Stemming Uncontrolled Illegal Immigration
STEMMING UNCONTROLLED ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION -- (House of Representatives - May 12, 2004)
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Chocola). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher) is recognized for half the remaining time before midnight, which is approximately 44 minutes.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise to alert my colleagues to a vote that will be taken on the floor of this Congress next Tuesday. It is a vote that will mark a turning point for our country or will reflect a continued unwillingness by America's elected officials to do anything to protect us from the greatest threat to our national safety and well-being.
What am I talking about? Next Tuesday, there will be a vote on legislation that I have offered, H.R. 3722, which will attempt to protect us from a major decline in the quality of life and the quality of our health care due to the uncontrolled onslaught of illegal immigrants into our country and into our hospitals and emergency rooms. If left unchecked, illegal immigration will destroy the quality of life for many of our people.
It is unforgivable that government has refused to act when the evidence is clear: millions of people are being permitted to stay in our country illegally, and it is having a horrendous impact on the standard of living, safety, and quality of life of average Americans.
For tens of millions of Americans and legal residents, real wages have stagnated. The education of our children has been undermined, our health care resources depleted, and the safety of our streets and neighborhoods and, thus, the safety of our families compromised.
This is not a back-burner issue. It goes to the heart of what America will be like tomorrow and, in some cases, it deals with a crisis of today. Yet, elected officials have remained silent about illegal immigration. Why? The American people need to ask themselves that question, because it is clear that the overwhelming number of the American people are troubled and enormously concerned about this onslaught of this uncontrolled, massive flow of illegal immigration into the United States.
But why are our officials not acting? First and foremost, I believe that many elected officials have been intimidated from addressing this burning issue. When I say intimidation, what is that all about? Is that against the law? Well, no, one can be intimidated in a number of ways. I mean that our elected officials are afraid to address this issue because they are afraid to be called racists. They are afraid to be called hate-mongers.
Let me note for the record today that I have been called many names when addressing this issue, and I believe that I have love in my heart for all of, not just our fellow citizens and legal residents, but I have love in my heart for other people. People who are malicious, people who are doing ill and bad things to other people, of course we do not love them. But the vast majority of people, even illegal immigrants coming into this country are wonderful people, and I have nothing but love in my heart for those people. But that is not the question of the day. We can be very caring about the rest of the world, but that does not mean we do not recognize that we have limited resources and that we can deplete those resources to the point that it will be harmful to our own citizens if we do not act responsibly.
Furthermore, it is not hateful to use scarce resources to provide for one's family. If one is taking care of their family, if one works hard and has a certain amount of money, and even if there are needy people down the street, down the block, it is important to care for your family first. That does not mean you have any less love in your heart for your neighbors and the people down the street; but first and foremost, caring for your family is itself an act of charity and love.
I am committed to doing something about the threat of illegal immigration, not because I dislike people and certainly not because I dislike people from other countries. Most people who come here, as I say, even the ones who come here illegally, are wonderful people. But we cannot take care of all of the wonderful people in the world and expect that it will not hurt our fellow Americans, in the same way that we cannot, as individuals and as members of a family, give away all of the family's money to people down the street who might need some help and not expect if we give away too many of those resources for it not to have a horrible impact on our own family and, indeed, hurt our family. We Americans, of course, are very proud that our country represents every race and religion. So it would not be that we have in some way something against people who are coming here from another country. In fact, we are all descendant from people who originated in other parts of the world, with the exception perhaps of the American Indians. Yes, we are a nation of immigrants and we are proud of it. And we are proud also that our country today permits more legal immigration into our country than all the other countries of the world combined.
One million immigrants are permitted to come here every year, along with 400,000 refugees. With a population of 280 million people, we can expect that we will absorb this responsible number of immigrants. It has worked out for us well in the past, because the immigrants who come here legally need to be healthy, they need to be honest, and they need to be self-supporting; or they are not permitted to come here. We have no such controls on people who are coming here illegally, perhaps bringing diseases, perhaps criminal elements, perhaps terrorists.
