Willingness to Admit Failure

WILLINGNESS TO ADMIT FAILURE -- (House of Representatives - June 14, 2004)

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Garrett of New Jersey). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) is recognized for half the remaining time until midnight.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, it has been an interesting discussion of the issues of the day for the last hour or so by the opposing party, and certainly I am sure that to a large extent the remarks are heartfelt and are as a result of a distinct difference in opinion as to exactly where this country should be and how the leadership should actually be constructed.

It is intriguing to me in a way as I sat and listened to the discussion about when the Members of the other side talk about the need for admissions of wrongdoing or failure. It would be so much more, I think, credible for them to approach this issue by first saying that we on the left have to admit certain things that we now know to be inaccurate.

Let us start with the fact that the entire world has disavowed our economic theories of greater government control of the economy, of cooperation with foreign governments, especially those governments that were totalitarian in nature and Communist by design, but all of these things have failed and we know it and the whole world recognizes it. The fall of the Communist empire, as a result of the variety of strategies employed by the United States and by others, including the Pope, as a matter of fact, we now see that it was a house of cards that had no real basis in reality; that could not sustain itself; that socialism was not ever, ever able to deliver its promise of a better life for the people under its control; that greater government control of the economy, that larger government enterprises, that opposition to Communism, that all of these things were failures. It would be so much more credible for our friends on the other side of the aisle to approach this discussion of the need for willingness to admit failure had they started with that.

Had they started with saying, you know what, we have tried, we for 40 years, we had control of this body, Presidency, it was a Democratic-controlled Congress, certainly for the majority of the 40 years prior to 1994, and we pushed the idea of greater Federal involvement in the lives of Americans. We did so because we believed it was right. We did so because we believed the theories that were supposed to be there to substantiate the claim that greater control of our lives by the government, even control of the means of production by the government, the things we call socialism today, those claims have now been proven to be false.

It would be so refreshing to have them stand in front of the House, Mr. Speaker, and say we were wrong and we are willing to admit it; we are willing to admit that people do better throughout the world, as a matter of fact, not just in the United States. But throughout the world, it is the governments under which they live that are governments that espouse a free enterprise, a democratic kind of government that allows for individual liberty and individual enterprise. We were wrong to suggest that we should not confront Communism as forcefully as possible and that we should not, in fact, increase all of our Defense appropriations so as to essentially force the Communist empire to collapse under its own weight which is, of course, what we did, what Ronald Reagan proposed and it worked.

Most of the leaders of the Free World, and even some leaders of what was in the past a totalitarian country, came to the United States for the purposes of paying homage to Ronald Reagan and admitted that his strategy and his ability to see what was good for America and what was good for the world was, in fact, the right way to go.

Yet, never did I hear in the discussion here for the preceding hour that our friends were willing to concede the point that they were wrong and that the whole world knows it, and that people, every time they have had the opportunity, they voted to cast off totalitarian dictatorships and socialist enterprises.

So, as I say, it would have been better, it would have been certainly more convincing had they come here first with an apology for all of the things that they have been espousing for the last half a century and now they know to be incorrect and failures of policies, but they did not do that. They just suggested that what we are doing today is wrong. Well, what makes us think then that what their view is of today is any better, any more correct, any more insightful, any more intuitive than what their view of what was yesterday and the world in which we lived up till today? Why should we trust them with guiding this Nation's future?

I did not hear them disavow the principles upon which their party and upon which, in fact, the left has been relying for years and today only, only exists and are espoused in institutions of higher education primarily in this country but perhaps even around the world; but everywhere where the rubber hits the road, everywhere where people have to actually go out and make a living for themselves and their families, everywhere where people are struggling to overcome the kinds of government tyranny under which they may live, everywhere where that exists, people yearn for something quite different than what the left offers them.

So that realization, that empirical evidence that we have to say that all of those ideas were wrong, that evidence has not yet manifested itself, and that realization of the error of their ways, it has not manifested itself in any of the rhetoric I heard tonight while I was waiting to deliver my remarks on, I should say, a totally different subject.

Nonetheless, I thought I should comment on what is apparent to me to be at least a discrepancy in the testimony that was provided here by our friends on the other side of the aisle for the last hour.

