Policy Solutions to the Border Crisis
Floor Speech
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Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the time to be able to weigh in on these issues in a little more relaxed manner here and spend some time.
I want to talk a little bit about legislation we are working on here known as S.J. Res. 38. In this case, it would ensure our taxpayer dollars are used to buy American-made products, something that has had bipartisan support, nonpartisan support, in the past around here.
Certainly, when we are talking about having something domestically produced or buying it from a foreign competitor or ally, one thing we shouldn't be doing is buying more and more things from China.
What is the sense of exporting so many of our dollars over to somebody who is such an adversary in so many things on the world front, with the funding of countries that are helping to sponsor terrorism and the unrest they are helping fund in the Middle East? There are constant threats to Taiwan and the other islands in the South China Sea that are possessions of Japan and others, constant aggression on that. They sink many other smaller countries into huge debt by dangling out loans they know they can't repay, and pretty soon, they can take over the resources of that country.
As the United States of America, we can produce anything we want here. We can produce it well, usually of the best quality, using the best practices, by far, yet what are we doing? We are hamstringing our own ability to strengthen our own economy with the energy we need to produce in order to do that, with environmental policies that 50 years ago were well intentioned but have been completely weaponized against industries and farming, mining, and timber. The West burns each year massively. In California and Utah, it is endless.
A lot of this currently comes from Biden administration policies, and I jump back 3 years to 8 years to the Obama-era policies that have put us in this spot.
Currently, President Biden wants to shoot down the waiver to eliminate the buy in America requirements for, in this case, electric vehicle chargers. That is what this bill, S.J. Res. 38, is about, which would be purchased under the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, another boondoggle itself.
If the money is going to be forced to be spent, and we have to buy these electric chargers for electric cars, at least can we have them be American produced, American made.
Don't get me mixed up with the electric car crowd. I don't think we should be forcing that on anybody. At the same time, they are tearing down the California power grid with the dams they are removing on the Klamath River up in the north part of my district and one across the border, and then threatening the Snake River farther up and one down in Mendocino County.
It is just one thing after another, getting rid of hydroelectric power and also the ability to store water and for the water to be retained during flood control season and for some recreation--yes, even water available to let out for fish when they need to. When they tear these dams out, we lose that green, renewable, clean, CO
An addendum to that, CO
In 2021, the Democrats included $7.5 billion of taxpayer money for electric vehicle charging stations in their pie-in-the-sky idea that we are going to electrify everything in the next few years. This is the Infrastructure and Jobs Act.
I don't support the forced purchase and proliferation of electric vehicles, but doggone it, if we are going to do this, we need to buy American.
Why do we have to steamroll our own laws? Why is the administration backstabbing our American manufacturers and sending billions over to China and other Asian markets?
In the process, it also destroys our immigration laws and fosters more chaos at the border when we have this continued policy by the Biden administration of basically ignoring the border.
As mentioned earlier, 64 of my colleagues went to the border. I have paid a couple of visits myself in Arizona and California and such. It is indeed chaos. They are just walking right past you when you go visit the border. Some of these are nice folks from Central America, families and such. We keep putting out the magnet, the green light to come across.
We have talked many times about the numbers coming across the border, like 10,000 per day just in the month of December, 300,000 for a month.
The burden is being borne even by our Democrat-run cities, even they are starting to cry uncle. We have the Governor of New Jersey saying we need to check with these bus companies and see where they are all coming from. No, you need to check over here at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That is where the policy is coming from. It isn't bus companies from Texas or Florida or something. That is who you need to be talking to because that is where the problem is.
Indeed, the administration is shifting from pushing our jobs overseas to then having our jobs here filled by people who are coming here illegally. It is the chaos they have had at the border coupled with these other policies and fentanyl coming across the border.
Who knows what kind of terror cells are being built by people coming across the border illegally and the gunrunning and everything else that can happen? It has even resulted in the housing of illegal immigrants in our National Park System, including a national park right there in New York City, so people can't use it.
Now, you have seen the stories more and more recently that they are going to be housing them in schools. Kids are getting kicked out of schools in New York right now because they have a supposedly temporary problem where they have to house them in the gym. The kids can go online, back to Zoom learning, like during the height of COVID, which was manipulated in my own home State of California, which took an extra year to allow kids back into school.
What a mess. Why are these people entrusted with power?
When you talk to the American public, this is all preventable. We don't have to live like this, when we are talking energy, when we are talking domestic production. No, we would rather export it, I guess, and have kids in Africa mine the products in order to have your electric car and electric gadgetry.
The National Park Police have testified that these encampments on our National Park lands endanger the people that would normally enjoy and use them. Also, in the wintertime, these areas can end up being a floodplain, like the one in New York City, endangering the illegal immigrants that are being attracted--until recently, when it seems maybe the light is starting to turn around for the Governor of New York and the mayor of New York City and such.
I don't know. I don't know.
Mr. Speaker, we have a porous border. We have a massive problem with the encounters that we have at the border here that are overwhelming our demoralized Border Patrol folks. How are they supposed to do their job?
On my visit down to Arizona, they actually had, and still have today, government-provided vans go over and just pick people up at the gaps in the border and get them to the processing center sooner. We know that 85 percent of them are not going to be heard at their asylum trial any time soon.
One thing after another is wrecking our economy, wrecking people's confidence in government, and the ability just to conduct their own lives. There is no reason we need to have such costly ways of doing business with energy, with procuring food; everything else that is happening under this Biden administration.
Mr. Speaker, just 3 years ago, things were looking pretty good on the cost of fuel, cost of groceries, and employment until they used COVID as a weapon to attack our economy at that time and tried to make it look bad in order to win the 2020 election.
We have a lot of complex issues, but the solutions really aren't that tough when you get down to it: enforce the border laws that we have.
We don't need comprehensive immigration reform. We already know what we are supposed to do about the border. We just need to enforce the laws that we have and have common sense applied to asylum.
At the same time, let's not exploit American jobs that we could be doing if we have to produce these electric vehicle charging stations. At least let Americans produce them instead of sending them to China.
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