Providing for Consideration of Senate Amendments to H.R. 5281, Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act of 2010
Floor Speech
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Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gen tle lady for yielding.
I rise in opposition to this rule and the bill, H.R. 5281. I agree with some of the presenters before me. It is not a DREAM Act. It's a nightmare act. It's one of those pieces of legislation that if the proponents actually understood the components of it, some of them would peel off, some of them would change their mind, and some of them would wish they could but they're on record and can't.
The nightmare act is amnesty. Now, we need to come to an agreement on what amnesty is. I have long said that to grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crime. This legislation seeks to reward those who are, under the law, eligible for being sent back to their home countries.
Now, it's everybody that says they came in on the day of their birth until the last day before they turned 16, but we don't have any way of verifying this. The certification and the background checks are completely impossible. About 50 percent of the people that come into the United States across our southern border don't have a legal existence in their home country, meaning they don't have birth certificates or a track of their life like we normally have here, so it's impossible to do background checks. They can say who they want to say they are. They can propose whatever they want to propose. They can say they were born in the United States or were brought into the United States. And they can say they had done so when they were 15 years old, they could have come into the United States when they were 29 years and a day old and still be eligible under this bill because there is not a way to verify. So this is the thing that is designed to tug at our heartstrings, and it opens the door for amnesty, and it lays the foundation for a whole series of other pieces of amnesty components.
But truthfully, this process is illegitimate. This is a repudiated, rejected 111th Congress. The American people went to the polls in unprecedented numbers, and they voted an unprecedented number of people out of office and put new faces in here. This lame duck session should never be used for a large agenda, and it has already been invalidated. Keep faith with the American people. Lame duck sessions are to provide the functions of government that can't be legitimately provided until the new Congress is gaveled in on January 4.
This process of no committee hearings, no subcommittee hearings, no subcommittee markup, no full committee hearing, no full committee markup, no access to this legislation that has changed four times--there are four different iterations here on the floor--and now a same-day rule up before the Rules Committee that still is the only committee that I know of on the Hill that meets without cameras, without the public presence knowing what is going on up there. I look forward to an open door and sunlight on the Rules Committee.
But this CBO score that they tout as actually a plus for the government ignores that the CBO score says it is a $5 billion deficit spending in the second decade and likely for each decade thereafter. It ignores CIS, the Center for Immigration Services score, which scores the cost to local government, State and local government, at $6.2 billion annually for the cost of providing education to the people that would otherwise be eligible for deportation.
It triples the number of green cards. And it provides safe harbor, safe harbor for ``any alien'' who has a pending application under the DREAM Act. So if someone comes in, they can be 79 years old or 99 years old, they allege that they are younger than that, file the application under the DREAM Act, and now we have to go forward and adjudicate and determine you really weren't 16 or a day before 16 when you came into America, and you really weren't under 30 when you filed this application. But it is certain if this becomes law, there will be people into their late thirties and perhaps into their forties that would be granted citizenship underneath this because it takes that long to process.
There are exemptions for fraud, exemptions that go so far as to reward it in a way that if someone falsely claims citizenship and was deported, they can't be adjudicated under this.
This DREAM Act is an amnesty act, it is a nightmare act, and it must be opposed. There is more to be said in a broader debate, and I hope to engage in that.
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