Dana Rohrabacher

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, let me just note that the person who alerted me to the subject I will talk about tonight was a World War II veteran. His name was Frank Casado, a very proud Mexican American, who owned and built Lucy's Restaurant in Los Angeles. Frank later became very politically active. He was a Democrat, I might add, but he was a very close friend, and I would go to his restaurant as a young reporter and then as I worked in Ronald Reagan's staff in the White House; and Frank would always pull me aside and say, ``Dana, you have got to do something about the illegal alien invasion of our country. You have got to do something about it.'' If there ever was an American of Mexican descent it was Frank Casado. Frank joined the Navy in World War II, and he always prided himself that he had been on the boxing team and been one of the contenders of the championship of the fleet, and he was a very, very proud man. He was proud of his Mexican heritage as well, but he knew that the flood of illegal immigrants into our country was bound to bring us down, and if we can do anything to keep faith with those veterans who have sacrificed so much for our country over the years, it is that we should have the courage to face the issue of illegal immigration and to deal with it, to understand that those people who fought and died in World War II and have sacrificed over the years for our country to create this wonderful country of ours, they would be appalled to know that we are afraid to discuss the issue of illegal immigration, afraid to discuss the issue that perhaps is the greatest threat to America's well-being today, and that is an onslaught, an uncontrolled invasion of, yes, good people but people who will have a dramatic impact, negative impact on the American way of life. They did not give their lives in order to make sure that this country could be taken over by anyone who would thwart our laws and basically massively come into our country illegally. We need to have the courage to face the issue. Frank Casado, as I said, first alerted me to how this major influx of illegal immigration was changing the nature of California as he knew it and as he grew up, because he was a native Californian. He was a man who grew up in Los Angeles and described for me how this massive influx of illegal immigrants was bringing down the people of his community. People who should have been on the upward path instead were being brought down by a flood, an uncontrolled flood of illegal immigration. Let us keep faith with those people who defended this country and won our freedom and wanted us to live in a high standard of living and wanted our people to have a good country. Let us keep faith with them. And certainly let us not do one thing, let us not permit the benefits that we give to illegal aliens to have a negative impact on these very same senior citizens, these very same soldiers, whether defeated Hitler or Tojo. In fact, today we have a very limited amount of health care dollars. At a time when our economy is moving forward, but not as strong as it was, let us say 10 years ago, we need to make sure that every dollar counts. Because if a dollar is not spent most wisely, the people most affected will be our senior citizens and also will be our children. And so, today, I plead a case for these seniors and these children. Let us not dissipate the funds that are available to take care of our seniors and our children in order to provide services for illegal immigrants who have come here thumbing their nose at our law and blatantly and arrogantly breaking the law to come here. And, yes, these are generally honest, good people, coming here to improve their lives, but we cannot afford to take care of all the good people of the world if it means, and it will mean this, that we will have to cut back on what we give to our own citizens. I rise tonight to alert my colleagues to a vote that will be taken tomorrow on the floor of this Congress, a vote that will mark a turning point for our country or it will reflect a continued unwillingness by America's elected officials to do anything to protect us from what I am calling, what I believe to be the greatest threat to our national security and well-being. Now, again, what am I talking about when I say that? Tomorrow morning, 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 our quality of life and a decline in quality, I might add, of the health care we have for our seniors and our children due to the uncontrolled onslaught of illegal immigrants into our country and into our hospitals and into our emergency rooms. If left unchecked, illegal immigration will destroy everything which those World War II veterans were fighting for: a decent quality of life for our people, a government that is reflective of our values, and a country in which we can take care of those who are in need because they are people of our communities and of our States and of our country who have also served our country, whether they be Mexican Americans, like Frank Casado, or black Americans, or Caucasian Americans, or Asian Americans. We have a country of rich diversity, but all of us need to stick together and care about each other more than we need to care about people who would come into our country illegally and dissipate the funds that are needed for these other Americans and even our own families to get the education and health care that they need. It is unforgivable that our government has refused to act when the evidence is so clear. Millions of people are being permitted to get into our country and then to stay in our country illegally. And this is having an horrendous impact on our standard of living, on safety in our country, and on the quality of life of average Americans. For tens of millions of Americans and local and legal residents, real wages have stagnated over the last 15 years. We have seen a major increase in our standard of living and in the statistics that indicate how much wealth our country is worth; yet we have a huge number of people, citizens and legal residents, who live here and have not seen their standard of living increase. In fact, they see all the time little indications that their quality of life is going down, whether it is the fact they cannot afford to buy tires for the family car, or their children cannot afford to buy a home, so they have to stay at home now because they cannot afford to get a house of their own, or the fact that their kids are not expecting really to have a good job. They see these indications that something is happening to our country, where the middle class and working class people are not living as well as they did before and, in fact, have been cut out of this huge increase in the wealth that has taken place in our society of these last 2 decades. Well, the answer is very clear. The factor that is intervening is a massive flow of illegal immigration that is undercutting the ability of our own people to have good-paying jobs because we are holding wages down with an influx of illegal immigrants. And we are also taxing all of the services provided to our people, the people who have worked all their life to pay taxes; and sometimes, what is happening is, illegals will come into our country and they will not be paying taxes. They will work at jobs where taxes are not paid, and they will bring their families in to consume those benefits in education, health care, and otherwise that are meant for our own people. Our education and the education of our children has been undermined. Real wages have stagnated. Our health care resources that are necessary to take care of the health of our people have been depleted and the safety of our streets and neighborhoods, and thus, yes, the safety of our families, has been compromised. This is not a back-burner issue. Illegal immigration and how we solve it, or if we ignore it, will determine what America is going to be like tomorrow. This deals with a crisis of today. It seems to me that we have political people here whose only real goal is to prevent a crisis of the moment. Let us not have a crisis now; let us put that off. Well, I say, no, we need to deal with the threats to our country, just the way the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) was speaking about the threats to the world and to our country that loomed there 50 years and 60 years ago when Hitler and Tojo threatened the world. That generation, the Greatest Generation, did not turn its back and simply say let us try to find a compromise and it will go away. They understood that unless something was done, unless the issue was looked at with courage and with conviction that the United States would cease to be the country that they had inherited from their families and their parents. So, today, this attitude of elected officials that we should do anything to get away from confronting this issue, let us not have a crisis today, let us not have a confrontation on it today, this works totally contrary to the tradition that we have had that has kept our country free and prosperous. Elected officials have basically remained silent about illegal immigration. Every poll that I have seen, and I include the polls of Americans of Mexican descent, indicates that the vast majority of our people are angry and upset with the fact that illegal immigration is permitted to go uncontrolled and that illegal immigrants are pouring into our neighborhoods and destroying our way of life and the quality of life and the possibility for better jobs for a whole segment of our population. The American people are angry that their elected officials refuse to deal with this issue. The American people need to ask themselves: Why is it, why is it that elected officials refuse to even think about confronting illegal immigration? Well, a large number of American people, as we know, are deeply troubled and enormously concerned about the onslaught of this massive flow of illegal immigration in the United States. So why are our officials not acting? First and foremost, I believe that many elected officials have been intimidated from addressing this burning issue. Now, when I say intimidated, what does that mean? Today, in the debate on my bill, 3722, which we will talk about later, one of the Members came forward and said this represents mean-spiritedness. And, of course, that means racism. That is a little catch phrase for racism. And also I was pulled aside by several people after the debate, oh, you should not bring this up, because they think this is a racist attack. Racism. The elected officials of the people of the United States are afraid to be called racist. They are afraid to be called mean spirited. Well, I can be intimidated in a number of ways, but I can tell you it means a gun or a knife. They can call me all the names they want, but I am confident in my own heart that I am dealing with this issue and other issues based on a love for humanity; and more than that, and I will admit this, a love for the people of the United States of America, in gratitude for the contributions and the sacrifices that people like those people in the Greatest Generation, people like my father and the others the gentlewoman from Ohio was talking about. The sacrifices they made give me strength and give me the willingness to know that I am trying to do things that are positive. And I will not be intimidated because people are willing to call me, and try to use the tactic of calling me and others, a racist. I will tell you this, the label of racist and hatemonger has caused fear throughout Republican ranks. The liberal left knows this, and they constantly try to play that card. It is time for the American people to totally reject this type of racism in and of itself, the people who bring up racism in order to defend policies that should be discussed on the merit. Unfortunately, as I say, when someone says you are a hatemonger, most Republicans just wither away because they are afraid to be called hatemongers. They basically know, as I do, that most illegal immigrants, if not all illegal immigrants, are wonderful people. Ninety-five percent, let us say, or ninety-nine percent of illegal immigrants who come to this country are wonderful people. But this is not a debate about whether illegal immigrants are themselves bad people. We can care about them. They are probably good people. And we can care about the rest of the world. But that does not mean that we have infinite resources here in the United States so that we can provide benefits and goods and services and a place to stay for anybody in the world who can make it to the United States. If we try to do that, if we are cowed from discussing the issue because we are afraid to be called racist because we know we have to draw a line somewhere or it is bound to bring our people down, if we keep doing that, what is going to happen is that our citizens are going to experience a major decrease in their standard of living. A threshold will be reached and the American taxpayer will be spending more and more, and yet our citizens will actually be living lives that are not as high in quality and filled with opportunity as when the tax rates were even lower. It is not hateful nor is it being racist to use scarce resources, like the amount of tax money we have, the amount of health care dollars we have, the amount of education dollars we have; it is not a racist thing to say we are going to provide for our own people first, realizing that our own people come from every race and every religion and every ethnic group. That is what makes us so proud to be Americans. But if we do not think of our own citizens first, then we have abandoned the one thing that ties our Nation together, and it is a feeling of love and solidarity with all other Americans. Let me say that I believe even if we take this down to the family level, and we say some family that works hard, saves their money, and spends their money that they have saved on their own family, on their children and on perhaps their father and mother, are these people actually filled with hate, are they hatemongers, do they deserve to be called that simply because they refuse to spend money on the needy people down the street rather than on their children's education or health care? Well, I believe that it is not hateful. It is not negative to try to take care of your family first. And no one should apologize that that is the policy of our government or that that should be the policy of our government, which is what we are advocating today. That does not mean you do not care about your neighbors or that you do not care about the neighbors down the street. But first and foremost caring for your family is in and of itself an act of charity and love. And let us never forget that charity begins at home. And for us to be giving away the limited dollars available for health care in this country to people who have come here illegally, and taking the money away from that pool of money that should be going to our own citizens, our own children, our own senior citizens, to that great generation that the gentlewoman from Ohio talked about it, is sinful. It is sinful for us to take it and give it to strangers, many of whom have never contributed anything to the country. Now, yes, some illegal immigrants have contributed, but let me note that many illegal immigrants who come here do not work at jobs where they take the taxes out of their paychecks. Then they bring their families, and so their families are basically being taken care of by the taxes that come out of our pockets, that we gladly gave to take care of our own families and our own fellow citizens, but these other folks who have come here illegally often do not pay any taxes at all. To make matters worse, the employer that employs them and gives them a job and then pays them under the table more often than not does not give them any health care benefits. Thus, they do not pay taxes, are taking away the benefits, the health care benefits, that should be going to our own people who are paying taxes. I say this not because I dislike people, but because I do like people from other countries. Our greatest asset is that we are a country that is made up of people of every race and every religion. But I say this, every person who is an American and who is here and conducting him or herself in a legal way and trying to live their life as best they can, these people are part of our American family, and we need to care more about them than we do to take care of someone, even though he might be a good person, or the family that comes from China or Latin America, that we need to take care of our own people first. It has nothing to do with race. The people that are involved in the United States of America, they are good Americans who come from every race and every religion, but we cannot take care of every wonderful person in the world. If we try to, we will hurt our fellow Americans. We cannot try to do everything for everybody, especially when we mean everybody in the world, and expect that we will be able to do anything for anybody, and that includes anybody in the United States, because our system will break down. As Members hear this debate about illegal immigration, whenever we try to draw a line, the other side chastises us for it as if we are being mean-spirited. Where do they draw the line? The Members opposed to H.R. 3722 seem to believe we can give unrestricted and unlimited health care benefits to people who have come here illegally and it will not impact the American way of life or quality of life of our own American people. That seems the height of naivete. But there are other Members who are not naive at all about this issue. While we are proud of Americans, of every race and religion, these other people have another motive on wanting to have illegal immigrants coming into our country, and it is not just to be benevolent. But let me get to this issue and that is the idea, and we hear this because it is not just racism that is charged, but those of us who want to do something about illegal immigration, we are being charged with the idea that we are anti-immigrant. I believe around 15 percent of the population are immigrants. They are a sizable force in our communities, and they are doing great things for America, great things. In fact, one of the things we can be most proud of in the United States is that we permit 1 million immigrants to come here every year, along with 400,000 refugees from many of the horrible spots around the world where people live in total desperation. With a population of 280 million people, I believe we can absorb 1 million immigrants a year along with 400,000 refugees. That is our contribution to the world. That figure represents more legal immigration into our country than is permitted in all the other countries of the world combined. All of the other countries of the world combined do not permit a million immigrants into their country. But just in the United States, we permit a million people to come here, along with 400,000 refugees. It has worked well for us because people who come here legally must be healthy, they cannot be bringing diseases into the country, they need to be honest, and they need to be self-supporting or they are not permitted to come in. That is a wonderful thing. I think legal immigration is something we can all be proud of because, of course, Americans are immigrants. We are a nation of immigrants, and proud of it. In fact, every American immigrated here, and that includes Indian Americans who at one point emigrated from the Siberian tundra when there was some sort of ice bridge between Asia and the New World, so we are all immigrants here. But we have come here to prove that we can show people how to do things and have a better way of life. We did not come here, however, to take responsibility for the health care and the benefits for everyone in the world. We have people now who are coming and swarming into the United States above and beyond that million people. There are probably 2 or 3 million illegal immigrants that are coming here every year, but that is just a guesstimate. They are coming here without control, so we have no idea whether they are criminals, whether they are bringing diseases to our country, and perhaps they might be terrorists. Perhaps they want to do us great harm because they identify with Islam or some other faith and hate the United States. Maybe they are coming in as illegal immigrants. We do not know. The fact is by bypassing the legal system, they have thumbed their nose at our law and they are putting us in jeopardy because we do not know. I want to draw my colleagues' attention to the dire consequences of not stemming the uncontrolled flood of illegal immigrants into our country. Every day tens of thousands more illegals arrive in our country. If they are sick or 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 or a major crisis in our country in which our people will suffer greatly. The American people see what is happening. They know, they can see what is happening in our cities and in our communities throughout the country. The American people are seething with anger, and every poll suggests 60 to 80 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 illegal immigrants from other countries. Where is our courage? Where is our tenacity? Yes, we stood up to the Japanese empire during World War II and the Nazis and the Communists after that, but now we are going to give our country away to other people who come here illegally thwarting our laws, thumbing their nose at our way of life in order to come here and consume the resources that have been put away by our mothers and fathers, and squander all of the institutions that we have invested in for our own children? I think the World War II generation, and every time I have spoken to them, they are ashamed that we are not doing anything about illegal immigration, and they give the most support of any segment of our society in the demand to do something about illegal immigration. Every time it comes to a vote, we can see that the American people do not like and are upset about illegal immigration, and they are upset that their elected officials are not doing anything. Elected officials are blowing smoke in the faces of their constituents. They are refusing to be honest about this issue, and we need to have an honest discussion between the elected officials of this country and the American people about illegal immigration. There was a direct vote by the people about 10 years ago, Proposition 187, in California. Every news media was against it. The establishment of California was totally opposed to Proposition 187. It was going to lose. People were being attacked for being racist. And I know I was attacked as a racist skinhead for supporting Proposition 187. Although you could not tell it from the commentators who were saying what a great disaster it was for the Republican Party, no, Proposition 187 passed in a landslide, a landslide even though all of the major interest groups were against it and all of the major media were trying to bringing it down. Even though an overwhelming number of voters voted for Proposition 187, it was portrayed immediately thereafter as a loss and something the Republican Party should really worry about. Let me note that 1994 was the biggest year for Republicans to gain seats than in any other election in my memory. Let me also note, when we examine the issue of illegal immigrants, that Americans of Mexican American descent like my good friend Frank Casado, they are just like other Americans. They believe that illegal immigration is an evil that is doing great harm to our country, and about 50 percent of the Mexican Americans are with us when we want to make a stand because their children and their homes and their families