Immigration
IMMIGRATION -- (House of Representatives - May 24, 2006)
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I do appreciate the honor to address you tonight, and the subject matter I wish to take up, along with my colleague from California, will be the subject of illegal immigration. We are continually discussing this issue because it is a big issue. It is complicated. It is very, very detailed, and it has many, many ramifications for the short term, mid term and long term.
As we speak, at least today and likely tomorrow, there will be more debate over in the United States Senate about this very subject matter. And as we watch them make decisions over there, many of us in this Chamber and across the country get quite apprehensive as we review the decisions that are made there, which are recommendations to us here, because many times those decisions are made, I think, without considering and maybe even without access to the facts at hand.
As nearly as I can bring it up to date with the amendments that have been passed and the way the bill sets today, the cap that they have put on for a guest worker plan is 200,000 a year. That would be a flat number that would presumably increase, and it would go 200,000 each year.
There are a number of other categories there. As we know, we have visa categories all the way from A to V. And so with all these categories that we have, there are many different ways to legally come into the United States. So I would like to send a message out there to the people who have come into this country illegally or the people outside of America that are interested in coming to the United States to live and work and play. And that is that you can go to the Web page of the U.S. Consul, and on there, you can click your way through to find out how to come the United States legally.
That is the right way to do it. That is the way we welcome people here. That is the policy we have here in the United States of America, the country that has the most liberal immigration policy on the face of the earth. Any way you measure it, we have welcomed more people into this country legally. We have welcomed them here, and they have had the opportunity to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and contribute to this country. That is the right way to do things.
We have this debate going on in this country, and the debate, Mr. Speaker, is about illegal immigration and what to do with 10 or 12 or 20 or more million illegals in this country. There seems to be a lack of will in the United States Senate to enforce the law. In fact, it seems as though, if all the illegals in America lined up and said, I think I want to go home, a bunch of the folks in the United States Senate would say, please, don't comply with the law; we don't want that to happen.
Well, I will say that I want everyone to comply with the law in the United States. The law says, if you come into the United States illegally, the penalty you are facing is 6 months in jail and deportation. Those two penalties go along with that violation. If you make that violation and you are walking the streets of America today, that means you are here illegally. If you came into this country illegally and you are not lawfully present here and you don't have proof of how you might have come here in a lawful fashion, then you are guilty of a criminal misdemeanor punishable by 6 months in jail and deportation. So many of the people that were marching in the streets claiming they were not criminals, yes, in fact, many of them were that day and are today criminals.
One of the issues we need to deal with are people who overstay their visas. At least 20 percent of the people that are here illegally come into the United States legally, as did the September 11th bombers. Some of them came here legally and then violated their visas and found themselves unlawfully present in the United States. That is part of it that we are not doing much enforcement of.
The balance of this, though, the vast majority, the mass quantity of humanity is pouring across our southern border at the rate of 11,000 a day, 77,000 a week, 4 million a year. That is a huge haystack of humanity. Some of that humanity is pretty good humanity, though they have still broken our laws. And then there is some of that humanity is not very good humanity, and in that group is the criminal element and the drug dealers and the terrorists, the needles within that 4-million-person haystack of humanity that must be sorted out.
It is not possible to sort them out with a haystack of 4 million strong. We have to cut down on the flow of humanity coming across our border.
I went down to the border about a week and a half ago and spent 4 days on the ground. I have sat through hearings in the Immigration Subcommittee, and I have done that for 3 1/2 years, sometimes two and three and even four different hearings a week. And in that period of time, you pick up a lot of information about the immigration subject matter.
In reality, I had one of the more pessimistic views of how much illegal immigration was coming across our southern border, how many illegal drugs were coming across our southern border, how bad it is down there and how much crime comes along with it. So I went down there and spent those 4 days on the border, and I am prepared to go back to the border very soon. But it made me more pessimistic. It opened up my eyes more on how bad it actually is down there on the border.
The crime that was there in front of my nose almost every time I turned around with the interdiction of about 180 pounds of marijuana on one afternoon, and later in the afternoon, I went to a port of entry. And there on the Mexican side of the border there, I don't know if it was a drug deal that went sour there, but there was an interdiction. They brought one of the Mexican nationals that had been stabbed in the liver, and they brought him across the border in a Mexican ambulance, and we air-lifted him out to Tucson and saved his life. You and
me, as taxpayers, we paid for that, and we pay for that on a daily basis.
Down there, at just that one port of entry, they get four of those a quarter, generally gunshot victims and, not as often, a knifing. So about 16 a year just at one small port of entry, with only about 180 vehicles going through it a year, which gives you an idea of how bad it is at the rest of the border, Mr. Speaker.
So I am for sealing this border, and I am for shutting off the jobs magnet, and I am for eliminating the birthright to citizenship. But shutting off this border is not going to happen with the 11,000 people a day, 4 million a year pouring across that southern border.
So what I have done, Mr. Speaker, is I have designed a concrete wall to go down on the border. I would put it 60 feet on the north side of the actual borderline, so we could have a barrier fence right on the line, and then I would put the border fence, the border wall back about 60 feet, and we can top it with concertina wire, and I am going to demonstrate just exactly how I want to go about building that.
