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“THE EFFECTS OF MULTICULTURALISM AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION ON OUR NATION” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2163-H2171 on May 4, 2006.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE EFFECTS OF MULTICULTURALISM AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION ON OUR NATION
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to come to the floor of this Congress, as always, an opportunity to say a few words to you and a few words to the American people at the same time.
We have completed a fair amount of our work here in this Congress this week, and some folks are on their way home and some are on their way to other points around the globe to get better informed about some of the locations so that we can do a better job of doing our jobs here. We will, many of us, gather information over the weekend, come back and speak up. And you will hear next week, Mr. Speaker, the voices from all across this Nation as it was envisioned by our Founding Fathers, that we represent the people from our districts, we listen to them.
They did not envision that we would be going home as many weekends as we do because they had not had the advent of air travel when they constructed this Constitution and envisioned this great deliberative body that we have the profound blessing to serve in.
But they did envision that we would be the ear that would listen to the people. And we owe them our best judgment. We owe them our due diligence. We owe them 100 percent of our responsibility to listen, learn, think, reason, rationalize, and establish the framework of a belief system, that the issues and the opinions of the people in our districts would ask for us to reflect of their character as well, and then bring the specifics here to this Congress and, with due diligence, try to shape a policy that can be agreed upon here by a majority vote, most of the time a majority vote in this Chamber, although sometimes we do have a suspension calendar that takes a two-thirds majority to pass.
This Nation, Mr. Speaker, is involved in a very intense national debate on what some will say is the issue of immigration, but those people are really trying to obfuscate the issue because the issue really is illegal immigration.
I have not heard debate in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, about legal immigration. In fact, we seem to be universal in our support of legal immigrants who come here to the United States. They do it the right way. They follow the legal channels, those people that want to come here for a better life, and understand that the welcome mat that has always been rolled out here in America is rolled out for legal immigrants today. We encourage them to come, and we encourage them to engage in American life and to throw themselves into it with all their heart and all their soul and to assimilate into this American way of being. And the more quickly it can happen, the more effective they can be. The more quickly they learn the English language, the more quickly and effectively they can access this economy and be a more productive member of this economy and this society, Mr. Speaker. And that is the way it has been since the beginning of this Nation, as people came here searching for their dream.
Some came as indentured servants. I think it would be my great, great, great, great, great grandfather, if I track it correctly. Five greats, Mr. Speaker, who came over here as an indentured servant in 1759. And he owed, I believe, 7 years of work in the stables that he had signed up to work in to pay for his passage and the privilege to be here on this continent, not really as an American at that point but as a subject of the British Crown. And not that many years later after that 1759 or perhaps it was 1757 year date, the United States of America issued the Declaration of Independence, and we at that point became a free Nation and he became a free person. Raised 17 children here. They started out in Baltimore, Maryland, and they grew and scattered out across this country all the way across America. And their legacy is there today: hard work, integrity, Christian values, and a sense of family and decency.
He was part of the original foundation of this great American culture that we have. The great American culture that has this belief that, yes, we believe in the foundational principles of our Constitution and the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that are in our Declaration, and we believe that those rights do come from God and they are in our Declaration of Independence. That is the guarantee as they pass through our Declaration. We have a sacred covenant with our Founding Fathers, who essentially codified those rights that are granted to us from God, put it in the Declaration, and transferred those rights over to the Constitution of the United States and set a standard for the world that had never been matched before, Mr. Speaker.
And so those standards began on the Mayflower. They began with the earliest settlers here in America. And the shape and the character of America took place, and they created in those years the beginnings of this great American culture, this great American civilization.
And I sometimes go before high school groups and middle school groups and I will ask them the question: Do you believe that the United States of America is the unchallenged greatest nation in the world?
Very few of them raise their hands and say, yes, I believe that, because they have been conditioned to believe that all cultures are equal, that there is a multiculturalism belief and a diversity belief that you do not set yourself up above anyone else.
And I will argue, Mr. Speaker, that we are not in the business of downgrading anyone or being critical of anyone. We are in the business of trying to upgrade ourselves. And if we are going to upgrade ourselves as an American civilization, then we have got to realize who we are, we have got to realize how we came about being these people we are, and we have got to then take a look at where do we stand on this spectrum of the different civilizations and cultures in the world, not just contemporarily around the globe, Mr. Speaker, but also throughout history. Where do we stand as a culture and are we a people that have risen to a point where we are the unchallenged greatest nation in the world?
We are the world's only superpower, and I think that is inarguable. But what about our character? What about our culture? What about our civilization? What has made us great?
And that question came to me, and it came to me about 10 years as I was serving in the Iowa senate and I happened to be reading through the Iowa code, and in there, there is a chapter on education. I read through that chapter, and I would not recommend just reading through any State code or the Federal code, for that matter. It is like reading the phone book of New York City. But I was doing that, and I came across a chapter on education. And in there it said each child in Iowa shall receive a nonsexist, multicultural, global education. Well, that all sounds really good. It sounds good to the ear today, and it sounded good to most ears back then in about 1997 when I first raised this issue.
But as I read that, it occurred to me that we had put into the law in the State of Iowa that we were going to teach political correctness to all of our children that went to our accredited schools in the State. That included our public schools and our accredited parochial schools, or religious schools, that each child shall receive a nonsexist, multicultural, global education.
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Now, I am not advocating that we teach a non-global, non-
multicultural sexist education. I am arguing that there is another viewpoint here not being exposed to our children. And it came to me last night as I sat at a table with five college students and began to discuss some of these issues with them. The ideas that I think are endemic in our civilization and culture, the ideas that made us great seem to be foreign to them.