IMMIGRATION REFORM

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, let me go on to the discussion of an issue that I have many times in the past tried to bring forward on this floor and an issue that I believe to be of enormous importance to the country and certainly an issue that I believe needs the attention and debate of my friends and colleagues in the Congress of the United States and certainly a reflection of the debate that goes on throughout the country every single day around water coolers in offices and on work sites throughout America and around dinner tables throughout America. That debate and that discussion revolves around the issue of immigration and immigration reform, and it has many, many implications for who we are as a Nation, where we go from here, and how successful we may be in trying to achieve whatever goals we establish for ourselves.

It is connected to an even more significant challenge to the United States, and that is the reestablishment of the idea of
exactly who we are, of what we are, what principles we espouse as a Nation, of what principles we can adhere to as a people.

This part of the debate is an extremely important one, hard to bring up, hard to articulate. Certainly it is impossible to do so in a bumper-sticker fashion. It does require some degree of analysis that goes beyond the 30-second or 60-second sound bite, but I believe it to be a very important debate and discussion to undertake.

If we are to believe the polls that have been taken for the last decade or more on the issue of immigration, Americans generally believe that, number one, we should, in fact, enforce the law against people coming here illegally. That means enforcing our borders, making sure to the extent possible that people do not come into this country without our permission, people do not come here that we do not know about, and that we make people come into this country through a normalized and legal process.

The United States of America is unique in many ways. One way is that we accept more people into this country every single year legally, through a legal process of immigration and also temporary visitor status, than any country in the world.
We are and have been always a beacon of light to the world, a beacon to which many people are attracted.

It is peculiar, to say the least, that even with this policy, this very liberal policy of immigration and legal access into our country through temporary worker status, we still have and allow for millions of people to enter this country illegally. We do not know who they are. We do not know why they are coming. We do not know how long they are staying, and we do not know where they are once they are here.

Now, most Americans will say this is a bad policy to pursue, that it is not good for America, it is not good for our future, and that we should establish the concept of the nation-state and defend that concept with essentially defending our borders.

Beyond that many people suggest, a majority of Americans even suggest we need to reduce legal immigration until such time we can get this problem under control. Every poll says that is what America wants. Now, a dilemma is then created by the fact that this is the will of the people, and it has been for a long, long time. It is not new; it did not just happen after President Reagan said he wanted a guest worker/amnesty program and that created quite a furor. It has been the case for years that that is what the American people want. They want borders enforced, they want controls on immigration, and yet this body and more peculiarly, even cities and States throughout the Nation, which one would think would be more reflective of local citizen input than even the Congress of the United States, which we know has always been historically way behind the curve in terms of popular sentiment, but one would think that we would see reflected in city councils and State legislatures, one would think we would see far more of a reflection of the position that I have just described that is held by a majority of people in the country.

The most difficult question we have to answer, why is that the case? Why do our elected officials seem to be paying little attention to what most Americans feel? There are a number of answers to that question. They are not necessarily pleasant to discuss, but they are true. That is for the most part we see legislatures and the Congress of the United States and even city councils that are very responsive to pressure and pressure groups and less responsive to the general will of the people if it is not reflected through these pressure group-type of organizations.

For the most part, politicians in the United States have concluded that they can address this issue by essentially finessing it, by agreeing theoretically with people when they are in an atmosphere, an arena in which doing so would be to their political advantage. They can agree there is a problem with immigration and that we should do something about it and we should stop illegal immigration. Everybody will mouth the platitudes connected to that concept.

But they believe also that they can finesse this issue by essentially using the rhetoric to mollify a certain part of their constituency while simultaneously doing things to attract another group; and these are very powerful groups in many ways, certainly very vocal groups which press for open borders, for relaxation of law enforcement, and have a totally different opinion about how this country should actually develop.

For the most part, they are trying to serve two masters here. Most politicians are trying to serve two masters, and they have been successful in doing this in many ways because for the most part people in the United States when asked how do they feel about immigration come down on our side, but are not organized in political pressure groups designed to actually force politicians to acknowledging it. They are simply voters and citizens who go to work every single day and have other things on their minds.

It is also true that the parties themselves, the Democrats and the Republicans, are both inclined to do exactly what I say that individual politicians do, and that is pander on the one side to immigration, pro-immigration groups, and on the other side placate those people who are concerned about it, placate them through rhetoric, but not through action. They are trying to play this dicey game, and sometimes it works.

