Immigration

Floor Speech

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I'm privileged and honored to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and I appreciate the opportunity to, I think, help enlighten you and the Members that are listening in and anyone who might be observing this process that we have in the House of Representatives.

In this great deliberative body, there is a limited amount of time that we can debate here on the floor. And as things churn through, sometimes we don't come back and revisit subject matter, but I think it's necessary to establish the perspective that fits into the broader picture.

The perspective that I intend to address tonight is the perspective of immigration, and that debate has gone on in this country for a number of years. It was brought up by Pat Buchanan as a candidate for President back in the 1990s. He said he would hold congressional hearings on immigration if he were elected President of the United States. He did a lot to help galvanize this immigration debate and bring the issues that are important to this country to the forefront. And since that time, people like Tom Tancredo, and probably before that time, actually, came to this floor and raised the issue of immigration and the rule of law over and over again.

Eventually, the American people began to look at the circumstances of millions of people that are in the United States illegally, their impact on this economy, this society, and this culture.

As intense as this debate got in 2006 and 2007, it got so intense, Mr. Speaker, that as the Senate began to move on a comprehensive amnesty bill that was bipartisan in its nature, however weak it was in its rationale, it had the support of the President of the United States at that time, George W. Bush, and it had the support of leaders of the Democrat and the Republican Party in the United States Senate, as well as here in the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker. And yet the American people rejected the idea of amnesty in any form, whether it be comprehensive amnesty that was proposed and then the nuances that they tried to bring through or whether it would just be blanket amnesty.

Well, here we are again, Mr. Speaker. Here we are again with a transformational issue that is slowly being brought forward before the American people, and I'm here to say, let's pay attention. My red flag is up, and I have watched the transition of issues that have unfolded since, actually for years, but intensively unfolded since the beginning of the Obama Presidency.

And these issues unfolded in this fashion, and perhaps I'll go back and revisit them in some more detail. But the American people did go to the polls a year ago last November and sustained majorities and actually expanded majorities for Democrats in the United States Senate and in here in the U.S. House of Representatives, and they elected a President who fit their mold as a party member, a Democrat, a very liberal Democrat. In fact, President Obama, in the short time that he served in the United States Senate, had the most liberal voting record out of all 100 U.S. Senators. So they elected, I think it's not even close to arguable, the people in the United States elected the most liberal President in the history of this country.

And while there wasn't a legitimate debate in the Presidential race that had to do with immigration, because neither candidate really wanted to touch the issue, they knew that they were at odds with the American people on immigration. John McCain knew that, and he didn't bring up the subject after the nomination, at least not in a substantial way. I couldn't say that it never happened. And Barack Obama knew the same thing and didn't bring immigration up in a substantial way during the Presidential campaign after the nominations.

And so this Nation went forward with discussions about national security, about economic development, discussions about energy, but not discussions about immigration. Here we are today, a year and a month after President Obama was elected, and we have seen these big issues come through this Congress. And here is the sequence of events, Mr. Speaker, that has taken place, and I invite anybody to challenge me on the facts of these, but it is this:

During the Bush administration, we had the beginning of the first call for TARP funding. That was the beginning request that began by my mental marker here, chronologically, September 19, 2008, when Secretary of the Treasury at the time, Henry Paulson, came to this Capitol and asked for $700 billion. All of it, of course, would be borrowed money. All of it would have to be paid back, and the interest on it, by the taxpayers and their children and their grandchildren, presuming we would be able to retire our national debt in that period of time. Or it might take more generations, Mr. Speaker. $700 billion in TARP, this Congress approved half of it then, and I believe that it was actually into October, the early part of October 2008, delayed the other half, the other $350 billion to be approved by a Congress to be elected later and signed into law by a President to be elected later. That began September 19, 2008. $700 billion in TARP funding, partly before that, mostly after that, became the sequence of events then.

As the described downward spiral and threat of economic crisis of global proportions came at us here in this Congress and it was spread around the globe, causing nation after nation to react in one fashion or another, we saw most of it under the hand of President Obama, the nationalization of three large investment banks, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, the large insurance company, General Motors, Chrysler, all of that swept through in a period of time of approximately 1 year. And at the tail end, framing the nationalization of those eight huge entities that represent about one-third of the private sector profits in the United States, framed on the other end of that nationalization effort on the part of the White House and those who supported that, was a $787 billion economic stimulus plan. All of this just raced us towards the nationalization of an economy, the socialization of our economy, Mr. Speaker.

The American people looked at that, and it went so fast that they didn't believe they had the expertise. They trusted Wall Street. They trusted Big Business in America, and they believed, as I did for a time in my adult life, that Wall Street was looking out for the foundations of free-enterprise capitalism so that over the long term they could continue to do business in a free-market environment to be able to buy, sell, trade, and make legitimate gain by creating real wealth that is rooted in the productivity increase of the American workers and the American economy. Well, it didn't turn out to be necessarily the case that clearly.

