The Distinction Between Legal and Illegal Immigration

Floor Speech

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, one of the things that makes America great is that our country is a country that--regardless of one's race, one's religion, or one's ethnicity--we, as citizens of the United States, make up a collective family, the American family; yes, a diverse family, but a family, in and of itself, composed of all the people, the great variety of people we have here from every part of the world who have come here to live in freedom and enjoy the opportunity and the liberty and the justice that America represents.

Here, despite where one was born or whose one's parents are or when even one became a citizen, we are all equally part of that family.

Just as many families across our Nation have come to discover, at one point or another, in a time when there are scarce resources, when you are going through perhaps an economic crisis or trying to avert an economic crisis, it is not unreasonable to provide for one's family before helping others.

It is not selfish to watch out, thus, for our fellow Americans. It is not selfish to watch out for our fellow Americans above the well-being of foreigners, even foreigners who wish us well and, yes, foreigners who would like to become part of the American family; but, first and foremost, those Americans from every part of the world who are citizens of this country or, yes, who have come here legally in the attempt to become a U.S. citizen, their interest must be our first priority.

Tonight, I draw my attention and the attention of my colleagues to the dire consequences that we face if many--and many people have been insisting that we do this--if we implement the so-called immigration reform which, of course, would legalize the status of those who are currently unlawfully living and working in our country.

Just as we are a nation of immigrants, we are also a nation of laws. What the American people and my colleagues must keep in mind, while debating this issue of immigration, is the distinction between legal immigration and illegal immigration.

Perhaps the thing that has disturbed me most in this debate is the attempt to blur the difference between the two, the difference, even to the point where statistics are being used to say: well, this is what immigrants have done for our society.

No, the statistics are what immigrants have done, but that does not include the illegal immigrants that are part of the equation.

No, illegal immigration is on a totally different plane. Legal immigration and illegal immigration are on totally different planes. Too often, we see these lines blurred, as I say, in this debate.

I happen to be very pro-legal immigration, and there is no reason for most Americans not to lift their head up when we actually understand that our country admits more legal immigrants annually than all the other countries of the world combined, totaling roughly a million legal immigrants every year.

While our immigration system certainly needs reforming or making it more effective and more efficient in what it is doing, this controlled and open process of legal immigration has worked well for America and demonstrates the capacity for our people to have compassion and generosity towards other human beings, other people who would like to come here to be part of the American family--coming here while obeying the rules, coming here not thumbing their nose at our legal system, coming here with respect towards the rest of us by obeying the laws and the regulations that are necessary for someone to come here legally.

Those folks have been wondrous, and, in fact, we all trace our roots back to people like this who came here and have contributed so much to the well-being of our country, and those million people who come here legally every year are a major positive asset to our country.

Despite our generous legal immigration policy, it is estimated that anywhere from 11 to 20 million foreigners are unlawfully present in the United States today.

While I certainly understand the positive motives and the essential goodness of the vast majority of these trespassers, of these people who are here illegally, it does not negate that they are lawbreakers, nor does it negate the economic and social consequences of inundating our country-- far above that million-person mark of legal immigration, but inundating our country with a large number of people, thus causing a growing damage to the American family, to people who are here who have come here legally, and to our U.S. citizens.

The dire consequences are evident to average Americans who see the decline in the quality of their schools, their neighborhoods--the safety of their neighborhoods, yes--and their health care. Yes, even their jobs. They can see the decline in the quality of the jobs that are available to working people in this country. Not only are citizens hurt by permitting illegals to cut in front of the line, but it is also a slap in the face to those who continue to wait their turn to come to America.

When we give in to trying to placate and trying to meet the interests of people who come here illegally, it is done at the expense of those people who are waiting in line and want to be American citizens and want to obey our laws and want to come here legally. Yes, illegal immigrants hurt the American people and hurt legal immigrants even worse.

Earlier this year, President Obama's 2012 unilateral deferral of deportation for certain illegal immigrants, essentially an amnesty decree, caused huge delays for thousands--that is thousands who are here legally seeking green cards, seeking to have government employees do their job and to actually make the immigration system work. Our government employees were servicing illegal immigrants at the expense of legal immigrants. They got it totally backwards. And that is the argument that we face today. It has a lot of things totally backwards.

