Tom Tancredo

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to add another family to the list of what we are calling ``homeland heroes.'' These are people who have faced incredible odds and very, very difficult times, who live on the border, northern and southern borders of this country, and are really in the middle of a war zone. And I do not use that term just figuratively. The things that are going on on our borders and the way these people are having to deal with them are truly worthy of note here on the floor of the House. Tonight, I want to bring to the attention of the floor of the House Tom and Betty Jo Kuykendall. They own and operate a ranch only 34 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border of Douglas, Arizona. Their children and grandchildren have stayed in the ranching business and all live on nearby ranch lands. The Kuykendalls are the heart of a 6-generation ranching family. For over 6 years they have lived in a war zone, as I say. All three of their grandchildren have been either threatened or physically attacked by illegal trespassers on their own property. When I say trespassers, I am not talking about folks who just are out for a Sunday walk. These are people coming across their property from Mexico and coming into the United States illegally. It has been over the last 6 years that something has happened dramatically and caused a dramatic difference, I should say, in the life-style of the people on that border. There have always been people coming from Mexico across that border, many of them illegal; but they have been in relatively few numbers. They will stop and ask for a job. The Kuykendalls in the past have offered jobs to these folks. They have gone on and come into the interior of the country. But in the last 6 years something has happened. They are now coming across that border in hundreds, in fact, in thousands. The Border Patrol estimates that over a thousand people cross that border every single night in the area of the Kuykendall ranch. And what happens as a result of it? Well, their property is essentially destroyed. I was privileged to be a guest in their home, the Kuykendalls, and this is not too long ago, just several weeks ago. And, frankly, from their front yard, we could see people crossing their property, people coming into the United States illegally and crossing their property. You can see it any time of the day or night. It is, of course, more evident, more observable in the evening when the numbers become significantly higher than when there are people coming through in the daytime. The Kuykendalls have had their dog poisoned because it had committed the crime of barking at the illegal trespassers when they came close to the ranch house. So their dog was poisoned. Illegal aliens have been caught trying to steal their horses, vehicles and ATVs on more than one occasion. One of the children's horses was stolen and found 3 days later several miles away. A group of illegals accosted the Kuykendalls in their truck, beat on the truck and threatened them and ran only when a Border Patrol came on the scene. Some of the illegals who were apprehended were later proven to have criminal records as felons here in the United States, records of crimes ranging from murder to child molestation. The Kuykendalls have personally observed and photographed drug smugglers crossing their land dressed in dark camouflage clothing and carrying assault rifles. The land itself is littered with discarded plastic bags, water bottles, and clothing items. The Kuykendalls' fences are torn down, gates are destroyed, water lines are cut, and unauthorized trails blazed by illegal immigrants while they trample the range land into bedrock. These tribulations are typical of what all the ranchers in southern Arizona are experiencing to one degree or another. They suffer from a daily assault on their property and implicit assaults to their safety. Tom and Betty Jo Kuykendall are trying to earn a living and raise a family by managing a ranch, which is hard work even in the best of circumstances. All of these assaults and intrusions on their property damage their property, cost these ranchers money, money for repairs, for lost cattle, for damaged equipment, money many ranchers simply do not have; and several of their neighbors are now taking up bankruptcy. The Kuykendalls have lived and worked under these outrageous conditions because we, this government, refuse to take the steps needed to secure our border. Unofficial numbers, as I say, from the Border Patrol say over a thousand cross every evening in that area. They know that that is actually a very conservative amount. I hope that this Congress will take the steps necessary to secure the border. By failing to do so, we are betraying not only the Kuykendalls, but the liberties of every citizen affected by a growing tide of illegal immigration flooding across our borders day after day. I salute Tom and Betty Jo Kuykendall and their children for their efforts in defense of their land, their property and their way of life and add them to the list of homeland heroes.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Madam Speaker, as we rightfully address the issues that are confronting us overseas and the possibility of sending American troops into harm's way, I think it is also important for us to think about those people who are here in the United States, those citizens, who every day, as a matter of fact, face almost warlike conditions at places on our borders, a place on our southern border especially, that I think there is no other way to describe the activities down there, with the number of people coming through that border illegally. That it is a battle zone, and there are people there who daily deal with this particular problem. I am periodically going to bring several of these folks to the attention of the House. Today I would like to identify Mr. Roger Barnett and his wife Barbara, who own a 22,000-acre ranch located only 2 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border near Douglas, Arizona. Mr. Barnett also owns and operates a towing and propane gas business with branches in Phoenix, Tucson, Wilcox and Sierra Vista. Almost any evening after dark, Mr. Barnett can get in his truck, ride a short distance across his own land and personally witness groups of 20, 30, 40, 50, even 100 illegal aliens crossing the property. Sometimes, of course, they cross in daylight also. Mr. Barnett, his brother, and his wife have personally been responsible over the course of the last year for detaining, calling the INS, and being able to actually take off of his property over 2,000, I say 2,000, people who are trespassing, who are coming across his property illegally and, in fact, coming into the United States illegally. Now, of course, that in and of itself is a challenging experience for anybody who lives on that border, but along with it goes a whole lot of other problems that are created. Mr. Barnett and all of the other ranchers in the area find that their fences are cut. They are constantly, and I mean constantly, challenged with the responsibility of going out and repairing the fences that have been cut, trampled, gates left open, cattle disappearing, cattle being butchered and eaten right on the spot by the people who are coming through. The water on the property being damaged, the water wells being damaged; the amount of trash that accumulates on these properties is enormous, and it accumulates at something called layover sites and these are simply sites where a large number of illegal aliens will gather and they will prepare to be picked up by a truck, by some sort of vehicle in a road not too far away from the site. They discard all of their belongings because they want to pack as many into these vehicles as possible, so they will discard all of the trash that they have been carrying with them and certainly a lot of the water bottles, even articles of clothing. It is a place of enormous trash and human waste, as a matter of fact. This also gets into the water on the ranch when, after a rain, it destroys the wells; it becomes something that the cattle cannot drink. The trucks and the buildings on this gentleman's property, as well as many people in the area, have been vandalized. The grasslands needed for food for the cattle are continually trampled by the aliens crossing and making new paths across the land. They discard, as I say, water bottles and trash and plastic bags. The cattle eat the plastic bags and die. Recently, Mrs. Barnett, Barbara, was driving her truck near her home and saw three illegal aliens crossing her farm. She called her husband, and he and his brother came out and tried to locate them. After following the trail for a period of time, they found a stash of 220 pounds of marijuana hidden in the mesquite bushes. The Border Patrol has told him that some part of his land is used every single night by drug traffickers, but the Border Patrol does not have the manpower to stop it. Lately, these illegal groups have been coming closer to his ranch house using a creek bed hiding spot not 100 yards from his home. A few months ago, he found a group of 30 and called the Border Patrol to come and get them. This is happening day after day after day to the people who live in this area. This is not a unique story. I identify these people as homeland heroes, because they are fighting a war on their own land, on their own property, and on the border of the United States; and they are doing it certainly without the help of this government. They turn to their own government, to the Federal Government and say, what can you do? How can you help? What is happening to our property and to our lives? Our lives are essentially being destroyed. They have to travel everywhere armed. They keep a rifle by the door, a loaded rifle by the door in almost every one of these houses up here because of the number of vandals that have come in, the number of times they have personally been threatened. People have been accosted. Their cars have been stolen, hijacked. The illegal aliens will put rocks up on the dirt road, stop the vehicles, and then hijack the vehicles. Again, this is something that they put up with every single day. Madam Speaker, what would we do if that was the way we had to face every single day of our lives? I mean, would we not turn to somebody for help and say, what is going on here? This is incredible. This is, by the way, a relatively recent phenomenon, maybe 4 or 5 years. It is a result of a whole lot of things, including the fact that the Mexican Government has chosen to help move people into the United States illegally to serve some of their own needs in the country, Mexico, that is to say. These are travesties, Madam Speaker, and they cannot be justified in any way, shape, or form. These people are homeland heroes. I want to bring them to the attention of my colleagues, and I will continue to do so.