Tonight, however, I want to draw the attention of my colleagues to the dire consequences of not stemming the uncontrolled flood of illegal immigrants into our country. One can be for a responsible and a sizable legal immigration without then compromising a position that puts one totally against a flood of illegals coming into our country, especially the uncontrolled flood of illegals that we have been seeing in the last decade. Millions of illegal new-comers are arriving in our communities. Every day, tens of thousands more of them arrive. If they are sick or they are criminals or they are terrorists, we do not know. This is a catastrophe in the making. It will lead eventually, if left uncontrolled, to a destruction of the American way of life, the very way of life that has attracted all of our forefathers and -mothers here and has attracted the legal immigrants who come to our shores legally and come with respect for our law.
The American people, they see what is happening. They can see what is happening in our cities and in our communities throughout the country. The American people see this, and they are seething with anger. Every poll shows that 60 to 70 percent of the American people are outraged that nothing is being done and their country is being taken away from them by an uncontrolled flow of people from other countries. Every time it comes to a vote, the American people express this cry for help to elected officials to do something about illegal immigration. Proposition 187 was the first time that that really came to a vote; and let me say, 10 years ago, no matter what people have heard about proposition 187, it passed in a landslide. It passed in a landslide when all of the major interest groups were against it, the major news media. All the name-calling you can possibly imagine was thrown at this little band of activists who put proposition 187 on the ballot. But even though an overwhelming number of voters voted for proposition 187, it was portrayed as some sort of a loss for the Republican Party, because Republicans by and large had supported and identified with proposition 187.
Let me note that there are people in this body, such as the gentleman from California (Mr. Gallegly), who represents many areas in which there are Americans of Mexican descent who represent a majority of areas in his district, but the gentleman from California (Mr. Gallegly) tells me that many of the cities where the majority of the population are legal immigrants and where Americans of Mexican descent hold a majority, that many of those communities voted by majority in favor of proposition 187.
Many people are afraid, even with that staring them in the face, the evidence that Mexican Americans, like everyone else, feel that their way of life is being threatened and their standard of living and their families are being threatened by illegal immigration. Many people still hesitate, thinking that they might be insulting our American citizens who happen to be of Mexican descent. Well, there is no Californian that does not respect our Mexican American and Hispanic fellow citizens and legal residents. California is, by its very name and by the names of our cities and our streets and our culture, deeply influenced by the Hispanic culture and by the Mexican American culture that has been part of our State since before it was a State, and we are proud of that as Californians. We are proud of that. And yet many people are afraid to be called a racist. They are afraid to be called racist or hate-monger; they are afraid that that might make some people who are right down the street from us, our next-door neighbors or others, feel that we have something against them.
Well, turning one group of honest citizens against another in order to keep the flow of illegal immigration into our country has worked to intimidate people, but it is a dishonest tactic; and we will hear it over and over again. I would alert my colleagues and the American people to pay no attention. The real hate-mongers and the real people who are engaged with racism are the ones who would suggest that we cannot deal with problems like illegal immigration unless we can call each other names.
Well, I would suggest that today the situation has gone so far down the road toward disaster that we have got to come to grips with this illegal immigration flow, or there is going to be irreparable damage to our country and to our people.
[Time: 22:45]
What else, of course, has prevented us from dealing with illegal immigration? It is not just a fear of being called a name and racist, et cetera; although that is a powerful factor. There is another factor involved, and that is, there are some enormously powerful interest groups who believe they are benefiting from this massive flow of illegal immigration into this country.
Who am I referring to? I am referring to big business who want to ensure that they keep wages down and suppress wages, and I am talking about the liberal left wing of the Democratic party who believes that they will exploit illegal immigrants for their own electoral purposes, that they can politically exploit them.
So we have two groups of people who want to exploit illegal immigrants: big business and the liberal left wing of the Democratic party, both trying to exploit these helpless people who come to our shores.
These powerful forces obviously do not represent the interests of the American people. First of all, let us note this. It is estimated that if illegal immigration is unchecked, and everything else being equal, the population of our country will jump from 280 million people today to 420 million people just a few decades away. Is that in the interest of any American to have that kind of crowding, that type of incredible increase in the number of people that we have to deal with and the demand on our scarce resources? That is what will happen if we leave illegal immigration, with millions of people coming in every year, and let it go unchecked. If that is going to happen we are going to end up with a half a billion people here in the United States of America.
Why are we letting it happen? There has been a lot of other things happening, and people know this is attributed to this massive flow of illegals. Yet we continue to let those things happen. Wages, for example, are being held down. There is no doubt about it; there are some people who benefit from low wages, the people who own the companies, people who want servants, et cetera. But most people, most Americans, are damaged by the product of illegal immigration, and I might add this keeping down of wages is changing the demographics in our society, thus changing the American way of life.