The value system, not that they are not good people, they are good people and I really like this generation, but their education isn't grounded in the same things that my education was grounded in.
So as I looked at that section in that chapter of education in the code, multicultural, non-sexist global education, it occurred to me we didn't need to be impelling and compelling that to be taught to our children.
So what would I like them to be taught? I took out a bill draft form and I struck a line through there to strike out the ``multicultural non-sexist'' global, because I didn't want that to be a mandate. I wanted room there to teach other things as well. You can't teach multiculturalism and teach this American civilization in a way you understand them both if you are going to exclude one.
So I wanted to find a way that we could teach that perspective that was more objective than the one that was proscribed in the Iowa code. So I drafted a piece of legislation that today I call ``The God and Country Bill.'' And it says like this: Each child in Iowa, we strike that language out, each child in Iowa shall be taught that the United States of America, of which Iowa is a vital constituent part, is the unchallenged, greatest Nation in the world, and that we derive our strength from Christianity, free enterprise capitalism, and Western Civilization.
Now, Mr. Speaker, that might sound like an arrogant statement for a State code to have in it, but I put those words out there for a reason. I wanted to challenge people to come with maybe a competing idea. Instead, I filed the bill and they didn't come with a competing idea, they came with name calling. So I sat there at my desk and I wrote down each one of the names that they called me and typed them up and laminated them and put them in my desk, and I have those names to this day. And they are all printable names, but none of them are constructive and I won't put them into this Congressional Record.
But I would just state I will stand on that statement. I would maybe expand the statement that our first value is our Christian values, I might say our Judeo-Christian values, and that doesn't exclude the contributions of other religions, but what it does say is this is the predominant philosophy that shaped the American culture, is our Judeo-
Christian values, the foundation of our beliefs that are in the Bible, in the Old and in the New Testament, and our belief that when we commit a sin against mankind, we should confess that sin and repent and ask forgiveness. That is part of our culture.
If we wrong our neighbor, what is the best thing to do? What if one of our children was playing baseball in the backyard and they hit the ball through the neighbor's window? We would send them over there and say, you need to go over there and confess that you broke the window, and you need to also ask forgiveness, and you have got to repent. So you say I broke your window, and repent, you say I am sorry. Then you say can I make it right with you. Will you forgive me.
That is a Christian value, Mr. Speaker. That is as clear an example as we can have of a Christian value. It is the core of the character of the American people today, and many of the things we do. We know what is right. What is right is in our culture. We don't always do what is right, but we know what is right. That foundation, the free enterprise capitalism foundation and the Western Civilization foundation.
But to explain this and to explain what kind of a nation we are and how we came about being this great Nation we are comes back to these core values of Judeo-Christianity, free enterprise capitalism, Western Civilization.
I would argue it this way, Mr. Speaker, that in the beginning of Western Civilization, you had during the Greek period of time, when they had the Age of Reason, and during the Age of Reason the Greeks took great pride in being able to rationalize their way through. They set up the hypothesis. They set up the theorem. They set up a means to be rational in a deductive reasoning approach so that they could begin to establish science and begin to establish technology. The Greeks took great pride in that.
They sat around and reasoned. Some of them sat around in their cloaks and reasoned all day long, and the philosophy that grew from that was the foundation of Western Civilization.
So civilization began to make progress because they weren't any longer just a group of people that were moving because they had an emotion that drove them or an irrational emotional button that was pushed. That was part of the Greek civilization, too.
And a little aside on this, Mr. Speaker, is that the Greeks did have as pure a form of democracy as the world had seen, at least at that time, and our Founding Fathers rejected that form of pure democracy. Because what they saw was in the Greek city states, where every man of age could vote, they gathered together in the coliseum, or in the city hall you might say today, and they debated the great issues over the day. And some of the great orators had the ability to sway massive numbers of people. And if they were so compelling in their oration that they could move people perhaps in a direction that wasn't good for the city state, of, say, Sparta, for example, or Athens, and so the people in those communities understood that they didn't always do the thing that was right because they were sometimes led by emotion.
So the Greeks being, in the Age of Reason, so rational, that they identified the folks that led them wrongly by emotion rather than rightly by reason and those people were identified as demagogues. And a demagogue who was leading a city state down the wrong path was occasionally put up for a vote, for a black ball. And if any of you have been involved in Greek life on campus, that black ball still exists today on campus. And if that demagogue received three black balls from three members of the community, they said we need you to leave, he would be banished from the city state for 7 years, couldn't come back, couldn't be there to give any great oratorical speeches, couldn't get them to charge like lemmings into the sea and do things that were irrational, not in the great Age of Reason of the beginnings of Western Civilization in the Greek city states. That is one of the little side notes that happens.
But the rationale that came from Western Civilization, the deductive reasoning that came from Western Civilization, grew from a real commitment to be logical, to be rational, and to also always build for an a greater good.
This Western Civilization then that flowed and grew out of Greece began to travel through the known world at that period of time, and it migrated its way over into Western Europe and arrived there at the Age of Enlightenment.
The Age of Enlightenment then, and I have to give the French some credit because they seem to be the center of the Age of Enlightenment, that is when technology took hold, building upon Western Civilization, on the Western Civilization foundation of the Age of Reason, was built the Age of Enlightenment. And that Age of Enlightenment was the foundation for the industrial era.
As the industrial era grew, so did the population over in the 13 original colonies here in the United States on this soil that we stand on today, Mr. Speaker.