are the ones suffering the most by the negative impact that goes on, economic impact and elsewhere, when our country ends up flooded by illegals. So the Mexican American community, however, was told afterwards you have to be against 187. That was drummed into their heads. Even today, examine the polls. The majority of people who are Americans of Mexican descent, people who are citizens or who over the years came here legally, those people are with us. A majority of those people are with us. Let me note that the gentleman from southern California (Mr. Gallegly) has told me over and over again how there are several cities in his congressional district where a majority of their citizens are Americans of Mexican descent, and he is very proud to tell me in those cities Proposition 187 got a very strong showing. It actually won a majority vote in several of those cities. Why is it then that we have conservatives and Republicans who are afraid to lead the charge on this issue and to discuss it openly and bring it up? Again, they do not want to be called racist, and they do not want to insult their fellow citizens. They actually care about their fellow citizens of Mexican descent, and they are afraid they may be insulting these folks if they bring up the issue of illegal immigration. That is the guilt trip the news media is putting on these people. Let me just say that Americans of Mexican descent are with us on this. They do not want their families to suffer from being unable to get higher wages for their children or income earners of their family, or education funds to be totally eaten up or health care funds being dissipated by people who have just come here, whether it is from Mexico or anywhere else. These are great Americans and these are Californians. We Californians understand that. California is itself a name that suggests a past culture, what we think of as sort of a paradise in California. It is a Hispanic culture. All of us are proud in California of this Mexican heritage. Before our State was a State, there was a proud Hispanic civilization there. California is based on a mythology of an island where there was always milk and honey, and the fruits were always ripe and ready to be eaten. It was a paradise on Earth. We know that. That came from a mythology that was written out in the Spanish language. We understand that, and we Californians are proud of that. We believe we live in that paradise. Yet we will lose paradise if we do not take those steps that are necessary to maintain the quality of life, not just for the upper middle class and the upper class but for all Californians. Illegal immigration is the greatest threat in California to the quality of life of every one of our citizens and legal residents. Let me note, they know that we are not hatemongers because we are protecting them. We need to join an alliance of all Americans to solve this problem and to speak frankly about it and not worry about being called names. We Americans must stick together. It is our loyalty that creates one Nation, our loyalty to each other; and if we are going to permit half of our population to suffer because we are giving away the benefits that were paid for by tax dollars to people who have come here illegally at the expense of that other half of our Americans who live with us, then we are committing a very sinful act. We are not caring about our fellow Americans and we are showing our disrespect for them by not trying to ensure that someone from the outside, a stranger, does not come in and take away the health dollars and education dollars they need. Turning one group of honest citizens against another group of honest citizens in order to keep the flow of illegal immigration into our country has worked to intimidate people, but it is a dishonest tactic. We will hear it over and over again. But I hope that the American people are beginning to fine-tune their hearing and their listening of these arguments so that when people start saying, this is mean- spirited, this is racist, that they will know that that person is insulting them and trying to get them not to look at the issue of the day. I would alert my colleagues and the American people to pay no attention when they are called names. The real hatemongers and the racists are the ones who would turn Americans against Americans. They are the ones who do not care about us as a people. We care about each other, and let us demonstrate that. I would suggest today that America is so far down the road towards a disaster that we have got to come to grips with illegal immigration, or there is going to be irreparable damage to our country. Already many of our people are suffering, and sometimes they do not even understand why. What else besides what I just described, this fear of being called a racist, prevents us from dealing with the illegal immigration issue? There is another factor involved. This is also a powerful factor, but it is not quite as visible as the one I just described. Everyone can see that people on the liberal left are calling other people names. They are calling them racist, et cetera. We can see this effort on the left side of the political spectrum to try to unleash and keep the flow of illegal immigrants coming to our country because they want to use them as pawns, political pawns. But there is another very powerful factor involved and that is there are some enormously powerful and enormously wealthy forces in our society which are benefiting from the massive flow of illegals into our country. Who am I referring to? I am referring to Big Business. I am referring to corporations and Big Business and all those people who would make a profit by keeping wages down. Keeping wages down. That is what is going on. There are some powerful interests in America suppressing wages so that people who are in the middle class and lower middle class, working people, are finding themselves in a trap rather than finding their own standard of living increasing. As I say, there is the liberal wing of the Democratic Party who wants to exploit illegal immigration for their own political purposes. They want to use them as pawns. Then we have Big Business in an unholy alliance with the liberal left of the Democratic Party. These people are trying to exploit helpless people who come to our shores, of course in order to make a bigger profit, so they will not have to give health care benefits, so they do not have to pay as much; and in fact, the wages of all their other employees are brought down because other employees know they can always hire some illegal immigrants from China or from Mexico or elsewhere to do these jobs if we will not do them for this minimal salary that they are offering. 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 goes unchecked, everything else being equal, our population in our country will jump from 280 million people today to 420 million people just a few decades from now. 420 million people. Is that in the interest of the people of the United States? Is that the type of increase in the number of people that we feel comfortable with? Along with that, of course, with this huge increase in our population comes a huge increase in the demand on scarce resources, especially those scarce resources: places to live, good housing, good jobs, good health care, good education. If we let illegal immigration continue, we will have in the blink of an eye a half a billion people living in the United States. Is that what we want? Is that what the American people deserve? If we leave illegal immigration unchecked, with millions of new people coming to this country illegally every year, if that continues, as I say, we are going to have teeming masses. We will have people who are trapped in situations that are totally inconsistent with the vision of the American dream that has motivated the American people for over 200 years now, the opportunity to dream of a place where people can uplift themselves with hard work, a place where every person willing to work can live a dignified life. If we continue to allow this to go unchecked, all of that will disappear. The American dream will disappear. It will disappear in a mass of faces, of people who are unhappy because they do not have the opportunity that their grandparents had. We will look into the faces of people who are angry. The level of hostility in our society will increase. The America that we know and love will cease to exist. Were we meant to have an underclass of working people who have no hope for a better life? We are beginning to develop that now. We can see it. Because wages are being held down. There is no doubt about who benefits from low wages. The people who own companies, people who want servants, et cetera, these are people who benefit from illegal immigration. Let me add, there are a lot of upper middle income people, people let us say in the top 20 percent and upper income people who have benefited by illegal immigration. Those people should understand that their whole way of life would not exist if it was not for the people who went out and fought the wars and work hard every day and are honest citizens and are willing to stand up for the principles of America that we respect each other's private property and we respect their rights to live their lives. These wealthy people would not have that if it was not for all these other Americans who were willing to sacrifice and they do not need as much. They just need a clean and decent place to live. They need to know that their children are going to be educated. They need to have some hope in their lives. This will be taken from them unless we come to grips with a massive flow of people who are coming into this country from every corner of the world and consuming the seed corn necessary to plant the gardens which will give us the food and the benefits and the good life that the American people have worked so hard for. My dad and mom came from very poverty stricken homes. I used to go there. My dad joined the Marines, but he was there for 20 years. We used to go back to North Dakota in the summers and sometimes in the winters and work on the farm. They were very poor farms. Those people knew that if they worked hard that America had a promise for them. But what about in the future where that promise does not exist because the education level for the children of working-class people, in California we see it, the education level is going down. It is not going down because of anything they have done. It has been going down because our State is being flooded with illegal immigrants, and their children are pouring into the school system, and they cannot even speak their own languages correctly; and thus the teachers are spending all of their time with problem students from other countries whose parents have never paid the price for the education system in the first place. So the working-class families, their children do not get the education they deserve. It is wrong. It is absolutely wrong. We have got to have the courage to face it. What are we going to say, that every person in the world will be subsidized in their education and their health care and everything else by the American people? Where do you draw the line? If you disagree with what I just said, where do you draw the line? The other side has no answer for that at all except, you are a racist for bringing it up. Let me note this: we are being told by those captains of industry who are now condemning any effort to try to get illegal immigration under control, we are told that illegal immigrants are taking jobs that Americans just will not take. That is why we have got to let them here, so they can take these jobs that no one else will take. That is not true. The fact is that that is no justification for allowing this massive influx into our country which is bringing down the wages of all of our people. I suggest that Americans are willing to do just about any job, but they are not willing to do any job at the pay level that is being offered. Yes, if our country was not flooded with illegal immigrants, employers would have to pay more money for the jobs that they need to have done. That is okay. It is a good thing when you have an increasing standard of living or an increasing GNP that working people get their share and that you have higher incomes and that the people are able to own their own home and have a car and treat their kids out to dinner a couple of times a week. That is okay. But, instead, we are being told, oh, my, we would have to pay them so much money, it would make it impossible. Let us pay 25 cents more for a hamburger if it means that people who work in those shops giving us those hamburgers and that meat have a decent standard of living and can take care of their families. A good example of what I am talking about and what has happened to our country when we are flooded with illegals who are now living in substandard housing with their whole families and it has sort of brought down the quality of life of whole areas in Southern California, let me mention this. When I went to graduate school, I worked at night as a janitor. Yes, I cleaned toilets and there was nothing wrong with that type of work. Every person who works and sustains himself or herself as an honorable job and as a dignified person, we honor them. When you are taking care of your own needs and you are self-sufficient, that is what it is all about and that is fine. It has been a long time since I was a janitor. I have to admit I was not a very good janitor, but I worked hard. If you look back, 30 years ago when I was a janitor, the gross domestic product of this country has dramatically increased in those 30 years. Yet the money that janitors make in real dollars is about the same. That is it. Our country has had a major increase in wealth, but the janitors make about the same money. It is because our country has been flooded by illegal immigrants who are willing to take those jobs. The people who run the building say, we could not afford to actually hire all these janitors if we had to pay them more money, the market value, without the illegal aliens there. All that would mean if they were paying more money to our own people to clean those toilets, there would be a toilet-cleaning machine and there would be a fellow there, a man or a woman, who could clean 10 times as many toilets with this technology and they would pay him $50,000, $60,000, maybe $70,000 a year. That is a good thing. That is fine. But, instead, we have had a flood of illegal immigrants and instead of one American earning a decent standard of living and taking care of his family, we have got seven or so illegals who are living substandard, have brought their families in, they are all totally dependent on government benefits, and it is bringing down the quality of our neighborhoods, et cetera; and we have a teeming mass with no hope instead of an American, a proud American being able to take care of his own family and having a decent standard of living. That is what illegals have done to our society. It is a very sinister impact, but it has happened very slowly. I had an L.A. Times reporter come to my house this weekend looking around, sifting through everything to find out if I had hired any illegals. I did not hire illegals to do my lawn work. My wife, who just had triplets, as people know here, we did not hire a service unless that service agreed to guarantee that there would be no illegal immigrants in that service. So I try my best. I try not to buy products from China, because I believe that China is a slave trade state. They use slave labor. But sometimes I end up buying Chinese things unknowingly, as much as I try not to, and I guess sometimes I buy a hamburger from an illegal immigrant. But let me put it this way. This fellow came to me and said, ``Who takes care of your lawn?'' It just happens to be that the lady I rent from, and I rent a very modest house in Huntington Beach, her brother, who is a senior citizen and is retired now, takes care of the lawn. That is what he does on the side as a side job. He said, ``All over your neighborhood, your neighbors are using illegal immigrants to do their lawns. Is that bad?'' I said, well, it really is. I will tell you why it is bad. When I was a kid, I did the lawn work. I actually earned all of my spending money by cutting people's lawns, and a lot of my friends did, too. I think it has a horrible impact on our society that the young people do not cut their own lawns now and earn their own spending money, but instead we let these slave-like laborers come in from different countries and do our lawn work for us. It would be better for our own children to earn their spending money than to pay someone else a pittance so they can live in destitution in our country and then live off of government benefits. No, that is not the way to a better country. And we have had this impact, and it has been coming on and coming on, and we have not even noticed it, that our kids do not have the dignity now of earning their own spending money by cutting people's lawns. So that is why we can be such a prosperous country right now, and there can be so much growth in the wealth that is available in our society, yet there is a whole group of people in our country who are being left out. The illegal immigrants are being left out, but so are those people whose wages are being impacted by the illegals' presence here, and it brings down those wages of our average working people. Their share is being gobbled up. At one end of the spectrum you have got wealthy people. You have got wealthy people over here, they are gobbling that wealth that should go to the middle-class because they are hiring all the illegals and they do not have to pay as much. At the other end of the spectrum it is being gobbled up by bureaucracy and big government. You have liberals and leftists basically advocating more and more government programs, and what they do, with more and more government programs, they have to tax you more. So what we are doing is taxing the lifeblood and the way of life out of our people in the middle-class, and we are, as well, keeping their wages down and destroying their way of life. They are being attacked by both sides of the political spectrum. I would say that if it was not for the influx of illegal immigrants today, many of our college students would be out probably doing these jobs during the summer that they say we cannot get Americans to do. I think Americans will take these jobs, if they are given the right kind of pay incentives. What we have now is a focus tonight on something that I wanted to bring up specifically about the bill that was debated today. My piece of legislation, H.R. 3722, was brought to the floor for a vote. This piece of legislation is designed to come to grips with a new issue confronting us on illegal immigration, because something happened a few months ago that very few people saw. What I am talking about is the fact that in the Medicare bill, a bill that passed this House, I guess it was 4 or 5 months ago now, when it passed through the House there was not this provision. But when it came back from the Senate, a provision sort of secretly had been inserted by Senator Kyl from Arizona. It was the creation of a $1 billion fund, a $1 billion fund that will be used to pay for the health care of illegal immigrants, a $1 billion for the emergency health care of illegal immigrants. It is the first time we actually have a budget item to legally pay for the services of an illegal immigrant. What does that do? That means that $1 billion in this fund will go to emergency rooms who take care of illegal immigrants. Well, what does that mean? That means that in the future, when this is being used, American citizens who do not have health care benefits, and a lot of them do not have health care benefits because the employers will hire illegals if someone demands a health care benefit, an insurance policy, health care insurance, so if they do not have health insurance and then they have to go to the doctor, to the emergency room, what happens? Unless we do something about it, we have set up a perverse priority. What is going to happen is that the American citizens who do not have health insurance and the legal residents who do not have health insurance are going to be told to go to the back of the line, because we can get the money from the Federal Government to pay for the health care, the emergency health care, of illegals. We quite literally are taking care of foreigners who have come here illegally at the expense of the American people. My legislation, H.R. 3722, will ensure that the money that we have, the health care that we have, will not be dissipated dramatically by illegals, because what it does is it states very clearly for the hospitals of America, if an illegal immigrant comes to your emergency room, you do not have to give them extensive treatment for diseases that are not at that moment life-threatening. Thus, they will take care of an illegal whose life is being threatened, but they will not have to take care and spend $300,000 or $400,000 for cancer treatments, and this happens, for all types of transplants of organs, for hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars worth of health care that illegals are getting right now. My bill says they do not have to do that. If they want to, they can, but they do not have to do it. This legislation is vital to make sure that the pool of money available to the American people for their health care goes to the American people and not to illegals. It also says that if someone is illegal and they come in and they are an emergency and they are taken care at the hospital, when they are seeking compensation from the fund, they just have to make that same information that they are collecting in order to be compensated, they have to make that available in a computer for the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Homeland Security. What we have heard again are bogus arguments this morning, over and over again, that this is going to increase the paperwork of doctors; it is going to make doctors policemen. Not true. The bill we are talking about only says the information, that they will collect anyway in order to get compensated by this fund, must be made available to the INS and the Department of Homeland Security. They are not being turned in by anybody, it is just available. The other government agencies at that point have to take over. There is no reporting on the part of the doctors. So we hear these bogus arguments over and over again, as if people are going to bring some type of contagious diseases into our country if we do not treat every illegal alien that comes into our emergency health care. Let me note this: If you want to see diseases that will spread in our country being brought into our country from overseas, just make sure that everybody around the world knows that we are now paying for illegal aliens' health care in this country. No matter who gets into the hospital, they will be taken care of. They will bring communicable diseases from all over the world, and that is what is happening right now. We need to instead come to grips with what my legislation does, that if someone is indeed here illegally and they are dissipating the use and the amount of money that is available for our own citizens or their health care, that illegal alien should be sent home. They should go home to their home country. That is what H.R. 3722 says. The information will be available to the Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and they will proceed from there. This is not on the back of the doctors. The doctors are freed from responsibility on that, because they no longer have to treat anything, unless someone's life is threatened at that moment. Let me add one other thing. If they do treat an illegal immigrant in an emergency situation, my bill insists that we go to the employer, because that is the only question that hospital has to ask, who is your employer? And if that employer has not done due diligence to see if he is hiring an illegal immigrant, that employer has to pay for the emergency health care costs of the illegal immigrant. Do you get that? The taxpayers are off the hook. What has happened is, this bill, which would be an of incredible importance to the middle-class Americans, this bill, which strives to protect us from having our limited health care dollars being drained away by people who have come here illegally, this bill is being attacked by the Chamber of Commerce. It is being attacked by big business on one end, and being attacked by the liberal left organizations that control the Democratic Party on the other. I suggest tomorrow the vote on H.R. 3722 is one to watch, and whose side you are on will be determined by how they vote on that issue.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds. Let me note that if we really want to have the spread of disease in this country, let us set ourselves up as the HMO for the whole world. Let us make sure that everybody in the world knows that if they can get their kids to the United States, we will take care of them, and see how many diseases we are going to get. That is what is happening in California right now. Diseases are beginning to materialize because people have brought their children and brought their seniors as well to come to the United States to be treated. We have got to end that syndrome because the money is coming directly from the health care dollars that should go to our own citizens, and it is luring more people with disease into our country. This is a catastrophe. The best way to prevent it is to vote yes on H.R. 3722. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Norwood).