Let me note, it is a big lie that illegal immigrants are only taking jobs that Americans will not do. No, that is the great lie that is being used to justify this influx into our country, which is bringing down the wages of all of our people. No, no. Americans will do just about any job, but they will not do it at the pay level certain people are offering those jobs at. The pay level in our country for certain jobs, yes, Americans will not take that, but if we did not flood our country with illegal immigrants, those jobs would have to pay more money to get them done.
A good example of this is a job that I held when I was in college. When I was in graduate school, I held the job of a janitor. Yes, I cleaned toilets, and there is nothing wrong with that type of work. In fact, it is very honorable work. Any work where you are taking care of your own needs and being self-sufficient is honest work and dignified work.
During this time period after I, of course, got done with that job, that was 30 years ago, the GNP of our country has dramatically increased. We have had a tremendous increase in the GNP of our country, in the wealth of our country. This is a much richer country now than it was when I was cleaning toilets as a janitor, but if you look to see what janitors are making today in real terms, in real money, they are making almost exactly the same pay as I made when I was working as a janitor.
So why is it that the country can be so much more prosperous, there is so much more wealth here but the people working in regular jobs and more lowly jobs are not making anymore money? Where is their share of the prosperity we have enjoyed?
Their share is being gobbled up at one end of the spectrum by wealthy people and being gobbled up by government, I might add, and bureaucracy, and who is not getting it are the average working American people.
They say, well, no one would have taken that job as a janitor now. Yes, they would have taken that job had we not had a major influx of illegals in to take this janitorial work. What would have happened? They would have had to pay someone, like myself when I was in college, more money to do that job, and then you can bet that somebody would have invented a janitor machine, a toilet cleaning machine that would have cleaned the potties, maybe 100 potties. A man or a woman might be earning $50,000 a year to do a janitorial job.
There is nothing wrong with paying someone those type of wages for that type of work. As I say, any honest work is dignity, and the law of supply and demand will determine how much wages are paid, but instead of having one man working a machine, working technology to keen up our buildings and our bathrooms, we instead have opted in the society to bring in illegal immigrants, give them the jobs, but there are now five or six of those people and they are living in substandard housing with families that are deprived and are bringing the standard of living of their neighborhood down. These are people who are not living the American dream but, instead, are living the type of nightmare that they left in their home countries where there are very poor people and very rich people.
So what we have done, instead of giving working people in America an avenue of earning enough money to buy their own home, we have created a new class of poor people. Is that working for the interest of the American people of our country? Is that what we want? This is on top of, I might add, of course, the legal immigrants that we permit in, a million legal immigrants and 400,000 refugees every year.
Pressure is being felt throughout our society because of this massive flow of illegals into our country. I am suggesting millions of people are coming here every year illegally, and we are not doing anything about it, and the pressure is being felt. We can see it. The American people can see it. They can feel it, but nowhere is that more evident than in the providing of health care for our people.
Obviously we can feel it in other areas. We can feel it in the area of education. We have seen that in education, the quality of our education in California is going down. Everyone talks about class size in California. They are taking illegal immigrants out of the equation. In California, class size is not going up. You take the illegal immigrants out of the formula in California, education is doing very well, and our teachers would have time to teach our own students and give them a quality education; but no, we are permitting that to be eroded. For the average person out there who depends on educating their children in the public schools, we have permitted illegals to come in in order to help people who live in gated communities and send their kids to private schools. So education is being affected.
Our criminal justice system is being affected. We can see that throughout California as well, and health care is being affected.
Emergency health care is something that all of us depend on at one time or another. We just heard before us a few minutes ago by some of my Democratic colleagues talking about all these uninsured Americans, and there are uninsured Americans who do not have health care in this country. I have a piece of legislation aimed at trying to make sure that we do not put the status of illegal immigrants above our concerns for our own American citizens who do not have health care. My bill, H.R. 3722, will come to grips with an element that has just been put into our system unbeknownst to most American people.
What we did not know and what most people do not know is that a provision was slipped into the Medicare bill of a few months ago that passed through this House, and this provision established a $1 billion fund to compensate American hospitals for providing emergency health care to illegal immigrants. Let us make this clear: $1 billion of Federal money going to compensate hospitals for providing emergency care to illegals. Thus, we have officially opened the door to our own Treasury and to the taxpayers' money of providing services for illegal immigrants into our country.