We are the beneficiaries on this continent of two great movements in history, the Western Civilization and the Age of Enlightenment. Those two things coupled together, the Western Civilization that flowed through the Age of Enlightenment, the leg of this three-legged stool, found its way here on the new world, North American continent, where we had unfettered free enterprise capitalism, where you could come over here and invest a dollar, invest your sweat equity, you could have an idea, you could take a chance, you could go out and blaze a trail into the wilderness, and if you wanted to trade for furs or cut some timber or start a farm or trade with Native Americans or maybe get a job, as George Washington did, surveying some of this land, all of those opportunities were open in this new world.
And there wasn't a limitation on the potential, there was no restriction, there was no class system that restrained us. This land had, aside from the Native Americans, that did not really fight over the land, but believed that land ownership for the most part wasn't their province, the land had not been fought over as a piece of property like a commodity like Europe had been. So the legacy of that friction and resentment didn't exist either.
But what did exist here in this land that we stand on and in the 13 original colonies and then growing to the West in manifest destiny was a belief in Western Civilization, deductive reasoning, the Age of Enlightenment, free enterprise capitalism, many times no taxation, many times no regulation, unfettered free enterprise.
What a dynamic team to have, Mr. Speaker, Western Civilization coupled with the Age of Enlightenment at the beginning of the industrial age, coupled with this unfettered free enterprise capitalism with low taxes and low regulations, in fact no taxes and no regulation in many cases. Binded together, it was the most dynamic economy that the world had ever seen.
And the vision of manifest destiny began to blaze the trails out across the west and settled this continent clear to the Pacific Ocean. As this country grew and we believed in manifest destiny and reached out, this dynamic organism of the United States of America would have become, in my opinion, one of the most aggressive, unrestrained, imperialistic nations ever in the history of the world if we weren't constrained by our Judeo-Christian values.
But the Judeo-Christian values functioned as a governor on us, a governor like on an engine that keeps it from racing too fast, running too many RPMs and blowing the engine up eventually. This governor was our moral values, our faith.
And this Nation that was founded on the faith, the Judeo-Christian and mostly the Christian faith, believed that we had a moral obligation to our fellow man. It believed that we needed to help ourselves up the ladder and help others up the ladder with us, the idea to reach out and lend a hand and teach a man to fish and each one of us to stand on our own two feet and reach out and help the others. A means to reach across to, in this case it would be to the aisle, reach across to your neighbor and offer them a helping hand, but demand from them the things that they could provide, their responsibilities for work, their responsibilities to contribute to this society.
We had some socialist experiments on this continent too and they didn't do too well. Some of those socialist experiments, in fact, all of them at one point or another, reached their end because in the end, we realized here in smaller experiments rather than going to large experiments like the Soviet Union or Communist China, that the sum total of the strength of a nation is, at least in part, the individual productivity of all of its people added up one person at a time. All of the productivity of us all together represents the strength of a nation, and people produce better and more productively if they are doing that for themselves.
And the people in this country are the most generous people anywhere on the globe, because they work hard, they earn what they have, but they are glad to share it with people in need. That is also our religious foundation, our Christian faith, our Judeo-Christian values that tie that altogether.
So I hope, Mr. Speaker, that I have described how this worked, this unfettered free enterprise capitalism that grew from Western Civilization in the science and the technology and the Age of Enlightenment and the industrial revolution era with this voracious appetite to grow and produce and explore manifest destiny, but controlled by the most powerful and profound moral values that come to any civilization in the history of the world, our Judeo-Christian faith, rooted in the Bible, reflected in our Declaration of Independence, and those values that show up in the Constitution, even though they aren't specifically listed within the Constitution.
So, this great Nation that we are a part of, this legacy, this history, needs to be taught to our young people. And the American people have to think about who we are. How did we get here? What are we formed from? What are we shaped from?
I have described some of that, Mr. Speaker, in the God and country bill, Judeo-Christian values, free enterprise capitalism, Western Civilization. This combination, coupled on this land, a land that didn't have a legacy of bloodshed for the land, joined together with these wonderful natural resources from sea to shining sea, that is America.
When I see the Statue of Liberty, I know it has been a beacon for people across the world. And as they see that statue and the image that is there, you will not find a country anywhere on the globe where you don't have significant numbers of people who want to come here, want to live here, want to make their future here in the United States. And that image is this image of freedom, this image of opportunity, that has existed for more than 200 years, and it continues to exist in different forms.
But sometimes we lose track of who we are. Sometimes we lose track of how we got here. We have an ongoing debate in this country continually of what is giving us strength, what has made us strong.
I, Mr. Speaker, have tried to define that so that it is an understandable analysis. Others will say well, no, we really aren't the greatest Nation in the world. We really have a lot of things we ought to apologize for, because we have been violent and we have sent our military around the world and we should feel guilty about that because we did it for selfish purposes. And then that is when the debate begins.
But I don't think we have anything to apologize for. Wherever we have gone in the world, we have left a peaceful legacy and we have left a positive legacy and we have been proud enough of who we are that we left a way of life there that has been beneficial to the people who have been visited by our soldiers and our Marine Corps.
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And one of those examples would be in the Philippines. I recall a speech that was given here in Washington, D.C. a couple of years ago by the President of the Philippines, President Arroyo. And I do not think she knew that she was speaking to at least one Member of Congress in that scenario.
But she said to the group that was gathered in the hotel here in Washington, D.C., she said, thank you America. Thank you for sending the Marine Corps to the Philippines in 1898. Thank you for liberating us.