We have seen throughout the land the development of a very interesting phenomenon whereby foreign countries have used their consular offices in the United States to lobby States and city governments to get them to accept for purposes of identification something called the matricular consular ID card that is given to a person not by the United States of America but by a foreign government. And then that government comes to an American city, county, or State and says please accept the card we give out as proper identification.

Now of course Members have to understand that the only reason that the card is necessary is because we have millions and millions of people who are living here illegally. Those are the only folks to whom such a card would be important. If a person is here in this country legally, of course, they have a document which we have given them, a visa, a passport stamp, something that the United States of America has said this allows you to enter our country. Even if you are not here as a citizen, you are a legal alien resident. That is the term.

So the only people who need the matricular consular are illegally present in the United States, and everybody knows that.
The governments that are pushing it, and the cities and States that are accepting these things know that they are only helpful to people who are here illegally, and they are only helpful if a city or State agrees to accept that card, thereby making it very difficult for people who actually enforce immigration law in this country. Making it very easy, on the other hand, to live here if you are here illegally. You will get all of the benefits of anyone who is here legally. You will be afforded a variety of privileges that have heretofore been allowed only to those people who were citizens of the United States or at least here with the permission of our government. That is happening throughout the country. We have seen it. We have seen cities capitulate. We have actually seen cities, it is bizarre as you can imagine, we have seen cities that actually allow people to vote if they are not legal residents of this country.

The Mayor of this city, Washington, D.C., the District, proposed this several months ago for D.C. He said that anybody who is here as a resident should be able to vote regardless of whether or not they are citizens. Again, if we put this up for a vote, a vote of the people, the specific issue to allow people who are here illegally to vote, how many places in America can you imagine that would pass? Maybe in D.C., that is true, but not too many other places in this country would say that is okay; but cities and States are doing it.

In the next few days we will be debating a number of appropriations bills, one which will fund the Department of Homeland Security, the Commerce-State-Justice appropriations bill. I will offer a series of amendments to that bill. I will tell Members right now those amendments will fail on the House floor. They have done so in the past. That certainly will not stop me from introducing them again.

But I suggest, every one of the amendments that I propose, if I proposed them to the American people in the form of some initiative process or some way to let all America vote, I know and certainly all polls tell us they would pass. One, I will propose that no city that has established a sanctuary policy, that is a policy that allows people to come into that city who are here illegally and be protected from the Federal Government's attempts to actually enforce immigration law, where cities that will pass legislation, pass municipal ordinances saying if a person is here illegally, that will not effect the way people are treated by their own police department. In fact, if police pick someone up for violating a law, robbery, rape, murder or going through a red light, if they find that person is here illegally, they will not report that to the Department of Immigration Control and Enforcement.

Those laws are on the books in various cities throughout the country, and even States are undertaking similar types of proposals. Maine has recently declared itself, or is in the process of declaring itself, to be a sanctuary State.

I am going to suggest in the form of an amendment to an appropriations bill that no city or State that adopts these kinds of policies should be able to obtain any of the grants that are available through the bill through the Department of Homeland Security.

I have in fact done that in the past, and I think we got about 110 or 120 votes, I cannot remember now; and it will probably not be much more than that when I introduce that amendment again.

I have another amendment that says any city or State that gives illegal aliens driver's licenses will likewise be restricted from obtaining Federal funds under the act.

It is amazing to think about the fact that we have States that are willing to do this and in fact have done this, provide people who are here illegally with the form of identification as close to a national ID as we have that will allow people to have access to every aspect of American life as a regular citizen would have, and make it therefore much easier for someone to be in this country illegally. That goes for the person who is here, quote, to only do the job that no other American will do, as if there in fact was such a job, and it also goes for the person who is here to kill every single one of us and our children. They can use that passport into American society that we call a driver's license just as well as the person who is only here to do a job no one else will do; and yet these things are happening, and I will go ahead and suggest that, in fact, my amendments will fail.