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, today the American people should pay close attention to the debate when the House takes up H.R. 3722. If one is concerned about the flood of illegal immigrants pouring into our country, this is the debate to watch. And H.R. 3722 is the vote on which to judge your Member of Congress. There has obviously been a conscious decision made by certain powerful people that massive immigration into the United States, legal or illegal, is good for America or at least good for certain friendly interest groups. This vote on H.R. 3722 is clear-cut. The American people can determine who is on their side and who will channel our scarce health care dollars to illegal immigrants, thus encouraging even more illegal immigration into our country. H.R. 3722, which will come for debate here later today and will be voted on tomorrow, is designed to undo the harm done by an amendment that was slipped into the Medicare bill that was passed just a few months ago. That surprise and somewhat covert amendment established a $1 billion fund to reimburse American hospitals for the emergency care they provide illegal immigrants. The perverse, unintended consequences of this are easy to predict. Americans and legal residents who lack health insurance will be sent to the back of the line when seeking help for a medical emergency because the hospitals will naturally give primary service to those illegal immigrants whose tab is being picked up by the Federal taxpayers. This is a travesty. Anyone voting against H.R. 3722 is voting to put our kids, voting to put our seniors, at the end of a long waiting line moving the illegal immigrant to the front of the line. At this time when we cannot afford the money to pay for prescription drugs for our seniors, we are going to be spending $1 billion to treat people who have come here illegally. Those against H.R. 3722 are voting to spend our limited health care money to make America the HMO of the world. And then they act surprised when even more tens of millions of illegals flood into our country. Watch the vote on H.R. 3722. Listen to the arguments. The other side will claim that the legislation causes hospitals more paperwork. That is a bogus argument. However, the public will decide when they are listening to the debate whether they are hearing legitimate arguments or whether it is simply noise being generated to confuse people so they will not know who is ripping off their health care dollars and giving it to strangers. The flood of illegal immigration has already had horrible impacts on our society, on working Americans and middle-class Americans in particular. Wages are being kept down. Our educational and criminal justice systems are deteriorating. And, yes, our health care system is failing. A government's first responsibility is protecting our citizens and, yes, our legal residents, not to provide benefits and services to anyone in the rest of the world who can get here. Our responsibility is to the people of the United States and the legal residents here of the United States. Our responsibility is not to the rest of the world and to provide any benefits that we can't provide to our American people, to provide them to anyone in the world who can get here. That will break our bank. If we are going to try to do everything for everybody, we are not going to be able to do anything for anybody, even our own people. H.R. 3722 is the litmus test. There is always a good sounding excuse for voting against any bill that tries to come up and tries to come to grips with the out-of-control flood of illegals coming into our country. But the issue is clear in H.R. 3722: Are America's limited health care dollars going to treat illegal immigrants rather than being used to treat our own people? Members of Congress need to hear from their constituents. H.R. 3722 is a first good step in stemming the tide of illegal immigrants into our country. It will be debated here in just a few hours. America should pay attention.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, let me note that this President is taking care of the business of our national security; and, yes, it is a tough and hard job to do, and it is a job that requires tenacity and character. Our President is providing that leadership. He is not cutting and running. He is not trying to claim that the responsibilities for defending our country should be put off on the United Nations or other organizations. In fact, if we have to rely on the United Nations for our national defense, as seems to be the Democratic plan, that means that the Communist Chinese and the security council would have veto power over anything done to protect the United States of America. I do not think we want to do that. I think our President and Secretary Rumsfeld deserve a recommendation for their courage and willingness to stick out a situation until the victory is won, otherwise there would never have been any victories by American forces anywhere. Tonight, however, I am here to talk about another threat to our national security, and that is the threat of an uncontrolled flow of illegal immigration into our country. On Tuesday, H.R. 3722, that is a piece of legislation that I wrote, will be voted on here on the floor, probably Tuesday. It is designed to control the flow of illegal immigration into our hospitals that is destroying health care in so many of our States. This legislation, H.R. 3722, sets the parameters for the use of a $1 billion fund for illegal alien emergency health care that was allocated in the Medicare bill that passed Congress a few months ago. If we do not act, this billion dollar fund will create a perverse priority at America's emergency hospitals throughout our country, that is, we will be using this billion dollars to reimburse the hospitals for taking care of illegal immigrants in the emergency rooms, but not for American citizens; illegal immigrants then whose emergency health care costs will be covered by a Federal grant, and will be given priority over uninsured U.S. citizens and legal residents. This is as perverse a priority as I have ever seen. What is wrong with this picture? We have to act to stop that. We are literally telling our legal citizens and legal residents to sit in a line while illegal immigrants will be taken care of. My legislation, H.R. 3722, will rein in the cost of illegal immigration on our health care in several ways. Number one, it is minimal in paperwork. It is being charged that my bill will create new paperwork. That is a bogus charge. If anyone wants this billion dollars in funds, they will have to fill out the paperwork anyway. Hospitals that are going to get reimbursed for illegal immigration health care are going to have to fill out a couple of forms, not by my bill, but in order to get that money. My bill simply says that information has to be available to the INS and the INS should start proceedings against an illegal alien to get him out of the country if he is sucking up dollars in our health care system that should go to American citizens. It also requires the hospital to take a Polaroid picture or get a fingerprint and ask the illegal who his employer is. The reason we ask who his employer is is because H.R. 3722 says that if the last employer of that illegal immigrant has not provided health care insurance, it is not the taxpayers who should be paying for the health care of that illegal immigrant; it is that employer. If we cannot show that he has done due diligence, the employer, in trying to find out that he is hiring an illegal immigrant, they will have to pay for that. H.R. 3722 also sets a limit on health care treatment requirements on illegal immigrants. Only in life-threatening situations do our hospitals have to give treatment to illegal immigrants. Today we see billions of dollars, heart transplants, 12-month long treatments for leukemia, all of these things, we are talking about billions of dollars are being spent for the health care of illegal immigrants. Genetic problems that they brought into the country with them, that is coming right out of the money that is available to take care of our senior citizens and take care of our own young people. It is a sin that we are letting that go on. My bill takes care of that. It takes care of the mandate on our hospitals saying they have to treat anybody who comes in their door. We only have to treat them if their life is in danger at that moment, otherwise they get sent back to their native country where they can pay for their health care. This legislation is being attacked from all sides by bogus arguments. Remember, it does not create new paperwork. This bill will be voted on on the floor next week. Everyone needs to hear from their constituents about whether we believe our limited health care dollars should be going to pay for the health care of illegal immigrants. If you think that the money, the limited money we have available to take care of your family should be spent on someone who has come here illegally, then you need to look at who is voting against my bill. But if you think we should make sure that our limited health dollars are put to use for our own citizens and legal residents, then make sure your Congressperson knows, and my colleagues should know that their constituents support the idea of making sure that our limited resources help our own citizens and legal residents, immigrants who have come here legally, rather than being used by people who thumb their nose at our law and come here anyway. Limited health care dollars should be used for our own people rather than providing unlimited care for illegal immigrants. That is the issue of H.R. 3722. We will vote on it next week. If you agree with me that this money and these resources are important for the health of our senior citizens and for the health of our young people and should not be dissipated on trying to make America an HMO for the whole world, then please make sure that my colleagues understand how their constituents feel on this issue. I believe my colleagues should be judged on whether or not they are concerned about illegal immigration and they are protecting the interests of our citizens and legal residents by this vote, H.R. 3722. No matter what type of smoke can be blown in the air to try to confuse the issue, it is clear: limited dollars should go to legal immigrants and citizens. I ask my colleagues to seriously consider the consequences of letting this flow of illegal immigration dissipate all of our money available to us to take care of our seniors in the future.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

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. 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. 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. 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.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, just a few thoughts about the controversy concerning the abuse of prisoners by American contractors and military personnel, if accurate. Some of these charges, of course, must be accurate. No American should deny the truth, nor ignore this unacceptable and illegal behavior. In fact, the source of information and photos documenting wrongdoing appears to have come from an investigation, an investigation that was set forth and set in motion by the Pentagon itself. The Pentagon launched an investigation in order to end any abuse of prisoners that may have been taking place. Americans can be proud that we have standards that will not tolerate such abuse, and the Pentagon moved to correct it before it was publicly known. We Americans should not flagellate ourselves because of a tiny number of American personnel who humiliated or abused prisoners. Certainly, the vast, vast majority, if not 99.99 percent, of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have conducted themselves in a courageous and honorable way. But such abuses and such mishaps and wrongdoing have occurred in every war. From the American Revolution on, we have seen soldiers who perhaps lose a friend and are struck by grief and lash out with revenge, killing a person or killing a prisoner or mistreating a prisoner or, we find, in some cases, a person with sadistic tendencies ends up overseeing the prisoners that have been taken. This happens in every war and conflict. Yes, things like this may have happened in this war as well. The question, however, is what is to be done? Our government has declared such treatment of prisoners as wrong and illegal. We have thus maintained an honorable standard that we can be proud of. Many of those criticizing us now or jumping to criticize us have no such standard. They murder their own people. Saddam Hussein, for example, butchered hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen. We found the mass graves, and in those mass graves were thousands and thousands of children. Now, the world, the Arab world in particular, criticizes us over and over again, finding everything that they could possibly criticize us about, for trying to remove this sadist Saddam Hussein from power. Most of those Arab countries who criticize us or Arab organizations that criticize us, well, let us take a look at the criticism. Yes, it is wrong to abuse prisoners, and to the extent that they were, we were wrong. But we are actually trying to correct the problem. But those people, most of those people or many of those people who are criticizing us do not come anywhere close to a humanitarian standard of their own. They should not be pointing fingers at us or at our troops. This is sort of like the drunk down the street who has been arrested for drunk driving and had his license taken away pointing his finger at a neighbor because the neighbor is drinking a beer on the front porch. Well, this hypocrisy comes from nitpickers, naysayers, and America- bashers. It is a bit too much. We are correcting a bad situation. We are admitting our failures, and we are correcting it. But we recognize that any noble cause, any war that has a noble cause is messy, just like all wars are messy and brutal undertakings. And for Americans, war is usually thrust upon us. Tonight, I rise to discuss the war on terrorism, a war that was thrust upon us. This great challenge to our generation is the challenge we must face. History records that the people of the United States rose up and courageously defeated the forces of evil that threatened this planet during the last century. First we defeated the combined might of the German Nazi and Imperial Japanese war machines. Without the strength, courage, and sacrifice of the American people, this would have been a far different world dominated by the likes of Tojo and Hitler. And, yes, in that war there were some abuses and some mistakes by American military personnel, but does that mean that our cause of eliminating Hitler and Tojo was wrong? Certainly not. And we moved to correct those abuses, just as we have moved in this case when we have found some people who were misbehaving and doing some immoral things. After World War II, Americans believed they had earned a better and a more peaceful life, only to realize that another evilism, communism, would destroy democracy unless America acted. The Cold War was upon us. Had it not been for the tenacity of the American people, for our love of liberty and, yes, our willingness to bear the burden for a sometimes ungrateful world, a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship would undoubtedly be dominating this planet. Do our Muslim friends really believe that it would have been better for us not to have won the Cold War? Do they believe that the Marxist- Leninist regimes like they had in Yemen would have been better throughout the Muslim world? Certainly the rest of the world understands that communism was an evil force, and we can be proud of ourselves that we helped defeat that force, and it would not have happened without America. I am proud to have served in the White House during a pivotal time in that Cold War. For 7 years I was a speech writer and special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. It is clear now that it was the tough policies put in place by President Reagan that brought the collapse of the Soviet Union and brought the collapse of Soviet communism and an end to the Cold War, but it was not easy. It was not a historic inevitability, as we are being told now; and it would not have happened on its own. So please do not tell me also of the bipartisan spirit that enabled President Reagan to rebuild our defenses, that enabled President Reagan to support those fighting Communist domination, that bipartisan spirit that enabled President Reagan to vigorously expose the immoral underpinnings of Communist power. No, do not tell me that. I can testify to the Herculean effort that was needed to end the Cold War and that I never saw the bipartisanship the Democrats now remember so vividly. What I remember is that every time we took a stand, as when we opposed a freeze on nuclear weapons production, that freeze which would have permitted the Soviet Union to dominate Western Europe, and as when we supported those resisting the Communist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, amplified by their friends in the media, blasted Reagan and blasted those of us on his team as warmongers, as if America and as if we were responsible for the conflict between East and West, and we were, of course, portrayed as the bad guys, even though we were promoting democracy. The dictatorial concepts that are special to Leninism were just shrugged off. By the way, the Sandinistas, who the American left heralded as the representatives of the Nicaraguan people, have lost every free election that has been held in that country since President Reagan insisted that free elections be part of any peace plan there. Ironically, one fight in the Cold War that did have bipartisan support was in Afghanistan. There we supported the Mujahidin, local insurgents who fought courageously for 10 years against a Soviet occupation army with all of its artillery, tanks, helicopter gun ships, and a willingness to do anything to destroy its enemies. Here was the greatest victory of the Cold War, which broke the will of the Communist Party bosses in Moscow. However, the Afghan people paid an enormous price for this victory: millions dead or wounded, families, villages, and a way of life destroyed; people living in abject poverty, with a million babies dying of dehydration and other easily curable conditions and diseases. The retreat of Soviet troops from the Afghan war marked the end of the Cold War. It was not the German people, let us note, who brought down the Berlin Wall; it was the bravery and sacrifice of the Afghans. And while we celebrated and prospered, the Afghans continued to suffer. Not only now are we helping remove the millions of landmines planted throughout their country, many of which we supplied ourselves to the Afghans; and these landmines, which we are only now helping to remove, kill and maim young Afghan children even to this day. The roots of our current terrorist challenge lie not in our support, not in our support for the Afghan people and their fight against the Soviet occupation, but in our unconscionable decision in 1990 to walk away and leave them in their rubble and suffer their misery. Walking away was a policy decision. It was wrong. It was dead wrong. President George Bush, father of our current President, has to accept the lion's share of the blame for this cowardly, arrogant and selfish policy. There would be no Marshall Plan for Afghanistan or anything else from the United States because when we left, we left everything up to the Saudis and the Pakistanis. Unfortunately, the Saudis and Pakistanis had their own agenda. This was an unholy alliance doing the bidding of radical anti-western Muslims in their own countries, meaning Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. And while the majority of the Muslims even in a Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are wonderful people, there are large numbers of others who believe they have a right to commit horrendous acts of violence in the name of Allah, or as we would say, in the name of God. Instead of trying to defeat, control or subdue these elements, the leadership of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan has tried to buy them off, compromise with them and as is evident now, the leaders of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, many of these leaders, sympathized and allied themselves with Muslim extremists who would make war on the west and were intent on destroying our way of life, the American way of life. I first became aware of these vile forces within the Muslim world while I was still at the Reagan White House. One of the worst of these blood soaked monsters was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a fanatic who in college was known to have thrown acid into the face of women who refused to cover themselves. It is shameful that a disproportionate share of what America sent to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets went to this beast. Even when objections were registered, and I can assure you that strenuous objections and complaints were made, the CIA and the State Department continued to the policy of channeling our aid through Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, who then passed on much of it to their first choice, to their golden boy, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. So we knew crazies were out there and we knew the Saudis and the Pakistanis supported them. Yet, we walked away and left them in charge. Later, I learned, after I left the White House, that the problem was even worse than I suspected. After I left the White House, I left the White House in 1988 to run for Congress and I won that election in early November of 1988. And while other Members of Congress took vacations