But while this was unfolding, $700 billion in TARP, the eight huge national entities of the private sector that were nationalized by the Federal Government, and the $787 billion economic stimulus plan, all of that came at the American people faster than they could react and faster than they could understand. And they were not simple enough in the foundational understanding of them that the American people could look at that, describe it in a bumper sticker and mobilize. It took too long to understand them. It took long to explain. It was harder for the American people to get caught up, and it was hard for Members of Congress in the same fashion to understand the nuances and the details with the level of confidence necessary to rise up and say, Hold it. That's it. We've got to stop. We cannot race down this path and leap off the abyss into the socialized economy. But that is where we have gone, Mr. Speaker.

The American people started to catch up when they saw cap-and-trade being pushed through this Congress. The cap-and-tax legislation that taxes every bit of energy in America and transfers wealth from one group of people in America to another group, they understood that. It came so fast they couldn't get mobilized very much.

Meanwhile, while this was going on, organizations across America were spontaneously growing up out of the prairie, out of the mountains, out of the western States and off the east coast. People that love this Constitution, love fiscal responsibility and free-market capitalism have risen up, and they have carried their flags into city after city, and they have jammed the capitals of the States, and they have jammed this United States Capital. And when you look out across that sea of people, you will see represented there, Mr. Speaker, American flags, one after another after another, patriotic Americans, any one of which I would expect to see at my own church picnic. And among those American flags, you will see yellow ``Don't tread on me'' flags. These are the Americans that will save us from the greed that is also political power greed as well as an economic greed in this country.

All of that has taken place. The American people have mobilized. By the end of July of 2009, this year, they had seen all of this come to pass, and they saw cap-and-trade, or cap-and-tax, pass off the floor of the House of Representatives and a hurry-up rush to judgment, a proposal and a model that cannot be sustained, debated, or argued in any logical fashion that has to do with economics, and neither can the science be defended, especially in light of the emails that have been dumped onto the Internet in the last week or two.

And we've seen at least one resignation, Phil Jones, one of the scientists promoting the climate change argument. The change actually went from the words ``global warming'' to the phrase ``climate change,'' because obviously they can't show the warming of the globe over the last decade in the fashion that they predicted at least.

All of this happened and we saw town hall meetings fill up all across America during the month of August and early September. Hundreds and hundreds of town hall meetings. Hundreds of thousands of Americans came up and filled those town hall meetings, and they filled up the public squares, and they stepped up and resisted the idea of a government-run health care system of socialized medicine in America.

Now the American people are starting to get some traction. They can see the pattern. They voted for change. They didn't know what the change was, Madam Speaker. And now they have a pretty good idea of that change that has been in store for us, and they reject it. It's why they filled up the Capital and filled up the town hall meetings.

But what we've seen so far is this intensity, this resistance to cap-and-tax, this resistance to a national health care act, the resistance that brought somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 people here to this Capital to be outside this west side of the Capitol on the Thursday before the final vote. And some of those people that came here on Thursday got on a plane and flew back to their hometown, landed, and they saw that they had a request to come back to the Capital to do this again on Saturday, to do our very level best to dump out all of our energy to kill this socialized medicine bill.

That's the American people mobilized, Madam Speaker. The American people have been mobilized in every State in this union and they came to this city just a few weeks ago to resist socialized medicine. They came from every single State, including Alaska and Hawaii. And that mobilization of the American people that are determined to defend this country and the values that made this a great Nation is only a smaller part of the energy that's out there if this President, this majority and this Congress, this Pelosi majority and the Harry Reid majority down the hallway through the center of the Capitol in the United States Senate, if they decide they want to try to bring comprehensive amnesty to overhaul the immigration laws in the United States of America, rather than enforcing them, we've seen nothing yet so far this year to what we will see if they try to bring amnesty and force that down the throats of the American people.

The lines have been drawn. The American patriots have stepped up. They understand what's going on. This is about the rule of law. At the core of the argument on immigration is the rule of law. A Nation cannot be a Nation unless it defends the rule of law. And we have been so proud of the rule of law in America. When I went home over Thanksgiving vacation, I arrived home, actually it was very early on a Friday morning and I went to Sioux City. One of the things I did that day was to go to a naturalization ceremony at the Federal building in Sioux City. I have spoken to the naturalized groups there a number of times. There were 37 new Americans that took the oath of allegiance to the United States on that day. They were from 11 different countries that I counted, perhaps a couple of more. These are people that today are as much an American citizen as the residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, or the residents in my house. I welcome the legal immigrants that come into America, that follow the law, that come here, lawfully, to have access to this American dream, because when they do, they will build this dream for others. The vitality that we have gotten from every donor nation is the cream of the crop off of every donor civilization. It's one of the things about being an American that's unique. We're not just an appendage of Western Europe or the other countries that have contributed people to come to the United States and become Americans. We have a unique vitality, Madam Speaker. It's rooted in a lot of things. It's built upon the foundation of the pillars of American exceptionalism. Among them are free enterprise, capitalism and property rights and freedom of speech, religion, assembly and the press and the right to keep and bear arms; and also, the right to be judged by a jury of your peers.