While it is concerning that the President's actions appear to be political--which is this effort that we saw to try to appeal to the various segments of our population in order to conduct policy in the interest of illegal immigrants--I am most troubled by the fact that, basically, our President would defy the rule of law and congressional intent by unilaterally granting preferential treatment to those immigrants who are here illegally. And our President then, without congressional intent or any rule of law behind it, actually shifted the services of our government to service the needs of people who are here illegally at the expense of those people who are here legally.

Nearly 4.5 million mostly legal immigrants are currently caught up in the backlog of our bureaucratic immigration process. That is 4.5 million people who we need to be concerned about. They are part of the American family. They have come here as part of those 1 million legal immigrants that we have coming in, but yet they end up waiting decades--years, and sometimes decades--to make sure that their papers are processed so that they can become citizens.

The last thing we need to do--and unfortunately this administration has been doing it--is shift over the work effort and the time and the resources that are necessary to help these people who come here legally become citizens, shift that over to trying to service those people who are here illegally and have thumbed their nose at our law.

A policy which hurts those who follow the law and hurts those who are U.S. citizens and then rewards illegal and dishonest behavior is going to have some pretty bad consequences.

We are not fooled by the rhetoric--and no one should be fooled by the rhetoric--that we need to have ``comprehensive immigration reform'' and that it will in some way impact in a positive way what I have been talking about this afternoon. What they really mean when they talk about ``comprehensive immigration reform''--what they really mean--is ``amnesty.'' They don't want to use that word because the American people learned what that was all about. What they are really doing is rewarding those who have broken the law; and they do so at the expense of American citizens and, yes, at the expense of those immigrants who are here legally.

As the saying goes: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Mr. Speaker, we have already been fooled once. Amnesty has been tested, and it has proven to be a failed policy. In fact, it has served only as a catalyst for chain migration, which has compounded many of the horrific economic and social challenges that we face today.

So we have already had an amnesty in the past, and we know what it has done to the challenges that we had then. It has made them worse. And now we have ended up with, as I say, horrific economic and social challenges.

I am, of course, speaking--when I talk about the amnesty of the past--of the 1986 immigration reform bill, where Congress infamously promised President Reagan that they would enhance border security in exchange for an amnesty on the behalf of nearly 3 million illegal immigrants then residing in the United States.

Needless to say, border security was never enhanced and, needless to say, many more than the 3 million that we were supposedly talking about were legalized through chain migration. And millions upon millions more would continue to illegally flock to our country.

Why?

Because they saw that those people who had come here illegally ended up becoming naturalized, ended up being put in front of the line of those people who were waiting diligently in other countries to come here legally. Thus, it created a major increase in the flood of illegals into our country.

As common sense would dictate, the U.S. Government cannot continue to send this type of mixed message, the message which basically says we are going to reward that person who is here illegally by making him a citizen, putting him through the process actually even before those people who have come here legally, and anybody who gets here illegally, we will reward them with citizenship. They will then have the rights of Americans for education, for health care and the opportunities that are abundant here for American citizens and legal immigrants.

Well, if we continue to say anybody who can get to this country illegally or not is going to have those benefits, that is a mixed message if we expect that illegal immigration is going to be halted or in some way that the people overseas who are considering will hesitate to come here. In fact, we are rewarding those who made it here. Without expecting the legal

immigration invasion of our country to increase, we actually gave people the incentive to come here illegally.

Illegal immigration only dramatically jumped after the 1986 amnesty deal, setting the path for our current predicament.

And what is our current predicament?

We have social and economic dislocation that is harming the American people, especially middle class working people. Like after the 1986 amnesty deal, those admitted into the United States under a new amnesty will surely have spouses, children, parents, even siblings back in their home country with whom they will want to reunite. They will insist on reuniting with--legally or illegally--those people who are in the United States.

