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“THREAT OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA AND MASSIVE UNCONTROLLED IMMIGRATION” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H3196-H3199 on June 14, 2001.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THREAT OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA AND MASSIVE UNCONTROLLED
IMMIGRATION
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Issa). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, today being Flag Day, millions of Americans around the country are honoring the Nation through honoring the flag. Naturally, our thoughts turn to a number of subjects on a day like today.
I just returned from a particularly stirring presentation that was held over in the Cannon Caucus Building for veterans, at which time I was able to give a little bit of a presentation. It was a very powerful event, beautiful music, and a lot of great speeches about the country, about the Nation, about where we are as a Nation and about where we hope to go.
Mr. Speaker, this evening I want to talk about a couple of things that I believe to be the most significant threats this Nation faces; one is an external threat, and that threat is the People's Republic of China.
I characterize that nation as a threat, because of the actions taken by the Chinese, not just in the recent past, by the forcing down of one of our planes, but I suggest that China is a threat to the United States and can be identified as such as a result of analyzing China's history and its most recent actions together.
China is a nation with a very long history of aggressive behavior; that behavior is often activated by grievances, both actual grievances and perceived and contrived.
It is motivated by a sort of raging nationalism that finds expression in expanding its borders in xenophobia. I believe that the best way to successfully deal with China is to understand these realities and to fashion a foreign policy accordingly.
Later on, I will discuss what I believe to be the other most significant threat to the United States and that is internally. It is not a foreign threat, it is an internal threat, and that is massive uncontrolled immigration into this country, both legal and illegal.
I recognize that both of these subjects are quite controversial. Both of these subjects always engender a lot of emotion and a lot of discussion. The latter, the issue of immigration, does not get much attention on this floor, because there is a fear, a natural fear, on the part of a lot of people, a lot of my colleagues to address this, for fear that they will be characterized or mischaracterized, as the case may be, as a result of their opposition or concern about massive immigration into this Nation.
It is, nonetheless, the second topic I will deal with. First, I want to stay with the topic of the People's Republic of China.
Another important understanding for Americans with regard to China, something we must come to grips with is the fact that China believes itself to be our number one enemy. They look at us as their enemy. There is absolutely nothing we can do by way of appeasement that will ever change this reality.
Here in the United States, as in most democracies, there is a basic unwillingness to confront the harsh realities of nature. We want to attribute always the hostile actions of others to benign intent.
History, of course, has proven that this particular course of action is always dangerous and sometimes disastrous. From a historical perspective, China provides an unparalleled view of a nation in the constant grip of absolutism. Indeed, this tradition goes back to the very founding of the Chinese state by the Chang dynasty in 1766 B.C. The governmental structure at that time was sophisticated, and an autocrat ruled it. When addressing his subjects, he referred to himself as I, the single one man.
For literally thousands of years, the Chinese people have been treated as disposable resources of the state. The recent discovery of the famed Terra Cotta Warriors in China's ancient Capitol of Xian have survived far longer than the bones of the thousands of construction workers who were buried alive to hide the location of the tomb from grave robbers.
I find this to be a more interesting aspect of Chinese and a more revealing aspect of Chinese culture than the craftsmanship of the artists involved.
China's long history is an unbroken international internalization of the concept of externally expanding power as a guiding principle of foreign policy.
A China scholar by the name of Steven Moser states that this desire for hegemony is still deeply embedded in China's national dream work, intrinsic to its national identity and implicated in what it believes to be its natural destiny.
Mr. Moser divides China's quest for hegemony in three parts, basic hegemony, he says, the recovery of Taiwan, and the assertion of undisputed control over the South China Sea. Regional hegemony is the extension of the Chinese empire to maximum extent of its old, what they call their old Celestial Empire.
Finally, global hegemony, this is a worldwide contest with the United States to replace the current Pax Americana with a Pax Sinoca.
Certainly many observers disagree with Mr. Moser's characterization of modern day China. They would argue that time have changed and that new realities have forced a cultural and political metamorphosis in the PRC.