And the rule of law, Madam Speaker. The rule of law says that if you are judged, and I said this to that group of newly naturalized Americans in Sioux City that day, some week and a half or so ago: If you come before a court of law in the United States of America, if you're the richest man in the world, you'll get the same level of justice that you get if you're the poorest man in America. If Bill Gates comes before that court, before the Federal court in Sioux City, Iowa, he'll be judged on the same standard as the poorest person in that room that day, or the poorest person they could find off of the street, the same measure of justice. It's what we've pledged. It's one of those foundations of being an American, the same level of justice. Justice is blind. Equal justice before the law. That rule of law, that profound respect for the rule of law would be cast asunder if we grant amnesty to anyone, especially not 10 million or 20 million or more that have come into the United States illegally, demonstrated their lack of respect for our rule of law and, in many cases, demonstrated their contempt for the rule of law in America.

During the early part of July, I went down to the border, mostly in Arizona, and there I went into the border patrol station at Nogales. It's the busiest border patrol station in the country. It's part of that section of 2,000 miles of border from the coast of California all the way to Brownsville. There, as I watched what was happening, we went out and watched as some who were jumping the fence that exists there, it's not a good enough fence, but it's better than no fence. They couldn't control anything without it. And they monitor the fence. They picked up some illegals that had jumped the fence or otherwise broke into the United States. We also saw others on film that were picked up and they were brought to the center, the center at the border patrol station in Nogales. Good people work in there that do respect the rule of law.

If you watched the people that I'd seen arrested because of breaking our immigration law come waltzing into the border patrol station at Nogales, some of them just with a smirk on their face, Madam Speaker, some of them thought they had accomplished something again, that, well, so they got caught; they knew what was going to happen to them. I looked at that smirk, and that smirk on face after face, not every one of them and probably not even quite half of them, but the attitude of many of those who were picked up for unlawful entry into the United States was an attitude that allowed that smirk to be there, that they had tried to pull something off, so they got caught; and they knew what would happen to them. They knew that they would be released and released back to Mexico, and then they would have a chance in the next hour or the next day or the next week, whenever they decided to come back into the United States again. And they knew that they could keep trying over and over and over again until they finally got where they wanted to go.

Some of these questions come down to this. I posed this question, Madam Speaker. How often does one suppose that a unique individual is picked up at the border sneaking into the United States? We don't have to wonder; we don't have to ask the question because we have some data now that's more than a year old since we've been accumulating, fingerprinting and taking a digital photograph of each individual who is being processed for a voluntary return, or anyone who's been processed for violating our immigration laws, for that matter, those that are processed for voluntary return.

And so I asked the question, How many times do you meet a unique individual? What's the maximum? And we go back and look at the data. Anecdotally it goes to 37 or 38 times for one single individual that's been picked up and brought to the same station, printed, photographed; and then what happens? Oh, and by the way, Madam Speaker, the process is this: Border patrol picks them up, and when they're able to, let's say, interdict one or more individuals, then they call the contractor, a contractor who has a van and a couple of uniformed officers. The van is set up for security so they can haul inmates or those individuals in the van. The van comes, picks them up and two of these people that look like officers, I guess you'll say they are officers, but they're contractors, they load up the one or more illegals that have been interdicted by the border patrol, they take them up to the station where when they walk in, they already have their little plastic bag with their personal items in it. They sit down against the wall; they all get processed, fingerprinted, they get their pictures taken and then they put them in one of four different holding cells, and if they'll do a voluntary return, then they pick them up, it might be the same officers, it often is the same officers, that will take these illegals and haul them down to the border, turn the van sideways, open up the side door and they get out the side of the van and walk back into Mexico. The door gets closed on the van. This time I was watching, they squealed their tires as they turned around and went back to get another load.

The things that I saw in front of my eyes were not catch and release into the United States, but catch near the border and release at the border and direct them to go back to Mexico. No further questions asked. We just have your prints and we have your digital photographs. Anecdotal evidence says 37 to 38 times a unique individual--when I go back and look at the data, the data supports numbers that go up to 28 times that we process the same individual. That's part of the records.

What kind of a law enforcement, what kind of a rule of law would establish the law that says that it's illegal to come into the United States and violate our immigration laws, and then pick people up, run them through the process, and drop them back off at the border and just simply put them back in the condition they were in and very close to the place they were in before they broke the law and not at least have a limit? Voluntary return 28 times, no consequences?