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, yesterday I brought forward to the House a picture and a little story about an individual who died on the border last August. His name was Chris Eggle. Mr. Eggle was an employee of the United States Government acting in the capacity of a park ranger down in the Oregon Pipes National Park in Arizona. He was killed in the line of duty by people who had come across the board after being involved in some sort of drug altercation where three others were killed in Mexico. The point of my presentation yesterday was to explain to the Members of this body that we have, in fact, a war zone on our southern border, and to a certain extent, on the northern border. Today, unfortunately, I have the sad occasion to bring to Members' attention another young man named Jorge Salomon Martinez. Mr. Martinez was brutally murdered in Mexico just a short time ago. He was a Border Patrol agent working for the United States. Mr. Francisco Javier Rosas Molina, who is 18 years old, is in custody, and the Mexican authorities continue to search for others that they say have probably fled across the border into the United States. Mr. Martinez had apparently met Mr. Rosas Molina earlier in the week near the border town of Naco. They began to party together and converse, and Salomon had originally identified himself to the group as a member of the Border Patrol, as employed by the Border Patrol. Then they met some other people and Rosas Molina evidently told the other members of the group that Mr. Martinez was indeed a Border Patrol agent, and what happened next is described as the following. He said that is when Rosas Molina identified him to the others as a Border Patrol agent, and that appears to be the reason that they killed him. Martinez was beaten and his head bashed in with rocks. His Ford pickup was stolen along with other belongings, including a gold chain and a medallion. A passerby discovered the body early Wednesday and notified Mexican police. Later police received a tip about the slaying and robbery of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The caller led agents to Rosas Molina, who had the agent's truck and medallion. Rosas Molina has admitted involvement in the slaying. The purpose of the slaying, as it appears from the evidence gathered, is because Mr. Martinez was a Border Patrol agent. He is not the first Border Patrol agent to be killed in the line of duty on the border, he is not the first Border Patrol agent to be accosted. It happens all too frequently. It is because our borders are war zones. We were are in the process of debating whether or not, and the President is in the process of determining whether or not to send Americans off to fight a war in the Middle East. Without discussing the merits of that particular decision, I will tell Members there is a war going on on our borders. People are being killed on our borders. Troops are needed on our borders. Our homeland needs to be defended. These people need to be defended. They need to be trained, and they need to be protected. We have to make a decision as a Nation as to whether or not we want borders or not. If we choose not to enforce our borders, we should move away from them and let people come into this country at their will. We should stop this process of sending a few people down to our border, put them into harm's way, and then refuse to actually secure the border. Mr. Martinez, before him Mr. Eggle, and others, are examples of this kind of policy, this policy that puts people at risk without really having a desire on the part of this Nation to defend those borders or to protect our people on those borders. Mr. Speaker, our hearts go out to the family of Mr. Martinez. Our prayers go out to that family. I hope that we will not forget his face or his story.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to introduce two homeland heroes. They are Robert Eggle and his late son, Chris. Chris was a brilliant young park ranger in the Organ Pipes Cactus National Park in Arizona when he was brutally murdered by an illegal alien who had crossed into the United States after committing two murders in Mexico. Chris was in the front lines on a battlefield we pay far too little attention to. He gave his life in service to the country, and certainly deserves the designation as homeland hero. But I want to introduce another homeland hero, and that is Chris's father, Bob, the gentleman here in this picture to my left. Mr. Eggle is an incredible individual with whom I had the opportunity to spend some time in Arizona just a couple of weeks ago. He has become an incredibly articulate spokesman for the cause of homeland security. He understands fully that that security begins with the security of our border. Mr. Eggle and several others, as well as Members of the House, including the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) and the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Shadegg) endured the trip to the very spot in Organ Pipe Cactus National Park where his son was killed. And I say ``endured the trip'' because, as anyone can imagine, this was a difficult undertaking for anyone, especially the father of the murdered victim. But Mr. Eggle's stoic character was a true inspiration for all of us who were with him that day. He was an inspiration as we traveled to the spot where his son was killed. He was an inspiration as we stood and he led us in silent prayer for his son. Mr. Eggle does not, understandably, does not want his son's death to be forgotten by this Nation. He wants to make it an example for others. He wants people to understand that there are many folks on the border like Chris, who put themselves in harm's way every day to try to protect those borders. But he also recognizes that we are in sort of a halfhearted war on those borders because we really do not fully support the men and women who we send to defend them. Chris was not trained to deal with terrorists. Chris was not trained to deal with people coming across that border with AK-47s and carrying tons of drugs and all the things we know go on along that southern border. It is, in fact, a war zone. If anybody does not believe that, they should go to Cochese County and spend some time there, spend some time with the rangers, spend some time with Mr. Eggle. Mr. Eggle stated recently, ``I gave an eye for one war, now I have given my son in another. What is our President going to do about the war on our borders?'' This is an excellent question, Mr. Eggle. It is one that should be asked not just of the President of the United States, but of all the Members of this body, because we have essentially abandoned Mr. Eggle. We have abandoned the people who live along the border to the ravages of what I believe can be called nothing less than an invasion. Their homes are being destroyed. Their families are being destroyed. Their lives are being destroyed. Chris Eggle's life was taken. Bob Eggle lives to tell us the tale and to help and to ask us to remember. That is the least we can do for Mr. Eggle, a true homeland hero.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, it will be interesting as times goes by and as we begin the debate on the budget, which will come up in a relatively short order, it will be very interesting to hear our friends on the other side who have spoken so long and eloquently tonight about the issue of prescription drugs and the problem with the President's plan. It will be interesting to hear how they address the problem with the budget. My guess is, it is just a guess, of course, when the budget is presented, it will be attacked by our friends on the other side of the aisle for being too high and having too much of a deficit attached to it. I ask, I wonder, Mr. Speaker, if it would not be appropriate for all of us to think about the fact that the plan that is being put forward by the other side is one that would, oh, say a trillion dollars I think is the last we have seen that would attach to it in terms of cost. And my guess is again we will not hear much about that when we discuss the budget. At any rate, tonight I do want to talk more about a different issue than the budget. I want to talk about, of course, the issue of national security and the issue of immigration and how the two actually connect to each other. A great deal of debate is ongoing in the country about the activities that the United States will be involved with in a relatively short time perhaps in Iraq, whether or not we should be and whether or not the President is right to, in fact, address this issue in the way that he is choosing to do so. And that debate is appropriate and it is healthy in our Republic. Some aspects of it are healthy. But the one thing that I seldom hear being discussed by anyone, frankly, on either side of the issue of the United States involvement in Iraq is the actual threat that is posed by the action that we will take in that part of the world, the threat to our homeland, the threat to American citizens here in the United States. And the threat is real. No one, for instance, believes that our armies will be defeated in Iraq. No one thinks that we will fail in the desert of Iraq. Saddam Hussein does not think that we will fail there. No one believes that that is where the final victory in this huge endeavor we are involved with will be won. It is very possible, it is even predictable, I think, that various aspects of this battle against terrorism will be fought in a variety of places around the world, and we will experience casualties in places other than the desert of Iraq. And those casualties may very well be here in the continental United States. We know that Saddam Hussein and others have called for a greater level of terrorist activities be committed against American interests should we commence hostility in Iraq. And we know that that may very well be the commencement of hostility, that is, may very well be a catalyzing agent that will bring together many of the disparate forces in that part of the world in what is often referred to as a jihad against the United States, and we must be prepared for it. And we have heard how FEMA has put out various pieces of information and on the FEMA Web site people can go to it and figure out how to protect their homes and figure out what to do if they are at their business and something happens, some sorts of attacks occur, biological, chemical or nuclear. And we are preparing the Nation for this eventuality. We talk about it a great deal, and we should because it is a true possibility. It is, in fact, a probability. Now, we know that and we talk about that on the floor of the House, and we encourage Americans to be vigilant, and we ask them to take measures to protect themselves against these kinds of terrorist activities which we anticipate in the United States of America on our ground. It is amazing to me then that there is such a silence, almost one would say a deaf silence, emanating out of this body, out of the administration, certainly out of any sort of aspect of the media by and large, I guess I should say, some aspect of the media. Do pay attention to what I am going to say and suggest that it is, in fact, something Americans should be made aware of. But we hear very little discussion about the fact that our borders are porous and across them come people not just looking for a job, although many and in fact most do come that way and for that purpose. But many others come looking to do us great damage. And we talk about, we do pay lip service to things like the creation of the Homeland Defense agency and the reconfiguration of the INS and the Border Patrol within that umbrella agency we are calling Homeland Defense; and that I suppose is supposed to salve the concerns, that is supposed to make us all feel better and more secure: the fact that we are arranging the deck chairs, and that new boxes are being constructed with new names in them to oversee agencies with really important-sounding titles, all dealing with homeland security. But, Mr. Speaker, I just came back from a trip to the border, to the southern border; and I will tell you and I will tell anyone who will listen that our borders are not secure, that our homeland is not secure, even though we have an agency for that purpose. It is not secure. It is incredibly vulnerable. People still by the thousands come across those borders at their will. Again, most I am sure are doing nothing more than looking for the kind of life, a better life that our, perhaps your grandparents, certainly mine, came here for. They are coming illegally; and, therefore, they should not be given any sort of sustenance here. We should not encourage that. We should not reward that kind of activity. And I do hope that we will begin to understand that you cannot create a sieve on the border that allows only those people who are looking for a better life to come through it illegally, while simultaneously stopping those people who are coming here to kill us. I do not know how to construct such a sieve. I do not believe anyone does. Yet that is exactly what we are trying to do today. We are trying our best, and the government