Thank you for teaching us your way of life. Thank you for sending the priests over there to teach us your religion. Thank you for sending 10,000 American teachers over to the Philippines to teach us all of the academics that you did, to teach us your way of life, and to teach us the English language.
Thank you for the English language, because today we speak English in the Philippines, as a result of the Spanish-American War, 1898, and today they have 1.6 million Filipinos who go anywhere in the world that they choose to go, they can get a job there, they can work there, and they send their money back to the Philippines, creating a significant portion of the gross domestic product.
Another example would be, last night I had the great privilege to sit down and have dinner with a group, a delegation from the Japanese legislature. We have an exchange program that has gone on here, and this is my fourth year to have the privilege to sit down with them.
It is interesting to me that I sat down for the first time I met Minister Ono here in this city. And at the time he was the Minister of Defense for Japan.
My father spent 2\1/2\ years in the South Pacific and came back home from there weighing 115 pounds; not on a very good ration, is the way he put it. It was quite interesting to me that I had the privilege more than 60 years later to sit down and have dinner with the Minister of Defense for Japan.
If there was a hatchet there to be buried, it has been buried a long time ago. And there was a hatchet to be buried. And we are joined together now not as allies for strategic purposes, which we are, but we are trading partners and we are friends. And, yes, we have our disagreements, and so do brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and fathers and sons and mothers and daughters.
We have our disagreements, but we are trading partners and we are friends; we are good for each other's economy. They have a way of life. They have a constitutional system in Japan, and their result in the aftermath of World War II has been that they have become a modern nation with high productivity. They moved into the modern world.
They are a developed nation today; and no one questions a developed nation, because they have had a good work ethic, they have had a good constitution to work under, and they have a strong belief system, and much of this was structured by General MacArthur after World War II. Another American legacy.
I also point out, Mr. Speaker, that if you look around the world, and ask yourself, where has the English language traveled? And we can see nations, I mentioned a couple of them, and you might look also into India where the English language is prevalent there. You can look across in places in Europe where you sit down at the roundtable in Brussels where now 25 nations of the European Union sit.
The language of debate and discussion at the roundtable, and I have engaged in that debate and discussion, is English. And the documents that are printed by the European Union are predominately English, although there are some exceptions. I think the French language usage there has gone from 57 percent down to about 7 percent of the documents now are in French.
But if you look at the history of the English-speaking peoples, as Winston Churchill did when he wrote his epic novel, ``The History of the English Speaking Peoples,'' as you read that document, it occurs to me, and I do not think he quite says it in the book, but the documentation does as you sum it up, as you read through, wherever the English language has gone, and it has been either Americans or the British people that have taken it around the world, but wherever the English language has been planted, there you will find freedom.
Without exception, I cannot come up with a single nation that speaks English then but does not have freedom, that does not have a representative form of government. And I think that the English language has become a precursor to freedom. In fact, I think that there is not really, some people will say you cannot understand the Bible unless you can understand it in Hebrew or you can understand it in Latin, or you can understand it in Greek, because there are different definitions and connotations that come from different languages.
I will say that I speculate that it might be difficult, in fact it could be impossible to thoroughly understand freedom if you do not understand the English language, because English is the language of freedom. It is the language that has taken freedom throughout the world.
It is the language that has identified these principles that we hold so dear in this Chamber, Mr. Speaker. And it is essential to this country that we bind ourselves together with one common language.
Also when I look around the globe, and I did this test some years ago, I went to an almanac and looked up the flags of all of the nations in the world. And identified all of the nations. Then I went to the
``World Book Encyclopedia,'' which is what I had available to me, and I looked up every one of those nations, because the ``World Book'' will give a list, but it will show what the official language is of each country; you have to look them up one at a time.
I looked up every country in the world. And I wrote down the language, or sometimes languages, the official languages of these countries. And of every country in the world, there by that analysis, every single nation had an official language and probably to this day does under that analysis.
Until I got to the United States of America. We do not have an official language here in the United States; we have a common language, English, but we do not have an official language.
But the rest of the world has understood this. The rest of the world has understood that the most powerful unifying force known to humanity throughout all of history is a common language, a common language that binds everyone together, a language that allows everyone to communicate together quickly and efficiently and precisely without miscommunication, without misunderstanding.
And if it happens your language is Spanish or if it happens to be Swahili, or if it happens to be French or German or whatever it might be, if that language is the language of your country, that is the language that ties you together.
And we have understood that here. And we promoted assimilation for that reason. And we have encouraged the learning of the English language. And the printing of the documents here has been, other than interpretations that run to other countries and for other reasons, has been in English. We have committed to that in this country, as a practice but not as a matter of law.
And I wonder why not. I wonder why it would be that all of the other nations in the world understand that the most powerful unifying force of any civilization is a common language, a common form of communications currency. I used to carry a euro around in my pocket, Mr. Speaker, a 5 euro bill.
Because that is a way to define how they thought they were going to pull together the European Union, print a currency. Well, if you can print a currency and everybody has to do business in that currency, you pull your center together because you identify by the currency that is coming out of your billfold.
And that is the direction that they have been working to go in the European Union is to establish the United States of Europe. They have had some setbacks of late. But yet that idea of tying people together on that common currency was a unifying philosophy.
It did not matter that today with computers you can do the exchange rate instantaneously; you can set up the automatic exchange with your credit card and never have to pay attention to the difference. What mattered was to have that currency, to be able to look at that, to be able to pass that on to the person you are doing business with, and that identifies you as someone from the European Union, whether you are from the Chec Republic or from Ireland or Italy or the Isle of Malta or whatever it might be.