We are providing this and it is $1 billion to start off with, and you can imagine that 10 years from now we are talking about 10s of billions of dollars, and we are talking about attracting more and more people here to the United States of America in order to get health care for their families.
We cannot spend money providing health care for people who come here illegally and not expect that we are not going to have even more people come here illegally to get that health care. It does not take a genius to figure that out. We have seen what has happened. We have seen this flow continue. We had an amnesty back in 1986. That amnesty was supposed to say there will be no amnesties after that. What happened? What happened was a dramatic increase in illegal immigration into our country.
The American Hospital Association reports that there were $21 billion in uncompensated health care services provided last year, and illegal aliens amount to 43 percent of those who do not have health insurance in this country. So 43 percent of all these people we are talking about that do not have health insurance are illegal immigrants. That is about $9 billion we are spending already for illegal alien health care. Yet we have established a fund that will provide health care for illegal immigrants' emergency health care.
What does that do? What does that mean? That means that we have created a perverse incentive for our hospitals to take care of the illegals who end up coming to their emergency center and treating the Americans and legal residents who come there, who do not have health insurance, as second class to the illegal immigrants. We have got the priorities totally backwards, but that message is not going to be lost on people overseas. They know they can come here and get that health care.
We all remember Jesica Santillan. She was an illegal alien who died after receiving not one, but two, heart and lung transplants in North Carolina. The Santillan family paid $5,000 to be smuggled across the border to get here to have care, care that they knew would take a long time to get if they could ever get it at all in Mexico.
There are American citizens who desperately need organs, and they are being knocked out of line by a family who broke the law to come here. Yes, that was a nice, little girl and that family's a very nice family. We hear stories in the newspaper every day about people who come here from China and elsewhere in order to get their families treated by America's health care providers. Yes, that touches your hearts, but let us be fair to the American people.
This is depleting our health care dollars that should be going to our own senior citizens. If we cannot provide medical care for our senior citizens, we cannot provide them medicines, how is it that we can provide $1 billion to treat illegal immigrants and then we are going to get more of them?
My bill will come to grips with this particular issue, H.R. 3722. It is meant to deal with this travesty. If passed, it will signal to the leadership that the American people no longer will stand for this type of providing services for illegal immigrants.
What does this bill do? It requires that hospitals ask questions that they are going to ask anyway. The hospitals are opposing my bill because they said it is going to add all kinds of questions that you have got to ask. No, I have got to tell you this. In order to get those funds to get compensated for treating those illegals, what we have got to do is ask questions anyway. My bill provides almost no extra paperwork. When you hear that argument, it is a lie.
[Time: 23:00]
What we have done is we have asked for a photo to be taken or a fingerprint, and one other question to be asked: Who was your last employer?
And I might add that my bill also says that if that last employer of this illegal who is now in the emergency room to get care, if he has not taken the due diligence to even make a telephone call to verify that this employee is here legally or not, and that system will be in place in 2005, well then that employer is required to pay the bill, not the taxpayers. The employer will pay that health care bill for being so arrogant as to try to hire a guy, probably not even paying his taxes and not giving him any health insurance.
So, number one, it suggests the hospitals have to take a minimum of attention to collect a fingerprint or a picture of this person, and enough information, as well as a few minor questions that they ask anyway, and that that information be provided to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Homeland Security, and that we expedite deportation of that person who is here taking hundreds of thousands of dollars of health care away from our people.
If that person is here illegally, they should be deported; and that information should be available. But the hospitals are not required to do anything else than that which is minimal. It will not cost them time or money. And right now, by the way, these hospitals report abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse. That is all reported. They can do this. And, as I said, we require the employer then to pay for it if he has not taken due diligence.
Most importantly, this bill limits the amount of health care that we are going to provide illegal immigrants if they come to the emergency room and expect treatment. This is the all-important provision. Today, we have people coming from all over the world here illegally. They arrive at the emergency room and they say, you have got to take care of me. I just mentioned this young lady, this young girl from Mexico who we spent millions of dollars on, and then her family ended up suing the hospital for heart and lung transplants. No. Under my bill, the hospitals will not be required to do anything except treat anyone who comes in for a life-threatening condition.