really should be given credit, certainly the administration, for the diligence that they have exhibited heretofore, that we have been able to see actually, perhaps stop certain activities and events from occurring, and we should praise the efforts of our various intelligence gathering services and parts of the homeland security agency, because there are things that I am sure could have happened to the United States, very bad things that have been stopped by their diligence, and I commend them for it. Their job is overwhelming. It is made immensely more difficult because the borders are porous. We have embarked upon this interesting strategy that says we are going to try to find the people who have gotten into the United States and are here trying to do what they were sent to do, the literally thousands that we have been told are here in these sleeper cells, just awaiting orders to execute some act of terrorism against the United States, and we apply a great deal of our resources to that end, to trying to find them once they are here and stop them from doing what it is they are going to do. We do not do what is, I think, most logical thing, the thing that our constituents ask us to do every time I think almost any of us go home and have a town meeting. Somebody usually, certainly in my town meetings, will bring up the issue of border security and ask why we are not trying to stop them at the borders, why we do not try to stop the people from coming into the United States and doing bad things, why is it that we are concentrating on trying to do something about the ones that are here now, and here is the answer. It is an ugly answer, but it is the answer. The answer, Mr. Speaker, is that if we were to actually do what is necessary to prevent people from coming into this country to create havoc and to commit acts of terrorism, we would essentially end illegal immigration, and therefore, we will not do that. We will not secure the border. We will not defend American lives or property because it would end illegal immigration, and Mr. Speaker, there are many people in this body, there are people throughout the government that recognize the political peril that might develop as a result of doing what I suggest. There are large segments of the American population who could be offended by us securing our own borders. I do not understand how that could be. I do not understand how any American, any American regardless of the hyphen, what word we put before the hyphen, I do not understand how any American could say please do not defend our borders because if you do, fewer of my countrymen would be able to come in. Because if you feel that way, then that it is your countrymen that we are keeping out, then you are not an American, of course. You are connected, at least mentally, to another country. Politically, emotionally, linguistically, whatever, you are connected to another country and your concerns about our borders should not be taken into consideration. Anyone who believes themselves to be an American, it seems to me, would be willing to say, and in fact, they do in huge number, please protect the border, please stop people from coming into this country to do us great harm because it may be me, it may be my family that is the casualty and the casualties of the next terrorist activity, and because they have some sort of connection to our country, to the United States of America, because they want to see us survive, and they recognize that the world in which we live today is the world that does not, in fact, exist easily with things like open borders. The world in which we live, the kind of world we have lived in this United States for a couple of hundred years where we felt so secure from the problems of other countries, the oceans protected us and that we could defend ourselves by sending armies to other countries, that world is gone. It no longer really exists. Our Nation is at risk because our borders are porous, and no matter how many times somebody stands on the floor of this House or in front of the cameras at press briefings and says something like we are doing everything possible to defend the people of this country, no matter how many times they say it, it simply is not true. It is not true. I can tell my colleagues that anyone who lives on the border, northern or southern, will tell you that the border is porous and across that border is coming thousands, thousands of people over the course of a year, millions of people, and that they will also tell you, by the way, Mr. Speaker, that their lives are being essentially destroyed, that their way of life is being destroyed, that their ranches and farms and homes along that border are being destroyed, literally and figuratively, destroyed. We spoke to rancher after rancher in Cochise County on the border with Mexico, and they talked about having lived there for generations and how something different was happening in the last 4 or 5 years where they have always had the issue of, in the past, illegal immigrants coming across their border or that border and on to their land, and it is a few here and there, and they would give them food. They would give them jobs many times frankly, and these people would either move on or move back to Mexico at certain points in time, and it really was not much of a problem frankly. Something, they keep saying, has happened in the last 4 or 5 years, something very odd and very disconcerting, and what they say is that it is not just one or two people coming across. It is, in fact, hordes of people, thousands of people coming across the border, destroying the fences, depositing litter throughout the land and in areas that were heretofore pristine in nature. They are now essentially the local landfill, but there is no EPA to govern the problem and to constrict the use of this particular land. People will come to what are called pick-up sites, Mr. Speaker, and they are all over the land in this area. There are places where people will cross into the United States illegally, continue on foot to a particular spot inside the United States where there is a road, and they will congregate there, sometimes in the hundreds. Over a period of time, maybe thousands will congregate in this particular area, waiting for their truck, semis, various other forms of transportation to get there, pick them up and take them into the interior of the United States. The land becomes essentially destroyed where these sites are. There is so much trash that a person literally has to be careful as they walk through there because of what they might step on or what they might touch. I mean thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of water bottles and trash and plastic bags because people are told they must discard everything. They must discard their backpacks, jackets, coats, shirts, whatever, get into these whatever kind of transportation is made available to them with as little as possible because they need more room. So they do not let them take in anything that they are carrying and they have to just simply drop it at that point. The land is devastated. If this happened anywhere else in the United States, the Sierra Club would be going crazy. We would be hearing from them on the floor of this House every single day. Somebody would be getting sued. I guarantee my colleagues that. The cameras from ABC, NBC and CBS would be there every night saying, look what these people are doing to our land; they are destroying this property. Yet, I really have not seen that kind of exposure of this particular problem. I have certainly not heard the Sierra Club or any of the environmentalist organizations out there in the United States condemn this activity and try to do something about it and suggest that maybe the government ought to take some action. The trash that is deposited is not only unsightly and becoming something that becomes very dangerous at certain points in time, but it is also, of course, something that these ranchers have to put up with, and it becomes an economic liability for them because cattle eat the trash. They try to consume the plastic, and of course, it will kill them in a short period of time. The human feces that is deposited in this area, oftentimes a rainstorm will occur in that, especially in that part of the country it occurs quickly. These arroyos fill up. The human waste is washed down. It gets into the water supply for cattle and eventually for human beings. It is a very dangerous situation, very ugly situation. I talked to ranchers who spend most of their day trying to repair their fences instead of actually conducting the ranching operations that are necessary to keep them afloat. Many of these ranchers are in bankruptcy. Then, of course, there are the even more dangerous aspects of this, because the people coming across the border, many of them are carrying drugs, illegal narcotics into the United States. They come with backpacks, 60 to 80 pounds on their back. Sometimes they come guarded by people carrying M-16s or various other automatic weapons. They come across the land in, again, droves, thousands. We have pictures of them. These are very dangerous people. These are people who do not simply drop everything and run when they are confronted by either a rancher or a border patrol. They will want to many times shoot it out with them, and they have done so. Even some of the people who are not necessarily directly connected to the drug trafficking have become very indifferent in their nature, very aggressive, very antagonistic to the ranchers in the area, have threatened them physically, have assaulted them, have broken into their homes, their barns, the buildings on their ranches, have vandalized the wells, have threatened the family members. Person after person we speak to is armed. Children go to school armed, 13- and 14-year-old kids. Their parents are afraid to send them that far alone or unarmed. Ranchers have to keep shotguns or other firearms by their door, and as one rancher said to me, nobody should have to live like this. We have lived here for generations. Nobody ever locked their doors. Nobody ever locked their cars. This was the idyllic and picturesque rural life that most people thought existed in this country. Everything has changed on the border. The government of Mexico has decided to move as many people into the United States as possible, as I was told by Juan Hernandez, who was the head of something called the Ministry for Mexicans Living in the United States, a newly-created ministry in Mexico. He was at that time the minister, and when I asked him the purpose of such an agency, I had never heard of such an agency before, he said, well, no, it is new, and I am the first minister, and the purpose is essentially to increase the flow of people into the United States from Mexico. I said, why do you want to do that? And he said there are several reasons. He was very, very candid. I must tell my colleagues I was astounded by how candid he was when he said, well, the reason why we are trying to get as many people into the United States as possible is so that eventually we will be able to affect American policy vis-a-vis Mexico just by the number of people who exist there. He said, of course, these people send money home to Mexico. It is called remittance and it accounts for almost 30 percent of their GDP. It is a very important function. It is a very important part of the Mexican government and the Mexican economy. It also serves another purpose, although he did not claim this, but it is certainly accurate to say that because of Mexico's enormous growth rate in the last 25 years, having doubled their population, they are now, and because they are still looking, they still have an economy is that is anything but robust. They have a huge unemployment problem and they have lots and lots of very young people who are unemployed, and as certainly we know, what that means throughout anywhere, any country, it means instability. And so they want to move these people out of Mexico and into the United States. Some