This cardboard box, Mr. Speaker, represents the desert in Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California or Texas. Some will argue that is not all desert down there, and it is not. But looking at this on the end, one can see that this is just a trench cut through the floor of the desert. Most of that is flat ground down there. Yes, there are rocks, and there is tough terrain in many of those places, but there are hundreds and hundreds of miles that lay out smooth and flat and without a lot of rocks in it and this ought to work pretty good.
We have a company that can build a machine, and that won't even be one of their biggest challenges, that can set in and drop in a trencher and slipform a concrete footing all in one operation. This is what I have designed.
This would represent that footing, and it would drop in the ground 5 feet deep. Here is a slot we would put precast panels in, and I will demonstrate that in a minute. But this concrete footing would be poured in right behind the trencher in a slipform fashion. And as you pull that in, an operation you might visualize like this, and as you establish this footing in place, it would sit here in the desert. The earth would go up to just about the top of this.
This would be about 12 inches thick, this portion of the footing here. You would have concrete in the ground at least 5 feet. It would look like this from the side, and then you would just simply go to work, picking off your truck that has delivered precast concrete panels. These panels would be 13 feet, 6 inches long. You would pick them up with a crane and drop them in something like this. You pick up the next one and drop it in something like that. And you just continue. Once the footing is poured, it doesn't take a lot of time and it doesn't take particularly a lot of skill to install the precast panels, Mr. Speaker. They look like that, and the last section like that.
Now, you can see what I have here is a concrete wall that is 12 feet high and it goes down underground a good 5 feet. It has 6-inch thick concrete panels on top. It will have a roll of concertina wire on top, at least one, maybe two. We can put really any kind of fixtures on top here that we like and affix them to this concrete. If we want to do infrared or a camera setup, if we want to do vibration and motion sensors along this wall, we can do all of that.
But I think, for the most part, once we get the wire on top, they aren't going to want to test this wall, Mr. Speaker. They are just going to look at that and say, well, now they have built a wall I can't get over very easily, so I am going to go try to find something else.
But we need to put this in place where we have the most human traffic as fast as we can. It needs to be something that will stand up to the weather, something that doesn't rust out, something that is cheaper than the steel. If you buy that new steel, the steel prices have gotten too high. This concrete is substantially cheaper than the steel. And the construction of it is fairly easy. If you can slipform a footing, as I have demonstrated, it is very easy to set up these concrete panels.
A little company like I used to own before I came to this Congress and my son operates today could set a mile of this in a day pretty easily. You could move along pretty well. And there wouldn't be just one crew out there along that desert, and you wouldn't do 2,000 miles all in the same operation, Mr. Speaker. But this is a simple demonstration of what can be done with a rational approach.
We are spending $8 billion on 2,000 miles. That is $4 million a mile. Now, if you pay me $4 million for a mile of that desert down there and say, guard that mile, Mr. King, I would say, for $4 million, you would not get a cockroach across that border. We can put a barrier in place so that humanity doesn't get across the border, and that will stop the lion's share, at least 90 percent of the human traffic going across.
There are $60 billion worth of illegal drugs pouring across the border and much of it in the form of 50-pound backpacks that get tossed through the fence. They climb through and put the pack on their back and walk 20 miles through the desert to a pickup location.
You cannot stop that with a vehicle barrier or with a fence. You can only stop it with a wall.
Sure, they can dig under the fence, but we are going to be checking this and monitoring and patrolling it, and you will not have them tunneling underneath it in the desert where they have no place to hide the dirt pile. That will only happen in the urban areas where they can come up inside of a building and hide their dirt pile.
So this works very well for the vast stretches of the desert. Many of those areas they are not crossing very intensively at this point. They will. As we close this wall in, they will.
Somebody who knows something about the southern border and has been articulate in his response and firm in his stance, and this is a time for courage and conviction. This is a time to stand up for the Constitution, the rule of law and for the future of America and stand up for Americans who respect that rule of law.
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Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher) for his remarks and his commitment to this cause.
I wanted to point out that this concertina wire or razor wire on top, we can put two or three or four rolls up here.
Then I point out that this wall does not speak about America. We know that America is a magnet for people all over the world. It speaks about the failure in Mexico. The failure in Mexico is what drives people here. They have a corrupt society and a failed economy. They need to clean up their act.
Vicente Fox needs to do his job down in Mexico, rather than coming to the United States and interfere with the domestic policy of the United States. That would be a violation of the law in Mexico, for someone from the United States to go down there and interfere with their domestic policy.
Their domestic policy needs improvement. They need to get the corruption out. They need investment. And one day, when they clean up Mexico, this wall will not have to be here any longer.
When they do that, we can tear down this wall. We won't need it. This is a wall that can be torn down as easily or more easily than it can be put up. The footing will be there if we have to put it back again.
Mr. Speaker, these are all solvable problems, but they are issues that must be resolved for the benefit of the people of the United States of America. Everyone's immigration policy should be designed to enhance the economic, cultural and the social well-being of the United States of America.
Mr. Speaker, that is what Mr. Rohrabacher is for, that is what I am for, and that is what the House of Representatives is for.
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