If an illegal immigrant is there and they want to have leukemia treatments or treatments for genetic problems they have been carrying all their life, the hospital only has to treat that patient to the point that that patient then can get to an airport or get to a transportation system that will take them back to their home country to be treated for that disease there. That is where they should be treated, instead of having our hospitals being forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for leukemia treatment, for example.
There was a fellow in my congressional district who came here from El Salvador, and he was dying of leukemia. He received $300,000 worth of treatment for leukemia. That $300,000 comes from the money available to take care of our children. It comes from the money that is available to take care of our seniors. Imagine, $300,000. It is a crime to permit someone who has come here to this country to deplete our resources like that.
Now, we are going to have a chance to vote on this next Tuesday; but it is not going to happen on its own, because H.R. 3722, which is the bill, is going to be the target of every interest group that you can imagine that wants to keep the flow of illegal immigration coming into this country. But the American people need to know that H.R. 3722, my bill, which will be on this floor next Tuesday, is going to be voted on. And the decision that is going to be made is the decision that we have limited health care dollars in this country; so are we going to spend them for illegal immigrants or are we going to try to get control of this situation so our health care dollars are going to our own legal residents and our U.S. citizens.
Is that hateful? Is that racist? Is that a horrible thing for people who care about other people to do? I say that that is the loving thing to do. I say that you can have love in your heart and try to be responsible. We know that if we try to do everything for everybody, we will end up not being able to do anything for anybody. We have seniors right now that cannot afford their medicines, yet we are talking about spending billions of dollars to take care of illegal immigrants.
Now, the only way that I got this vote to the floor, the only way that this bill, H.R. 3722, was permitted to come here to the floor for a vote was that they needed my vote. The leadership in the House needed my vote on the Medicare bill.
I voted for the Medicare bill because I felt that our health care had evolved now so that a lot of people who depended on operations and the type of things covered by Medicare in the past now took care of these problems by using pills and medicine. So we had to evolve so we could help people get those pills and medicine as they get to be older. Well, that bill only passed by one vote as it went through the House. And I voted for that and I am proud of that.
Then it went over to the Senate and that is where they stuck this provision in, this provision of a billion dollars, which is of course an installment. Ten years from now it will be $20 billion. We know that. So they stuck this provision in, and on the way back they did not have enough votes to pass the Medicare bill. That is why there is a miracle that is going to happen here next Tuesday.
They needed my vote in order to get the Medicare bill passed, and I said I cannot vote for this with this provision in here. I already voted for it when it was not in; I cannot vote with it in here. Unless it is mitigated, I cannot vote for this bill, and the bill was going to go down. The leadership said, what do you mean by mitigated. I said, I need to bring a bill to the floor that will undo the negative impact of the money that we are going to provide for illegal immigrants' health care in this bill. They said, you have a deal. We will let you bring this to the floor and the people of the United States will be able to hear the arguments and your colleagues will be able to vote up or down on the legislation that you have in mind.
That is how this bill came to the floor for a vote. The American people have to be involved in deciding this issue when this bill comes onto the floor on Tuesday. H.R. 3722 is very easy to understand. It means limited health care dollars are going to go to illegal immigrants, or it means that we are going to try in some way to restrict the use of our limited health care dollars in the servicing of illegal immigrants.
As I say, we have a situation in this bill that goes to the cost of illegal immigrants as well by making sure that our hospitals no longer feel compelled to provide extensive services, like cancer treatments and genetic engineering and bypasses and things to help people who are not in a life-threatening situation. We cannot afford to do that for illegal immigrants. We cannot afford to do it.
First of all, it is unfair to our own U.S. citizens to have a fund that will compensate hospitals for taking care of illegal aliens who do not have health care insurance, but then we are not doing that for our own citizens who do not have health care insurance. That is wrong. It is immoral, and it is wrong.
We need to make sure when the illegal immigrant is there that we do not end up spending massive amounts of money. The only money that should be spent is in case that person, his or her life is in danger at that moment. We cannot afford anything else. There are some people who believe that we can do everything for everybody. They never vote against any spending in this body. They vote for any new government program. I do not know how they can think they are being responsible, but they do.
I can tell you right now, we cannot be the HMO of the world. If we try to be the HMO of the world, and we attract people from all over the world, which we are doing now, and taking care of all their maladies and all their health care problems, we will be doing so at the expense of the American people.