people would even suggest that there are other reasons, that term ``reconquista'' is more than just an idle phrase; that people actually believe that they can reconquer that part of the United States, the southern part of the United States, by simply moving people into it. Well, there are many reasons why we are seeing this enormous number of people coming across the border, and Mexico may very well have their reasons for encouraging the flow into the United States. But we have absolutely no reason to accept this state of affairs except for the fact that we fear the politics. We fear the political reaction to any action we take to secure the border, both northern and southern. Well, that is simply not good enough for me, Mr. Speaker. That is not a good enough reason for us to abandon our borders. Because it is imperative, I think, for any nation, in order to call itself a nation, to be able to control its own borders; and we do not do that. We do not wish to do that, and we suffer the consequences: increased costs for American citizens. There is always this debate as to whether or not massive immigration of legal and illegal workers, low-paid, low-skilled workers into the United States is a benefit to the country. Well, I will tell you to whom it is a benefit. It is a benefit to those who hire low-skilled, low-wage workers and pay them very little. Those folks do, in fact, get a profit from this migration activity and from the fact that our borders are porous, and they can therefore hire people who are desperate. That is profitable for them, but it is costly for the United States. Many very reputable studies have been conducted that are designed to identify the actual costs. A lady at Vanderbilt University, a very well-respected economist, has stated often that the result of massive immigration into the United States of low-skilled, low-wage people creates profits for some, but costs for the many. And there is absolutely no way that the United States benefits in the aggregate from having millions of people here for whom housing is necessary, schooling is necessary, hospitals are necessary, and prisons are necessary. Twenty-five percent of the prison population in Federal prisons is made up of people who are noncitizens in this country. It varies from State to State as to how many noncitizens end up in State facilities or in local lockups, but it is a significant number. And these are very expensive costs. And they are not paid back by the ``taxes that are paid by the people coming in.'' First of all, even if they were paying taxes, of course, we would recognize these are low-skilled, low-wage people. At one of these pickup sites I mentioned before, Mr. Speaker, that we were going through a couple of weeks ago on the border, we saw some paper, well, there was paper and stuff everywhere; and I happened to look down and there was a 1040, a Federal income tax form that someone had filed, and it was deposited in the rest of this trash heap in this pickup site. I picked it up and we were looking at it and it was a Mr. Delgado. And Mr. Delgado had filed taxes, a tax form for the previous year, in which he claimed, and I cannot remember now because I do not have it with me, but I think it was $8,000 or $9,000 in income that he had paid $1,100 or $1,200 in taxes. But of course he also claimed $2,400 in unearned income tax credit. So he got a refund, of course, of almost double what he paid. And this is not unusual. It is costing us not just the money that every city and State and the Federal Government has to put out for all the services and the infrastructure, but it costs us in terms of the tax claims that are made by the people who come in here and work often illegally. And my colleagues know as well as I do how this happens. Tax ID numbers are assigned. The IRS could not care less whether a person is legal or illegal. They will assign a tax ID number, and that is really all one needs to then make a claim for an income tax credit. So there is that one side of the immigration issue. There is this economic dilemma that we face and certainly an economic hardship that is placed on Americans to support massive immigration into this country. Then there is this other side, there is this thing we call the national security implications of massive immigration. And before I go to that, Mr. Speaker, I do want to talk about something else that is occurring. We are about to perhaps embark upon some action in the Middle East, and we are looking for friends around the world. We are very interested in getting countries in the Middle East to help us out. We have heard a lot about Turkey and the fact that we had offered them, well estimates go from $12 billion to $30 billion in aid, essentially a bribe, to have them allow us to station troops there. Their parliament recently turned down that request from the United States to station troops there, so this has caused a lot of consternation. But they are not the only government that is trying to hold the United States up in order for them to agree to allow us to do what we think we need to do for our national interest and for the interest of, in fact, the civilized world. Our friends to the south have been negotiating with the United States, because of course we need their vote on the Security Council in this resolution that is coming up. It is widely reported that some bargaining has been going on between the administration and Vincente Fox's government. The issue is, well, what is in it for us, is the way I think it has been put. What is in it for Mexico? What are we willing to give them to get their vote on the Security Council? This is the same government, Mr. Speaker, the same country whose president came here and addressed a joint session and talked about the need for trust. He used that word over and over and over again, I remember. We have to trust each other. We have to trust Mexico especially, he said. Well, in that vein, then, he is suggesting that some quid pro quo is necessary for them to support our resolution, or the British resolution in the Security Council; and what they are asking for is another push for amnesty for all the people living here illegally, all the people from Mexico living here illegally. I do not know, Mr. Speaker, I do not know what arrangements have been made to get their vote; but I would suggest that this is not the action of a friend, of a nation that we are supposed to be able to trust. And I also assure you, Mr. Speaker, that I will certainly do everything in my power to stop any effort to provide amnesty for anyone here illegally, Mexicans or anyone else. It is the worst kind of public policy. Just before I came on the floor, I was talking to someone who was telling me about the fact that he is engaged, and he is trying to get the person to whom he is engaged here in the United States. It is a lengthy and difficult process, and he is of course doing it the right way. It is going to cost money. It is certainly going to cost a lot of time, and it is a big inconvenience. And I wonder what we would tell him and anyone else who is actually trying to do it the right way if we were to in fact then grant amnesty to the, what, 10 to 13 million people here who have done it the wrong way. What message does that send to all of the law-abiding citizens of this country and/or law-abiding prospective citizens to this country? It tells them they were suckers; and that is it, that they should have simply snuck in. Why would someone not just sneak in? Why would anyone go through the hassle? And by the way, when we go down to the border, the border patrol will say every time, please do not even mention amnesty. Because every time we say amnesty up here, this flood they are trying to deal with turns into a tidal wave. It is terrible public policy, Mr. Speaker, and I will do anything I can to try to stop it. Again, I do not know what arrangements have been made. I know it has been widely reported that this is the kind of thing that is going on. The fact that the borders are porous is more than just an obstacle to those of us who want to adhere to the rule of law and encourage people to come into this country legally, to enhance the idea of national sovereignty. It is more than just a little obstacle along those lines. It is also a very severe and significant threat to the existence of the United States of America. Across these borders come people, as I have said before, with ill intent, and they can come across at their will. And many people are coming from areas of the world that are certainly known to spawn the terrorists about whom we are so greatly concerned. In fact, on the border they also have a term for that. They always refer to these people coming across, this new phenomena, by saying there are so many OTMs. That simply means ``other than Mexicans,'' coming across the southern border. But it is not unique to the southern border. I guarantee it is happening on our northern border also. Many people are being reported, hundreds, sometimes more, who are actually coming from countries in the Middle East. And what we are noticing recently is quite a number of people coming up through Brazil in what is something called the tri- border region in South America. This is an interesting phenomenon, Mr. Speaker. A very interesting phenomenon, because it is something we hear very little about. In a paper, from which I am going to quote here, it is called ``Tres Fronteras,'' which means ``three borders,'' and that is why I say we refer to it now mostly as the tri-border area. It is Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil in South America. It was submitted by Lawrence J. Martines, a member of the IACSP, the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, and a variety of other organizations. It is entitled ``The Nexus of Islamic Terrorism in Latin America.'' It starts off: ``Ciudad Del Este, Paraguay once held the title of the contraband capital of South America. A seedy border town surrounded by jungle, where the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet. Millions of dollars in drugs have passed through Ciudad Del Este down the Parana River to the Rio de la Plata and eventually reaching the Atlantic seaboard. Upriver came illegal booze, jewelry, and black- market cigarettes. The narcotrafficantes and all-purpose smugglers fueled the economy of the region. According to a U.S. State Department document, thanks to Ciudad Del Este, impoverished Paraguay had both a higher consumption of whiskey than Scotland and a record supply of foreign cigarettes and jewelry. ``In the mid-1980s, a demographic shift began in South America,'' and this is the part that is quite interesting and something hardly anyone talks about. ``Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and Southwest Asia began flooding into the region, including the Tres Fronteras. By 2001 the Muslim population south of the Panama Canal had skyrocketed to an estimated 6 million. Over a million currently live in Brazil, while Argentina plays host to 700,000. Much of the remainder live in Paraguay, Chile, Peru and Bolivia. In Ciudad Del Este, over 23,000 Muslims, mostly Lebanese, Syrians and Iranians, now control the economic and political life of the area which extends across the border to the city of Foz do Iguacu on the Brazilian side of Parana. ``Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, and under major prodding from the CIA, police officers from the three adjoining nations swept into the area to scour for evidence that the tri-border region may have evolved into a haven for Islamic extremists. Paraguayan police rounded up numerous Arab immigrants and Paraguayan citizens who they claimed to have links to international terror groups. Among those arrested was Alejandro Weiss, the former Paraguayan consul to the United States of America. It was discovered that consul Weiss had sold over 300 passports, visas and cargo shipment authorizations at $8,000 a piece. These documents went to Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptian citizens