So that is why we have ended up in a situation where we hear people say: Well, we have these people that we will never see in our family in this other country. Well, the people who are saying that have every right to go to that other country. It is as if someone who is in the United States who is saying that we have to reunite the families--and they are here illegally in the first place--that that is a reason that we should legalize their status so that they can reunite the family that has been left behind. No. The other option is people who are here illegally should go home and be with their families that they left behind. It is better for them to do that.

So this has really been a potential threat when we talk about family reunification and the rest because there is a potential to triple the number of people who are currently here in this country illegally. Let's get that right--triple. If we give amnesty and we legalize the status of those who are here illegally, we could be tripling the number of people. We could be inserting this number of people into our system.

If true, this abrupt population swell will fundamentally change America socially, economically, and, yes, politically, causing major consequences that we can even see across the board. And you can see what those consequences will be because those people that now are swirling in the ranks of our population will mainly be poorer people, people at the poorest end of the economic level. We will be importing millions--tens of millions--of poor people, increasing poverty in America.

The stress that would place on our social services is one thing, but to our economy and what that does to the American people in the job market would be horrendous. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, every 1 percent increase in the labor force attributable to immigration tends to lower the relative wages of all American workers. Let's get that straight. That is what happens when you have an increase in the labor force by immigrants who come to this country. That is why we want to limit it to 1 million people.

If we have 11, 20, 30, 40 million people coming in, we can expect major decreases in the actual wages that all Americans receive. It is going to impact the American wages. Surprise, surprise. When you have a flood of illegal immigrants into a country, they are bending down the wages, bending down the wages of the American people.

However, those who stand to lose the most are whom, when we say that these people are mainly people from lower income levels? So what we are talking about, the people who are really losing by legalizing the status of illegals, by having a plan that would eventually bring tens of millions of more people into our country and insert them into our process, the people who are hurt the most are low-income, low-skilled American workers.

One major study found that increases in immigration during the 1980-2000 era resulted in an 8 percent decrease in wages for high school dropouts and a 3 percent decrease in wages for the average American worker. Well, this is hardly surprising. Well, for me, it wouldn't be surprising.

During my college days, I was a janitor. I worked as a janitor. And let's note, I worked as a janitor because I needed a job. I was cleaning toilets. I was scrubbing floors. I was picking up trash. That was not my desired job, but I needed the money.

Historically--right now--jobs such as these would be a steppingstone for those who perhaps lacked an education or were trying to earn their way through school. I was trying to help pay my education expenses. But after decades of illegal immigrants who have been bending back the wages and the businesses willing to exploit them, many of the jobs that we are talking about, like janitorial jobs, no longer pay even the wages that were paid in real dollars then.

I have gone back and taken a look at what a janitor makes, and janitors were making basically the same pay as I made back 40 and 50 years ago. Well, why is that? Our economy has quadrupled, maybe tripled, in the last 40 years. How come janitors make exactly the same amount of money?

They have been left out. They have been left out because the job of janitor has been bid down. The wages for people who would be janitors in our country have been bid down, bid down by people who flooded into our country illegally willing to work for a pittance, willing to live in homes where you have three or four families to a house that is only supposed to have one family.

We have a situation where who is being hurt? It is that American who would have had that job being that janitor--maybe working his way through school, maybe not--who now can't take that job because it pays so little. People say, well, how can we afford to take care of buildings if you are going to have to pay a certain amount of money, more money to those people who are taking care of the buildings?

Well, proportionately it is the same. The people who own the buildings are making a bigger profit now at the expense of the fact they are paying a pittance to illegals to take care of the building.

But also we can rest assured that technology would by now have developed that would make the life of a janitor and the job of a janitor much more efficient. You probably would have toilet bowl machines that would permit one person to clean 100 toilet bowls a night rather than 12 or 15, and that, then, would mean that the person running that machine and making that machine would be an American citizen or a legal immigrant who is earning a decent wage.

There is nothing wrong with having people who are working those jobs earn a decent wage so that they could then raise a family and, yes, maybe own their own little home some day. That is the way it used to be. When you are a working person, then you can expect to earn enough to maintain a decent standard of living. But we have a flood of illegals coming in. Especially after we gave that amnesty, what we have done is bid down the wages of the American people as tens of millions of illegals are now present in our society.