They recognize that, and they tie themselves together in their debate with English as their debate language. But another example would be the Israelis. And they established their nation in 1948, and the U.N. endorsed them, and they fought a war to establish their freedom in 1948.
Their anniversary just came up this week; I believe it was Monday if I am not mistaken. And there, by 1948, and 1954, they concluded they needed to establish an official language of Israel. And so they deliberated, had their debates. They could have chosen English, they could have chosen Russian, they could have chosen German, they could have chosen French, they could have chosen Italian. They had people in that country that spoke all of the languages that we know of or that I know of at least that I can quote to you from this floor, Mr. Speaker.
But they came together and resurrected a language that had not been used as a conversational language or a business language, but only a language of prayer, for the last 2,000 years. They chose Hebrew as the official language of Israel.
And I asked the ambassador from Israel, why did do you that? What brought you to this conclusion? And he said to me, we looked at the United States. And in 1954 we saw the successful model that you were of having a common language that tied you all together, English being that common language. And we learned from that wonderful assimilation success that was established very well in the United States of America.
And we adopted Hebrew as our official language. But they had to resurrect the language, and they had to get it in print, and they had to start to use it, and they actually had to teach themselves how to use Hebrew in conversation and in business aside from the use of Hebrew in prayer.
And it has been a successful experiment. And as I meet with people over in Israel and ask them questions about how it works, when they bring in new immigrants from foreign countries, they bring them in to kind of an apartment complex camp that is there, and they teach them Hebrew.
If they are young enough and if they are literate in their own language, in 6 months they will have enough Hebrew that they can say, good job, now you are ready to go out into the world and make your living here in Israel.
And they send them out. If they come from a country where they are illiterate in their home language, they do not read or write in their home language, then they have great difficulty teaching them Hebrew. So they will teach them to read and write in their own language and then transfer them over into Hebrew.
That takes about 18 months. If you are 45 or 50 years old, you get 18 months to learn Hebrew, and you are out into the world, go ahead and make a go of it. People do that. They are successful. And it has been extraordinarily successful to tie the Israeli people together.
If you remember the raid on Entebbe, when things needed to happen fast and you needed to identify a fellow countryman, even if it is in the dark, if you yelled to somebody to get down in Hebrew, they are going to hit the deck, and it is likely going to save their life; and I believe it did under the circumstances.
So Israel learned from the United States' lesson. All of the other countries in the world had an official language. Israel chose one. They chose Hebrew. We have English here. If it happened to be some other language, I would be for that other language being our official language.
I received some disagreements from the Catholic Church in that we did not need to move forward with establishing an official language in the United States. And so I went ahead to my ``World Book Encyclopedia.'' And I looked up the Vatican. And I found out in the Vatican that there are two official languages there, Latin and Italian.
They seem to get along just fine with official languages in the Vatican. And we can get along better with an official language here in the United States.
I would submit that that is part of our debate, Mr. Speaker, and I believe that we should bring that forward and establish English as the official language of the United States of America to uncomplicate our future, to pull us together as a people, to reduce the divisions between us, to put incentives in place for people to learn English so that they have an opportunity to succeed in this society, and to send the message to the world that we are one people with one cause and one history, bound together by a common history, by a common experience, bound together by a common official language, that official language of English.
One of the reasons that we have not been able to accomplish this as a matter of policy here in this Congress is, in my belief, Mr. Speaker, that there has been this division that I mentioned in the early part of this discussion, the division that grows from multiculturalism and diversity, that grows from the idea that we cannot set our culture our civilization up above anyone else's.
Well, as I look around the world, there are societies that are in far worse condition than we are in. Why is everyone looking at us for help, for some type of salvation? Could it be that we have some dynamics here within this culture and this civilization that really do set us above and beyond? It does not mean we have to walk around with our noses in the air. It does not mean that we have to be the ugly American.
In fact, we have a greater responsibility and a greater duty to reach out to the rest of the world and try to teach them to fish and try to share with them our values, a rule of law, our Judeo-Christian values, that work ethic that we have, the way that we pull together and respect this rule of law, the foundation of our Constitution and the rights, the freedoms, the freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly.
The right to keep and bear arms in this country, and that right is such an essential right, it seems to be the only place in the world where it is sacrosanct. It must be and it must remain so.
Those values that bind us together to make us great as a people are the values that we can export to the rest of the world. We need to be proud of who we are in order to do that.
And if I look at the operations going on over in Iraq, and I see the configuration that has been recommended to them by the State Department, and I question whether we had confidence in who we are when we encouraged the Iraqis to establish the voting districts that they have there in Iraq. And so what we have are representatives there who are defined as representatives who are Kurds, representatives who are Shiias, representatives who are Sunnis, then there is a 25 percent requirement that 25 percent of all the candidates elected shall be female.
And so putting that configuration in there and not allowing just regions to be defined without regard to religion or ethnicity, or sex for that matter, and not allowing them to be defined that way sets up representatives. And they know that there are only six categories, if you are represented in the newly seated parliament of Iraq. I am grateful that we finally watched the Iraqis choose a prime minister.
And I am looking forward to Prime Minister Talabani pulling together that government and naming his cabinet. But they know that they represent, they are either a Kurd, a Kurdish female, a Sunni, or a Sunni female, or a Shiia, or a Shiia female. That is the six categories.
They know they are there to represent their ethnic group. And I have to believe that the women who are there know that they are there to represent women. And I would like to think that if they would have just simply carved up Iraq into representative districts without regard to religion, without regard to ethnicity, without regard to what sex, and let people run for office and guarantee them equal opportunity as individuals, like we do here in America, I have to believe that there would have been a different kind of mix in the parliament.
