and it was supposed to be 1 million people. I was appalled that 1 million people would get a pass on the rule of law. Well, I was triplely appalled when I realized how bad it was because that 1 million turned into more than 3 million by most accounts because, first of all, they underestimated how many people would apply. Secondly, they underestimated how persuasive the fraud would be with people that raced across the border and jumped in line so they could get their amnesty.
I have met some of the people that received amnesty in 1986, and they are almost universally in favor of amnesty in 2007. And the reason is because they were a beneficiary of amnesty. When they had amnesty, it was good for them; so, of course, they advocate that for anyone else. Certainly their children were taught: amnesty was the best thing that ever happened to you, sons and daughters of mine, and we need to make sure that everyone else can take advantage of this same thing.
But amnesty comes with a price, and the price is you sacrifice the rule of law if you grant amnesty.
So the 3 million that received amnesty in 1986 became great advocates for more amnesty. And then each generation after that, more people have come into the country, that 3 million, and today the most conservative number of illegal immigrants in the United States is about 12 million. Many of us believe that number exceeds 20 million. Some believe it exceeds 30 million. I am in that above-20 million category, and it is anybody's guess up in that territory. But if there is an amnesty bill that comes out of the Senate and through the House and to the White House, then you are going to see tens of millions of people that take advantage of this, and we will be sacrificing, Madam Speaker, the rule of law.
And I have talked about why would we do this, what would be the purpose for this kind of a policy. Well, first of all, the Federal Government has failed to enforce adequately our immigration laws. And as we got more and more illegal immigrants into the United States, it became a magnet for more and more to follow. They began to recruit in their communities. We had companies that put up billboards in Mexico encouraging people there to illegally come to the United States and apply for a job. Some of them recruited them down there and brought them across the border to go to work in their factories and in their plants. And this is commonly known in the communities that utilize this kind of labor. So what kind of a Nation would do that and why would we? First of all, the Federal Government didn't enforce the law.
Secondly, employers took advantage of that because they could hire illegal labor cheaper than they could local labor. And capital is always rational. Capital is going to do the smart thing. Capital is going to follow the path of least resistance like electricity. So there wasn't a resistance on the law enforcement side; so capital then hired illegal labor, brought them into the United States or hired them when they came here. Regardless, that was the magnet.
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They understood that they could pay illegal labor less and there were far fewer contingent liabilities that went along with the illegal labor.
So if you have to pay $15 an hour as a going rate for an American citizen or someone who is lawfully present in the United States to do a job, but you can hire someone who is here illegally because they are in the shadows and have to scurry around and hide away from the law, if you can hire them for, let's say, $8 an hour, and then if you have to provide health insurance, retirement benefits and take on the contingent liabilities of legal employees, the
$15 an hour, plus the health insurance package, plus the retirement package, plus the worker's comp piece, which is going to be higher because they are more likely to file the claims, plus the litigation risk of filing a suit against an employer, and then the unemployment claims that would come if you lay people off, none of that exists in any significant quantity when you are hiring someone who is illegal.
So you hire them cheaper, maybe at $8 an hour, compared to a $15 an hour legal person, but then that is all you are really ending up with, was 8 bucks an hour. But if you hire somebody at $15 an hour and they are legal, then you have to add on to that so much for health insurance, so much for retirement benefits, so much for worker's comp, so much for unemployment, so much for contingent liabilities. What if this employee turns around and sues me for something? You add that all up, it is far cheaper to hire the illegal laborer than the legal. Then that magnetized and brought more and more into this country.
Americans have allowed it to happen under their nose. The administration hasn't sounded the alarm. They could seal the border more quickly than they are, and they are accelerating their efforts here, and I want to compliment them for that effort. But I am also watching closely to see if this effort is a real, sincere committed effort, or if it is an effort that is designed to help clear the political groundwork so that Members of Congress will be lulled to sleep, so-to-speak, and adopt a comprehensive plan, which again the word ``comprehensive'' is the substitute word for amnesty plan.
So do we do this because we need the labor, is one of those questions. The statement is made over and over again, well, we have to have the labor. After all, we have willing employers and willing employees. That should be the standard.
Madam Speaker, if you can give me cheap enough labor, I want to hire them all. If you can get me reliable workers, I want the first 100 at a buck an hour I can get. I probably want the first hundred at $2 or $3 an hour, or in fact $5 an hour. We will find a way to make some money. I want them legal. They have to be for me.
My point is though the cheaper labor gets, the more demand there is. Kind of like if gas goes down to 50 cents, people are going to drive more, or if porterhouse steaks go down to 50 cents a pound, a lot more people are going to eat the fancy steak instead of eating the hamburger. Cheap labor, the same thing; the lower the price, the more consumption there is.