suspected of terrorist connections. These individuals and their cargoes have since melted into the rapidly growing Arab community within the tri-border region. Skipping to the end, On November 21, Otto Reich, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere made the following statement. ``We have information that there are numerous people helping the Hizballah organization in the tri-border area. This includes financially helping terrorist groups in the Middle East.'' ``Footnote: When taking a hard look at Islamic extremists in Latin America, one should not ignore Mexico. Within the last year, a former Mexican immigration official in Ciudad Juarez was imprisoned because of his involvement in smuggling hundreds of Iraqis and Palestinians into the United States of America since 1996. These Arabs apparently traveled up the land bridge from South America. Further, within the same time frame, Matamoros police arrested a migrant smuggler accused of sneaking numerous Pakistanis into the southwestern United States. ``One must conclude from all this Islamic extremist activity south of border that we must increase vigilance at our back door. The threat is clearly aimed at our homeland via the geography of our hemispheric neighbors. Continued sneaking of terrorists into America through our porous southern flank is a given, unless there is a major military or law enforcement presence implemented there in the very near future.'' While we were down there and in other briefings I have had from Border Patrol agents and from the INS, they will show you the number of people that they have arrested, and they identify them by country of origin. Over the last year and a half, it is fascinating to see what is happening, because there is the typical number from Mexico, and then they go through all of the other countries from which we are grabbing people that are coming into the country illegally. In the last year and a half it was weird because Brazil just went off the charts. What is the idea there? What is happening is this. Brazil and the tri-border area is home to this group of Islamic extremists, they provide the transportation network that brings these people up through Mexico and into the United States. They come from all over the Middle East, they come through that tri-border area. They are culturated to a certain extent, and then moved into the United States. We have gotten all of these people with these Brazilian passports. It is a very odd thing. But the point I am making is this: The folks that are coming into this country are not just looking for a job cutting your lawn or replacing your roof. Some of them, many of them, are coming to replace you, your very existence. They are coming across porous borders, and the only way that it can ever be dealt with is, I reiterate, to provide a major military or law enforcement presence on that border, northern and southern. It means the commitment of our military assets to a task that one would think would be the most logical task, the first task, to protect the homeland. Homeland defense. There are 37,000 American troops on the border between North and South Korea. South Koreans tell us that they do not want them. There are demonstrations all of the time against American troops there. Mr. Speaker, I would certainly look long and hard at any proposal to bring those troops back home and put them on the border where I know they are wanted, and that is our border between Mexico and the United States and Mexico and Canada. There are Muslim groups in Canada. When we were on the northern border, we were told about a Muslim group in Calgary, Canada. Odd as that might sound, that is what we were told by the Forest Service officials that were playing host to our group. And the reason they identified this group was this group was responsible, perhaps not all 25,000, but the Muslim population in Calgary that was responsible for the transportation of the narcotics of the drugs into the United States. They put them together here to make methamphetamines. And then the money that was garnered from this illegal trafficking in narcotics went back to this group in Calgary, Canada, and was then used to support terrorist organizations all over the world. We were told that there is something like 100,000 Muslims in other major cities in Canada, including Vancouver. Again, an odd thing. Muslims in Canada and Brazil, yes, it is happening. It is documented. It is pretty peculiar, I agree, but it is a fact of life. It is not a fact that we want too much exposure on however because if most people in the United States understood this, knew this, there would be a call to do something about it, and their government would supposedly respond to that. I do not know that they would do it, but I know there would be a call to do it. Mr. Speaker, I have never seen a greater divide between what the people of this country want and what this government is willing to give them than in this area of immigration reform. The people want it. We are not willing to give it. Why? Because of the politics of the issue. What do we do instead? We not only open the borders and keep them open, but we encourage even more people to come across. States are now providing various amenities, benefits to people to come here and live illegally. The Mexican consul in the United States is going around lobbying cities and States to get them to accept the matricular consular. It is a card handed out to Mexican nationals. They have every right to do that, but then the Mexican consul has gone out and asked cities and States to accept these cards as an ID for the provision of benefits and services, and many cities and States have agreed to do that. That means that we are running a variety of immigration systems in this country. The Federal Government is saying here is what we give you. It is called a green card when you come into the United States legally, or a visa. And a city is saying I do not care about that, I will take this card given by the Mexican consul. Mr. Speaker, I wonder if an American consul official would go to a State official in Mexico or Canada and say would you please help me help people that are here illegally violate the Federal law, would you please help us. Well, there would be an international incident. The governments of Mexico and Canada would file a protest saying what are your consuls doing in my country trying to get people to break the law. That is exactly what is happening in America. Yet we have taken no action against it. We have not even filed a protest. In fact, we do not want this to be known. It is happening in State after State. Colorado, my State, to its great credit, has passed through the House and through at least one committee in the Senate a bill to ban any acceptance of the matricular consular by the State and any local entity in Colorado. I hope States throughout the United States take this example and move forward quickly. I have introduced legislation to stop the Federal Government from doing this. Why would there even be opposition to this? Why would we be saying that we would accept for identification purposes anything but a U.S. or State government issued document? But we are doing it to accommodate illegal immigrants into this country because, Mr. Speaker, that is the only people that in fact need this card. The only people who need a card for identification purposes are people who are here illegally. Otherwise, you have something from our government. It is called, as I say, a green card or a visa. But if you are here illegally, you do not have that so you need this other card, and we are accommodating that. States and cities are doing it. Even the Federal Government is abetting it because we have not spoken out against it. We have not demanded that the Mexican consul stop this activity. The State House in Washington last week, I think, passed a bill giving instate tuition. If Washington goes ahead, they will join several other States, Utah, Texas, California, I cannot remember, I think there is another State, that have done that. I wonder if they recognize, and, by the way, this is something I hope that they hear, Mr. Speaker, that in 1996 this Congress passed a law saying that if any State does that, if they give instate tuition to illegal residents in this country, then they have to give that same rate to everybody who applies, all outstate applicants have to be given the rate that they give to an illegal alien applying. So that will end outstate tuition for anybody wanting to go to Utah, California, Texas and Washington, anybody in the United States who chooses to leave their State and apply to any of these States for college; and if they are told that their costs are going to be much higher than the State resident, they could sue. I would certainly encourage them to do so because, of course, this is an activity that is designed to thwart the will of the Congress and the Nation. How many immigration systems are we going to run in this country? And they are given driver's licenses and they are out lobbying for this. And everybody will say, But these people are just coming for jobs. Come on. It is good for the country. No, Mr. Speaker, there are major, negative implications to massive illegal immigration. Where are the ears to hear this? Why have we not as a body risen up and reflected the will of our constituents and demanded that these governments stop trying to infiltrate into the United States, stop trying to send their people in here illegally? There is a process to come into the United States legally. It is not the act of a friendly nation to encourage people to come across our borders illegally. Michelle Malkin, I cannot say enough about her as an author and observer of the political scene, has written a book called ``Invasion'' to describe this phenomenon, and it is an invasion. It is the accurate word to describe what is happening to us. In order to stop it, we need to put our military on our borders to defend our Nation against this invasion. I do not know, Mr. Speaker, how we can look our constituents in the eye, any of us, when we go home if we have not done everything possible to defend the country. That includes using the military assets of this country for that purpose. We do not have to place people arm in arm across the border. Technology now allows us to, in fact, monitor large tracts of land, be able to address the issue when it occurs, someone crossing a border; we have sensors that can identify a person as opposed to a deer or an animal coming across. We have drones, unmanned aerial vehicles we can use on our borders. I have seen it work. We tried it on the northern border for a 2-week stint, 100 Marines using three drones and two radar stations controlling 100 miles of border in some of the most rugged areas of the country. We can do it. It is not an issue of resources. People will say, it just costs too much. A Member of the other body indicated, and he is from Arizona, that we could not put troops on our borders because we are about to go to war. I would suggest that there is a problem there, because we are at war in a way, in his own State, I should say. Therefore, those troops could be, I think, appropriately used there. Mr. Speaker, this is an issue that I know is uncomfortable for many to deal with; but it is nonetheless a real issue, something that needs to be dealt with by this body and by the American people. I appreciate the time that has been given me this evening to bring it to the attention of this body.