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I know from my own experience that in the district that I represent there are people that are on the right and people that are on the left. I have sat down and talked with both of them, reasoned with both of them, compromised those disagreements that come, and come with a policy and come to this Congress as a voice for all the people in my district. So if there is a conflict that needs to be resolved, it is more likely to get resolved back in the 5th District of Iowa than it is to be brought here and create more disagreement here in this Congress.
If I simply were a representative of the conservative wing of the party representing the 5th District of Iowa, I would not have an ear then for the people on the other side of the aisle. If I were a representative of, say, for example, the Catholic church in the 5th District of Iowa, and that is the viewpoint that comes if you are a Shi'a or if you are a Sunni, then you know which wing of Islam that you come from. You are there to represent that wing of Islam.
So if I came here as a Catholic conservative and did not listen to anyone else and I had a full constituency base that was always chosen just to support me, my position is going to be more aggressive than it would be if I had to go home and meet all the groups and answer to all of the different divisions of viewpoints.
In Iraq, it is segregated now, and the voices in that parliament will be more partisan than they would have been otherwise. It will be more divisive than it would have been otherwise, because they configured them based upon religion, ethnicity and also sex rather than upon the geography that might have done a better job to put more moderation into their parliament.
We have our values here in this country, and we exported them to places like the Philippines and places like Japan, but I wonder if we had enough confidence in who we are as a people, Mr. Speaker, to export those values to places like Iraq or did we retreat from that? Did we lose our self-confidence? Are we afraid to teach the English language, the language of freedom, in Iraq? Are we afraid to bring our free enterprise capitalism there? Are we afraid to bring our Western civilization values and give Iraq an opportunity to learn from Americans?
I gave a speech to the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce late last summer. As I walked into the room, they were introducing me to give the speech; and it was a bit of a hurry. I said, hold it, because I wanted to be introduced through my interpreter first. They said, you do not have an interpreter, so we are going to introduce you. I said, well, I do not speak Arabic. They said, it is not necessary; all of the people here in the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce speak English.
They did, and I could tell, because they laughed at the right times, they responded at the right times, they applauded at the times I would say was appropriate.
Afterwards, they crowded around with their business cards. They could not get enough conversation with a Westerner, with an American with some business background who had come to Baghdad to wish them well and to help guide them. They were looking for advice, listening carefully.
We have a lot to give, a lot to offer, and they are a sponge to absorb it, and they will pick up a lot of these values.
The American Chamber of Commerce that is over there actively are doing great things. We just need more people to be involved in the people business. We need to be more proud of who we are, Mr. Speaker, and yet we have so little confidence in what has made us great that we cannot bring ourselves to do some of the simple things like enforce our immigration laws.
I have watched since 1986 when President Reagan signed the amnesty bill, and first they said it was maybe 1.3 million people. Now we hear they really amnestied about 3 million people or about 3.5 million people. And the argument was, well, we cannot find these 1.3 or maybe 3 million people. We cannot find them. We do not know what to do about it. We cannot get them out of the shadows and into a bus to go back to their home countries. So what we need to do is have stepped-up enforcement for those that will try to come afterwards, and we will just give them amnesty. That solves the problem.
President Reagan, in one of the few times he let me down, signed the amnesty bill in 1986 with a great big hard promise of enforcement.
I remember the fear of that enforcement. I was hiring employees at the time. I took their I-9 form and I watched them fill it out carefully and asked them for their identification, for their driver's license and Social Security card at least, as a minimum, and I put that on the copy machine. I scrutinized it. I put it on the copy machine, took a copy of the driver's license, Social Security number, asked them a series of questions about their origins and who they were and where they had come from and took that I-9 form, put that copy in there, and I carefully filed it with their job application form if we put them on and hired them. Because I was just sure that around the corner was an INS agent, Immigration and Naturalization Service agent, who would be there to audit my books to take a look at the nationalities of the employees that I hired in the construction business and to see if we had done everything exactly right.
I had fear of enforcement of the INS in 1986, and I still had it in 1987, 1988. Maybe by 1990, by then I had just about forgotten about the idea that there was a threat that there would be an INS audit because I had not heard of any out there.
Now there were some back in those days, but I will say, Mr. Speaker, that from 1986 when the amnesty bill was signed, and they called it amnesty, from that point on there was an accelerated enforcement. From that point on, that enforcement went down, diminishing over 20 years where we get to this point in 2006 up until just a few weeks ago, there was zero enforcement. No employers were sanctioned under penalty of law in 2004. There were some allegations there were three in 2005. I cannot identify which companies those are, and I am not sure whether it is truth or rumor. If it only averages 1.5 companies a year in a Nation of 283 million people, then I would submit that that is not enforcement at all.
So we are not enforcing employer sanctions, and we are not enforcing domestic enforcement. People can go out on the streets and not be questioned as to their lawful presence in the United States. We have city after city in America that are passing sanctuary policies that forbid their law officers from inquiring into the lawful presence of the people that they stop in traffic stops and accidents or that they incarcerate for other crimes. We have news of people in this country who are incarcerated in our prisons without any idea whether they are citizens or whether they are not. No one wants to ask the question.
We are so intimidated by somehow or another this civilization of guilt that because America is a nation of immigrants that we cannot have a rational immigration policy. But I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that America is a nation of immigrants. I would ask the question of Americans. Name a nation that is not a nation of immigrants.