So it isn't an equation of willing employer-willing employee, because the employer is always going to be willing if he can make money off of a willing employee who will work cheaper than the going rate. It is an advantage for the employer to do that.
I hear from Member after Member, think tank head after think tank head, they get on the media airwaves every day, Madam Speaker, and they say a willing employer, a willing employee. We have people that need this labor. There is a demand for it. Therefore, we have to find a way to provide it. Otherwise, what happens in America if we don't flood the cheap labor market?
Well, one thing that has happened from flooding it is we have seen the unskilled purchasing power drop by 12 percent over the last 10 years, that is because there is a flood of cheap labor on the market. And it should go the other way. We want a broad middle-class. We want an ever more prosperous middle-class. Instead, the pressure that is coming here is those that are making money off of the cheap labor are becoming an aristocracy. They are part of nouveau rich in the United States of America. And our upper-middle class, or upper class, for that matter, is growing, and so is our lower class growing, because we are importing it, and that is putting a squeeze on middle America.
One of the principles of a free society is you need to have a broad and prosperous middle-class. We have been growing and broadening that middle-class for generations and becoming a stronger Nation because of it. But this last generation it is going the other way, Madam Speaker. This last generation, we are growing the aristocracy and we are growing the lower class, importing a lower class, all at the expense of the middle class, which is being squeezed in between the two.
But in the middle is the real America. In the middle is the real America that understands truth, justice, the American way, the merits of hard work, the American dream. They have a tremendous work ethic, a sense of family and community. They are being squeezed, Madam Speaker, by the interests on the upper levels of our society and by the thunderous herds that are coming across particularly our southern border, on the lower end of our society, at the expense of our middle-
class.
I would point out that if you envision this society like a barbell, and the middle-class would be the bar, and the weights on each end would be the bells, on one side you have the weight on the right side of that barbell, that is the business interests in America. A lot of them are Republican interests, but certainly not all of them. There are a lot of liberal elitists that sit in that category too. And they are clamoring for more cheap labor because they make money doing it, and they are not threatened, nor do they believe their children will ever be threatened by the competition in the labor market that takes place down in the lower end of the spectrum.
The people on the right side of that, the business side of that barbell, that interest, they will send their children to Ivy League schools, upper crust universities, they will get an education. They won't ever have to compete, probably, with the lower income people that don't have that kind of education, that kind of culture, that gives them a path to professionalism.
So they will end up living in their ivory towers and end up living in their gated communities and getting rich off the cheaper labor, and their children will be wired into that same kind of thing. And that is how you grow an aristocracy. That is how you grow a ruling class. That is how you grow an arrogance, that they have a birthright to a servant class, which they are creating.
That servant class that they are creating is the other end of this barbell, and that is this massive number of people who give especially the left a lot of political power. Even those who are in this country illegally give political power to many Members here in this Congress because we count people rather than citizens when he with redistrict in America.
As we count people, that means we count illegal immigrant in these districts. So illegal immigrants give political power to the Members of Congress who are here because they don't have to get their vote. They only have to compete.
There will be a couple of seats here in the House of Representatives, where it will take about 110,000 votes for me to get reelected to my seat, there are a couple of seats that take around 30,000, 35,000 votes for the same thing, and the reason is because the illegal population is counted in the census, and the larger that number is, the fewer citizens are left to actually cast a ballot. And that is the circumstance.
So think of this barbell. On the one side is the ruling class, on the other side of the barbell, the political power of the lower class, the new servant class that is being created, and in the middle, the bar itself is the middle-class that holds it altogether that is being squeezed by the two. That is what we are up against, Madam Speaker.
So, do we need this labor? I would point out that if it is 12 million in the United States illegally, according to I believe it was a Pew Foundation study, that the illegal labor amounted out of that 12 million, 6.9 million workers are actually working. They don't all work, of course. Some are homemakers, some are too young. But 6.9 million working illegals in America.
Of that 6.9 million, that represents 4.7 percent of the overall workforce, and 2.2 percent of the actual production, because they are unskilled, they don't produce like a more highly trained worker does. So they are only doing 2.2 percent of the work.
Well, if you opened up your factory doors in the morning and you found out that 2.2 percent of your production, your work force, wasn't going to show up that day, in order to make up for the difference, I would send a memo out to my staff that said, you know, your 15-minute coffee break this morning and your 15-minute coffee break this afternoon, I am going to shorten that to 10 minutes.