To this point, between 1960 and 2012, a time when America was experiencing its highest levels of immigration, native-born workers and legal immigrants lost an average of $402 billion in wages while native-owned firms, meaning American-owned companies, profited by an average of $437 billion.

So thus we have wages being depressed by illegal immigration that actually lowered the amount of money by $400 billion in money that was paid in wages, yet the people running the business or owned the property were $437 billion richer. So what we have seen here is a huge shift of wealth to whom? To upper-class owners of businesses at the expense of the lowest level of Americans.

Now, how is our country a safe country? Our country is a safe country because all of us who are part of the American family are doing our part to protect our country. Those people at the lower end of the economic sphere, they are the ones who join the military and go out and defend us. They are the ones who obey the law. They are the ones whom we rely upon in their good judgment to support the Constitution and a rule of law. If they lose faith in the system, we will suffer greatly.

That is one of the things that is happening is that the poor people are being left out. Actually, their standard of living is going down. Of course, our friends in the other party have provided very lucrative welfare abilities to people to be on the dole rather than giving them a good job. At the same time, they are pushing for more government programs to give the dole, to make people dependent and thus, I might say, lose their dignity of being able to be self-sufficient. At the same time, the folks on the other side of the aisle are pushing for amnesty, for illegal immigration, that would bring in 40 million new people, insert 40 million people, foreigners, into our system.

What is that going to do for the poor people of this country? Why are the unions in our country not jumping up and supporting the rights of their working people not to be having to face illegal immigrant labor bidding down their labor? Over the last 50 years, there has been a massive transfer of wealth going on, and yet at the same time we see the business wages, business profits, going up and workers' wages going down. Yet we have policies that seem to encourage it that don't make any sense.

We have people who use the rhetoric of trying to care for America's poor. The last thing they should be doing is bringing in 40 million new foreigners--mostly poor--into our country.

Knowing this, it should be no surprise that Big Business has been a consistent advocate of amnesty. Big Business wants cheap labor, and this, I might add, is not being loyal to the American family. To be loyal to the American family, no matter who they are, whether they are poor Americans, working class Americans, we should be watching out for each other.

Lower wages, however, are not the only negative impact of mass illegal immigration into our country. Similar structural breakdowns and strains can be seen in our education system. People in the lower income parts of town are seeing their education system fall apart. We see the health care system in our country falling apart. We see as well in a variety of other institutions that people rely on that the strain of millions of illegals--and they want to bring more in--is destroying this social, this economic, and this infrastructure that our people depend on.

All things considered, if amnesty were being granted to the 11 to 20 million illegal immigrants currently in the United States, it would cost the American taxpayers an additional $6.3 trillion over the next 50 years. At least 45 million foreigners, mostly poor, would be inserted into our society.

Is that going to make America a better place? Are the working people, the people who are part of the American family, going to be better off because of that? Absolutely not. And the voices of the American people need to be heard because we have people posturing as if they are doing a favor for the less fortunate by advocating this amnesty for illegal immigrants which would bring in tens of millions of more poor people from foreign countries into our country.

With our national debt approaching $18 trillion, a budget deficit of over half a trillion dollars and two unsustainable entitlement programs that we need in order to maintain some sort of security for the American people, Medicare and Social Security, these are currently on the road to bankruptcy, and if we bring in these millions more people, we can expect that the expenses of our government will shoot up trying to provide benefits for people who now--by the way, now after making them legal, they are entitled to those benefits.

Someone who is here legally is entitled to every benefit and protection as people who are here who were born here. And if we legalize the status of illegals, we are taking tens of millions of foreigners who are here illegally and granting them the rights to all those programs.

America cannot afford amnesty for those foreigners who are here illegally. We must take care of the needs of the American family, of American citizens, and of legal immigrants into our society who have joined our family. Their interests have to come first over the interests of--yes, and let me just say, there is no doubt that those people who are here illegally in our country, the vast, vast majority, 90 percent or more, are wonderful people.

We should not fool ourselves into thinking that we can somehow take care of all of the wonderful people in the world. We can't do it. As we try to do it and try to open up our borders even more than the 1 million legal immigrants that we have, we are going to attract even a bigger flood into our country which will put even more pressure on us. What we are doing in that case is hurting our fellow Americans.