during their 2-month break between the time they were elected and sworn in, I instead went to Afghanistan. I went to Afghanistan and joined for about a week an Afghan military unit, an infantry unit that marched into the battle, and it was the last major battle with Soviet troops in the war of Afghanistan, the Battle of Jalalabad. As I was hiking into that battle with this Mujahedin unit, we hiked where we could see a group of tents in the distance. Now, I was dressed as an Afghan and I was dressed as a Mujahedin soldier. I had a beard, et cetera. We could see these tents. They were luxurious tents. It was more like a modern day camping expedition by some rich people with SUVs than a Mujahedin camp, that was for sure. But I was told immediately that that was the camp of the Saudis and that I should keep my mouth shut and that no English would be spoken until we were far away from that camp because they said there was a crazy man in that camp who hated Americans, worse than he hated the Soviets, even though we Americans were there helping to defeat the Soviet Army. They said that man's name is bin Laden, and if he finds out we have an American with us, he would come to kill us just as he would kill the Soviet soldiers. So it was no surprise and it should have been no surprise that there was a real potential threat there in Afghanistan, waiting in the wings to take hold of that country. But instead of rebuilding Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia turned it into a mid evil kingdom run by psychotic, religious fanatics. Now, in hindsight we know the horrific role the Saudis and Pakistanis have played in formulating anti-western Islamic terrorism, and we should also note that many of them today have committed themselves, many of the leaders of those two countries have committed themselves in an opposite course. They are trying to correct what was done wrong 10 years ago which helped create this problem. And we hope that they are sincere when they joined us in our effort in our war against terrorism and the war of the west against this terrorist threat. But, let us note that when this was happening and the Soviet and the Saudi leadership and the Pakistanis were actually helping the terrorist element or the anti-western element within the Muslims in Afghanistan, that part of the world, we should have seen it coming. But just as the Saudis and Pakistani leaders subsidized and even assisted in this type of insanity, our government stepped aside and permitted the Saudis and Pakistanis to have their way. So the Saudi and Pakistani leadership either helped or stood aside as these radical Muslims who hate the west and would make war on us began to take control, and then we stepped aside and let the Saudis and Pakistanis have the decision and make the decision. Yes, and we even helped the Saudis and the Pakistanis make that decision. What was U.S. policy? We need to look at what the U.S. policy was in the 1990s that brought about this situation that we are in today. One of the things that I find most disturbing about the current hearing into the tragedy of 9-11 is that it downplays the importance of American policy in the laying of the foundation of 9-11. They would rather talk, meaning those people who are conducting this investigation, would rather talk about flow charts and organizational structure and a lack of a shared data base and no central coordination than trying to fix responsibility. We keep hearing that setting the blame, they call it the blame game, wrong is wrong. It is a bad thing to do. Well, I am sorry, 9-11 represented not an unavoidable tragedy but a dramatic failure of policy and of people. Those who put the policy in place should be held accountable. The individual leaders in our intelligence, the national security system who failed to thwart 9-11 because of their own incompetence and bureaucratic arrogance should be held accountable. Tonight I will provide a number of examples of policies that led to the empowerment of the hostile radical Islamic movement that we face today and to the policies and to the people who enabled these weird, feudalistic religious fanatics to become a major threat to the western world and especially a threat to the people of the United States. September 11 was the greatest massacre of American civilians in the history of our country. Yes, we are in the process of hunting down the perpetrators of this monstrous crime and destroying their terrorist network. And I strongly believe our President is resolved to do what is necessary to get the job done and secure our country and our world in the future. He and our military are doing a superb job under the most difficult and dangerous of circumstances and they are being nit picked and naysayed to death every time a mistake is made. People are trying to undermine the general effort and the noble cause in which our troops are fighting. President Bush has a long-term strategy. That is why we are in an Iraq, for example. We are trying to build a democratic society. Our success will not just be measured in the removal of this vicious and powerful dictator, Saddam Hussein, who hated us, who would have this man had an all-encompassing grudge against us that would have only been satisfied when he inflicted the death and destruction upon our people and the future whenever he had a chance to do so; but getting rid of him was not the only thing we accomplished. We not only did that but we freed the Iraqi people from their oppressor and we have also provided an opportunity to build in Iraq that will serve as a model for the rest of the Muslim world. We are providing Muslim people, especially the young people, an alternative a choice not to destroy western civilization, but to be part of it and to open the door of a new Renaissance of relations when Christians, Jews and others can live in the same world and benefit from each other. Even though we are distinct from each other, we can interact and trade and we can be friends. That is the better world President Bush is trying to build. But it must start in Iraq. And if we lose in Iraq, the evil forces that would separate the west from the east and would have us fighting among various religious factions, they will then dominate this planet and we will not be able to stop them except at much greater expense of blood. It is a strong vision that President Bush has. It is a noble vision; and it is the vision of a world living at peace where Muslims, Christians, Jews live together and this vision is stronger than what the radicals are advocating. They were trying to basically obliterate the faith and the culture of others. And our President is trying to make sure that the world is safe for us to live together in peace and harmony, no matter what our faith is. And we must succeed in Iraq. And I am here to today to applaud the President, and there has never been an action that has been perfect, but he is doing a tremendous job, as have our troops. As we support that, if we have succeed, we must hold those in our government, however, when we will hold them and we will make sure that they get the praise for a successful policy when and if we succeed, which I believe we will in Iraq. But we must also, when we have a failure of policies, recognize what that policy was, what made us vulnerable to the attack on 9-11, for example, and we must hold those people accountable who failed to protect us and failed to put the policy that would best serve the United States and the western world. This is not the blame game that I am talking about. It is holding people accountable for decisions that they have made while in public service and while they have held authority from the people. So when I speak of bad policy, what am I talking about? What is this bad policy that led to 9-11? Well, chaos and blood shed in Afghanistan, as I said, continued long after the Soviet Army left and America walked away. During this time in the early 1990s, I felt a personal debt to the Afghan people. I had been there when we were fighting the Soviets. I knew the sacrifices they made, so I felt that we owed them something, and I tried to do my best to find a solution but no one was listening. But it was not hard to find a solution. It was not hard for me to come up with an idea, with a plan that would have helped the Afghan people. But implementing that idea and finding that and making sure that solutions became policy was another matter. So what was the solution? It did not take a genius to determine the best way to restore order and a stable government to Afghanistan was to bring back the honest and beloved former king, Zaire Shah, who had been living in Rome, Italy since his exile began in 1973. He was an elderly man, but he still had a good mind and an impressive stature. He was one person all factions of Afghanistan knew would not seek vengeance upon him if he was returned to power. After visiting him in Rome and being beaten by him in a chess game, I took it upon myself to promote the exiled monarch as the logical choice to bring normalcy back to Afghanistan. So it is not like there was not an alternative to the policies that were put in place. It was the logical choice. Yes, it was the logical choice except for the opposition of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The Pakistanis knew they could not control Zaire Shah. Zaire Shah had ruled over that country for 40 years. He was independent and a fair and honest man. When he was in a charge of Afghanistan, they lived a relative peace for 40 years. But the Pakistanis were intent on dominating Afghanistan as many of them still are and they ruled out bringing back King Zaire Shah. The Saudi wanted to placate their own radicals. That is why they did not like Zaire Shah, the old exiled king. They wanted to placate the Wahabis who are their radical sector in Saudi Arabia. So they too, the Saudis, nixed the return of the king. But most disturbing to me is as I sojourned throughout that region on my own, sometimes at great personal risk, promoting the Zaire Shah alternative, U.S. State Department officials would follow me explaining that I was speaking for myself and that I was a lone junior Member of Congress not to be taken seriously. These arrogant and amoral policymakers of our State Department could have given Afghanistan a chance for a leader who was decent and caring and peace loving, who loved his people and were loved by them. Instead, they chose to play politics; and they chose the Taliban, make no mistake about it. It is only when I spoke to the head of the Saudi Arabia's CIA, Prince Turki, that I was tipped off that another plan was in the works. Prince Turki was fired immediately after 9/11. Just keep that in mind, but until 9/11, he was the man who I could say was most responsible for Saudi policy in that region. He explained to me personally that instead of the former king coming back, that they were creating a third force, and it was being created specifically to go into Afghanistan, and it would be comprised of religious students who had spent most of the war in the Islamic schools in Pakistan. These Taliban, which means student by the way, using their religious credentials, would dominate Afghanistan; and he assured me that they would not be involved in anything outside of Afghanistan. These Taliban, by the way, with certain exceptions as I say, were not veterans of the war against the Soviets. They were not Mujahedin. A lot of people make that mistake. The Mujahedin fought the Soviets. The Taliban came in well after the Soviets left; and in fact, when we felt, after we were attacked, we needed to drive the Taliban out, it was the remnants of the Mujahedin who joined with us and also drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan. For a long time, I blamed the Saudis and the Pakistanis for creating a force of religious fanatics and putting them in power. It is clear now, however, that it was not just the Pakistanis and the Saudis. Prince Turki, in Washington, when he tipped me off about the creation of Taliban, certainly he was there at the beginning and certainly the Pakistanis were there at the beginning, but other people were there as well. Last year, I found out about this. Last year, the current former minister of Pakistan visited Southern California; and when he was exasperated by my criticism of Pakistan, that they had created the Taliban, he was upset and he blurted out that Americans were in the room and part of the bargain that created the Taliban as well. There were three parties in that room. Well, that revelation was no surprise to me. I had been trying to get a confirmation of that for years. During the latter years of the Clinton administration, I charged that the administration policy was secretly supporting the Taliban. After making that charge at a public hearing, I was labeled as ``delusional'' by a senior Democratic colleague. When I insisted, with the support of Ben Gilman, who was then chairman of the Committee on International Relations, that the State Department provide the documents that would clarify America's real position, we were stonewalled, even though Secretary of State Madeleine Albright personally pledged to comply with this request. Here we are; that is our job to oversee American foreign policy. We requested the documents on the creation of the Taliban. The State Department thumbed its nose at us, gave us documents that were meaningless, that had a bunch of newspaper clippings, et cetera. Let us be clear and understandable on this point. I am charging that during the Clinton administration it was U.S. policy to create the Taliban, and once in power, the United States Government supported these Islamic fanatics. It was the policy of our government under Bill Clinton. This policy was fully supported and probably created by our State Department, and if one wants to accept the responsibilities for the policies that eventually led to 9/11, start right here, and those in the State Department, those who oppose the return of King Zaire Shah and undercut anyone who is resisting the Taliban, they have the blood of innocent Americans on their hands, those Americans who were slaughtered on 9/11. Let us accept that rejecting King Zaire Shah, and that option was dead wrong, but let us accept also it was understandable perhaps that our foreign policy establishment felt that way. They longed for stability, and they could not imagine stability without having the Saudis and the Pakistanis having their way, even though it is America that is supposed to be providing the leadership and not the other way around. After the fighting stopped and the Taliban were in control, and this is after the third force was then unleashed, the Soviets had been gone for several years, this third force was unleashed. The Taliban swept across two-thirds of Afghanistan, and they took the capital city of Kabul. Well, I have been trying to fight that for many, many months and many years; and I took a stand back, and just like everybody else, I wished the people of Afghanistan the best and I laid down a marker to the Taliban. I remember giving an interview where basically I said I would have a wait and see, and we expected them not to do things outside of their own country, and we expected them not to be a totalitarian force but a religious force. Of course, I tried to stop them from getting in power in the first place. There was nothing I could do at that point but hope for the best. After about a month, it became obvious that I had been right all along and that this new force, the Taliban, were Islamic Nazis; and as such, if they were not stopped, they would hurt our friends or they would even hurt us. So even after coming to power, our State Department, get into this, even after coming to power, our State Department closed its eyes to the increasing evidence of the nature of the Taliban; and they kept supporting the Taliban anyway. For several years, I was a lone voice, helped by Chairman Ben Gilman, then chairman of the Committee on International Relations, warning of the potential consequences of leaving such a fanatical, religious sect in power. I even went to Afghanistan during this time and met with leaders resisting the Taliban, men like General Dostum, Commander Masood, Abdul Haq, and Ismail Khan. Masood, of course, is the most impressive of the lot, but of course, none of them are pure. Everybody makes mistakes; everybody has made bad judgments; everybody has done things wrong after they have been fighting for as long as these people have been fighting. They all made a certain number of terrible decisions; but unlike the Taliban, they were not totalitarian psychos who believed that God was talking to them and justifying the wholesale slaughter and control of other peoples. Unfortunately, all of them and the rest of the Afghan people, when I say all of them I mean the leaders who were opposed to the Taliban, and the rest of the Afghan people, believed America was supporting the Taliban. So let us make this straight. Even after the Taliban took power, when it was no longer theoretical, it appeared to everyone, and I suggest that it was the case, America was still supporting the Taliban. Why should these people not, these Afghans, think that? Was not our aid going to the Taliban-controlled areas? I myself had been thwarted by the State Department under leadership of Clinton appointee Rick Enderfurth in getting humanitarian aid to parts of Afghanistan not under Taliban control. So it is okay for the aid to go to Taliban areas, American aid; but when I tried to get some aid to some of the other areas, that aid was thwarted. If there were any doubts, my suspicions about U.S. policy were confirmed in 1997 when the Taliban was saved from total defeat by high- level executives from the Clinton administration. What happened was in April of 1997, the Taliban launched a major offensive aimed at taking control over the northern third of Afghanistan. So they had already controlled two-thirds of Afghanistan; but up until that point, one- third of Afghanistan, the northern part, the northern alliance, were free from Taliban control, and yes, they were under the control, you might say, of regional leaders who were called and are called today warlords, but they are regional leaders. We can debate about the title. An Afghan general named Malik was one of those regional leaders; and when the Taliban attacked northern Afghanistan, General Malik tricked the Taliban and managed to capture almost all of their front line troops, along with all of their heavy weaponry. It was an utter disaster for the Taliban. The road to the capital, Kabul, was wide open. The Taliban were totally vulnerable and could have been wiped out. We are talking about early in April of 1997. I sent a message to my friends in northern Afghanistan that Kabul should be taken and that King Zaire Shah should be brought back to oversee a transition government that would eventually evolve and inevitably evolve as well into a democratically elected government, perhaps like what they did in Spain when the King went back and Spain, after the Franco dictatorship, evolved into a democracy; but before the anti-Taliban forces could strike, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Enderfurth and United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson, both Clinton appointees, flew to northern Afghanistan and convinced the anti-Taliban forces this was not the time for an offensive. This, they said, was the time for a cease- fire and an arms embargo. This was the United States policy. When the Taliban were vulnerable, it became time for a cease-fire. These two top foreign policy leaders of the Clinton administration were there to convince the anti-Taliban forces not to take advantage of the one opportunity they had to defeat their enemy, this Frankenstein monster that provided a base of operations to kill thousands of Americans. These Clinton appointees saved the Taliban. Right after the cease-fire and release of prisoners that was brokered by Mr. Enderfurth and Mr. Richardson, the Pakistanis began a Berlin-like air lift to resupply and re-equip the Taliban. So much for the arms embargo, which just happened as it always does, worked as an embargo against the good guys, but the bad guys, we just turned the other way. If I knew, which I did, of this massive resupply effort that was going on for the Taliban, the Clinton administration had to know about this. So they just let the scenario happen while still enforcing the arms embargo against the Taliban's adversaries. Let us note here that Richard Clarke, the man who testified on the hearings on 9/11, who cast aspersions on our President, who is now trying to take care of business, Richard Clarke was then a high-level official in the Clinton administration's foreign policy establishment. He undoubtedly knew about this effort to save the Taliban, was probably involved in all of these things that I am talking about, and probably approved it. So when you consider his self-serving testimony in which Mr. Clarke besmirched President Bush before the 9/11 investigation panel, keep in mind the role that he played in creating and supporting the Taliban. Dick Clarke has no credibility. By the way, after this episode had run its course, the newly equipped Taliban army launched another offensive. This time they took almost all of what was left of Afghanistan, except the Panjshir Valley, which was dominated and remained the domain of my friend Commander Masood, the only hold-out against the Taliban, and America did nothing to help them, even as a new gang of radical cutthroats moved in and made Afghanistan its base of operations. What am I talking about? Al Qaeda. What about al Qaeda? What about bin Laden? Where does he come from? So the reemergence of bin Laden. Nowadays Osama bin Laden is a household name. Yes, he fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets. I saw his tents and his luxurious living conditions. No, United States money did not train him or supply him. The Saudis had plenty of money to take care of that. So the United States Government did not train and supply bin Laden, but he was there; and after the Soviets left, this is an important point, bin Laden left. Not only did America leave but bin Laden himself left. He could have financed the reconstruction of Afghanistan. He came from one of the wealthiest Saudi families. He had contacts all over the gulf region where they were swimming in petrol dollars. He had all of the money and contacts needed for this noble deed of rebuilding Afghanistan. Instead he left, and it was during this time when he was making even more billions of dollars for his family that he began to focus on the United States as the prime enemy of his faith and he committed himself not to the reconstruction of Afghanistan, but to the destruction of America. So this is how God talks to bin Laden. Do not help people, do not help rebuild, just kill innocent women and children and try to terrorize a Nation. Bin Laden is from an enormously wealthy Saudi family. And while our petroleum dollars flowed into Saudi Arabia by the hundreds of billions, the Saudi establishment not only turned a blind eye, but attempted to buy off this and other Islam radicals in their country. Bin Laden's hatred for us grew during Gulf War I. Our presence in Saudi Arabia was an insult to his faith. The slaughter of unarmed people is consistent with his faith? In the late 1990s, bin Laden began to set up his terrorist underground army for a war that he intended to wage on America. In the mid-1990s he operated not out of Afghanistan, but out of Sudan. America's official position was that bin Laden was a terrorist and was on the most wanted list. In fact, CIA director George Tenet had declared bin Laden as America's number one target. While designated as such, this self-aggrandizing monster