So I asked those questions: What do you do when you have these numbers that run up, even a second time, even a first time? I'd say zero tolerance. Let's put the resources down there and have zero tolerance; punish everybody to the maximum extent of the law and see what kind of a deterrent effect we can establish. But that's not the case. And when they sometimes have moved people up the line for expedited removal and tried to get them a stiff sentence to punish them, at least in one case, the judge released the individual for time served.

What a demoralizing exercise to go to work every day, put on the uniform of the border patrol and go out and pick up individuals; you catch them and a contractor hauls them, they're processed through the station and hauled back to the border where they go back to Mexico to be caught again, around and around and around again, a never-ending circle, and we call that enforcement of immigration law.

But at least, Madam Speaker, we have immigration law. At least it's against the law to come into the United States in violation of the standards that we have; and at least we have penalties that we can impose against the people that do. But we're here in a Congress that looks like it has the will to start this idea again, this comprehensive amnesty argument again, that if people can get into the United States and they express that they want to stay here, that we should just say, We'll give you amnesty and we'll give you a path to citizenship because we don't have the will to enforce the law.

And this argument, this specious, baseless argument that's been made by this side of the aisle over and over again, and by some on this side of the aisle too, Madam Speaker, that somehow or another America can't get along without having immigrants, legal and otherwise, and actually they say especially illegal immigrants, to do the work that Americans won't do. What an offense to the people that are hardworking in America.

Americans are the majority of every single profession out there. And I mean Americans, legal workers in America, are the majority of every single profession out there with the exception of agriculture and farm workers. Everybody else is predominantly Americans. Yet they'll say there are jobs Americans won't do. Well, what jobs? Tell me what jobs?

John McCain said, well, Americans won't pick lettuce and offered $50 an hour. I'd have lost my whole construction crews. They'd have gone down there and picked lettuce for $50 an hour instead of haul dirt for the price we pay them, which isn't bad, by the way. That argument that there are jobs that Americans won't do and those are jobs that must be done doesn't have a foundation. Americans will do these jobs over and over again. And if there's a job that Americans won't do, let me describe to you the most difficult job there is. The most dangerous, the dirtiest, the most stressful, the riskiest, hottest, dustiest, dirtiest, nastiest job to do is rooting terrorists out of places like Fallujah or Karbala or Ramadi, or Iraq, Afghanistan and the mountains in Afghanistan, for example. That's the most difficult job there is. It's the most dangerous. It's the dirtiest. You don't get to take a shower every day and sit down and take a coffee break when the bullets are flying or the IEDs are being detonated.

And what do we pay Americans to do that? The lowest ranking marines--a couple of years ago I checked the number--about $8.09 an hour, presuming it is a 40-hour week, and it's not. Can you look those people in the eye that are defending our safety and our security, Madam Speaker, and say to them, There are jobs Americans won't do? That marine, that soldier, he's going to look at you and wonder, well, what's dirtier or more dangerous, what's nastier than this job that I'm doing for the love of my country? For the love of my country and $8.09 an hour? And we have to take this insult that there's jobs that Americans won't do.

Americans do every job. I look at my family. I look at my neighbors. It's hard to come up with a job that we haven't done. That includes processing meat. I've done a fair amount of it myself. But if I look at the meat processing around my neighborhood, 25 years ago, at about that era of time, if you wanted to get a job in the packing plant around my neighborhood, you had to know somebody to get in. These weren't union jobs, but you had to know somebody to get a job like that because they paid well. The benefits were competitive with anyplace else. I watched people grow up and maneuver and position themselves to go through school and get out of school so they could get a job working on the line at the packing plant, just the way a lot of miners got in line to go down and mine some coal or steelworkers lined up at the mill and generation after generation went to work at the steel mill. These are proud jobs, and there's dignity in every kind of work that's necessary to be done.

But at the time, 25 or 30 years ago, you had to know somebody to get a job to work in the packing plant, and the job paid about the same as a school teacher made then. Today, that same job is usually held by someone whom we suspect is illegal, and it pays about half of what a teacher is making.

So what we've seen is we've seen an oversupply of labor that has poured into these jobs because people can go in and do these jobs without being particularly literate or particularly educated, but you can't do it without being particularly ambitious.

And so the young American that grew up that really only wanted to go and do his 40 or 45 hours a week and go work in the plant and punch the clock and come home and raise his kids and play ball and take them fishing and modestly pay for a modest house and give an opportunity for his children and focus his life on other things other than always career advancement, that opportunity is nearly gone in America today because we have an oversupply of labor that's willing to work cheap and they can compete in these jobs because it doesn't take a long period of education to do some of the work out there where the wages have gone down.