They go on to contend that the United States should fashion a foreign policy to accommodate this change. This, of course, is one of the arguments that was made during the recent debate here in this Congress over PNTR, or permanent normal trade relationships, with China.
The other very powerful argument that was made for PNTR, and about which I will say more later, when something like this, we do not really care about America's national security interests. There is money to be made by buying cheap in China and selling dear in the rest of the world. Well, let us test the theory of the modern day Chamberlains that rely on the accommodating rather than confronting China.
China, of course, is already acquired, through more peaceful mechanisms, Hong Kong and Macau; but they are now preparing for Taiwan to follow suit, peacefully or otherwise. China is aggressively assembling the military capabilities to protect its war power beyond its present internationally recognized borders.
Six days ago, China masked amphibious vehicles and landing craft on an island near Taiwan as part of a large-scale military exercise. These exercises are expected to be one of the largest shore-based war games held by the Chinese military in recent history.
China's capability to deliver the nuclear weapons to targets which include Los Angeles and many other cities in the United States has been perfected by the application of advanced technology that has been both purchased and stolen from the United States.
China has embarked upon the construction of three missile bases along the coast to threaten Taiwan. My colleagues may recall that they fired several missiles toward Taiwan just not too long ago.
Mr. Speaker, a little over 1 year ago, China exploded a neutron bomb; that event went relatively unpublicized in the Western press. Included in the plans for this basic hegemony of the region is the occupation of the Spratly and Paracel Island group. No fewer than 11 naval bases have been constructed in this area in the very recent past.
By the way, these are very important sites strategically, as they control the sea lanes connecting the Strait of Malaca and the Taiwan Strait. From there you can easily strengthen the Philippines and Brunei and Thailand.
In recent history, China began its quest to regain the Celestial Empire, that was an area stretching from the Russian Far East to Lake Bakal and most of southern Asia, by sending troops into Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Manchuria.
They are using nonmilitary assets to project Chinese influence around the region by exporting human beings. There are now over 60 million Chinese expatriates in surrounding countries operating businesses that generate almost $700 billion a year, which is, by the way, almost equal to the entire Gross Domestic Product of the Communist Chinese.
Chinese now outnumbers Russians. Chinese now outnumber Russians in Siberia. In 1995, the Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev warned the Chinese were in the process of making a peaceful conquest of the Russian Far East. Russians are fearful of this mass immigration, but the Chinese love it.
The outflow relieves unemployment. It facilitates trade and, more importantly, it strengthens the historical claims to the land. By the way, all this sounds unfortunately very familiar to some of the things that are happening in our own country and, again, about which I will speak more in the future.
There is a significant increase in activity of a variety of sorts in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan and Mongolia and Korea.
Eventually, the Chinese believe they will be in direct confrontation with the United States. Their military and political leaders have stated this on several occasions. We, however, would rather whistle past the graveyard, which by the way may well be the one that we would all rest in if China had their way.
Now many people disagree. Again they will say that the era of monolithic communism is dead and the era of democratic capitalism has replaced it. Well, philosophical communism is indeed a rotting corpse, but totalitarian communism is alive and well in the PRC. In fact, throughout the world, political oppression can and does coexist quite comfortably with various iterations of capitalism.
{time} 1545
One can make the case that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom; but the opposite case that economic freedom leads inevitably to political liberty is much weaker.
In fact, let us look closely at China over the last 20 years of economic reforms. Today, remember, after the last 20 years of economic reforms where democratic capitalism was supposed to have been making inroads in China, after 20 years of this, every major dissident in China has been jailed or they have been exiled.
According to the State Department nation report this year, thousands of unregistered religious institutions have been either closed or destroyed. Hundreds of Falun Gong have been imprisoned. Thousands more have been sentenced to, quote, reeducation camps or locked up in mental hospitals.