organized, financed and implemented attacks that cost tens of billions of dollars and the death of thousands of innocent people, and not just in the United States, but worldwide we have seen these attacks. Yet the same CIA that declared bin Laden their number one target with all of the power and assets that the CIA has, they could not thwart 9/ 11 and they did not warn us about 9/11? If this is not incompetence, what is incompetence? But this everybody knows. Unfortunately, this is mind-boggling evidence. The fact is, the very basis is they did not warn us, and 9/11 happened and he was their number one target. What more evidence do we need of incompetence on the part of our government and CIA in particular. Vanity Fair has an interesting report about bin Laden and perhaps America's policy toward bin Laden and why he succeeded. Vanity Fair suggested that when bin Laden was in the Sudan, the Sudanese government cataloged all of the people he spoke to on the phone and in person. Here was a listing of all of the members of the bin Laden network, and the Sudanese government was abruptly turned down when they offered to give the United States the entire catalog. According to Vanity Fair, Madeleine Albright made the decision to turn down the offer and instructed no one to look at or copy the material. The Sudanese former ambassador personally told me that he tried to hand this list to a representative of the United States Government. It would have permitted us to apprehend bin Laden's entire network, but we threw it back in his face. By the way, Dick Clarke had to know about this decision, too. This is the man who cast aspersions on our President. That was back during the Clinton administration, of course. Then, an even more personal incident happened when we want to talk about our government's ability to protect us and what was going on during the Clinton administration that led to 9/11. In April and May of 1999, America had an incredible opportunity to capture bin Laden. I was involved, and I am here to report yet another example of the incompetence of those we trusted to protect us from an attack like what occurred on 9/11. In April 1999, I was contacted by a long-time friend who had been deeply involved in the Afghan fight against the Soviet occupation troops. My friend, an American, had impeccable credentials. He had been in Afghanistan, and was widely known and admired by the Afghan people. My friend called me to tip me off that bin Laden was outside of Afghanistan and could be easily captured. I told him I would pass on his name and phone number and that he would be contacted as soon as possible by the CIA. The very next day I briefed the CIA and I passed on my friend's phone number and name, and briefed them on his credentials, and told them he could hand them bin Laden on a platter. I called my friend after a week. The CIA had not called him yet. I went back to the Agency, and this time they were adamant they would contact my friend. There was still a chance to get bin Laden. Another week passed. The CIA did not call my friend. This time I went to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss) who is the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. When the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss) heard my story, he arranged a meeting for me the next day. So the next day at the appointed time I went to a secure room in a secret and heavily guarded part of the Capitol where I went to meet with the representatives from the CIA. When I got there, there was a CIA representative and National Security Agency and the FBI. That was the bin Laden task force. They were all there, and they apologized for the dunderheads at the CIA who had not called my friend to get the information, and they were going to fall up on it immediately. A week later I called my friend and he still had not been contacted. I mentioned it to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss) who was appalled. The next day a representative from an intelligence agency finally called my friend. The caller's tone of voice suggested that the inquiry was obligatory. It did not make any difference because the trail was already cold. This incident is bad enough, but then there is the episode of Julie Sears. At the same time I watched the CIA stiff my friend who wanted to tip them off about the whereabouts of bin Laden, there was a young woman who came to my office seeking help. Her name is Julie Sears. She was an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. She knew I was the only one who understood what was going on in Afghanistan, and was seeking my help because she had been fired from the Defense Intelligence Agency. Julie Sears has an interesting story. She had worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency for 3 years. She was an Afghanistan analyst. That was her specialty. She went to Afghanistan and was permitted to go to the Taliban areas only. When she returned, she did her study and realized there was information in Northern Afghanistan that was vital for the Pentagon to know if they were to understand the threat that might be taking place and building in Afghanistan. Julie Sears was forbidden to go to the non-Taliban areas of Afghanistan, so she decided to go on her own. She told her boss she was taking leave, then reported where she was going, officially to the Agency's office that approves that. It was approved that she could go, and she went to Northern Afghanistan on her own and met with Commander Masood and others and came back with some information that was vital. That information was that Commander Masood was telling her that he was capturing troops from the Taliban who were from all over the world and that apparently bin Laden was bringing in huge numbers of people into Afghanistan, training them for terrorist activity, and then letting them fight Masood's forces to get wet behind the ears in battle. And when he captured these people, they were from all over the world. He was talking about the creation of al Qaeda. Julie Sears came back with that information and she was fired on the spot, and the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency even refused to let her brief other members of the government and refused to have her report be officially put forward, and no one got that information. I called in the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. I called him to my office and he came there. He was a general, and we will not go any further than that. He had been in charge of the DIA for several years during the Clinton administration. I told him General, this woman risked her life in order to get this information. She is a hero. His answer was, She is insubordinate. I said General, I think she risked her life and spent her own money to try to get information for the safety of our country, let us compromise at the very least. Give her back her job, I will not call her a hero, you will not call her insubordinate, we will leave it the way it is. He said, No, I cannot do that. I said General, do it and if you blame somebody, blame me. Blame this politician who is politically interfering with the way you manage your operation. He went back to his office and fired Julie Sears. That is the type of arrogant, bureaucratic attitude that ended up with 9/11. Finally, there are two other instances that have colored my view of how we ended up with this war in terrorism which could have been avoided, but we were ill-served. A few days before September 11, my friend anti-Taliban leader Commander Masood was murdered by al Qaeda. After the shock of seeing that my friend had been murdered, I figured it out. Bin Laden had sent his people to kill Masood because he knew the United States would rally behind Masood if there was a major terrorist attack against our people. Bin Laden's terrorist army planned to attack us. It was not hard for me to figure out. They killed Masood so we could not counterattack against them by supporting Masood. Bin Laden's terrorist army was going to attack us. Perhaps Masood's death was a signal to move the plan that was already put in place forward. The day before 9/11, I called the White House and asked to see National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice, it was an emergency. The purpose was to warn her of an imminent terrorist attack on the United States. One of her assistants came on the line and apologized, she was really busy that day but she made an appointment to see me the next day. Yes, on 9/11 I had an appointment to see Condoleezza Rice in the early afternoon to warn her of a major terrorist attack that was about to happen. The question that needs to be asked was how was I able to figure this out. I have one staff member who is my foreign policy military staff member who helps me with foreign policy issues, why I was able to figure it out but the CIA was not able to figure it out. We know why the DIA was not, but why would the CIA, with billions of dollars at its disposal, hundreds of analysts and bin Laden the number one target, that they could not figure it out. Incompetence. We need to blame people for their failures, and we need to blame the policies that brought about the problem. Finally on 9/11, once the planes started slamming into buildings, I knew right away what was going on. It did not take a genius at that point, but what also dawned on me, without Masood, there was only one person left on this planet who the Taliban and al Qaeda knew threatened their base, and that was the old king of Afghanistan in Rome. The exiled king, they knew without Masood, he was the only man the Afghan people could rally behind in order to launch a counterattack. I called the king. I was dumbfounded to hear there was no one there to protect him. This is hours and hours after the planes slammed into the buildings. He was totally exposed. Our number one asset in a war that we were just entering was totally exposed. I called the American Embassy in Rome and then I called one of the top leaders of the CIA who concurred with me that the king was a primary target of the band of terrorists with whom we were now at war. Yes, he needed to take care of that, and the king would be protected. Five hours later, by chance, I had the opportunity to speak with this very top CIA official again, one of the top leaders of the CIA. And when I asked him if the king was now protected, he said, ``You do not expect us to act that fast?'' So there you have it. We are at war. Thousands of Americans were being slaughtered and the CIA official in charge of protecting us does not take the initiative to try to protect our number one asset that we needed to thwart the Taliban and thwart the people who were murdering our people. Why did we have 9/11? There you go. Let us remember George Tenet was appointed by Bill Clinton, and he is still the director of the CIA. People tell me that since 9/11, he has been doing a better job, and that some people who were not doing a good job over at the Agency are doing a superb job now. Let me note that. But when we talk about why 9/11 happened and who was responsible, especially when we have a committee who is trying to besmirch our President who is now taking care of business, let us look at the policies that people who created this. The committee now investigating 9-11 can tell us about lack of information sharing; but we know that within the FBI itself, there were agents who were begging higher-ups to pay more attention to the possible threat of suspected terrorists who were receiving pilot training. No, there was not an obstruction there. There was not lack of communication or agencies did not talk to each other. That was right within the FBI. But, no, someone in that line of command was arrogant and told them to forget it. There was no absolute proof that this was going to happen. This is called bureaucratic arrogance and bureaucratic inertia or perhaps maybe the arrogance of officialdom or just plain incompetence. Couple that with the policies of the Clinton years that created and nurtured the Taliban and turned Afghanistan into a terrorist training base and a staging area for terrorism, take those things together, that is what brought us into this situation that we find ourselves in today. Those who run our government should be held accountable for the policies that they advocated that created this Frankenstein monster, and they must have the commitment and be held responsible and accountable for their lack of commitment of getting their job done if their job was to thwart attacks on the United States. 9-11 happened because of the actions or lack of actions of certain people with authority and because of fundamentally bad policy. Today we have a fundamentally good policy at hand when our President is taking care of business in Iraq. He is not kicking the can down the road like they did during the last administration. He is going to see that the people of Iraq develop an alternative to radical Islam, and by doing that he has a strategic vision that will build a better tomorrow rather than ignoring any potential threats and permitting the Frankenstein monsters that appeared in the late 1990s to reappear. If America is to be secure, we must do our job, and that is our job in Congress, and that is to hold people who fail accountable, and we should quit whining about it and quit playing politics. That is our job in Congress, to hold people accountable, to oversee what is happening in the other branches of government and to pass rules and regulations and to make sure that our military is equipped and doing the right job. We too have to be held accountable perhaps in the 1990s for not stepping forward but instead being focused on other things. The United States Congress was not focused on Afghanistan. It was not focused on these problems as well. And today I think we have a chance to make up for that. We have a chance to work with our President and, instead of playing politics, make sure we win this battle in Iraq and help create a better world. I am very proud of our President, and I am very confident that our children will not have to suffer another 9-11 because we are doing what is right today.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this rule, but in opposition to the underlying bill, H.R. 2844. This is a very serious issue, and we have heard two sides of the debate. One emphasizes making appointments, and the other emphasizes having expedited elections. I have a constitutional amendment proposed, H.J. Res. 92, which satisfies both of these objectives and would permit Members when they are being elected by the public to designate a successor in case they are incapacitated or killed during the time they are in office. This would permit the public to vote on someone's successor as well as the person running for office. It seems to me this is the best approach. The current approach that we are being offered today in H.R. 2844, I do not believe is the best way to go because it would leave the party leaders to nominate who the choices are for the public. In essence, the party hacks are going to control who the public can vote on. Let us give the public a chance to really vote in an ordinary election and oppose H.R. 2844. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this rule, but in opposition to the underlying bill, H.R. 2844. Continuity of representation in Congress is a very serious matter. On one side of this debate we will hear that we must have temporary replacements as quickly as possible in a national emergency. On the other side, we will hear that to be legitimate, any replacement House Members need to be chosen through the electoral process. I happen to think both sides are right in their stated principles, and that's why I've introduced a congressional succession constitutional amendment, H.J. Res. 92, which I believe satisfies the core objectives of each side. Under my proposal, each general election candidate for the House and Senate would be authorized to appoint, in ranked order, 3 to 5 potential temporary successors. For these appointments to be valid, the successful candidate would have to have submitted them in publicly available form at least 60 days prior to the election. In the case of the elected legislator's death or incapacity, the highest ranked person on the list of successors would become the Acting Senator or Representative. Determination of incapacity in my proposal generally follows the precedent of the 25th Amendment, under which the President either declares his own incapacity, or people he has appointed do so. The legitimacy of a successor designated under H.J. Res. 92 temporarily succeeding a deceased or incapacitated Representative or Senator is similar to that of a Vice President succeeding a deceased or incapacitated President--not separately elected, but chosen by the principal and known well in advance of the election. Primarily to provide the incentive for incumbent and non-incumbent candidates to submit successor lists, state governors would be empowered to appoint temporary replacements only if no such list is submitted, or if no one listed is able to serve. Continuity of representation, I think we would all agree, means that the death or incapacity of Senators and Representatives should cause as little change in the composition of Congress as possible, which means that replacements should be politically as much like the deceased or incapacitated Member as possible. Who better to determine who fits that bill than the elected official him- or herself? There is no reason to limit a satisfactory solution to the ``continuity of representation'' problem to a situation horrible enough to kill or incapacitate a quarter or more of the House. Even 50 or 20 Representatives being killed or incapacitated could make a profound change in the direction and control of the House. And the death or incapacity of even one Representative deprives 600,000 U.S. citizens of representation for the several months it typically takes for the vacancy to be filled. Also, the legitimacy of a congressional succession plan is more likely to be accepted in a national emergency if it has previously worked in smaller tragedies. When State governors use their current power under the 17th Amendment to appoint temporary Senators, they naturally appoint someone who is politically like themselves, even if that appointee is the complete political opposite of the deceased Senator. We saw this played out most recently in the aftermath of the tragic death of Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) when control of the Senate was in the hands of the third-party governor of Minnesota. Also, during the last Congress there was a constant theme of speculation about the fact that the death in office of the aged and ailing Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) would allow the Democratic governor of South Carolina to change party control of the senate for up to 2 years. There is also clearly a democratic problem with the status quo in the House in which we allow death or incapacity to leave the seat vacant and the district unrepresented for months. But H.R. 2844 in some ways would actually make the democratic problem worse. Although replacement would be sooner than the status quo, the replacement would be someone whose nomination was decided by party bosses, not by a vote of the people. For all the talk about ensuring that this House of Representatives stays ``the people's house,'' that is just not a democratic way of filling vacancies. By contrast, H.J. Res. 92 gets an immediate replacement already vetted by the voters, and then allows States to get a regularly elected replacement who is both nominated and elected by the voters. It is obvious to me that H.J. Res. 92 is better for both the continuity of Congress and for democracy than H.R. 2844. I ask my colleagues to defeat H.R. 2844, and support my congressional succession constitutional amendment, H.J. Res. 92.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I have just introduced a constitutional amendment on congressional succession. Much has been said over the last couple years about the need to make sure we have a functioning Congress that is perceived as legitimate in the case of a national disaster that kills or incapacitates a large proportion of Members of Congress. So far, none of the proposals that have been introduced have been able to appeal to a broad, bipartisan cross-section of Congress. I believe the constitutional amendment I have introduced today addresses the major criticisms that have been leveled against the ``continuity of Congress'' constitutional amendments that have been introduced so far. Under my proposal, each general election candidate for the House or Senate would be authorized to publicly appoint, in ranked order, 3 to 5 potential temporary successors. The legitimacy of a successor designated in this way temporarily succeeding a deceased or incapacitated Representative or Senator is similar to that of a Vice President succeeding a deceased or incapacitated President--not separately elected, but chosen by the principal and known well in advance of the election. The problem faced by other proposals of how to determine when sufficient members have died or been incapacitated to trigger emergency procedures is avoided in my proposal because no such determination is necessary. If a congressional continuity solution is good enough to use when 110 Representatives are killed or disabled, it should be good enough to use when 50 or 20 or even one Representative dies or becomes unable to discharge his or her duties. Continuity of Congress is certainly important, but so is continuity of representation. Death or incapacity of Representatives and Senators (as in the case of the late Senator Paul Wellstone) should not change the control of either House of Congress or the outcome of votes. Also, the legitimacy of a congressional succession plan is more likely to be accepted in a national emergency if it has previously worked in smaller tragedies. To further legitimize temporary successors, my proposal would repeal the current power state governors have to appointment temporary Senators. Since the adoption of the 17th Amendment, the American people have expected that the members of both Houses of Congress should be democratically elected. When a more democratic solution is available, we don't need to perpetuate the practice of a governor of another party being able to change the composition and control of the Senate just because a Senator tragically dies or is incapacitated. My proposal would allow governors to appoint temporary Senators and Representatives only if the elected Senator or Representative has not submitted a list of successors or if none of the listed successors is able to serve. This backup appointment authority provides an incentive for Senators and Representatives (and potential Senators and Representatives) to make sure their ``political will'' is in order, since otherwise their governor could appoint someone they may not like. The backup authority of course also provides a further assurance of congressional continuity. Mr. Speaker, I believe that my congressional succession constitutional amendment would solve the continuity of Congress problem in a way that would appeal to both sides of the aisle. I ask my colleagues for their support.