The highest levels of unemployment that we have in America are in the lower-skilled jobs. That's to the detriment of the American worker. And, Madam Speaker, there are people out there today that are going to work in these jobs that are legal. They're legal immigrants or else they're natural-born Americans. And when they step up to the line, whether it's at the steel mill or whether it's the packing plant or food processing or whatever it might be, and if you look to their right and they see someone whom they suspect is illegal, and may well know that they are, and they look to their left and they see another person that they suspect is illegal, or know that they are, they need to understand that on their right and left likely are jobs that Americans would be doing if those positions weren't taken by those who broke into this country or those who overstayed their visas, Madam Speaker.

Here we are with the President of the United States tomorrow having his jobs summit at the White House. And there you will see a collection of Keynesian economists, the kind of brains that brought about all these things that I've talked about, from TARP funding to the nationalization of the investment banks and AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and General Motors and Chrysler and $787 billion and an economic stimulus plan; the kind of brains that decided we should tax all the energy consumed in America and tell America that we're going to create green jobs; the kind of people that can't draw a distinction between the private sector and the public sector; people that don't understand that it's the private sector that produces all of the new wealth that's necessary--in fact, all of the wealth that's necessary to make this society work--and that out of that wealth that comes from the private sector is skimmed the funding that goes into the government machinery. It has been so convoluted over the last generation or so that economists can go through a college education and go off and get their master's and really not have much exposure to where the new wealth comes from.

I need to make this point, Madam Speaker, that the American people need to understand there's a distinction between the private sector--the productive sector of the economy--and the public sector of the economy--the parasitic sector of the economy, the sector of the economy that comes from government that taxes production and punishes production and regulates production until it defeats the very spirit of the entrepreneurs that start the companies that create the jobs.

And these companies that come from the entrepreneurs, they aren't just based on some esoteric dream like we seem to be getting out of the White House economists that we will hear about tomorrow. The idea that we have out there, I can't draw a distinction very much between what is going on between the years of Larry Summers, for example, or someone who may believe that they can always keep pushing the system further ahead. We have heard of those people.

Madam Speaker, my news to the White House is this American economy is not just simply a large magic chain letter that you can stimulate some people to make another investment and send out another dozen letters in the chain and they would get theirs out of the next group of suckers. That's what a chain letter does. That's what a government-driven economy does. It always has to find another group of suckers. And the suckers today are becoming the ones that are producing some wealth in the private sector.

Now where does wealth come from? It comes from the production of goods and services, first, that are essential to the survival of mankind and, second, to the production of goods and services that improve the productivity of those goods and services that are essential to the survival of mankind.

So if it's food, clothing and shelter, the things that we must have if we're going to live, if you produce those things, you're at the foundation of the new wealth. If you produce those things that make us more efficient in producing those essentials for life, you're at the second level of the economy. The third level is the disposable income that comes that's in excess to the necessities that are required to replace your capital investment and the necessities that are required to continue the production of the necessities of life. And so that's the disposable income. That's the income we use to add those things to our quality of life that allow us to go to Disney World, to go on vacation, travel around. Those things that, when we buy nice things and sit them on the shelf, make us feel good. They're not essential. They're nice, but we can get along without them.

So those are the levels of the economy and all new wealth comes from the land or out of Mother Earth. And whether you want to mine some gold or some platinum or whether you want to raise some corn or soybeans or cotton or peanuts, all of these things add to our ability to provide for the survival of mankind and the production efficiency of mankind. And when we do that well enough, we've got disposable income and the Federal Government and other political subdivisions come in and skim the cream off that production out of the private sector that I've just described.

And then you have people like those who have been appointed by the President, hired by the President, and the President himself, who sit back, get this thoughtful look on their face, and they think, Let me see, if I could borrow a few hundred billion dollars from the Chinese and promise to pay interest on that few hundred billion dollars, then I could drop this money in and I could do a few hundred billion dollars' worth of patronage--patronage jobs that will call for more political loyalty and the government jobs that are temporarily created by the taxation and the borrowing that takes place.

Never mind about 4 years from now or 8 years or a decade or two or a generation from now. We'll just borrow that money now and drop this into the economy and give this big, giant economic chain letter a spin. That's what's been going on, but it has gone into over-drive in the last year. And while this is going on, we have this immigration policy that's becoming more and
more errant in its philosophy and its results.

I've talked about the lack of will to enforce immigration law just by illustrating what we're doing. We're doing catch-and-return as opposed to catch-and-release. We're just returning them to the border and releasing them there. So catch-return-release is a better way to describe what is going on with immigration law in the United States. We have a Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security that has essentially said, I'm not going to go out and do raids on employers, even if I know there might be thousands there that are working there illegally. She's essentially said that she just wants to go in and find the employers that are violating the law by hiring illegals.