I am going to do another amendment as soon as the bill for foreign appropriations comes to the floor, and that is just another way of saying foreign aid. When our foreign aid bill comes to the floor, I am going to introduce an amendment saying that the foreign aid to any country will be reduced by the amount of money that is flowing from this country, from the nationals of the foreign country who are working here, anybody who is working here and sending money back to the country of origin, and that is called remittances, that is how we refer to the dollars sent back from people working here for the most part illegally, and taking money out of our communities and not allowing that money to go to work to create jobs and improve the economy of the communities in which the folks here are living, most of them communities in desperate need of economic stimulus; but those dollars are flowing to people in countries outside of the United States.

We had a report not too long ago that that number, the number of dollars that flow just to Latin America, not to the rest of the world, just to Latin America is about $30 billion a year.

There are several countries in the world that have more than 10 percent of their gross domestic product made up from remittances from the United States of America.

I suggest, Mr. Speaker, that if foreign aid is the simple transfer of wealth from one country, in this case America, to another country, that we can do it better through remittances than through writing a check to a corrupt government that will skim off almost all of the dollars before they ever get to anybody who actually may need them. So as a result, I think we should punish those countries for the economic policies they have adopted that have caused the populations in their country to despair and to be subjected to impoverishment. We should not reward the thugs that run these countries. We should stop giving them money and we should say, okay, we know you are getting billions of dollars a year from the United States going straight to people who are certainly in need in your country, so we will not be giving you that money in foreign aid anymore, we will just allow the flow of remittances to make up for that.

Most of the countries in the Western hemisphere that have been lobbying so hard to get the United States to maintain an open door policy toward immigration, in fact, the elimination of borders, it is interesting, many people have asked me why it is in fact that Mexico and Guatemala and El Salvador and a number of these countries have been so adamant about getting us to open our borders to their nationals. There is a reason, Mr. Speaker, and it is not just simply because they want to see the people in their country prosper. It is because they want to see the people in their country become the source of revenue for the folks in their own country. They recognize that they can maintain their power more easily if the masses are being provided the sustenance they need through the remittances that are coming from the United States, then they can rely on the foreign aid that we send them to go into their pockets and to prop up their regime. I think we should reduce that. I think we should stop that. I will propose an amendment to the foreign ops bill to do exactly that.

If we put that amendment to the country, Mr. Speaker, is there anyone in this room, is there anyone on either side of the aisle that really and truly believes that would fail in the eyes of the American people? No, of course not. We all know it would pass overwhelmingly if the American people were allowed to vote on it individually. It will fail here in this body.
But I will continue to do that. I will continue to offer amendments of this nature. I will continue to talk about the need to do something about immigration and immigration control because I believe it is perhaps the most important domestic policy issue we face as a nation.

As I said at the beginning of my remarks, Mr. Speaker, the issue of immigration and that sort of thing does not just revolve around the issue of jobs although it is enormously important to America. It is a fact that we are importing massive numbers of low-skilled, low-wage people who in fact hold down the wage rates of low-skilled, low-wage American workers, making it even more difficult for them to ever work their way out of the cycle of poverty. It is absolutely true that that occurs. No one suggests that massive importation of cheap labor has helped the low-income wage earner in America. Nobody suggests that. Even the most devoted pro-immigration lobby never suggests that it helps the poor in America. It increases the number of the poor. In fact, when we do our surveys every year about people living in poverty, it is amazing, but a huge percentage, somewhere near 90 percent of those people whom we now identify as in poverty in the United States are people who are in fact noncitizens of the United States. It is also true that those people who have dropped out of the job market, who have had a harder and harder time to actually get a better job and crawl their way up out of their particular situation have been negatively affected and that job is made much more difficult by the massive number of people who are here illegally or by immigrants here legally or not. So it is an important issue.

The fact that we export all of our high tech jobs to India and other places while simultaneously importing very high tech, very capable people to take the place of American workers because they will work for less and that in turn holds down the wage rates of middle-income workers in this country, all of those things are true.

We will certainly see and do see as we look around the country the economic effects of open borders. It does benefit multinational corporations, that is true. It does not benefit the people who in fact work for them or the nations in which those multinational corporations exist or call home. Few corporations today can even be thought of as being American corporations. In fact, I think it was Ralph Nader sent a request to all of the huge corporations in America asking them to begin their board meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance. Few even responded but those that did were irate that he would suggest such a thing, suggesting that there is no allegiance to a nation state, that their allegiance is to a corporate bottom line.
And if that bottom line can be enhanced by ignoring the needs of the country in which they are housed, that is okay, they are going to do it because that is exactly what they are constructed for.