Yes, illegal immigration is out of control. It is dramatically hurting our way of life. We have wages that have been kept down so some of our people cannot afford health insurance, and now we are taking care of illegals and not their health insurance. We have people now who come to this country and will work and not pay taxes, so that means they are not getting health insurance, they are not paying taxes, and that means doubly that we end up paying for their bill.
[Time: 23:10]
Who are we really subsidizing? We are subsidizing the employers of these people who are basically not only exploiting them, they are exploiting the taxpayers. The people are getting filthy rich by hiring people who have come here illegally and not providing them any health care and not having them pay taxes to make up for the services they are consuming here. This has to be stopped. It is bringing down the wages of our people and it is destroying the American way of life.
We cannot sustain millions of people coming into this country without harming our own people. Wake up, America. We can do something about this, but we have got to take a stand.
Next Tuesday, it will be very easy to understand, except there is going to be all kinds of rhetoric about the burden of paperwork that we are going to put on the hospitals. By the way, there is no burden of paperwork unless the hospital wants to be compensated. H.R. 3722 will not require the hospitals to do anything if they do not want the Federal dollars to compensate them for taking care of that illegal immigrant.
If they want to opt out, there is no burden. But if they want compensation, they are going to have to ask certain questions to prove this person was illegal to get compensation. My legislation requires a minimal amount, maybe an extra 30 seconds, enough to snap a Polaroid shot and ask who the former employer is. That is it. All they are doing is putting this information into a computer that is available to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and then the legislation requires our government employees at the Immigration and Naturalization Service to look at that information and they will analyze it and they will begin deportation against an illegal immigrant.
Why should we do this? First, some will say it will mean more people are not getting treated in our society. There will be more sickness in our society.
Let me note that if Members want to see sick people coming to America, let everybody in the world know if you get to America, you are going to be treated. You are going to get free health care. They are going to bring their kids here with polio and everything else because they know their family will be treated in the United States of America. If we want to spread disease in our society, let us make our society the HMO of the world, and that is what we are doing here today.
No, this is not an imposition on the hospitals. They can opt out if they want. It is no more bother than what they are already doing. For example, child abuse cases go to the police. They make a report to the police; or some spousal abuse case, they do that already. No one is complaining about that. But let us compare what illegal immigration is doing to those situation.
This illegal immigrant from El Salvador who died with leukemia and taking with him $300,000 of U.S. tax dollars with him, how bad is that? Is that awful? The girl in North Carolina, we spent $5 million on her. Why is that bad?
Today if that guy would have lived and gone into a drugstore or liquor store and stolen a couple hundred bucks, he would be in jail. If one of our people, our citizens, goes into a store and robs it of a couple hundred dollars, that person is going to jail. But instead, we are taking people who have entered the United States illegally or have overstayed their visas and are just here illegally, and we are permitting them to consume hundreds of thousands of dollars, taken directly from our pockets; and the money available for providing services, we are permitting them to take this money. They are stealing from our society, but their accomplices are the people in our government who refuse to come to grips with this grave threat to our society.
We all know that we have a threat here to the institutions, our health institutions and to our schools. We also know that with illegal immigration out of control, we do not know if these people are terrorists, if terrorists are coming here. We have to come to grips with this.
We have to look in the mirror and say we are proud to be a country that is made up of every race and every religion. We are proud to be a Nation of immigrants. We are proud that we have more legal immigration in our society than any other country in the world, but we are not going to be browbeaten and called names in light of our generosity, simply for doing things that are responsible in protecting our own citizens and legal residents.
We have got to watch out for each other. We have to care for our other fellow Americans more than people who have come here illegally. If we do not, no one is going to stand in line and go through the process of legal immigration.
This is a situation that threatens our way of life. We have to proceed with love in our hearts, but we have to proceed with determination to turn the situation around. Next Tuesday, Members of Congress have got to know that their constituents will be judging them on their vote on H.R. 3722. No one should be fooled by any smoke that is blown into the air to try to confuse people on the issue. This is the issue of using scarce health dollars for illegal immigrants versus using those dollars for American citizens and legal residents.
People need to have their voice heard in Washington, D.C. Elected officials need to come to grips on this, and we need to have more votes on this than simply those votes that are required whenever there is some type of arrangement made because votes are needed on another piece of legislation.
There are good people on all sides of this issue. There are good people who are concerned about large numbers of illegals. We have 12 million illegals in this country, but we have to be more concerned with American citizens and legal residents.
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