Now, I think we should do that; but I think when we encounter people that are in this country illegally, whether they're working or whether they aren't, we have an obligation when we encounter people unlawfully present in the United States to take them back and put them where they're lawfully present. All we're doing is putting people back into the condition they were in before they broke the law. Deporting someone who's violated immigration law in the United States is the equivalent of catching--let's just say you catch a bank robber and he's got the money and you say, Hold it, you're going to have to give up the money and I'm going to take you outside the door of the bank and turn you lose again. That's the equivalent of deportation.

Any nation that doesn't have the will to put people back in the condition they were and the location they were in before they broke the law on immigration cannot sustain any kind of enforcement whatsoever. It's predicated on the ability to return them to where they came and keep them out. That's why. Not only do we need to use all levels of law enforcement; we need the 287(g) program to be refurbished again to what it was before it was distorted by the Secretary of Homeland Security for the purposes, I believe, of jerking the 287(g) local law enforcement cooperation memorandum of understanding rug out from underneath Sheriff Joe Arpaio down in Maricopa County. It was one of the strong motivations that took place.

We have to have, in a Nation with a rule of law, we have got to have cooperation at all levels of government with all laws. We cannot have local law enforcement take a position that they don't have the authority to enforce immigration law. Of course they do. The Attorney General should know that. There's an Attorney General's opinion that supports it; a previous Attorney General actually under Ashcroft. There are several Federal court cases that support the authority and the jurisdiction of local law enforcement to enforce Federal immigration law.

And I could drop those all into the Record here tonight, Madam Speaker. They are a matter of fact here in America, no matter how they have tried to distort this, because the open borders people don't want to enforce immigration law. They want to see a greater number of people come into the United States, and they want to empower themselves politically with the masses of those that are here illegally.

But they're running up against a little problem, Madam Speaker. This problem is the growing problem of unemployment in America: the pressure on our economy--the pressure on our economy that's watching us lose, over the last month, 190,000 jobs. We lost 190,000 jobs last month that were eliminated by the downward spiral of our economy. During the same period of time our Federal Government saw fit to approve permanent work permits--those are green cards--for legal immigrants of 75,000 per month.

Now, if you look at these numbers, these numbers work like this: there are approximately, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, 8 million illegals working in the United States. I think the number is greater than that. These numbers can be verified, I believe, by solid analysis. It's not under that unless the suppression of the economy has reduced that number marginally over the last few months, and it may have actually dropped as far as 7 million. But their number is 8 million.

The second number is 75,000. We issued in October of this year, the Federal Government, 75,000 working permits for immigrants; 75,000 new illegal immigrant workers in just one month. Seventy-five thousand. That's an actual rate of 900,000 new working legals in the United States of America while we're losing 190,000 jobs a month. This works out to be, on an annual basis--and I'm just extrapolating over the last month because we don't know what the future is going to bring, Madam Speaker--but I extrapolate this. We lost 190,000 jobs last month. That's 2,280,000 jobs lost at that rate. Those jobs gone, disappeared. But at the same rate, 900,000 jobs taken up by legal immigrants, not to count the illegal immigrants that are there.

So we had a net annual loss of jobs of about 1.1 million, 380,000 net loss of jobs as a result of the 900,000 green cards. We have 8 million--perhaps as low as 7--but 8 million illegal workers in America. You add that to the number, and you have a pressure on this economy that is just an awesome thing to think that we have a President of the United States that declared that his stimulus plan was going to, Madam Speaker, he said--and I'm almost embarrassed to repeat this--save or create 3.5 million jobs by September of 2010. I believe that's the date that he gave in that. Save or create 3.5 million jobs by September, 2010, if we just put another $787 billion into the economy, which some of that happened. All of it was approved and authorized in one fashion or another. However it was used is another story.

So a government, led by the White House, that was going to save or create 3.5 million jobs now has to admit that, according to the CBO, you can't determine what number of jobs have been created, let alone what jobs have been saved. And I always knew that those were pretty slippery words. It's hard to pin down a definition when you say ``save or create.'' But on that day--in fact, that moment--when I heard the language from the President that he was going to save or create 3.5 million jobs with the $787 billion, my instantaneous response was, as long as there are 3.5 million jobs left in America, they will be the jobs the President points to and says, See, those are the jobs that I saved with the $787 billion stimulus plan.

That's how this language works. If you're going to create jobs, you should be able to quantify how you're going to do that, and you should lay out the cost per job to create them. If you're going to save jobs, how do you invest money in saving a job? I suppose you could go to a company and say, Listen, we're going to buy up all of this product that you're producing because you have got a 1,000 jobs here, and part of the money that we're contributing to buy this product we wouldn't buy otherwise is going to save these 1,000 jobs that you have. It is pretty hard to measure.