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, the result of the election in Spain was a major setback in the War on Terror and is a setback in our relationship with the people of Spain. There is another election, which will be taking place shortly in this our hemisphere, in El Salvador. The communist/FMLN political party derives from the communist guerillas who waged war for years to establish a communist dictatorship in El Salvador. They could win this election in part because of reported covert assistance they are receiving from foreign communists and pro- Castro regimes. If the communist/FMLN presidential candidate wins, the great spirit of cooperation we have had with El Salvador would be put in jeopardy. The FMLN has promised to immediately open full diplomatic relations with communist Cuba, which is a state sponsor of terrorism. They will do that at the expense of El Salvador's relationship with the United States. If a new communist/FMLN government in El Salvador acts as it promises to do it could well cause the United States to reconsider its grant of Temporary Protective Status (TPS) to about 400,000 Salvadorans who live there. These citizens of El Salvador living in the U.S. also send about two billion dollars to their home country each year. A hostile communist/FMLN regime in El Salvador would likely lead the United States to reconsider our policies which permit the sending of such a bounty to El Salvador. It is important for the people of El Salvador to understand that their decision at the polls will have consequences for their future relations with the United States. A victory for the communist/FMLN will most likely open a regrettable gulf between our countries after years of cooperation.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H. Res. 557. Americans should be proud that we are again confronting an evil threat to the Western world. We have done that before and we will do it again. We should be proud of our soldiers and we should be proud of our President. The last administration did nothing. What we are doing now is making up for what was not done 10 years ago. Ten years ago, we let Afghanistan be turned into a terrorist base. Ten years ago, we let Saddam Hussein continue his dictatorship and yes, the administration before the last, George Bush's father, deserves some of the blame for this; but for the 8 years of the Clinton administration, Saddam Hussein was murdering his people and aligning himself with the terrorists of the world. Yet we did nothing. Now, I remember voting for the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. It passed this House by 360 to 38. Now, today, we hear oh, the President of the United States did not justify going into Iraq. Well, many of the people making that point voted for the Iraq Liberation Act in which section 3 of the Iraq Liberation Act authorizes the President of the United States to remove Saddam Hussein by force. Yet this President is taking care of business, while the last administration did nothing. Finally, we have a President who is taking care of business, protecting our national security. And what do we get? What do we hear? Nitpicking and back-biting from day one. Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to support this resolution because it indicates that America is standing proud again. We have a President that is providing leadership. We are courageous and we are going to change the course of history. By getting rid of Saddam Hussein, we are going to create a democratic Iraq and we are going to stick it out there. Nobody is going to force us to cut and run; no amount of nitpicking or back-biting will hurt our resolve. We are going to create an alternative for moderate Muslims throughout the world, and that will change history. It will take the power away from the radical Islam. We are taking care of business now. Let us support our troops and our President.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. Boehlert) for all his help and energy and creativity and that of his staff as well. We have worked long and hard on this and I am very happy that it is coming to fruition today. I would also like to thank my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who have been working on this with us in a great spirit of bipartisanship and love of country and love of technology and innovation. Mr. Chairman, the Commercial Space Launch Amendment Act of 2004 represents the fruit of a long and thorough analysis of the commercial human space flight industry beginning in July with a joint House-Senate hearing on this subject, a Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics markup, a policy roundtable with experts in the commercial space transportation industry late last year, and a full committee markup early in February. So we have been through the rings on this particular piece of legislation. The bill before us today, H.R. 3752, creates a clear and balanced regulatory regime to govern the emerging commercial human space flight industry. It is my sincere hope that this bill will encourage individuals like Burt Rutan and others to continue leading the way in pushing the boundaries of technology and safety by building and flight testing hardware, something NASA has yet to do. This fine piece of legislation carries forward my goal of promoting this new industry and cutting back bureaucratic red tape while protecting public health and safety. H.R. 3752 eliminates confusion as to who regulates reusable suborbital rockets by directing a regulatory regime for licensing commercial human space flight activities to be established under the jurisdiction of the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation. The bill makes it easier for entrepreneurs to launch new types of reusable suborbital rockets by directing the Secretary of Transportation to create experimental flight permits, which are separate and distinct from existing commercial launch licenses. H.R. 3752 also extends the existing commercial space transportation indemnification regime by 3 years, as the chairman noted, through December 31, 2007, and calls for a study in determining how best to gradually eliminate the indemnification regime for the commercial space transportation industry by 2008. Overall, the bill will help get this new industry on its way and on its feet and give the existing space launch industry more time to grow. Let me note that in the past we have seen spin-offs from the Department of Defense helping people in the private sector and the commercial sector do their business, whether it is GPS satellites or whatever type of technology that was developed over with the DOD in order to help our national security meet those needs. We have seen those spin-offs come to the private sector and help us commercially. I think today that this piece of legislation will launch a new industry where we will see the commercial industry developing technologies that will have spin-offs for the Department of Defense. The spin-offs are going to start going in the other direction where our great space entrepreneurs like Rutan and others are going to be developing aerospace technologies that can be put to use in our national security while they are developing them originally for use in the commercial and private sector. It is this type of cooperation that should be going on and we should be encouraging it in both directions. That is what this bill does. I would like to thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. Boehlert) again and the industry, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, the ranking member, the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Gordon) and the FAA for their help in developing the bill. Their tremendous efforts will ensure that the regulatory barriers do not hinder the promises and potential of commercial human space flight and all the potential it holds for our Nation. I urge my colleagues to vote for H.R. 3752.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 912) to authorize the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to establish an awards program in honor of Charles ``Pete'' Conrad, astronaut and space scientist, for recognizing the discoveries made by amateur astronomers of asteroids with near-Earth orbit trajectories, as amended.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 912, as amended, the bill now under consideration.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, as chairman of the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics of the Committee on Science, I have made the threat posed by near-Earth objects one of my top priorities. The hearings of our subcommittee have revealed that monitoring and tracking near-Earth objects, that is, NEOs, such as comets and asteroids, not only advance astronomy, but are critical in identifying the near-Earth objects that may threaten the Earth. Mr. Speaker, recent press accounts of asteroids passing close to Earth have raised public awareness of the possibility that one day one of these objects could hit the Earth with potential catastrophic consequences. Given the vast number of asteroids and comets that inhabit the Earth's neighborhood, greater efforts for tracking and monitoring these objects are critical. This is why I rise in support of the amendment to H.R. 912, the Charles ``Pete'' Conrad Astronomy Awards Act. This amendment does not alter the intent of the original bill, but clarifies what the awards program is and the role and responsibility of NASA and the Smithsonian's Minor Planet Center. We have worked with NASA, the Smithsonian Institution, and our colleagues across the aisle to make these improvements; and I thank them for all their help and support. H.R. 912 authorizes the NASA administrator to give one award each year to the amateur astronomer or to the group of amateur astronomers who discovered the intrinsically brightest near-Earth asteroid among the near-Earth asteroids discovered during that preceding year by amateur astronomers and another award to the amateur astronomer or group of amateur astronomers who made the greatest contribution during the preceding year to the Minor Planet Center's catalogue of known asteroids. The recipients of the awards in the amount of $3,000 are limited to U.S. citizens and, yes, also permanent residents. This bill is a tribute to Pete Conrad for his tremendous contributions to our country, to the world, and to the aerospace community over the last 4 decades. Pete Conrad was a pilot, an explorer, and an entrepreneur of the highest caliber. He commanded Apollo XII, and during that mission he became the third man to walk on the Moon. He saw space as a place to get to, to explore, and to do business. Space exploration and commercialization is what he did. It was his job to explore the Moon. He then worked to develop new spacecraft and space transportation systems. An interesting aside, analysis of an orbiting object identified by an amateur astronomer suggests that it is the remains of a Saturn V rocket, third stage, which most likely came from Pete Conrad's Apollo mission. So I find no better way to honor Pete Conrad than to establish an annual astronomers award for future asteroid discoveries in his name. He always wanted people to be looking up. He was a positive ``can-do'' American. He exemplified the American spirit, and he was often remembered, of course, for not only his own walk on the Moon but his historic description of the landing on the Moon. Of course, the threat of an asteroid hitting the world is a serious matter, and the idea of a catastrophic asteroid or comet impacting on the Earth has, of course, gained the attention of the media and the popular culture in films like ``Armageddon'' and ``Deep Impact'' of a few years ago, but it is vital for all of us to realize this is not just for the movies. This is not science fiction. We all know that the Earth's moon and many other planetary bodies in our solar system are covered with impact craters. Most people have heard of the dinosaur extinction theory or perhaps seen pictures of the meteor crater in Arizona. However remote the possibility of a near-Earth object striking the Earth and causing a worldwide calamity, no matter how obscure or how remote that is, there is a threat, a calculable threat. And while the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs is estimated to occur only once every 100 million years, smaller, yet still hazardous, asteroids impact the Earth much more frequently. For example, the destructive force of the 1908 asteroid strike in Siberia was roughly equal to a 10-megaton blast of TNT. The asteroid that hit South America in the 1930s was of similar magnitude. The asteroid that struck Central Asia in the 1940s was a large impact. In 1996, satellites detected a high-altitude burst over Greenland involving an asteroid which would have had the destructive force measuring 100 kilotons of TNT. Ironically, if we look at asteroids from the perspective of our national goals in space, they also offer us not just a threat but also unique opportunities. In terms of pure science, asteroids are geological time capsules from the era when our solar system was formed. Even better, they are orbiting mines of metals, of minerals, and other resources that can be possibly used to build large structures in space without having to carry up the material to build those structures from Earth. So far NASA has surveyed 600 asteroids, but this is a fraction of the projected total population of asteroids and near-Earth objects. What needs to be done now is to fully understand near-Earth objects and the potential threat and, yes, the potential use that they could pose to the world. In closing, asteroids deserve a lot more attention from the scientific community and from the American people. The first step is through tracking all sizable near-Earth objects, and H.R. 912 is a modest step toward this goal. I urge my colleagues to vote for H.R. 912, which will encourage young people in particular to start looking into the stars and get involved personally in America's space program. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of S. 610, the NASA Flexibility Act of 2003. NASA engineers, scientists, and technicians have been the space agency's true pioneers. These talented men and women dedicated to pushing the technological envelope are credited with opening new vistas of progress for all of humankind. We must look at them as a valuable, valuable asset. With the recent announcement of our President, NASA's workforce will again be looked upon to extend the reach of our capabilities, to extend our reach to the Moon and then farther on into the heavens. Let us hope that the can-do spirit of the past will be reawakened in NASA as a result of the President's visionary goals-setting coupled with what I consider to be a very pragmatic strategy as set forward by the President. Let us hope the young people throughout America will hear the President's words and are excited and activated by this new goal- setting by the President of the United States and thus by the executive branch of the United States Government. As we begin a new chapter in America's space experience, we are doing our job on the legislative end. S. 610 will help ensure that talented and creative people continue to commit their time and services to America's space effort so we can achieve the goals that I just referred to. An aging workforce today threatens the future of our civil space program. In response to this impending crisis, this legislation calls for remedies aimed at helping NASA become more flexible in recruiting, retaining, and restructuring its workforce to address the agency's critical needs. For example, major provisions of the bill authorize NASA to provide greater pay and bonuses to individuals critical to the goals, missions, and objectives of the agency, as well as to authorize and set up a scholarship for a service program in which NASA can pay a student's tuition in exchange for accepting employment at NASA upon graduation; and I am particularly proud of that provision. The gentleman from New York's (Chairman Boehlert) continuing leadership and all of his hard work have been making this reform possible; and given the administration's new vision for NASA, there is no better time for us to be tackling this workforce problem. I thank the chairman; I thank the ranking member; I thank the people on both sides of the aisle. We have worked on this in a bipartisan spirit, and this will give us the ability to accomplish great things in the future for our country.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. If the gentleman will yield, as I said, I believe that the interdiction effort and the efforts, punishment, et cetera, have not succeeded. One of the reasons that it has not succeeded in our society, what we have is laws on the books that supposedly make something illegal, yet we have, by our own actions not put a societal stamp of disapproval. In fact, by not having drug testing and by not having, as Ronald Reagan used to say, a Just Say No mandate, or a societal norm that is unaccepting of drug use as personal behavior, what we have done is we have got laws that are unenforced, so officially supposedly it is against the law, but at the same time, the norms of society are accepting drug use. I think that drug testing will make sure that young people know absolutely fully well that society has a stamp of disapproval on drug use. Right now it is very nebulous as to whether or not our society is against people using drugs or not. This would be a clear message to young people, saying that society is so much against it, we are even going to test you and if you are using drugs, we are going to send you through a special program to make sure that you know how harmful this can be, and so there is no question in these young people's minds. The gentleman is right. Young people are looking out for guidance. Frankly I believe that if you threaten them, and I know we disagree on this, if you threaten them, sometimes it is almost titillating for kids to get around those type of rules where the sheriff comes up and we're going to put you in jail or something. But when you have to say you are not going to get your driver's license if we find out that you have been using drugs, you are not going to graduate, there is no getting around that. That is a real life stamp of disapproval. I think this would be very effective. Again the gentleman is right on target for congratulating our President and applauding him for making this an emphasis in his State of the Union speech.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I do have some disagreements with the gentleman as to the best way to attack this problem, but I certainly agree that we should make sure that young people understand just how serious the problem is for them and that there would be no greater method of telling them and putting a stamp of disapproval on it than making sure they have to have a drug test. But the gentleman referred to on the chart there some of the decrease in drug use that we have had over the last 2 years, and I think that a lot of that can be attributed also to a stamp of disapproval that the young people understand that our society has given just in the last few years. In the last administration, I think that it could be accurately said that people who were out fighting this problem were faced by an administration that trivialized the use of drugs as to what kind of threat it was when the President talked about not inhaling and such. And some of us who have had pretty wild youths in our time looked at that and said this man is not being serious, and the young people looked at the President and said this is not being serious, and our administration's seriousness on this has had a lot to do with the reduction in the use of drugs.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I would like to join my fellow colleagues today in applauding our President last night for his position on drug testing, and I would certainly agree with what my colleagues have just said, because young people today are faced with this onslaught. First of all, we have a media around them, entertainment media, et cetera, that actually breaks down their ability to make the right decisions for their lives in the long run, and drug testing would not only go a long way in terms of just identifying a young person whose parents need to know that they are vulnerable and are perhaps making some wrong choices in their life, but drug testing also gives these young people an added incentive to say no. Without drug testing, if you are talking about your daughter going to a party or something and having a few beers, there is nothing she can say to the person proposing using drugs except, well, that is wrong and we should not do that; my parents have told me that is wrong. And that is about as neat a thing to say at a party as I guess let us listen to Bing Crosby music or something like that. But if there is drug testing in school, young people will know what to say. And what to say is I cannot take this drug because I may be tested for drugs in my school tomorrow. And if I get tested for drugs and I am positive, my parents will know about it. And as far as I am concerned, any young person who is found to have drugs through drug testing, and there should be drug testing in our schools from junior high all the way through, not only should their parents be notified but the student should be able to then face an extra hurdle to jump over before graduation. And that hurdle should be a class that they need to take that will demonstrate to them the evils and the threat that drugs have for them as an individual. We need to let this child, who is now a young person, sit through a few films and some personal stories about how drugs have destroyed the lives of other young people and make that mandatory if that young person tests positive for drugs. They would have to get a passing grade. And I would suggest that if someone has tested positive for drugs before they get their degree, they have got to test so they are not on drugs. In other words, we have got to provide positive incentives for young people not to get involved in this type of behavior in the first place. Again, I would applaud our President for taking a positive approach. I have some disagreement with some of my other colleagues as to how effective the war on drugs is and how effective just focusing on enforcement or interdiction is. I do not think they have been effective at all. That is why we have got to try this personal approach, personal responsibility, focusing on identifying those people who are vulnerable, especially focusing and identifying people who might make us vulnerable. Airline pilots, doctors, people who our lives are in their hands, they all should be drug tested, but then especially testing young people to make sure their parents can know that there is a challenge and giving an incentive for these young people to say no when they are offered these drugs. I would join you both in applauding our President and hope that we can stimulate people across this country to look at drug testing as a positive alternative rather than some sort of threat to privacy. The only way it would be a threat, I would say, to civil liberties is if drug testing is mandatory and then we believe that we are going to prosecute young people for using drugs. That would be self- incrimination in my point of view, but I do not think that is what is being advocated here. What is being advocated here is drug testing in order to facilitate some type of outreach program to get someone so they are not using drugs.