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, we have had a number of discussions in the House over the last several days dealing with the issue of the possibility of a conflict in the Middle East and the efficacy thereof, and whether or not it is in the national interests of the United States to embark upon this venture, whether a preemptive strike by the United States is justified, whether or not our sending men and women into harm's way is appropriate. And this is the place, of course, where that debate should be carried on. Throughout the United States, of course, around water coolers and in offices and around dinner tables, the debate continues. It is certainly appropriate that it goes on here. I just want to reflect upon something that happened not too long ago in Denver, Colorado when I was asked to speak at a rally, and the rally was organized by people who wanted to show the armed forces, especially the Armed Forces of the United States, that the American people believe in them, that the American people trust them, that the American people admire and respect them, and that we know we place our safety in their hands. We know that we place this great Nation in their hands, and we know that, in fact, we place the western civilization, in fact, in their hands. Its survival will be determined by the actions of people like those that we are sending off to the Middle East. So it was billed in the newspapers as a pro-war rally. And I was asked to speak at this rally, and I indicated to the people in the audience that I thought that it had been misidentified by the press. And that in fact I knew no one, I really cannot tell my colleagues that I have ever met anyone who was, in fact, pro-war, just pro-war. I do not know anybody like that. There may be people out there who live for the idea of risking life and limb or taking someone else's in the act of war, but I just do not know them; and I do not know that anybody at that rally could have been so classified or identified. Nonetheless, that is the way the press billed it, a pro-war rally. As I said, I think it has been mischaracterized. I know why the organizers asked me to speak and why I am here, because it is a pro- America rally. I am here, as I said, to lend my voice to those that have already spoken who have indicated their strong support for the actions of our government and for the people who are going to serve and are serving in the military. But I said that also it was interesting to me because there were many other rallies that had been held up to that point in time, certainly many here in Washington, many on the Mall, and they were organized for the most part by the Workers' Party and similar groups. The people who spoke at these rallies were people who said little about the issue of the advisability of peace in the Middle East, but they did say a lot about what was wrong, in their minds, anyway, with America. I quoted from some of the speeches that had been made right here in Washington on the Mall at these rallies. The quotes were those that reflected the sort of atmosphere that prevailed at these ``pro-peace rallies.'' I suggested that they were also misidentified by the press as pro-peace rallies, just as we were misidentified by the press as a pro-war rally; and that most of the discussions and most of the people exhorting the crowd were not really interested in just the concept of peace and the need for it, but they talked mostly about the problems with America: that America needed ``regime change''; that America needed a ``revolution''; that President Bush was, well, I will not go into the kind of epithets that they tossed out against the President and against our system. Also, they led chants of Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar, at these rallies. When we read what they said, when we read this, we came to the conclusion that there was something a little bit different; that maybe it was not just a pro-peace rally, but that perhaps their real concern was America itself, this Nation and everything it stands for. I indicated that I believed that those rallies could be more accurately identified as anti-America rallies. Now, not everyone, of course, who attends such a rally could be identified as anti-American. Many people went there, I am sure, because they just simply wanted peace and believed that the foreign policy of the United States vis-a-vis Iraq was inaccurate, was incorrect. But the organizers of the rally and the people who spoke at these rallies were for the most part unconcerned with the actual issues that we are confronting here with regard to Iraq, and they were much more concerned with what they considered to be the problems with the United States, with our system of government, and essentially with who we are. Now, shortly thereafter the newspapers in my State carried several stories about the rally, and about what I said. I was characterized as someone who said, if you are not supporting the war effort, you are un- American. Of course, that was not accurate; but it is certainly not the first time that my statements or anyone's, especially those of us here in this body, have been mischaracterized in the press. But it made me think about the way in which so many Americans have been inclined over the last several decades, really, to look first at what America's warts are, America's problems, America's shortcomings, without being even the slightest bit interested in what America's values are and what America represents for the world. I was intrigued by a number of things in this particular debate, not the least of which is the attention we pay to people like movie stars and entertainment, people in the entertainment business. We focus on them. As I was coming over here, I was listening to something that was referencing an actor. He was on the radio, and I think it was simulcast on television. I got to see just part of it, actually, before I came over. This actor was talking about what his opinions were with regard to the war. He was, of course, very critical about the United States and our actions. Now, this particular actor has every right to, of course, express his opinions, as does the postman, as does the waitress, as does any other citizen of this country. What is intriguing to me is the attention that we pay to that particular point of view by these people, who admittedly have no particular expertise that differentiates them from any of the people that I just mentioned in their walks of life: the waitress, the postman, the cab driver. As a matter of fact, I remember reading something a little bit ago about a cab driver here in Washington, D.C. when ex-President Clinton was addressing a group at Georgetown University right after 9-11. Mr. Clinton suggested in this particular speech that the reason the United States had suffered such a blow from these terrorists was because of the way we had treated Native Americans in the past and because of the history of slavery in the United States. That is why we essentially deserved what we got. This is from an ex-President. Now, it is understandable that the media would cover his interpretation of the events. He was, as a matter of fact, of course, an ex-President of the United States, emphasizing here, to my great relief, the prefix ``ex'' before the word ``President.'' In Washington there was a cab driver, and by the way, this was reported in the press, of course. I read this story about a gentleman getting into a cab. He saw on the front seat of the cab the newspaper, and it was turned to this particular article about the President's speech, about the ex-President's speech. The person getting into the cab said to the cab driver, I see you read about President Clinton's speech. The cab driver said, yes. He said, what did you think of it? The cab driver said, I thought it was baloney. He said, these people do not hate us for what we have done wrong; they hate us for what we do right. Now, I heard that, this particular little vignette, I heard it in a speech that was given not too long ago by the individual who was actually the person getting into the cab. I thought to myself at the time what an interesting and, I thought, profound observation. That was my opinion of that cab driver's observation. He said, you know, we do stuff right. We help people. We have such freedoms in the United States, freedom of speech and the press and freedom of religion, especially freedom of religion, and freedom of the sexes to vote and to share the rights afforded to all citizens; which is not, of course, the case with people in other parts of the world, people in other civilizations, who do not allow that kind of thing to exist in their societies. This cab driver was observing that our system was better and that we do it right. That is why they hate us. That is why we got attacked. I thought, what a very profound observation. Now, I will tell the Members that that little story, of course, appeared nowhere that I know of in the press, in the national media. Perhaps there was no reason for it to be reported, because, after all, this was a cab driver in Washington, D.C. What was his expertise? He talks to a lot of people, that is true, but not really a person that we would say, well, yes, gee, whiz, that is the guy we should listen to because of his great acumen, great experience, or whatever. Yet, interestingly, the press pays a great deal of attention to people in the media, people in the entertainment world, I should say, who come forward with their pronouncements about what is right in terms of our foreign policy and what is wrong, actors like Sean Penn and actress, although she does not want to be called an actress because that distinguishes a gender difference, actresses like Susan Sarandon, actors like George Clooney, and this guy, Mike Farrell. The closest he has come, I think, to being involved in any sort of conflict was his portraying a doctor on the TV series called ``M*A*S*H.'' These people are given a lot of attention and great air time. People listen to them and say, gee, whiz, that is how they feel. I know I am intrigued by it, because of course they are all, without exception, everybody I mentioned, and far more than that in the entertainment industry, being extremely liberal, they are, of course, opposed to our actions in Iraq. Now, I do not remember any of them saying a thing about our going into Yugoslavia. I do not remember anybody condemning President Clinton, ex-President Clinton, for tossing missiles around when he felt it appropriate, and actually pursuing a war in Yugoslavia that was against a country that posed absolutely no threat to the United States whatsoever. No one ever suggested in their wildest dreams that Milosevic was a threat to the United States. He was a bad guy, no doubt, but what was his threat to the United States? Yet we in fact carried out a war against him. All of these people stayed silent, if I remember correctly. I do not remember them being quite so vocal, or vocal at all during that period of time. But this war against a madman in Iraq, against a person that I have never heard anyone, even these people, suggest is a reasonable individual with whom we can ``do business,'' these people rail against the United States and we pay attention. The media pays attention. But I suggest that they have absolutely no more cache on this issue than the cab driver here in Washington, D.C. I happen to, of course, agree with his interpretation, but I do not think I ever saw him on television talking about it. He has exactly the same, or in fact one might say, because of the many people that he sees during the course of the day, and here in Washington, D.C. he may be transporting people in various capacities that discuss world issues, so he may be more politically astute than anyone in Hollywood. Yet, of course, we will never be talking about him because he is not a national figure, and because he happens to actually take a different point of view than the liberal left-wing anti-American sentiment that is expressed by the folks I just mentioned who are actors and actresses, noble profession that it may be. Certainly, I am not capable, not qualified, to make any sort of comment that anyone would take seriously about their acting abilities, or about the movies in which they appear. I do not know. I must admit, I had to ask somebody in the Cloakroom for some of these names, because I remembered some of the movies, but I could not remember the names of the individuals. And so if I were to go out and talk about what their movies were like, I mean I have that right to express my opinion