On April 23, the Chinese arrested a 79-year-old bishop and seven other Catholic clergymen in anticipation of problems arising out of the celebration of Easter. Two days ago, they arrested 35 Christians for worshipping outside their official church. They were sentenced to labor camps.
Speaking of labor camps, the number in China now stands around 1,100. These are places of human misery on a scale equivalent to anything seen in Nazi Germany or in the Soviet gulag. In fact, they have become an integral part of the Chinese economy through the sale of products made by slave labor. By the way, much of this can be found in almost every store in America. As we all know, China is the source the Pentagon went to to purchase the berets, the black berets that they were going to provide our military with.
A particularly lucrative industry has grown up around the harvesting and sale of human organs in China. Prisoners in these labor camps are categorized according to blood types and other pertinent information. When orders come in from around the world for certain body parts, the appropriate prisoners are slaughtered. Their organs are packed and sent off to the highest bidder.
In 1996, the Chinese Government admitted that 20,000 kidneys had been harvested from prisoners. By the way, in most cases, they took them two at a time.
All this is going on while American culture supposedly makes inroads into every part of the world and while the Internet provides a window to the world to all who can afford the hardware or get access to it. All this is going on subsequent to all the political strategies designed to bring China into the community of nations. It goes on after we pass PNTR. It will continue to go on until the United States and the rest of the world draw the proverbial line in the sand and make it clear that Chinese plans for basic regional and global hegemony are unattainable.
China may eventually be forced to accept the world as it is and accept that role as a peaceful participant in the March toward democratic capitalism. But it will not happen as a result of a policy of appeasement.
I worry, Mr. Speaker, about the fact that this Congress will be asked once again to approve normal trade relations with China because, although we passed over, certainly, my objection and that of many of our colleagues here, we did pass last year PNTR.
China has not, in fact, joined the WTO, the World Trade Organization. As a result of the fact that they have not yet joined the WTO, they have not achieved PNTR with the United States. So we will every year now until they are in the WTO, the President will still have to request normal trade relations with China. I fear that it will be extended to them.
Mr. Speaker, I will never forget what we went through here on this floor and in this body on the debate over that particular issue. I personally have never ever been lobbied more heavily, more pressure applied to try to get me to vote for normal trade relations with China.
Nothing that I ever dealt with here on the floor, not issues of abortion, not issues of gun-related laws, nothing matched the pressure that we faced from the corporate lobby in this Nation, the corporate lobby that puts profits above patriotism. That is the only way we can describe what they were doing here.
I will not call them American corporations because, Mr. Speaker, they had absolutely no allegiance to this country. They were much more concerned with that market they believed that existed in China. Really, what they wanted to do was import very cheap Chinese products and sell them in lucrative markets.
The idea that we were going to have a two-way trade was what they would constantly refer to. But, Mr. Speaker, that will never happen. First of all, there is no market there. Although there are certainly a billion and a half people, they cannot buy our products. They do not have the money, number one.
Number two, the Chinese Government will never allow massive trade with the United States. They only allow it going the other way, to the extent that we now sell to them only 2 percent of our exports, but we buy 40 percent of theirs.
Our trade imbalance with them last year was $86 billion. This is what we called trade. It is not trade. It is an imbalance that is detrimental to the United States and to American workers. Not only that, it is detrimental to the security of the United States, because when we make China stronger economically, we in fact provide them with the means to build the armaments to threaten us eventually. Taiwan today, the United States tomorrow. I believe this to be true, Mr. Speaker. I believe that China is our most significant and most serious threat externally.
Now, let me get to the internal threat to the Nation. Since 1970, more than 40 million foreign citizens and their descendents have been added to the local communities of the United States. Last month, the New York Times reported the Nation's population grew by more in the 1990s than in any other decade in United States history.
For the first time since the 19th century, the population of all 50 States increased, with 80 percent of the American counties experiencing growth.
Demographic change on such a massive scale inevitably has created winners and losers here in America. It is time, in fact way past time, that we asked ourselves what is the level of immigration that is best for America; in fact, what is even the level of immigration that can help the rest of the world.