So the Federal Government didn't really do much analysis. They just set up this Web site. This Web site, Madam Speaker, is recovery.gov/transparency/statesummaries, and the list goes on. Well, I didn't look at all 50 States. I went as far as Iowa before I actually learned all I needed to know at this point. This is the Web site. Not only does it create jobs that certainly don't exist, but it also creates congressional districts that don't exist. Just for the State of Iowa, on this Web site, recovery.gov/transparency, for the jobs that were created in western Iowa, alleged by the White House's Web site, they spent $862,498 per job created. Now, get that, $862,498 jobs per job created in western Iowa, created a lot of these jobs in nonexistent congressional districts.

We have five congressional districts in Iowa. Some of these jobs were alleged to have been created. These are the district numbers. Seventh, Eighth, 16th, 17th, 19th, 24th, and 31st Iowa Congressional Districts, jobs created at the cost of $862,498, and that leaves off the double-aught district of the State of Iowa. That's zero-zero. That's double goose egg. That's nonexistent, if you could put nonexistent there without a decimal point and carry it out to infinity. There they spent $114,000 to create five nonexistent jobs.

This is what's going on with these Keynesian economics on steroids while they're propping up immigration, while we have Americans that need jobs, want jobs, line up for jobs. While this is going on, we have this kind of fuzzy math accounting and a complete misunderstanding of where wealth comes from, a complete misunderstanding of the foundation of our economy. And I know John Maynard Keynes had some ideas, and I know he has got followers, and I know FDR was one of them. But Keynes was also the guy who said back in the 1930s, I can solve all of your unemployment in America. Just take me to an abandoned coal mine, and I will go out and drill a bunch of holes out there, and I will bury American cash in there, and then I will fill that coal mine up with garbage--this was before the EPA was created, by the way, Madam Speaker--and turn the entrepreneurs loose to go dig the money up out of the holes that were drilled in the bottom of the coal mine that was filled with garbage.

That was Keynes' idea, and I know he was sounding facetious, but, giving a little bit for his sense of humor and for his sense of accuracy, because we have spent a lot of money in this country, dug holes and filled them back up figuratively without putting the money in it, just put money in the hole.

Do Americans want jobs? Absolutely they do, Madam Speaker. And here's what's taking place: Day labor centers are now seeing natural born Americans, United States citizens, line up at the day labor centers right next to illegals, competing for jobs that illegals were supposedly doing that Americans wouldn't do. Here is an article in my hand, USA Today, December 1--that's yesterday--titled ``Unemployed U.S.-born workers seek day-labor jobs.'' It quotes a professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, Abel Valenzuela, Jr.--he is a professor of urban planning. To quote him, he says this:

``You had many, many unemployed construction workers who found themselves without any permanent or stable work. Some of them have gone on to seek employment by standing on street corners alongside immigrant workers.'' That's the professor at the University of California-Los Angeles. It goes on to say, ``Contractors and homeowners describe the jobs and negotiate pay on the spot,'' just like illegals have, for too long in this country. There are stories and narratives that come from Tucson, Arlington, Virginia, Los Angeles. Los Angeles, it says that ``Citizens are replacing''--citizens, Madam Speaker--``Citizens are replacing immigrant day laborers who had trouble finding work and returned to their home countries. These are people who used to have permanent positions. It's happening everywhere.''

That's the article from USA Today. Jobs Americans won't do? Americans are lined up to get jobs in day labor gatherings right alongside groups of illegals who have, some of them, decided to go back home because of the lack of opportunity here. The unemployment rate is 10.2 percent. Seven to eight million working illegals, as I said. That's about 15.7 million unemployed, and Madam Speaker, if you add to the list of that 15.7 million legitimate workers in America who are unemployed and, by definition, are looking for a job, there is another 5.5 million or more who have exhausted their unemployment benefits who don't quite fit the definition that are looking for a job.

There are more than 20 million Americans that want a job today. The American workforce, of 154.4 million of our total workforce, there are over 70 million Americans of working age who are not working. Over 70 million. We could tap into a workforce of more than 70 million people of working age that are just simply not working because the wages don't pay enough, the benefits don't pay enough. Maybe they're independently wealthy. Maybe they're in between jobs, but they're all hirable if you make a good enough offer.

These are Americans that will work. There are 70 million nonworking Americans of working age, 7 million to 8 million working illegals, and they tell us that they are jobs Americans won't do, and we won't possibly run our economy unless we have these millions of illegal workers that are here, but they want to give them amnesty and legalize them?

All we have to do, Madam Speaker, is hire 1 out of 10 of the Americans who are of working age and not in the workforce, put them into those jobs, and we could easily replace--by hiring 10 percent of the nonworking Americans of working age, we could replace every illegal in America, according to these numbers, that are produced by the Pew foundation. If it's double that, like I think it is, then we hire 20 percent, 2 out of 10 of Americans. We're looking at more than 20 million Americans that are looking for work. I think this is an easy solution for us. And by the way, we are wiping out 900,000 jobs a year because of legal immigration, green cards that we're granting at the rate of 75,000 per month. That number I believe is 780,000 so far this year.