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend my colleagues for that last special order, for the way that we are going to make sure that the young people in this country understand that drugs pose a threat to them is to have just this type of presentation in Congress and this type of discussion, serious discussion, with them as to the threat that drugs pose to their well-being. With that, however, I would like to now, in my hour, raise a discussion on another issue that I believe is perhaps the most serious threat to the well-being of the American people. I have introduced a bill today that will give my colleagues a stark choice. They can do what will help big business, but will, at the same time, do great damage to the American people as a whole; or they can support the legislation that I am proposing, which will be a big step toward eliminating the greatest threat to the well-being of the American people. Drugs is certainly a threat, but I will tell you that I believe the greatest threat to the American people as we stand here today is the still uncontrolled flood of illegal immigration into our society. All the other problems that we have, including drug use in our own country, are exacerbated by this uncontrolled flow of illegal immigrants into the United States of America. If we do not get control of this, it will surely destroy our country as we know it in the years ahead. Yes, we can absorb legal immigrants in a fairly high number. I am proud that we have a little more than 1 million legal immigrants coming into our country every year, one-half of one percent of growth or so of our population. Certainly we can absorb that kind of immigration flow. But what we have had in these last 15 years, and especially in the last 10 years, is a massive increase in the flow of illegal immigrants into our country. Perhaps it can be traced back to the 1986 amnesty bill that passed through this Congress and was signed into law, unfortunately, by my President, President Ronald Reagan. That bill was hard-fought on this House floor, and I understand that my colleague, Mr. Dan Lundgren, is the father of that portion of the bill that insisted on amnesty for those illegal immigrants that were already in the country. Once that amnesty took place, once this legislation was passed in 1986, the word went out throughout the whole world that if you get to the United States, you are going to get the benefits of the people of the United States, and you can outwait the American people because we have such good hearts that there will be another amnesty, and yet another. The flow of illegal immigration after 1986, instead of decreasing, dramatically increased. Surprise, surprise. No, the people who passed that need to take responsibility for their actions. That piece of legislation has caused great damage to us. In California, our schools, the education system, is under incredible pressure. Our criminal justice system is almost breaking down under the weight of illegal immigrants, with 30 and 40 percent of those who are held in incarceration at times being illegal immigrants. Our healthcare system, our emergency rooms are breaking down under the pressure and the strain of illegal immigrants. And that is what leads me to the legislation which I introduced today. This legislation that I introduced today flows directly from a confrontation that I had with the leaders of this body over whether a provision should have been included in the Medicare reform bill that provided $1 billion in order to pay for the emergency healthcare for illegal immigrants in those States where illegal immigration is most prevalent. I opposed that and I was not going to vote for the Medicare bill because of that, but the leadership in the House agreed that if I would vote for the Medicare bill, that I could write legislation that would, in some way, mitigate the damage that I felt was inherent in providing U.S. tax dollars officially to pay for services, health services, for people who have come to this country or are currently in this country illegally. I voted for the Medicare bill. I voted for it before it went to the Senate. When it came back from the Senate I only voted for it with this understanding. So today the bill that I place into the hopper is in direct relationship to the Medicare bill that passed through this House, that, yes, indeed, took care of the prescription drug needs of many of our seniors, but, at the same time, did include an extraneous provision for providing $1 billion in healthcare for illegal immigrants. With that, I would say that the hospitals and emergency rooms on our Nation's borders, especially those in California, are certainly now going broke trying to treat illegal aliens who are streaming into their facilities. And there is no doubt about this pressure. There is no doubt about the horrible impact that it is having. But the reasons are twofold for the pressure on these hospitals and emergency rooms. Illegal aliens, first of all, normally, or at least quite often, if not normally, we do not have the exact statistics because they are operating in a black area of our society, we do not know all of the statistics about what illegal aliens have or do not have, we assume they are normally working at jobs with no healthcare benefits. Couple that with the fact that Congress insists and the law now insists that hospital emergency rooms treat every patient who walks through those doors of their emergency room, that they must be treated according to law. America, with those two realities facing us, number one, that people who come here illegally generally are working at jobs without healthcare benefits, meaning the people who run the businesses do not provide them healthcare, but the taxpayers end up providing the health care, coupled with the fact that the emergency rooms feel that they are required by law to take care of anyone who walks through the door, what we have done is created a situation where America has now become the HMO to the whole world. We are taking care of illegal immigrants, any illegal immigrant, who can get to our country and get to that emergency room. Sometimes we are not talking about just emergency treatment, about what common sense would tell us is emergency treatment; we are talking about extended cancer treatments, we are talking about treatments for diseases that are congenital, we are talking about diseases that someone clearly had when they came to the United States. We are talking about diseases that require hundreds of thousands of dollars, and sometimes even up to $1 million, in treatment. With this Medicare bill that we provided, $1 billion for the emergency healthcare for illegal immigrants, that is the first time any money has been spent to provide services for illegal immigrants in our country, so this is a watershed. This is that moment. In doing that, did that same bill try to fix the situation by enforcing our immigration laws on the border and insisting that these immigration laws be enforced if we provide that $1 billion? No, that was not in the bill. Did Congress try to fix the situation by saying that emergency rooms can turn away patients who are not in immediate danger of dying? To me that seems what an emergency is. An emergency is if someone is in immediate danger of dying, or if they are in immediate danger of something happening that will at that moment create a circumstance in their life or create something that is irreversible, a health reality in their life that is irreversible. But, no, we did not put any restrictions on the emergency care rooms turning away patients because they really were not in emergencies, or just treating a case to a small degree until those people could go back to their own countries and get the rest of the treatment needed to become well. No, none of this was included in that Medicare bill. But $1 billion was. The bill included no provisions to lower the cost of caring for illegal aliens by enforcing the law and deporting them. After all, if the taxpayers and the American people are going to end up paying for the healthcare of someone who has come into this country illegally, just ignored our laws or thumbed their noses at our laws, and now they are in need of some health treatment and they come to us asking us to take money out of our pocket, those people, if they are here illegally, after they are treated, at the very least, they should be deported. That was not in that legislation either. The bill added $1 billion of funding for the healthcare of illegal aliens and did not even ask the hospitals to identify the illegal aliens they are treating, to identify them so that INS could deport them or take some action against them for being in our country illegally. It did not do any of those things. What it did do is begin the process of shoveling tax dollars in the direction of providing services, officially providing services for people who are in this country illegally. I will tell you now, there is no one in this body that does not know and understand that a $1 billion program like this starting off, just opening the door, is going to end up being a $50 billion program 10 years down the line. So it is time for us to act right now, before this $1 billion becomes $4 billion, which then becomes $10 billion, which then becomes $20 billion. It is time for us to use this moment, this opportunity, with the passage of the Medicare bill, to support legislation in the Congress that will at least be a first big step toward trying to see if we can get this illegal immigration issue under control, at least in the area of healthcare. What I am proposing is very simple. The legislation that I just dropped into the hopper is not so complicated that people cannot understand it. First of all, it is totally voluntary. A hospital that does not want to receive Federal money under the program in that Medicare bill does not have to participate in this. So that is the first principle. I would prefer that we make it mandatory, but this legislation is going way over to the other side in order to reach out and make this reasonable by saying if you are not going to get the Federal money for the illegals, if you are not going to apply for that, then what is required in this bill will not be required of you. But for the hospitals who do want that Federal funding, the bill is very easy to understand for these hospitals that want that Federal funding. The hospital needs to ask patients if they are a citizen of the United States. How about that? How about that? They are going to have to ask, when they ask all those other questions when you go into that emergency room, they just have to ask are you a citizen of the United States? If the patient says yes, no further action is required of the hospital in terms of verifying whether that person is a citizen. By the way, others can follow up on that. Others can follow up later to see if this person is or is not a citizen. But if the patient says no, and he or she is not a citizen, the hospital then is required to ask what country the patient is from and what is their immigration status. If the patient is a documented alien, meaning that patient is here legally and is a legal immigrant, nothing needs more to be done, because nothing that I am proposing and our outrage about illegal immigration is not in any way an attack on legal immigrants. People who have come to this country legally have every right of every other citizen, and I know a lot of people now are trying to blur the difference between illegals and legals. That is doing a great disservice to the legal immigrants in our country. Most legal immigrants, I might add, are outraged by illegal immigration and by the fact that we provide services to illegal immigrants. In fact, sometimes the legal immigrants and U.S. citizens end up having less bestowed upon them by our government than do the illegal immigrants. A U.S. citizen, for example, has to pay outside tuition in California to go to a junior college, but an illegal immigrant does not have to pay outside tuition. That was something that was passed by the California legislature. If the alien is illegal, once he comes into the hospital, going back to this emergency room treatment, if the alien is illegal, the hospital must ask about the immigrant's employer and a biometric indicator, meaning a photo or a fingerprint, must be taken, to be determined by the Department of Homeland Security of whether it should be a thumb print or a picture; but that is what they have to do if this person who comes into the emergency room is an illegal immigrant and states for the record that he is an illegal immigrant. So we need to know who they are working for, and we need to know exactly what country they came from and get a fingerprint or a picture. The hospital then uploads this information into a database that is now being set up by the Department of Health and Human Services and, of course, the Department of Homeland Security. Thus the information that we have collected will become available to the Department of Homeland Security and these other government agencies for national security purposes and, yes, for the purposes of immigration enforcement. There is nothing that would suggest that that information could not be used to immediately begin deportation proceedings against an illegal immigrant who is coming into our hospitals to get thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of free medical care from the taxpayers of the United States. Thus we have the information available that is not now available if my bill passes. And at that point, I would hope that our Immigration and Naturalization Service and this administration and the people of the United States begin to demand that people who are in this country illegally be deported, especially if they have used tens of thousands and millions of dollars of public services like health care while they are here, because what they have done is taken that money directly from the well-being of the American people, their host. This is wrong. It is wrong for us to permit our health care dollars that our seniors do not even get the type of coverage that we would like them to have, our veterans do not get the coverage we would like them to have; but yet we permit illegal immigrants to come into our emergency rooms, and without even any responsibility to be deported because they have come here illegally, they end up, oftentimes consuming, as I say, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars of treatment. This procedure of just asking are they legal or illegal and if they are illegal, getting this information, is not a burden on the hospital. It is just a couple of more questions to be asked routinely in the process in which they are already being asked questions before they treat patients. Once the hospital determines that a patient is undocumented, they take a simple fingerprint or a photo and then they just upload this information onto a government database. That is it. This is not a complicated process, although we are going to hear in the months ahead how horribly complicated it is and how people will have to wait there for hours to be treated and they will die by the thousands if they are just asked to do those two simple little tasks, along with the other questions that they ask people when they go into an emergency room. Well, so far, my bill, what I am talking about, is very simple for the hospitals to comply with. But let me note there are some other significant provisions of this bill. The first is, the Department of Homeland Security, when it gets this information, the bill does suggest that they should begin deportation proceedings. And as I say, that will only happen if we make sure, because it is already on the books that someone who is here illegally, there should be deportation proceedings, but that law is not being enforced. We add this to the law again, and we hope and we pray that those people who are in decision- making positions in our government will start enforcing the law or change the law. But the way it is now, to permit this massive flow of illegal immigration into our country and the flagrant violation of the law that is going on, it degrades the respect for the law throughout our society. So this is only common sense, that if we know that an illegal alien is in the United States, especially one that is consuming resources that are taking health care resources away from our people, they should be deported; and their own country should be taking care of them. Secondly, and this is a provision of the bill, any employer, when they find out who the employer is, that is one of the questions they have to ask. Any employer who has not called the employment verification program, and again, this is going to be a nationwide program that will be in place in 2005, a program that will verify an employee's legal status, if any employer whose employee has gone into the emergency room and been treated and thus consumed all sorts of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars, then if we find out that the employer has not called the employment verification program when he hired this illegal in the first place, well then, that employer will be liable for the illegal alien's emergency room costs. We have businessmen who now exploit illegal aliens in order to give them a pittance of pay and no benefits. These employers, if they are not giving them benefits, they expect the taxpayers to pick up the health care costs. I am sorry, under this bill that is going to go back to the employers. The employers, if they are going to get the benefit of using these illegals, they are going to have to pay at least for their health care and not expect the U.S. citizens, their fellow U.S. citizens to pick up the cost, their cost of hiring this employee. So this is only fair. Employers claim that American citizens, of course, will not take the jobs that illegal immigrants take. But of course they will not take the jobs, especially if employers are not going to provide health insurance. If you are not providing health insurance, it is pretty hard to attract qualified American job seekers, and no businesses will be providing health care insurance for Americans if they can hire illegals and the taxpayers end up picking up their health care costs. This has been an incentive, illegal immigration has been an incentive for less wages and for less benefits, for the fact that a lot of employers do not offer health care anymore; and that can be tied directly back to the fact that we have a flow of millions and millions of illegals who are willing to work without health care benefits; and, of course, everybody is relying on the taxpayers just to pick up the bill. This lack of health insurance ends up putting the burden of an illegal alien's health care on the shoulders of the American taxpayer. That is wrong and we have to change that. This bill will change that. I might add that this provision will initiate an eruption of opposition to this bill specifically for that, because we have had big business in this country who has gotten used to having the taxpayers pick up the health care costs that they should be providing their own employees, and they have been able to attract employees by hiring illegal immigrants. It keeps down wages and keeps down benefits. Employers should pay the full cost for the illegal alien labor that they hire, including health care costs of illegal aliens that they run up in emergency rooms. And this is not, I would say, a huge burden on employers, although they are going to claim this. All we are talking about is that when an illegal alien or someone comes to them, whether it is apparent they are an illegal alien or not, comes to them for employment, that one of the things they do when filling out the paperwork for this new employee is call one phone number, one phone call to a Federal agency, make one check on the name of this potential employee, and if they do that and check and find out that this person is here legally, they have indemnified themselves from this liability and they will not have to then pay for that emergency room care. But if they do not even make that one phone call, why should we taxpayers pick up the bill? These employers obviously are trying not to verify that someone they are hiring is illegal, and then they are not giving them health care and we pick up the costs. Where does that come from? Right out of the same pot of money that takes care of our seniors, our own veterans, our own women and children in the United States of America. There is a limited amount of health care dollars. We should be spending it on our legal residents, whether they are legal immigrants and/or U.S. citizens. So, anyway, I do not see how any employer can possibly object to just taking one step, a very quick step, to see if their future employee is here legally or not. Third in the bill, and this is a very important factor in this bill, this bill does something that is important to the whole formula in that it limits the emergency care that a hospital is required to give. Because right now what we have is an illegal alien comes in, any type of health care that is required that is an emergency, that is deemed to be an emergency, we end up giving extensive health care way beyond just someone's life or death situation or someone's situation where their health status would be altered forever if a treatment is not given at that moment. No. We go way beyond that so often. What we suggest is the hospital is required to give just the care that is required to medically stabilize the illegal alien's condition, and it would stabilize them to the point that they can be deported back to their home country. Now, we have seen, as I just said, we have seen illegal aliens obtaining organ transplants, advanced cancer treatments. There was a fellow in my district from El Salvador, it must have been about 10 years ago now, and this man had had $300,000 worth of cancer treatments. He was not a citizen; he was not even a legal immigrant. He was an illegal immigrant, and we had spent $300,000 on this man. That is a crime. If someone goes in and steals $100 from a grocery store, they are going to go to jail. Yet we permit people to illegally come into this country and take hundreds of thousands of dollars of treatment. The American taxpayer, as I say, cannot be the world's HMO. It is going to break us. It is already affecting the health care available to our own citizens in a very detrimental way. Again, let me repeat: the American taxpayer cannot be the world's HMO. An illegal alien should be transported back to his or her country to receive any extraordinary care. Emergency care should only be for the temporary emergency where life is threatened at that moment. It is emphatically the responsibility of the illegal alien's own country to care for him; it is not the responsibility of the taxpayers of the United States or the Treasury of the United States Government. The foreign countries who our illegal aliens are coming from need to take care of their own citizens, not export their problem to the United States. Let us note now for the record there are many, many incidences of people coming here specifically to get health care treatments. They come here and they are on a visa or something like that. That has got to stop, and especially if they have come here illegally and expect to get those same kinds of health care treatments. It is wrong. We should not do that, and it is hurting the well-being of our people. Now, we are going to hear about how mean spirited it is to enforce our immigration laws and how mean spirited this proposal is. This bill will probably just generate the most incredible opposition and people pulling their hair out and saying how horrible we are. The motive behind this bill is a positive motive, and there is nothing wrong with loving your family and taking care of your family and taking care of the citizens of the United States and those people who are here legally. There is nothing wrong with having that motive. But our motives will be attacked as if we hate other people from other countries. And they will try to blur the difference between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants. No, this bill is motivated out of love. And certainly and there is nothing wrong with anyone taking care of his family rather than giving money away to the point that his own family's health is not being taken care of. And the fact is that some people are saying now, well, we cannot afford not to have these illegals around because we are used