It is difficult to discuss this, because everyone here, certainly on this floor, all of us, all of my colleagues, everybody that we know as friends and relatives who are immigrants to this Nation and relatively recent. My family came here in the late 1800s.
So it is not immigrants in and of themselves with which we find fault. Certainly I do not. I understand entirely the desire for all of these people to come to the United States. I do not blame them. If I were in their situation, I am sure I would be trying to do exactly the same thing.
But we must ask each other, Mr. Speaker, we must as those of us who have been elected and the Nation's future put in our hands for at least this period of time, we must ask ourselves if massive immigration on the scale that we have been witnessing it over the last couple of decades is in fact the best thing for America from this point on.
Mr. Speaker, in the heyday of immigration into this Nation, in the late 1800s, in the early 1900s when my grandparents came here, the height of immigration, we call that the Golden Era, in fact we never had more than a couple hundred thousand immigrants a year during that period of time.
This year, and for every year for the last decade or more, we have had at least 1 million immigrants a year over that period of time. We have had about another 250,000 a year who come here every year under refugee status.
Now, I am going to try to explain what has happened here by the use of this chart. As my colleagues can see, in 1970, the population of the United States was 203 million. By the year 2000, the population had gone up to 281 million.
How much of this population increase can be attributed to immigration, and how much can be attributed to what we would call the natural, the birth rate of the people here that we refer to as the baby boomers and the people who are indigenous to the United States prior to this time?
The green area of this chart indicates what the growth in this country would have been, what the population of this Nation would have been in the year 2000, the 2000 census, had it not been for immigration. As my colleagues can see, it would have been about 243 million people. It is actually 281 million people.
By the way, this is a very low count because it does not really capture the number of especially illegal immigrants who are here in the country, and there are millions and millions of them.
But one can see, Mr. Speaker, what I am talking about here, in that we have had almost the exact same growth rate from the baby boomer generation, we call the baby boom echo, because we are having an increased birth rate in the United States, and it will continue to increase until about the year 2020. It then levels off, and it actually starts downward. That is what we would call the natural birth rate here in the United States taking out immigration.
But the fact is that immigrants and their descendants amount to almost exactly as much growth in the last 10 years as the entire baby boom echo, bringing this up to 281 million.
Mr. Speaker, there was a time when this land could absorb this kind of population growth. But I suggest to my colleagues that every single day on the floor of this House, when Members of the Democratic Party get up and talk about their problems, the problems in California especially, the problems with energy consumption in the United States generally, they always blame it on the producers, the price gouging electric producers, power producers.
Even we, Mr. Speaker, on the other side trying to explain supply and demand to those people who have a desire to not listen miss the important point that this particular thing plays in the debate over natural resources in the United States.
Mr. Speaker, I suggest to my colleagues that what we are seeing in California today we are going to see happen throughout the United States as a result of massive population increases, increases in population that force a demand on resources. It is a natural function.
We are actually in many States below where we were several years ago in per capita use of resources, per capita use of energy resources specifically. We have been able to conserve enough. We have been able to improve products. We have been able to do a number of things that actually have reduced per capita usage.
But it does not matter when the number of people in this country keeps climbing so dramatically. I want to tell my colleagues how dramatic it is going to be with this other chart here.
I just returned recently, I had an opportunity to speak in Los Angeles. As most people know, Los Angeles is a city that is inundated with immigration. The numbers of people are growing dramatically. I have to tell my colleagues that, for the most part, it has affected the quality of life in that city.
A lot of people I talk to actually use the phrase we have escaped from Los Angeles. They had moved to all the areas in the suburbs outside. Many, many more people I know living in my own community in my district came from California, and they came because they said it is a quality of life issue.
It is absolutely true that the quality of life has been eroding both in Los Angeles and other areas where massive numbers of people are congregated. We find that as a result, of course, tremendous demands are placed on resources.