Even if these people are wonderful people who come here legally and they are seeking opportunity, I am sorry, we can't take care of the whole world, and we can't tell the world that whatever good person comes here illegally we are eventually going to give them amnesty and they will be eligible for all our programs.

There is an argument about what are called the DREAMers, young people who were brought here by their parents. They didn't come here voluntarily. Their parents brought them here when they were 2 or 3. And now they don't have legal status. There are a lot of obstacles in their way. They want those obstacles removed. They want themselves to be legalized. But do you know what will happen if we do that, if we say that a young person going to school because they are young and they have been brought here by their parents, what is going to happen? What will be the message if we do that?

If we legalize the status of just the DREAMers, we are telling the people throughout the world, man, when you come here illegally to the United States, make sure you bring your children. We are telling people throughout the world, bring your children to this country so we can take care of the needs of your children.

We have needs of our own children in the United States of America. And they are wonderful kids out there that we care about, but we have to care about our own kids first. People who have come here legally have that right. They are part of our family. American citizens are part of our family. But the well-being of children from foreigners in various countries throughout the world has to be second on our list, down on our list, way down as compared to the well-being of our own people.

Yes, if we take care of the DREAMers, what is going to happen is we will be encouraging a mass flow of young people into our country. Younger people who are in school, we will have to take care of their education, et cetera. That is not right. You can't give the incentive to people to come here and expect that we are not going to have many, many more people coming here. We will have many more DREAMers coming here if we legalize the status of those who have been brought here illegally by their parents.

This issue continues to be presented as a humanitarian imperative, as something that without cost we could help these people among us. We can do that without cost? There is nothing without cost. We are being presented that we can have an amnesty as if it is not going to cost the American people. It is costing us right now. What we have done in the last 20 years to ignore this influx of illegals into our country has already caused great damage to the well-being and the standard of living of American workers at the lowest level.

People say they think they are appealing to Mexican Americans by being for amnesty for illegals. The hardest-hit community in America, perhaps the hardest-hit, and certainly minority communities, including Mexican Americans, they know where their jobs are going. They know when they have a job and an illegal comes across the border from whatever country, Asia or Mexico or Honduras or Ireland or wherever they are coming from, if they are taking the job of an American, the Mexican American community is the hardest-hit. Their education funds are the hardest-hit. Their neighborhoods are the hardest-hit.

That is why I believe that Americans of Mexican descent are patriots. They are part of the American family. And that is why I do not believe that they want to legalize the status of every illegal that has poured into our country. It hurts their families more than anyone.

So what we need to do now is make sure that as we discuss legalizing the status of illegals, of amnesty--they don't want to call it that, they want to call it comprehensive immigration reform--that we keep in mind these things could have a dramatic, negative impact on the well-being of American people. Whose side are we on? That is what you have got to ask.

What are the answers to this? Let me just say that solutions are not easy, but I would suggest there is a simple but not easy solution. We should make sure that anyone who comes here illegally does not get a job. We need to E-Verify all the jobs that are here in the United States to make sure they are not going to illegals, and they should be going to Americans or legal immigrants. And we should make sure that no illegal immigrant or the immigrant's family receives government benefits, whether it is health care or education.

I don't believe in deportation, actually. I think deportation is the wrong tactic. But unless you are going to--the President, obviously, didn't fulfill his obligation for deportation, but he didn't take another step that would then deter illegal immigration. The step to do it is no deportation. It is dehumanizing. No sweeps through people's community. But don't give jobs and benefits that belong to the American people to foreigners who are here illegally. That is the solution.

They will go home. They will go home in peace. They have our well wishes. But they are not going to have our jobs and our scarce resources that should be going to the American people.

I would ask my colleagues, as this discussion on the legalizing of illegal immigrants takes place, that we be honest with each other, and yes, that we be compassionate, but that our compassion is aimed at the American people and legal immigrants and not just compassion for those who come here illegally.

No matter how wonderful people these people are, we have to consider the American people first.

Mr. Speaker, with that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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