In fact, as I had a discussion with a historian, a Japanese historian, last evening, he talked about how they have a better understanding of the migration that came into Japan and the ethnic groups that make up the very homogeneous Japanese people today, but they come from, some of them, different origins, and they have been blended together on that island as a homogeneous people, but still they are immigrants, some generations, many generations ago.
The same goes for here in the United States. The same goes for Native Americans who came across the Bering Strait, by most accounts, perhaps 12,000 years ago. They were immigrants then, Mr. Speaker, and they were here first, yes.
But I do not think anybody asked Christopher Columbus when he discovered America, did you just consider touching bases there on the continent and then pulling back out of there and decided to leaving the Western hemisphere to be, let us say, preserved for indigenous people or what was Western civilization to do with this huge twin land masses and resources that we have?
It defies logic to think that somehow Western civilization would have just pulled off, said, hands off, no, we found indigenous people here. They migrated here a time ahead of us. We are not going to challenge that or try to use the resources. We are just going to make it a big preserve for Native Americans to live here happily ever after.
That was not going to be the case. The forces of history defined this Nation, and the alternatives can be argued plus or minus along the way. The result might have been configured a little bit differently, but there was going to be population growth. There was going to be a modern civilization built here, and if it had to be built by somebody, who better than the descendants of Western Europe, who better than the people who believed in free enterprise capitalism, Western civilization and Judeo-Christian values so that we could build this great Nation out of these strengths? Who better, I would submit, Mr. Speaker?
So this great Nation has been built from those values, and we are a nation of immigrants, as all nations are nations of immigrants. We should be proud of who we are. We should be proud of our heritage. We should welcome people into this society in a legal fashion, and we should ask them, we should compel them to join in this great experience and this great experiment that we are by assimilating into this society and into civilization.
For to come here to America and move into an ethnic enclave and not learn the English language and not move out of that enclave into the broader society but simply to live there for generation after generation is not being an American at all. That is the transplant of the donor culture to the host culture in the form of an enclave, and it is not constructive to the broader society.
It does not mean you have to give up your culture. I mean, we know that. We appreciate the great variety of subcultures we have here in America, and it is an ever-growing and changing thing.
And I would say also, Mr. Speaker, that we have an extra blessing. The filter system that we have had here in America for immigrants is something we do not talk about very much. But, by and large, throughout history, the people who came to the United States legally came here and I think knew why they came here. They knew what they wanted to leave. They wanted to leave the tyranny of the Kaiser, for example; they wanted to access religious freedom; they wanted opportunity; they appreciated the privilege of freedom of speech, religion and the press, all of those values. And sometimes the poverty, sometimes the potato famine, sometimes the fear, sometimes the persecution of a family or the political persecution of a belief or a persecution of their religious beliefs, those reasons drove people, and poverty is another motivator, to come to the United States.
They took great chances to come to this country. They staked their claim on this soil. They built their future here. They were grateful for the hospitality, grateful for the opportunity, but they also were the vigor of the donor societies. The cream of the crop often came to the United States, and that vitality that we have is much the product of voluntary immigration, who sacrificed a lot and took great risks to come here.
We find ourselves today in a little bit different kind of scenario. We have rolled out a red carpet across our southern border, and we refuse to enforce our border on the south, and we have immigration laws. We ask people to respect our laws, but 58 percent of the people on the south side of the border believe they have a right to come to the United States. They believe they have a right to come here. And if they believe that, Mr. Speaker, then we are not doing a very good job of conveying our sovereignty.
We have become a Nation without a southern border. An average of 11,000 people a day pour across our southern border, and our border patrol manages to stop perhaps a fourth of them, maybe on a good day as many as a third of them, but they reported for 2004 that they stopped on our southern border 1,159,000. For 2005, that number comes out to somewhere in the area of this statistical extrapolation of 1,188,000.
Now, most of them were told to go back home, go to their home country. Many were taken down to the port of entry and said go back. Some, and I will say also many others, were caught and released on their own recognizance, released perhaps on a promise to go back to their home country, Mr. Speaker.
But that is no border enforcement. The last time I went to the border, I was advised that the catch-and-release plan meant we catch them up to seven times before we adjudicate anybody if they do not have some other crime. So we will stop that same person six times, and on the seventh time then we will forcibly put them under control and perhaps take them back to their home country.
I have gotten reports that as many as 20 times there will be a single individual that is caught and released, as much as 20 times. There is smuggling that goes across our border, this huge human haystack, 4 million strong, pouring across our southern border in a given year; and out of that 4 million, our administration's policy is we are going to sort the needle out of that haystack, and needles will be the criminals and the terrorists and the people that threaten our American safety and way of life.
So with good border control and with good surveillance and with a virtual fence that the administration talks about, we are going to somehow shine a spotlight on this huge haystack of 4 million humans, and in there we are going to try to pick out these needles that represent the drug dealers and the rapists and the murderers and the terrorists.
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Well, I just can't imagine sorting out those needles out of a haystack while the hay is being picked out of my hair. That is what we are asking the Border Patrol to do, Mr. Speaker. It cannot work. It cannot be effective. We must shut off this human tide at the border, we must enforce our border, we must seal it up tight and then have ports of entry where we have good control and good surveillance in order to keep our trade open with Mexico, in order to have good relationships there.
Good fences make good neighbors. We can build a good fence on the border, and we can do so so that it is effective. When people say, no, fences don't work, I argue that fences don't work because, after all, we have seen pictures of people jumping over them and we have seen tunnels that have been tunneled underneath them, Mr. Speaker, but we also know people can fly over them in airplanes and go around them in boats. But if you can increase the transaction cost, if you raise the level of difficulty, you are going to find that there will be many people that won't try and fewer people will be successful.