We recognize that what was just yesterday a beautiful pasture is today sprouting houses. We recognize that where we took a walk with our dog and with our family maybe just a few months ago is now some sort of industrial park development. A road is coming through in an area that was a pleasant pasture land a short time ago.
In Colorado, we are forced with enormous expenditures for infrastructural development all to meet what, population growth. Population growth. A lot of people think to themselves, well, gosh, is it the case that we are having such an enormous growth of population just internally in this country? Because I know most people are quite concerned. I mean, the two-child family, a lot of people recognize that that is what is, maybe, the optimum number, and they try very much to achieve just that goal.
Well, it is not that birth rate that we are concerned about. It is not the natural birth rate in the country that will propel us into this dire strait that is the expansion of the Los Angeles all over the United States of America.
Nothing against the people who live there in Los Angeles. Many people I am sure love it. But I will tell my colleagues that it is a megalopolis by anybody's definition, and it faces some of the most difficult situations of any city in the United States as a result of that.
That is what I am referring to when I talk about the fact that we are expanding. That is exactly what cities are going to be looking like all over the United States in a relatively short time because this chart shows what is going to happen.
{time} 1600
This is the dramatic evidence of population and what will happen if we continue to have immigration at this particular level. This does not presume to define what will happen to the population because of legal immigration. Remember, this is just what is going to happen by the year 2100 to the population of the United States of America if we allow immigration to continue at the numbers that we have today.
Again, I have to reiterate, it does not count the fact that we are doubling our immigration rate every year with illegal immigrants. About 1 million illegals come in every year. About 2 to 3 million we gain. Nobody is really sure, of course, we cannot really count them all that easily, but the best prediction we have of this is that 2 to 3 million a year are net gains. So, in fact, this doubles. This doubles if present trends continue, 571 million at 2100.
Then where will our cities be? Then how much will gas prices be? How difficult will it be for us to deliver natural gas from one place to another?
How much will it cost to do that? What will the smog be like in these cities? What will be the quality of life for Americans in the year 2100 if we allow immigration to continue at this level?
Mr. Speaker, I suggest that it is nothing any of us here would like to think of. We cannot describe it as a pleasant place to be under these circumstances. That is why I characterize this as a threat, almost equal with the threat posed to the United States externally by aggressor nations.
This is happening, and we are doing it. We have the ability to control this, Mr. Speaker. This is something we can handle because in fact we have the power in this body to control immigration, at least to try to bring it under control. Certainly there will always be people coming across our borders illegally, but we have to at least try to preserve the integrity of the border. We must at least try to reduce immigration.
Can we handle 50,000 a year? Yes. Can we handle 100,000 a year? Yes. Can we handle 150,000 a year? Okay. Give me 200,000 a year, but not a million a year legally and twice that many illegally. We cannot handle it. It is the numbers. It is not where they come from. I do not care where they are coming from, whether it is Mexico or Guatemala or China or Cuba or Haiti. I do not care. The place of origin is not important; it is the numbers. It is the numbers. This is not a racial issue. It is the numbers.
I am somewhat discouraged because it is so difficult to get this subject dealt with openly, even, as I say, here in this body. People are afraid to discuss it. People choose to avoid it. As I was walking over here with the staff person carrying these charts, we were walking through the tunnel area coming over and an another Member of the House walked by and he said, oh, you are going to do a Special Order? I said, yes. He said, what about? I said, immigration. I am trying to talk about immigration control. He said, oh, brother, good luck. He said good luck because he knows that this is not a popular subject. It is very difficult to get my colleagues to really want to focus on it, but I think it is an enormously important thing for us to do.
We control immigration. No State does. No State has the ability to establish numbers for the people coming in. They cannot control their own borders. That is uniquely the territory of the United States, the Federal Government. It is our responsibility. It is a responsibility, Mr. Speaker, that I think we have abdicated. We have done so for a lot of reasons. We have abdicated this responsibility, to a certain extent, and have allowed this massive immigration because there are political implications to this. And, yes, I will say it, political parties and specific individuals within political parties want to manipulate and use immigration as a political tool.