If you do that, if you cut your two coffee breaks, morning and afternoon, by 5 minutes each, you will have picked up 2.1 percent of the production, almost the same thing that the illegal labor represents. Ten minutes a day out of an 8 hour shift of America, that is how much we would be missing. Yet I hear Chicken Little, oh, we can't get along without this labor. We must have it. If we don't have it, the economy will collapse.
It will not collapse, Madam Speaker. We can adapt to it easily. We have taken years to get here, at least 20 years to evolve into this circumstance that we are today, and we can evolve away from that, away from the dependency, away from this addiction, away from this methadone of illegal labor that we have in America, and it will not be that hard to do.
Also there are 6.9 million working illegals in America, but then the argument is, well, but we have unemployment at essentially record low rates of 4.6 percent. Well, that is nice. That is effectively a very low unemployment rate. It is not the lowest. It is not record low unemployment. In World War II, we had a 1.3 percent unemployment rate then.
But it is about 4.6, and they will say you can't get enough workers out of the unemployment rolls to fill the gap we need for this labor. Well, maybe you can't, and probably in fact I will say certainly you can't.
I will say also going into the welfare rolls, we couldn't hire all of them. Many of them would not be employable. If we could hire half of them and if we could hire half of those on unemployment, we still wouldn't put a very significant dent in that 6.9 million labor force.
But I can tell you, Madam Speaker, that going to look at the Department of Labor statistics, it shows an entirely different story. If you were going to place a factory in a location, you wouldn't simply look at the unemployment rate in that location and determine how many people there were to hire. You would hire a consulting company, and that company would go in and survey the area and determine the available labor force that was in the area. This is a standard known practice in all business and industry. The consulting firm would identify the available labor.
I went into the Department of Labor Statistics to determine the available labor supply in America, and I began to add up the different categories of age groups. 16 to 19 year olds, we have 9.3 million non-
working 16 to 19 year olds in America. Now, not even part-time. Some of these are part-time jobs. And so I start there, because that is where young people learn their work ethic.
As I add up these age categories from 16 on up to 19, and then from 20 to 24 and the list goes on up the line, and I got to 65 and I had to make a decision, and I looked around and concluded that Wal-Mart hires up to 74 years old, so I added them all up to that. One of the reasons I am going to confess, Madam Speaker, is because it was a convenient number I could memorize. It is not substantially changed if you lower the number down to 65.
But it works like this: 6.9 million working illegal laborers in America could be replaced by hiring one out of ten of the 69 million workers in America who are simply not in the workforce.
What Nation would ignore 69 million people not in the workforce and go and bring people in from another country? That would be like having a lifeboat with that percentage of people on it, and deciding you needed some more people to pull on the oars, and having all of those people up there in steerage riding along, and no, it wouldn't occur to us to go up and say come on down here and grab ahold of that oar. Why don't we pull off on an island and see if we can't recruit some more people, load them in the lifeboat, and maybe 7 out of 12 of them will row. That is what it amounts to, Madam Speaker.
So we have not been very objective in this. There is also a tremendous amount of crime, and the victims of that crime, it has been a tremendous price paid here in the United States. We talk about it very little, but every day there are American citizens that die violently at the hands of criminal aliens who are in this country and who, if we had enforced the laws, with not be here.
I had a gentleman say to me today, there isn't a shred of evidence that illegal immigrants commit crimes at any greater rate than average Americans do. But the truth is, Madam Speaker, there is a tremendous amount of evidence that they do.
In fact, the numbers work out to be that in the United States, the violent death rate is 4.28 per 100,000 annually. In Mexico, it is 13.2 per 100,000. That is a solid three-plus times greater violent death rate in Mexico. And Mexico is the most peaceful nation south of our border that I can identify. Honduras has nine times the violent death rate. El Salvador's is not published, but we know it is very high. If you go to Colombia, their violent death rate compared to the United States is 15.4 times higher.
So if you bring people from that society, of course they are going to commit more crimes. They are committed in their home country. They bring that culture with them. Also, $65 billion worth of illegal drugs pour across that southern border every year, brought in by these elements.
I am not here to say that they are all bad people. No, the vast majority of them are very good people looking for a better life for their families. But they have a higher percentage of violence among them, even as good people, than the average American that is here, and we are paying a price of about 12 Americans a day who lose their life as victims of murder to criminal aliens, about 13 a day who die at the hands of negligent homicide, mostly the victims of drunk drivers, not the drunks themselves.
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That is the magnitude of this, Madam Speaker. And I recognize by the clock I am in a position where I need to say thank you for the privilege of addressing you on the floor of the House of Representatives
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