and to either pay for the tickets or not, but I do not expect that the press would surround me and say, What do you think about the qualities of the movies these people make? Because, of course, it is of no consequence to the world what I think about their abilities. Why would it be of consequence to the world what they think about whether or not the United States should go to war? They are entitled to their opinion, absolutely, but why does anyone pay attention to it is the question I guess I raise. And it gets me to a point, you know, as I sat here listening to the discussion from the gentleman earlier about his resolution that I sort of recognize some of the fault of the United States in terms of the way they treated Japanese Americans or my ancestors, Italian Americans or German Americans who were, in fact, interred just like Japanese Americans were, and what a bad decision it was at the time. Certainly I will not argue that it was a good decision. But I remember I just started thinking to myself how interesting it would be if one were to run a resolution saying is it not great that the United States of America, this great republic, this great system, unique really in the world, is such a place in which the children of people who were interred can become Members of the Congress of the United States, and how wonderful it is that we can reflect upon our past and take the actions that are appropriate in terms of apologies and that sort of thing. But again, few, if any other country, would ever, ever think about that. And I wonder why we should not celebrate that aspect of America as much as we condemn and dwell upon the warts. But there is a philosophy in this land that has permeated our society, certainly permeated the media, the entertainment industry, the textbooks in our schools, the academic communities in the United States. It is sometimes referred to as multiculturalism, cultural relativism, and it has achieved a stature far, far higher than it deserves from my point of view. It does permeate American society and it is reflected by the kind of things that we see and hear all of the time, from people who are not just looking at the United States with some degree of objectivity and making determinations as to the good things we do as opposed to the bad things we do and what is good about America as opposed to what is bad. They only focus on what is bad not just on America, but about western civilization, of which we are, of course, the leader. And they dwell upon and they are obsessed with the problems, the mistakes, the inadequacies of western civilization and of American society in particular. And we teach our children that there is really nothing unique about America, that it is just one of those places people happen to be, nothing special. In fact, in fact, if it is different at all, it is different because of how bad it is, how ugly is its history: slavery, mistreatment of Native Americans, mistreatment of immigrant groups, all of which of course have some degree of truth, but pale in comparison to what we have given in this world, pale in comparison to the wonderful things western society, civilization, and America in particular have given to this world. Certainly the rule of law, certainly the idea of the value of the individual, certainly the idea of the freedom of worship. But these things are never discussed as values. They are never taught to our children. Certainly in the last 20 or 30 years anyway, they are not taught to children as being values worthy of their allegiance. It is surprising to me sometimes that there are still those people, and thank God for it, who are willing to risk their lives for what so many of our forefathers gave theirs. And so it is this peculiar obsession that so many have with the negative side of America and of western civilization in general that propels them, I think, to the street; even to the point of taking the side of someone like Saddam Hussein who has exhibited the most, the same characteristics, the same traits and has committed the same atrocities as some of the greatest devils that have ever beset the world in human form, including Stalin and Hitler. But people are so wrapped up in this anti-American, anti-western civilization, multiculturalist concept that they can not bring themselves to think about the possibility that action, even to the point of taking violent action in the form of a war, may be necessary to rid this world of an evil so great that it threatens the very existence of our own society; because, of course, to many of those people, evil is not something that really exists in the world; that everything is relative and the other forms of government, the other systems of governments, are all equally good or equally bad, but certainly nothing is worth fighting for or risking one's life for. Now, the reason why I address that issue tonight is because it does play a role in what I think is another huge problem that we have face in this Nation. And that is the need for our society, for western civilization to be coherent in the way in which it identifies itself and the way in which it projects its philosophy to the rest of the world. Put simply, Mr. Speaker, Americans have to know who we are, what we are all about, what are the principles that hold us together, that binds us together, and dwell on those and think about those as opposed to dwelling upon and thinking of only those things that tear us apart as a Nation and, again, as a civilization. Because I do believe, Mr. Speaker, that it is a clash of civilization with which we are involved. I believe that western civilization is at risk. It is at risk from what we might call fundamentalist Islam, perhaps more appropriately, extremist elements in the Islamic community. And I believe that it is a war that is fought both with arms, with the force of arms in places like Afghanistan, in the Philippines and Iraq, but it is also fought with the force of ideas. And that to be successful in this battle we not only have to field the best Army which, of course, I believe we have, with the best equipment, which I believe we can provide them; we also have to field individuals capable of defending western civilization in an intellectual arena. It is a war of arms. It is a war of ideas. And our civilization is threatened. Our ability to actually be successful in this clash will be determined not just by the valor exhibited on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq or anywhere else that we determine these brave young men and women need to be deployed, but our success will be determined by the way in which we project the ideas of western civilization and defend them. And we need to understand as a society, as a civilization, as a Nation, we need to understand who we are, what it is we are all about, where we want to go, what our history is, a common history. I think it is imperative for us to be successful. And that is why oftentimes I take the floor of the House, evenings like this, on special orders to exhort my colleagues to think about another aspect of this problem, and that is the degree to which massive immigration into the country combined with this philosophy of multiculturalism can be and, in my estimation, is a dangerous, dangerous phenomenon. Massive immigration into the country unchecked, massive immigration that is combined with this, that is combined with this philosophy I describe as multiculturalism does not help us develop a coherent society. It does not help us develop a strong intellectual base of support for the ideals of western civilization. It pulls people apart rather than pulls them together. We have a tendency to vulcanize our society rather than bring it together as one United States of America, both geographically and intellectually and emotionally. Immigration is a very, very significant problem. And it goes far beyond the issues of jobs that may be being taken by people from outside the country, although that is a significant issue. And believe me, if your job has been taken by someone from another country, then it is the most important issue to you. And I understand that. But the problems that arise as a result of this kind of massive immigration combined with this bizarre and rabid multiculturalism that pervades our society are such that I think that they actually pose a great and significant threat to the United States of America and, in fact, to western civilization. I think that the need is great for at least the debate of this topic. It is a topic that we eschewed, that we have avoided, that we have attempted to move aside because it is uncomfortable. That is true. The debate over immigration and its effect on our country at this point in its history needs to be undertaken, but is very, very uncomfortable for many Members of this body and certainly many people throughout the country. But I believe with all of my heart that debate needs to be undertaken. There are these more esoteric aspects of it that I have tried to address here, and then there are some very practical and very dramatic effects of massive immigration that need to be explored also. Mr. Speaker, last week a couple of the Members of this body and several members of the Arizona State legislature accompanied me on a trip I took down to Cochise County, Arizona, which is on the border, of course, of Mexico, to observe firsthand what was happening there and to try to bring back to the people that serve in this body and to the rest of the United States a picture, perhaps a little bit different than the picture of illegal immigration that is portrayed by the local media in the various cities and States of the people of the people here in the Congress of the United States. I know that in my own city, Denver, Colorado, the media enjoys the presentation of the concept of or the reality I should say of illegal immigration. It always presents the picture of illegal immigration as one of a very benign sort of concept and that the people here, those people who are identified as illegal immigrants into this country are just folks looking for a job and willing to do a job that ``other Americans will not do,'' and that they are, generally speaking, beneficial to the country from the standpoint of our economy and from just the standpoint of the type of individuals that make up the Nation. That is the picture of illegal immigration that is portrayed by the media in many of our districts; but if we go to the border, almost any point of the border, southern or northern border, of the United States, we will find a completely different picture, one that is hardly ever portrayed in the press. We will find a very ugly picture, a picture of violence, a picture of criminal activity revolving around the importation of illegal narcotics, a picture of threat to the national security of the United States as a result of having porous borders across which people are coming, some of them with the intent to do great harm. That is a different picture entirely and one, as I say, we hardly ever see; but it is absolutely as real as the one that is presented in the local media of many of the newspapers and television stations and radio stations of the folks of the hometown of the folks who actually serve in this body; and so I wanted to go there and show people a different picture, another picture that I think they should see. We went to the Coronado National Forest for the first day, and we looked at the environmental degradation in that forest, brought about by the fact that thousands and thousands and thousands of people coming into the country illegally every single week come across that national forest and do enormous damage to it from an environmental standpoint. They drive across in vehicles creating roads, ``roads,'' of course, where there should not be roads. They walk across, and the impact of thousands and thousands and thousands of feet on pathways that are created does enormous damage to the environment, very pristine environment, a very delicate environment in the southwest part of the United States, a desert