``Federal records show that before the recession began, the Federal Government issued 830,000 green cards in the previous year. Last year, during the first year of the recession, the government granted 875,000 new green cards, and we're at the pace to go to 900,000 or more this year.'' There were 900,000 jobs granted to people who were--at the time the card was advanced--not Americans, while Americans are lined up 20 million deep. We're wiping out almost 1 million jobs a year because of the legal immigration, and we know that there are 7 million to 8 million or more jobs that are taken by illegals, and we know that if we enforce the job--if we enforce a law for every illegal that's removed from a job, it opens up a job slot for an American to step into.

Madam Speaker, any sane nation would go after this enforcement. They would adjust their immigration policy to reduce the legal immigration because of the recession that we are in. Here is what's going on in this chart, Madam Speaker. The workforce enforcement free-fall--what we've seen happen is, the unemployment has gone up 58 percent overall. At the same time that's happened, here is the enforcement that has gone down. Department of Homeland Security administrative arrests are down 68 percent; criminal arrests are down 60 percent; criminal indictments are down 58 percent, almost reflecting the same; criminal convictions are down 63 percent. This whole level is down roughly 60 percent or a little bit more in the enforcement of our immigration laws, while unemployment is up almost the same thing, almost 60 percent.

What nation that needs a sound economic policy would go down this path of reducing its enforcement of immigration law while it watched unemployment go up to 10.2 percent and rising to 15.7 million by definition unemployed, more than 20 million altogether, and still we grant green cards at the rate of 900,000 a year. And every one of them supplants--if they go to work, they supplant a job an American would be doing otherwise while we tolerate, I'll say, tens of millions of illegals in America who come here and--yes, I know everybody has a dream, but everybody can't live in the United States of America. That is the bottom line. We can't help the world if we sink the lifeboat. That's what will happen.

I'm for a tighter labor supply, Madam Speaker. I'm for the kind of labor supply that will allow that person who grows up in this country or comes legally to this country to go to work and earn a living and be able to claim a salary and benefits package that they can live on, that they can raise a family on. And yes, today it takes two workers in a family to make this happen. Mom and dad to raise the kids, working together and making ends meet as best they can.

But that's not really possible today for the lower-educated Americans. Their dreams have been taken away by illegal immigration. And somewhere, somewhere in America thousands of times over, over Thanksgiving and coming up for Christmas, there will be a brother and a sister, or a brother and a brother, siblings sitting around the table, and they'll say grace and ask the blessings on their turkey, and they'll start to talk as they eat, and somebody will be unemployed. And their brother or sister will have a job, and they'll understand that there are people who are in the United States illegally that are filling those slots that they could have, and this discussion, which becomes a nationwide discussion, the rejection of amnesty starts to swell.

As the subject is brought forward here before this Congress--if it is--you will see the American people rise up, and their rejection of amnesty that we saw in 2006 and '07 will be child's play compared to the anger of the American people who now see themselves unemployed, 20 million or more, watching them being replaced by legal immigrants at the rate of almost 1 million a year and watching 8 million, or maybe twice as many, illegals working in America, taking jobs that Americans will do.

In fact, taking jobs, according to the USA Today article that I referenced, that Americans are standing in line to do right next to people that--if I needed to come and hand out the work permits, they would be compelled to deport many of these workers. This Nation does not have a logical and coherent enforcement of immigration law.

One of the things we need to do for a tool to enforce, Madam Speaker, is to pass my New IDEA Act. The acronym is this: The New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. It brings the IRS into this so that the IRS--it clarifies to the IRS that wages and benefits are not deductible for income tax purposes. It allows the IRS to do the audit and deny the business expense of wages and benefits paid to illegals, which takes--when the interest and the penalty and the tax liability that accrues from that decision at a 34 percent rate, will take your $10 an hour illegal up to $16 an hour.

Employers will understand that they would rather go with the legal worker at $13 or $14 an hour than the illegal that could cost them $16 an hour, and we have the IRS into this. They love enforcing their work. I know that. So we bring the IRS into the mix, and they would be required under the New IDEA Act to cooperate with the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. We can shut down this jobs magnet. We can control this border. We can reestablish the rule of law in America. We can reinvigorate this economy, and we can produce a tight enough labor supply that the wages and benefits paid to our workers, whatever their education level is--if they're willing to work, they need to be able to sustain themselves in this society.

We're moving away from it today. We can move this back. We can refurbish the middle class in America. That's one of our charges during this time. It's one of our opportunities during this time, Madam Speaker. And I urge that you and everyone in this Congress bring special attention to the preservation of the rule of law which is more important than our economy is today in this country.

Source