to cheap labor, as if cheap labor is something that is good for the American people. Well, as health care costs show, that labor really is not all that cheap when you include all the costs. Illegal immigrant labor, there are lots of costs related to it that we are picking up as taxpayers that the businessman does not have to shoulder. Big business has shown that they are not interested in paying American wages and giving benefits to their workers if they can get away with hiring illegals who will work for lower wages. What big business wants is a huge pool of international labor so that corporations can force down wages. Illegal immigration is having a horrible impact on all these government services that I am talking about, especially the health care. The legislation that I introduced today specifically deals with that. But let us note that the wages of all Americans are being affected and the benefits being offered to all Americans by their employers are being an affected by illegal immigration. American workers, no matter how competitive, cannot compete with Chinese slave labor or a Nigerian standard of living. Huge corporations then are using the poor and desperate of the world because we are not enforcing our immigration laws to force the American middle-class to accept poverty as a price of holding a job. Well, we hear time and time again, well, Americans will not work for these lowly paid jobs. Well, that is nonsense. There are no jobs that Americans will not do. There are no jobs. I can repeat that. There is no job that an American will not do but there are lots of jobs that Americans will not do at the wages that are being offered for those jobs. The answer to the labor shortage is not to import poor people from Bangladesh or to permit a flood of illegal immigrants into our country, but instead to raise the wages and benefits of the U.S. working people. We have a lot of people in this country who can work who are not going to work at those wages certainly because those are poverty wages. We have got a lot of businesses who will hire illegals now rather than hiring a person who is disabled and training that disabled American, that disabled veteran, perhaps, to do a job that can be beneficial to the country and he or she can earn his or her own way but the business will not do it. Instead they will they will hire an illegal immigrant who will work for half the price and does not require any special training because of a disability. And then if there is a disability on the job, the employer just waves good-bye and the taxpayers pick up all the costs. The National Research Council in 1997 did a study showing immigration was responsible for a 44 percent drop in the wages for our people in the United States who were high school dropouts. Look, I do not like that some of our people are high school dropouts. I am sorry some of our people are at that lower end of the income level. But those are the people who are being hurt the most by illegal immigration. The average immigrant has less than a high school education and so this makes perfect sense. It is Economics 101. If you increase the labor supply at that level where you have illegal immigrants coming in here who have less than a high school education and they are competing with our people who have less than a high school education, or are less educated people at the lower income of our country, guess what? If you increase the supply of that those people coming in, the wages will drop for those people who are already here, meaning our own people, legal immigrants and American citizens. This has meant misery in many blue collar households who actually in this last 15 years since this 1986 amnesty they have seen their wages drop and their standard of living decrease because we have been insisting on importing uneducated illegal immigrants, or at least insisting that the flood of illegal immigrants coming into our country not be stopped. This has hurt millions of our own people, people who maybe now have been working at a higher standard of living but are not now working at a higher standard of living because illegals have taken that job at a lower wage and kept the wages down. A good example of that is perhaps in my own case. When I was younger I worked as a janitor. The people who work as janitors today have perhaps the same income about the same level of income as I had when I worked as a janitor 30 years ago. I guess it might have been more than 30 years ago now, more like 40 years ago. Well, guess what? We have had an enormous increase in our standard of living in the GNP in those 40 years. Why should janitors not be making more money? Well, I will tell you why. Because if they would have not had a flood of illegal immigrants, you would have had machines and technology that would have been developed making that janitor much more efficient. Maybe he could clean 30 toilets or 100 toilets a night instead of 15 or 20. And that man could or woman could have been paid more money as a janitor. But instead what we have hired is illegals. And there has been no technology development that would make up for that. And thus we have kept the wages of janitors down, those janitors should be American citizens earning a wage that would permit them to buy their own home, or at least to live at a decent standard of living. Instead we have a flood of illegals in and those people are not living well now because they are having to compete with people who have come here, the poorest of the poor from everywhere. That is not fair to the American people who shoulder the burdens of freedom all over the world and shoulder the burdens of keeping our country the way it is. And they are hurting because of this flow of illegal immigration. The same National Research Council showed that the average immigrant household in California used $3,463 in taxpayer services. That is back in 1997. If you were looking for why California has such a huge deficit, that is, and have a deficit bigger than all other 50 states combined, illegal immigration is probably the answer. This taxpayer funded largesse includes in California health care, education, police services. And let us talk a little bit about the cost for each of these services. The American Hospital Association reported that its member facilities provided $21 billion in uncompensated health care services last year. Since illegal aliens accounted for 43 percent of those without health insurance in the country, we can assume that at least $9 billion of that total is attributable to illegal aliens. $9 billion. That is what business is calling cheap labor? This is cheap labor, $9 billion of costs added on to the American taxpayers? All along the border from Texas to California dozens of hospitals have closed their emergency rooms because they can no longer survive the financial hemorrhaging caused by giving free health care to illegals. And do not underestimate the drawing power of free care. This brings people across our borders. Remember Jessica Santillian, an illegal alien who died after receiving not one but two heart transplants and a lung transplant in North Carolina. The Santillian family paid $5,000 to be smuggled across the border to get care knowing that it would take years to get any type of operation at all if they stayed in Mexico. There are American citizens who desperately need organs. They are being knocked out of line by a family and by families who break our law. Then many of these families are coming here specifically to obtain a transplant or to obtain some sort of sophisticated health operation. This is a crime against our own citizens when we let that happen. It is not that we do not like that poor family in Mexico but we need to make sure that we keep the promise to our own citizens first before we expend our resources to those who have come here illegally from another country. And then, of course, the other country does not have the incentive to use their resources to build up their health care for their own people. What about the children of illegal aliens? The total K-12 school expenditure for illegal immigrants cost the States $7.4 billion annually. That is enough to buy a computer for every American student, America's junior high schools. Are you worried about school overcrowding? Hear anybody talk about overcrowding? You hear about that all the time. If the left wing teachers unions were not so allied with this cause of the illegal immigrants, we would find out exactly what is causing the crowding. Let me note this, and this is a very incredible statement, without school-age illegal immigrants, the children that we are talking about, the children of illegal immigrants, school enrollment would not have risen at all during the past decade. Let me repeat that. School enrollment would have remained flat if it was not for unrestricted illegal immigration into our country. So when one hears them talking about crowded schools, the answer is not to just spend more and more resources taking it away, again, from the other things that we need in our society in order to provide this service for illegal immigrants which then attracts even more illegal immigrants who care about their families and want their families to get this same largesse so they come here in even greater numbers. But by far, the most disturbing is the impact illegal immigration is having on crime in California. In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide involve illegal aliens. Do you get that? In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide involve illegal aliens. And up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants are for illegal aliens. Illegal aliens commit crimes in the United States and then they flee the country. Oh, as an aside, in California we have a particular problem, some of those flee to Mexico. And even when the criminal alien is known and their whereabouts are known to Mexico, the Mexican courts refuse to extradite them. By far the most outrageous case was that of David March, a Los Angeles County sheriff who was gunned down by an illegal alien who fled to Mexico and then only to have Mexico refuse to extradite a man who had blatantly murdered a police officer in California. Almost 30 percent of Federal prisoners are now foreign born; 36 percent of illegal alien criminals are released from Federal prison; 36 percent of illegal alien criminals were released from Federal and several state prisons with no deportation review. You get this? Thirty- six percent of those illegal aliens in our prisons and jails get out with no review as if they should be deported. But yet they are here illegally; 80 of these illegal alien criminals have been arrested for new crimes. Now, stop for just a minute and think about this: It is not just the cost of incarcerating illegal aliens, expensive as that is, which is $22,500 a year, for hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens. What is the cost to the American taxpayer of all of this? That $22,000, yeah, that is to the taxpayer, but what about their theft of property? What about the murders, the rapes and the assaults perpetrated by these criminals who come here illegally? And our government is so ineffective and so captive to corporate interests that we have permitted this massive flow of illegal immigration that is keeping down the wages of our people and is resulting in hardship and resulting in people suffering throughout our country. We do not even deport these criminals. When they are criminals we do not deport them when they get out of jail. These are not simple illegal aliens looking for a better life when they get out of jail, these are hardened criminals, many of them with ties to vicious drug gangs and violent criminal cartels and they are not deported? What is going on here? And our system, rather than allowing a swift and certain deportation, in many cases simply released these predators into the American population so they can rub elbows with our families at the movie theater. My friends, there is nothing conservative about a policy that has permitted this type of illegal immigration into our society with these horrific consequences to the American people. But even more worrying are the implications in our war against terror. Several drug cartels are getting into the illegal alien smuggling business. The cartels will help smuggle anyone into the United States who pays. These vicious organizations have no hesitation about smuggling terrorists into the United States. And once in the United States, terrorists simply disappear into the huge sea of other illegal aliens. Do we need this cheap labor that we are talking about? Is it really cheap labor? I am telling you that the cost is too high. The price of overcrowding of schools, the price of collapsing emergency rooms, the rise of vicious crimes in our society, the holding down of the wages of our people, our working people, this is wrong. This is a price that we are paying. Our people should not be forced to pay this price simply because our government is not enforcing the law. But more importantly, is the United States willing to go the way of South America? What kind of country are we producing when we permit millions of people to flood into our country every year? What is going to happen? And we keep wages down for our own people. We are creating a society with a wealthy privileged few on top and a huge class underneath who are barely surviving? Why are we doing this? Why are we permitting our country to be restructured where we have opportunity for all and our systems are working that can provide health and services and education services to our people? Why are we doing that? Because America's big companies want a huge pool of cheap labor to drive down American labor costs to the level of China and Latin America and because the left wing of the Democratic Party wants to use illegal immigrants as a weapon for political power. That is it. The unholy alliance between the left wing of the Democratic Party and the big business wing of the Republican Party. I am sorry. That is clear. Those of us who represent neither of those groups should start getting together and making sure we solve this problem. These corporations that I am talking about have no stake in this country. Many of these great big corporations want to keep our labor. They go overseas the first time they can. They end up investing in Communist China, the world's worst human rights abuser. They are setting up factories in Vietnam. Then they insult our intelligence as well by asking us to give them an export-import bank guarantee on their loans so that when they set up these manufacturing companies overseas, the taxpayers will guarantee them. So they can set up the manufacturing there and use the cheap labor in order to put our people out of business. Our people get out of those manufacturing jobs and what happens? They end up competing with guess what here at home? A flood of illegal immigrants who are willing to do their job cheaper and they end up being unemployed. What heartache, what misery this causes so many families in the United States of America. We are talking about alcoholism and drug use and family abuse. This is caused by the type of tensions by people who cannot get the jobs that their fathers and mothers had years ago, and they cannot be expected now to ever buy a new home or a new car. They are always worried a tire might go out because they cannot afford to fix the tire. This is what we have relegated half of the American people to. It is wrong. Now do not get me wrong. I am for capitalism. I am for free enterprise. I am actually for free trade in a way because I believe in free trade between free people. I do not think our government should be promoting free trade and subsidizing our people going overseas to any country. Certainly, we should not be talking about developing the economies of China and other dictatorships; but I do not see anything wrong in trading with Australia and other free countries. Also, this is not capitalism that we are talking about. I am for free trade and I am for free enterprise, but free enterprise does not mean that you artificially import labor into your country to keep labor costs low. That is ridiculous; that is not part of the free enterprise system. The working people of this country are willing to fight and die to preserve the freedom of this country in order to be confronted with the idea that their wages are going to be kept down by a flood of illegals coming into our country and an unwillingness to enforce the immigration laws. That is absolutely wrong. That is absolutely wrong. Democracies cannot survive without an educated middle class. And illegal immigration is destroying the viability of the American middle class. Our Founding Fathers envisioned a middle class of small tradesmen, of farmers who would have an education and the ability to govern themselves and to be independent factors in our economy. In fact, as we have seen over and over, a huge mass of desperate and poor and poorly educated people will quite often turn to the siren song of communism under certain circumstances like that where there is no hope. We are creating an underclass in America, a permanent underclass of illegals and of our own people. These people, when they get desperate, they listen to the rantings and raving of communism or the bellicose musings of fascism. Democracy is based on a well-educated and prosperous middle class. It has been America's greatest strength. To preserve this Republic, to protect the American middle class, we must stop the importation of cheap labor. We must stop the fact that we have a massive flow of illegals into this country. We keep the wages down and distort the progress that would be coming to the people on the lower levels of our economic tier here in our country. Instead, the people in the lower levels of our economy are not rising. Their incomes are going down. Their expectations are going down. Their frustrations are going up. And they do not know why, but they do know that all the jobs are taken by people who are working for dirt wages and that their fathers had better jobs at better pay that were meaningful jobs. Now, where do we start to turn this around? We can start by getting control of the health care that we provide those who come into this country illegally. At the very least let us stop right now. We have started a program, the first time that our country is spending any money officially to provide a service for people who are here illegally. That Medicare bill provides $1 billion for illegal alien health care services. It will be $50 billion 10 years from now if we do not do anything about it. So let us do something about it now. Let us start turning the situation around now by focusing on this legislation that I drop today that will mitigate any bad impact of providing this billion dollars for emergency health care for illegals by making sure that we have these provisions, these provisions that will see that they are identified, their employers, identified, that a deportation proceeding moves forward if they are treated, and that the amount of treatment that they can receive when they are here illegally is limited to a life- threatening situation rather than providing extensive care for diseases that are not a crisis at that moment. We can start turning it around right now. I would urge my colleagues to join me in this vital legislation to limit the health care to illegal aliens so that we can have that money available to the American people. I am going to be vilified for this. I know that. I had all sorts of press calls and everything after the leadership made the agreement with me to have this bill come to the floor. I know I am going to be vilified. I know people are going to say I am a mean, nasty person and that I do not care and that I am a racist or something like that. I am not and I have love in my heart for everybody. I know that even the people who come here illegally are wonderful people, 90 percent of them are wonderful people. They just want to increase their own standard of living, a way to treat their family decently. But we cannot do this for the entire world. We cannot expect to see our own people suffer and to try to equalize them to every poor person in the world, and this will bring more and more people here. And if we care and we have love for our families, having love for your family and having love for the legal immigrants and the legal U.S. citizens that are here, that love for those people does not mean you hate someone else. That means you care for your family and you will take care of them first. That is what care means. So I would ask the people who are reading this in the Congressional Record and my colleagues to look at this legislation. Let us turn the situation around now. Let us speak out. Let us make sure that we stand up for what America is supposed to be for. It is a land of opportunity, yes; but it is a land where one thing ties us together. We are Americans and we come from every race, every religion, every ethnic group. Here we are. We have come from every country in the world, and we have a proud immigrant heritage; and we are not shutting that off. I am not suggesting that we cut off the legal flow of immigrants into our country and we do about a million a year, which is more than all the rest of the world combined. So what we need to do is to make sure that we take the people who are here legally and people who are U.S. citizens and recognize who ties us together as a Nation. Other countries have their own religion. Other countries have a traditional ethnic group or a race that makes them what they were; but what ties Americans together is a love of liberty, of freedom, of justice, of people who come here to be part of this American Dream. Well, if we do not care about each other, if that spirit of caring does not, we do not have an ethnic tie to keep us together. We do not have one religion because there are people of every religious state here in America. That one religion does not keep us together. It is a love of liberty and justice and a commitment to opportunity and a caring for us all as all Americans as a family. We care about us. What is the United States? United States. It is us. And just because we are saying that we are going to focus on caring about us does not mean that you have hatred in your heart towards someone else. And please, please open your hearts and open your consciences. Look at this issue, and I think you will see this is based on positive motives. We have to end the massive flow of illegal immigration into this country, or we will hurt the people that we care about. It will hurt us. It will hurt the United States if we continue down this path. The quickest way to turn it around is to start with this legislation, and it is going to be tough and there is going to be a lot of name calling; but I would ask you to join with me and let us save America and let us leave the other countries so they start providing a better life for their people overseas, rather than just trying to use us as an escape valve so they can send people who are dissatisfied here. If we quit serving as that escape valve, they will have to have health care in Mexico and these other countries where they are coming here from overseas illegally. If we just keep taking people in, they will have lost their incentive. So I ask my colleagues to look at this legislation. I thank you for providing this time.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the distinguished chairman of the Committee on Rules, the gentleman from California (Mr. Dreier), and I might add the Member in this body who represents JPL in California.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Boehlert), chairman of the full Committee on Science. (Mr. BOEHLERT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)