Before barbwire was invented, cowboys rode their herds. They were out there making sure that they kind of kept the cattle turned in the same direction so they didn't get split up and taken out by predators and they didn't lose them in the process. So as the cattle moved across the range, they would go out and just ride herd and nudge them back in so they could keep a head count on them and keep them together.
Then somebody invented barbwire, and those cowboys that loved to ride their horses, they got down on their cowboy boots with post hole diggers and they set posts and they strung wire and they drove staples and they built fences. And not because they liked building fences better than herding cattle or better than they liked riding their horses. They built fences because it was efficient and effective. And then they rode the fence instead of riding the herd.
We can do the same thing on the southern border. We can get the Border Patrol to ride the fence instead of out there chasing around in the desert for 11,000 people a day scattered across in the night trying to bring them together.
We need to build a fence, Mr. Speaker; and we need to end birthright citizenship. This chain migration grows and cannot be controlled if we do not. There are 300,000 to 350,000 babies born in this country to mothers who are illegal in America, that do not have a lawful presence here. But we, by practice, grant them birthright citizenship; and the chain migration begins. That baby then, when it reaches age, can petition for mother and father and siblings to come into the United States.
Now let me submit that I believe that there are not 12 million illegals in this country, because I have been counting the noses of those coming across the southern border. I believe that number has been increasing by as many as 3 million a year for at least the last 3 years, but it is accelerating. So if we have been saying that it has been 11 million people for 3 years, but the number has been accelerating by 3 million a year for the last 3 years, we are at 20 million.
This thing has gone on longer than that. It has gone on longer than 3 years. The 11 million was never an accurate number. You cannot count people who live in the shadows. It is impossible to do so. But let us just say that population today is 11 million, plus 9 million, plus a couple million more, and I will take you up to about 22 million. That is the number I think is the right number of illegals that are here.
If the Senate passes their version of guest worker, this guest worker/temporary worker plan that has three levels of being illegal instead of right and wrong, if they do that and grant a path to citizenship, they are going to grant a path to citizenship to however many might be able to qualify under the standards they set. They are not going to put a quota in there and say, well, if you have been here 5 years or more and we think there are, oh, 3 million of you, we are going to give you a fast path to citizenship.
And what will they do if there are 6 million that show up and say I have been here 5 years or more? They will grant that fast track to citizenship for all those people whatsoever.
If it is 12 million that show up, they will grant that. If it is 22 million that show up, they will grant that. Because the legislation will simply set the criteria. They don't have the foggiest idea of what the numbers are.
Let us just pick my number for extrapolation purposes. Let us say 22 million people here illegally. Their first act was to break the law in the United States. The second act, when they went to work, they broke the law again. It isn't a matter of making criminals out of people that are here illegally because we want to make them felons and we voted to do so in this Congress. They are already criminals by virtue of committing a criminal misdemeanor by violating the immigration laws by coming into the United States illegally. The next act is to get a job, and that is also a crime.
So we have 22 million is my number. We grant them fast track amnesty to citizenship. Those 22 million access citizenship in, say, 5 to 6 years, or whatever it is the Senate might decide. And of course that doesn't mean we will agree in this House, Mr. Speaker, but if that happens, think of 22 million people lined up looking around at their family thinking, well, mom is down here with dad. I am going to invite them both to come and bring the chain migration for mom and dad. And I have my two sisters down here and my brother over here, and I left my 8 year old down in my home country.
I can add this all up, but I don't need to add all these extended families. I just say, try to imagine any one of them not having four family members that they would like to bring here to the United States under chain migration.
Now, take 22 million, multiply it times four, and you have 88 million additional entrants into the United States by virtue of the chain migration that comes from this fast track to citizenship that the Senate wants to give to America. So you add the 22 million to the 88 million and you have, Mr. Speaker, emptied Mexico. You have taken everybody that wants to come from there and brought them here. The people that will be left will be the people that are too senile to travel, too old to work, and people that will asking for a check to be sent down there to take care of them.
Some of them are living like that now, and some of the communities down there have been virtually emptied out of the working-age people. Senior citizens only sitting there waiting for the giant ATM America to zap a portion of the $20 billion that goes to Mexico or the overall $30 billion that goes to Mexico and Central and parts of South America. That is $30 billion out of the wages earned here that are wired down there, and some to be saved in banks for retirement, as they plan on returning back, and some to be spent to maintain the senior citizens that are there, the parents and the extended family members.
What does this do for Mexico if we set up a policy here that draws or magnetizes and attracts every willing person in Mexico and in Central America to come to the United States and empties out their communities and drains them of the flower of their youth and the productivity and the vitality of their Nation? What future then does that country have, particularly Mexico, with the vast natural resources, with the huge quantity of oil, much of it not developed to the extent it should be? This Nation would sit there on a massive supply of natural resources without the human energy, without the skills, without the education, without the technology to develop it.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Something, Mr. Speaker, will fill that vacuum. We have the Chinese that are in Central America today, and they are involved in drilling for oil offshore of Cuba, between Cuba and Florida. They are involved in the Panama Canal. They are looking, I am convinced, at potentially filling a vacuum that could be created.
I submit that we shut off the jobs magnet. I submit that, when we do so, there will be people making a decision to go back to their home country because that opportunity they came for is no longer here. If that happens, Mr. Speaker, we can send back to their home country a very skilled and educated group of people who can transform Mexico and take them into the 21st century.
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