American Dream and Promise Act of 2019
Floor Speech
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Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman, the ranking member, for yielding.
Listening to the debate here, the first thing that I think was missed in this discussion was the subject of amnesty. This bill is clearly amnesty, and it is amnesty for a large chunk of people, whether they do the math at 2 million, 2.2 million, 2.7 million, or whatever that number may be north of that. Whenever we have had amnesty in this country, it has always been a lot more than was calculated.
I recall those days back in 1986 when Ronald Reagan let me down. He only did it twice in 8 years, but this was one time.
I watched the debate in the House and the Senate on whether to grant amnesty to roughly a million people. All along, I believed that the wisdom of the House and Senate would prevail, and they would understand that amnesty destroys the rule of law.
I listened carefully, and the debate went the other way. The bill was sent to the President's desk.
But I was confident that Ronald Reagan would see the principle and protect the rule of law and veto the amnesty act. Well, we all know he signed it that day in 1986. He regretted it after that, as did many of his Cabinet members, but that was a big mistake.
This is an amnesty bill, and it goes a long way toward the destruction of immigration law. When you send out an advertisement that if you can get into America, you get to stay in America, people are going to keep coming here. It doesn't stop until they have to go back home again to tell those folks whom they had recently left that they didn't get to stay in America, to discourage the rest of them.
Here is an example: In a briefing from Francis Cissna, the recently retired Director of USCIS, he gave us these numbers. He said of 100 percent of those who apply for asylum, there will be 60 percent who show up for their asylum hearings. That surprised me. I thought the number would be maybe 95 percent that wouldn't show up. Sixty percent show up; 40 percent do not.
Of the 60 percent, 10 percent get asylum. That amounts to 6 percent of the whole. Forty percent don't show up. Fifty-four percent then get assigned a deportation hearing, and they don't show up at all.
When you add 40 percent, 54 percent, and 6 percent, that is 100 percent of them who get to stay in America.
I recall a night when I was in Serbia in the middle of that huge, epic migration. I asked the chief of police, who was directing traffic, loading trains to go off to Germany out of Serbia, when and why this ever stops. The first thing he said was the international answer of, ``That is beyond my pay grade.'' But then, as I pressed him, he said it only stops when the people receiving them stop receiving them.
That is the principle here. We have to decide what we are going to do here. Whom are we going to say no to? I haven't heard anybody define, especially on the other side, whom we might say no to. This is just the people that we want to say yes to, or at least as far as the left wants to say yes to.
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Mr. KING of Iowa. There is a report that, before the last census, with an average 710,000 in a Member's congressional district, at least six districts in California were comprised, figuratively, of illegal aliens. That means that illegal aliens in California had more representation in the United States Congress than any one of 23 States that have less representation. That is something to keep in mind as this debate moves on.
Mr. Speaker, I don't think this bill goes anywhere, but if it does, it could be the destruction of the rule of law and the fracture of the United States of America.
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