We all recall that in the last administration, the President, then-
President Clinton, forced the INS to go through this hurry-up process to bring all these people in and give them citizenship. Well, why, I wonder? Why did he force them to ratchet up the time frame involved, shorten the time frame involved and ratchet up their energy to get all these people registered, get them all in here in the United States, get them to be citizens, get them registered? Because, of course, they turn into Democrat votes. Let us be serious about this. We all recognize the politics of this issue.
I know it is another one of those things nobody likes to say, but it is the truth. And as a result of the fact that these populations are, and I will say it, manipulated, and I believe they are manipulated by political parties and by politicians, we are going to find it difficult to actually bring the numbers down.
Now, that is one thing that has done it. The other thing, of course, has been business. Businesses in the United States are very, very content to continue to hire people, immigrants coming in here legally and illegally. Why? Because they will work for less. It is not nuclear science here we are talking about. If I can hire somebody for a lot less than I would have to pay someone who is a citizen of the United States, I am tempted to do it. They are not supposed to. There are supposed to be laws against it. But everyone knows that they are regularly ignored. We all know the INS does absolutely nothing to actually enforce those laws. Once in a while, a little tiny feint here or there, a raid here or there to pretend they care. But in reality this is not an area where INS pays any attention.
I hear this from my community and from people all the time, from employers who say, Tancredo, I wish you would get off this thing, this immigration issue. I hire a lot of people who I know are here illegally, but I have to do it anyway. They will admit it. And certainly they will admit to hiring illegal immigrants because they can pay them less. Well, is that in the immigrant's best interest?
I mentioned earlier there are two interests here: What can America do for our own people, and what can we do for the rest of the world? Mr. Speaker, I suggest that people coming here and working for low wages are continually exploited. They are exploited by business. They are even exploited by the labor unions. And they are exploited by the people who bring them here, the ``coyotes'' they are called, people who pack them into vans and on the back of trucks, or packed in with other kinds of products in order to get them across the border, sometimes dead. We have had, in the last months in Colorado, several cases where people were found dead. Perhaps their car was in an accident. A van was in an accident not too long ago, and 13 people were killed in the van, and several others hurt, in a small van. They were all smashed in there.
They are coming across the borders in greater numbers. They are risking life and limb to get here. And I do not blame them for doing it. I do not blame the immigrants. I blame our government for not being willing to deal with this issue. It is extremely difficult for us to bring issues like this forward, but I will continue to do it as long as I have the opportunity to do so.
There is a June 11 special issue of ``Time'' magazine entitled ``The Border is Vanishing.'' It says: ``The Border is Vanishing Before Our Eyes Creating a New World for All of Us. Welcome to Amexico,'' their world is called. A world, of course, in which English is not spoken, a world in which the numbers, the population numbers, are affecting the quality of life in the way I have described and is described in this
``Time'' magazine article.
This is something with which we must deal, even if it is difficult to think about it. We have to do so. It is our responsibility as people who have taken an oath to defend this Nation against all enemies, external and internal. And I am not saying that immigrants are internal enemies. I am saying that immigration is a threat, huge massive immigration on the scale with which we have now observed it lo these many years is a threat to this Nation. And this is the best example I can provide to prove that.
This is where we will be, Mr. Speaker. This is not a place I think most of us would find appropriate or most of us would want our children to be living in. We want to bequeath them something else, both the children of people who have been here for a long time and I believe the children of recent immigrants.
I think many recent immigrants, Mr. Speaker, as a matter of fact, agree with us on this issue, agree with us that a cap has got to be put on it. It is the old thing about, I'm here, now you can shut the door. But they recognize the impact that massive immigration, legal and illegal, has. It is not just people who have been here for a long period of time.
So I do really hope that we will take serious account of these two issues, the issue of the threats posed to the United States, again externally by the People's Republic of China, and internally by massive uncontrolled immigration of this nature.
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