So it is true that this issue is a jobs issue. It is certainly true that this issue is a national security issue. As I said, there are people who are coming into this country hidden among those who are coming here for relatively benign purposes but there are people coming in to do us great, great harm, undeniably true. We have found some here already. We have arrested them.
Some of them we have been able to actually take out of circulation not necessarily because we can immediately bring them to trial on the basis of espionage or some sort of allegation that deals directly with their support of terrorism but because they have violated immigration laws. That is the first thing we go to. They are here illegally. It is nice we have something to use and it is nice that we would actually use it, but the fact is that even these things are not as important in totality as the issue I discussed earlier, and that is the very difficult problem we are going through in America with identifying who we are.

There is a great book that has just come out. It is in fact called "Who Are We?" It is by Samuel Huntington. I consider him to be an enormously talented observer of the American political and social scene. He has written other books, one called "The Clash of Civilizations" that I have read several times over. I am about halfway through "Who Are We?" I find it to be a fascinating read. I believe that that is the ultimate question with which we are dealing, who are we? Where are we going?
What is it we are going to try and accomplish as Americans? What does it mean to be an American?

Our students in our classrooms throughout the country are being fed a steady diet of anti-Americanism, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt. This diet includes a revision of history that creates a picture I think totally and completely incorrect and certainly skewed that would show American history and Western civilization itself as being inherently evil, something out of which nothing good could come. A textbook I remember picking up in a junior high I was in in my district, this was a couple of years ago now, started out, the chapter on American history, as Columbus came here and destroyed paradise.

That was not in italics. It was not just a quote they were going to then analyze. That was the way the textbook portrayed Columbus's trip and his landing here on our shores, on the shores of North America. That kind of thing where we have made it very confusing for Americans to even understand or identify who, in fact, or what we are, combined with massive immigration where that same message is given to people who are not necessarily coming here, by the way, to become Americans but to simply achieve a greater economic level of existence and prosperity, which certainly is an admirable and laudable and understandable goal. But it behooves us, I think, to change the way in which we teach our children, the way in which we discuss this issue of multiculturalism, which has gotten to the point where it becomes almost a cult and that anything that is said to suggest that American culture, that American history, and that Western Civilization is, in fact, worthy of analysis, worthy of allegiance, anything that suggests that is determined to be sort of against the grain; and it is certainly not going to be accepted by academia as a legitimate subject matter.

I recently had the opportunity of going to a high school in my district where 250 students were asked to assemble. And we talked for a while, and one of them asked me a question. They sent these questions up. And it was written out, and it said what do I think is the most serious problem facing America today? And I said, Before I answer that question, let me ask you something: How many in this room, 250, approximately, students, how many in this auditorium would agree with the statement that you live in the greatest country in the world? And about maybe two dozen raised their hands, and they did so sheepishly, the ones that did. It was none of that immediately hands go up, sure, of course, naturally, we live in the greatest country in the world. That did not happen.

And they looked along the walls where their teachers were lined up in this auditorium, and I could see in their faces that they were concerned. I am not saying that the ones that did not answer were suggesting that they did not like America, hated America. I am just saying that they did not have the slightest idea, they had absolutely no intellectual ammunition to defend themselves if they were to postulate that, in fact, America is the greatest country in the world. They were not taught anything that would lead them to that. In fact, they were taught things that would make them feel very sheepish and sensitive about making that kind of statement.

That is what I consider to be the real issue with which we are involved and which we should be debating: changing the way in which we look at ourselves, changing the way in which we teach our children about who we are, and certainly changing the way in which we try to bring immigrants into American mainstream, which today does not exist. Today we tell them they should stay separate, keep a separate language, even keep political affiliations with countries other than the United States. This is all done to our great and long-lasting disadvantage. It is a very serious issue, one that, as I say, requires more time and attention and analysis than can be given during a 30-second or even 1-minute ad during a political campaign. But it is the reason why I do come to the floor as often as I do to try to raise the issue.

I could be, of course, 180 percent off course here. I could be totally wrong. But I believe with all my heart that at least this deserves the debate, that this body should afford it, and that this arena would be the perfect place for that to occur.