environment. They start warming fires. These people, undocumented illegal immigrants, start warming fires in the night, walk away from them in the morning; and they, of course, during this draught are devastating. When I was there last, when I was in the Coronado National Forest little over a year ago, I left on a Sunday morning. By the time I returned back to Denver, Colorado, a fire that had started that morning by an illegal alien had consumed 35,000 acres of the Coronado. The trash that is distributed throughout the forest is enormous, are enormous, monumental. It is hundreds of thousands of pounds of trash discarded by the people coming through there, so much so that one would think that the Coronado National Forest should be renamed the Coronado National Dump because that is what it looks like. Yet, of course, and interestingly we have never seen or ever heard the Sierra Club or any other environmental organization in America take issue with this problem. One can talk to the forest supervisor. One can talk to anybody who works there, the parks people, the forest service people, and they will tell my colleagues what is happening to that forest as a result of porous borders, as a result of people being shoved out of Mexico by their own government, across the borders by the thousands and into the United States. We went the next day to Organ Pipe Cactus National Park, just adjacent to the Coronado, also a scene of environmental degradation that is truly disturbing. All of the same problems of the Coronado but it is also the site of the death of a park ranger by the name of Chris Eggle, E-G-G-L-E, Chris Eggle, 28 years old, killed by two Mexicans coming across the border escaping from the crimes they have committed in Mexico, several other murders that they had just committed in relationship to some sort of drug deal, drug situation. Chris was ambushed by them and killed. His life ended at 28 years old in Organ Pipe Cactus National Park, and we went there to that site with his father, Robert Eggle. Mr. Eggle has relived this event now three or four times. He has gone down to the national park to see where his son was killed and to relive that event, and he does so because he believes that his son's death cannot be forgotten nor should it be in vain, and it should not in either case. It should not be forgotten, and it certainly should not be in vain. He talks about the need to secure our own borders. He talks about the need to prepare and train the people who have to deal with the invasion that is occurring on our southern border so that the next person confronting someone coming across the border armed with AK-47s will be a little more able to defend themselves than poor Chris was. Then we went the next day to a ranch house, a ranch owned by the Kuykendall family, B.J. and Tom Kuykendall, wonderful people who have lived there for generations, and they brought their neighbors in from all over the county, people who had also lived there for generations and who for generations had dealt with the issue of some degree of illegal immigration, peopling coming across the border periodically. They would seek them out for food. These ranchers would give them food, would sometimes give them jobs; but it was never an issue, never a problem, no big deal. In the last 4 or 5 years something has changed they say. It has become not just an annoyance; it has become a threat to their very existence. Their ranches are being destroyed. Their cattle are being killed. Their homes are being broken into. Their families are being intimidated. Their entire way of life is being threatened, and they ask, where is my government? Who is here to protect us? What is happening to our life? Thousands of people we have on videotape, thousands of people crossing those borders, tearing down the fences, breaking the water wells, destroying the property, bringing with them tons of trash, depositing human waste in amounts that are certainly dangerous in terms of the health issues that they represent, bringing with them diseases that we cannot even treat, we do not have means to treat. We do not have the antibiotics to treat some of the most virulent forms of tuberculosis and something called Shakas disease, all these things being brought across by people into the United States. We are witnessing an invasion. It is an invasion that is being prompted by the Mexican Government to satisfy some of their needs, as was told to me by a Mexican official by the name of Juan Hernandez who was the head of something called the Ministry for Mexicans Living in the United States. And I asked him what is the purpose of such a ministry. It was just created about a year and a half ago, and there were two other Congressmen with me, two other Members of the House who were with me, in Mexico when we visited him. By the way, Mr. Hernandez is a very, very sophisticated gentleman, very urbane, very competent and articulate and a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico and interestingly serves or served on the cabinet of Vicente Fox, an American citizen serving in Mexico on the cabinet of the Mexican President, an interesting situation. He said, the purpose of my agency is to increase the flow of people into the United States, of Mexican nationals into the United States. I said what do you want to do that for, knowing in my heart of course exactly why. Because he had been so forthcoming, so candid, I thought this is great. I have hardly ever heard anybody be so candid about the designs of the Mexican Government vis-a-vis immigration policy; and he said the reason is simple, the more people we have in the United States, the more possibilities there are for us to influence your policy vis-a-vis Mexico, and he said there is the issue of remittances. ``Remittances,'' for those Members who do not know, Mr. Speaker, is just a term that applies to the money that is sent back home to Mexico from people living outside of Mexico, working outside of Mexico, and it actually amounts to a huge amount of money. Some 30-some percent of the Mexican GDP is a result of these remittances. Mexico has also experienced an enormous population growth, almost doubling in 25 years; and they have a stagnant economy because they are stuck with a socialistic economy which is combined with a completely corrupt system from the cop on the beat to the highest levels of government, and that combination makes for a lousy economy, and always will, regardless of NAFTA or free trade arrangements of any kind. Because of that, of course, they need to get some of those people out of there because they are very young, they are unemployed. That is a destabilizing factor and why not send them north. We, on the other hand, have chosen to accept this policy on the part of our southern neighbor and ``friend,'' that ``friend'' by the way who is threatening a ``no'' vote in the security council against the resolution that we are presenting to bring Saddam Hussein to bay. They are threatening a ``no'' vote until we agree to some sort of attempt to provide amnesty for all the Mexican nationals living in the United States illegally. That is their quid pro quo. That is what they want. These are our friends in the south. Now whether they are going to stick, whether we are going to be able to get them to vote ``yes'' or not soon in the security council remains to be seen, but this is what they are presenting to us as being their demands, like Turkey asking for several billion dollars for the right to provide American troops some air space and flyover opportunities. He said that, and he went on to say, Mr. Speaker, another fascinating thing as far as I was concerned, an immensely incredible statement. He said it is not two countries we are talking about. It is just a region. It is not two countries he said. It is just a region. That may be his true opinion. It is the opinion I think of some of the colleagues with whom I serve here, that the borders are really not significant. They are not of importance, they are anachronisms, and that they should be erased for the purposes of allowing for the free flow of goods and services and people. It is a libertarian point of view that is expressed on this floor and by several Members of this body. Mr. Speaker, I want to engender that debate with those folks. I do not want them just talking about it in the halls or with me individually. I want that debate here on this floor in front of the American people. I want to know whether this government, whether this government believes that, in fact, borders are necessary or not. I want to know the opinion of this government because I think I know the opinion of the people of this country, but I may be wrong. I may be in the minority. Maybe it will turn out that, in fact, borders are determined to be by a majority of the people in this body and the President of the United States, they are determined to be irrelevant and that we should allow for the, again, free flow of people, goods, and services. If that is a decision that is reached through the process that we have established for making policy in this country, so be it. I am a ``no'' vote, but so be it. What I am telling you, Mr. Speaker, and my colleagues, that what is happening is that that is the direction we are moving. That is the de facto sort of arrangement we are going to achieve, an open borders policy. But it will never be as a result of a debate or a particular piece of legislation where people have to vote yes or no. It will always be done in an incremental fashion. And the people in Cochese County will suffer the consequences. Their lives will be ruined. Their ranches will be destroyed. But they will just be the tip of the iceberg in terms of the sacrifice that this country will make as a result of our commitment to open borders. Because, of course, the people coming across those borders are not just people who are strewing trash all over the land, breaking fences, poisoning wells, breaking the pipes on wells and allowing all the water to drain out, invading ranch houses, threatening and in fact assaulting ranchers, pulling up these rock barriers on the highway to stop the cars to then carjack the people. It will not be just those people coming across to do ``jobs no one else will do.'' And, by the way, along those lines, about a month ago in the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, a Denver newspaper, there was a very large article about a restaurant, a Mexican restaurant that I have been to several times, called Luna Restaurant. It is in my old stomping grounds in north Denver, and I know it well. There was an article, a strange article, because it was talking about the fact that this restaurant put an ad in the paper for a waiter, a $3-an-hour waiter position. Three dollars an hour. Of course, with tips, you get more. That first day that the ad went in the paper there were 600 applicants for the job. One day, 600 applicants. Now, do you believe, Mr. Speaker, that every one of those 600 applicants were illegal immigrants wanting to do a job that no American would do? I do not think so. I think there were plenty of American citizens looking for that job. But nonetheless, nonetheless this is what we hear all the time; that that is the only thing we have going on; that these are just people coming to do jobs that no American will do and, therefore, we should not be concerned about what is happening on the border, and we should not be concerned by the Kuykendalls or the Barnetts, or any of the other people who have lived there for generations and who are trying to sustain themselves on that border. We should not be concerned about them. We are going to sacrifice them for cheap labor for the Republicans and for potential votes for the Democrats. That is why we refuse to secure our borders. It is a political decision of this body to not secure the borders because of the fact that it will harm what we believe to be a political base, a power base that we either want to get or that we have at the present time, and all the time these people are coming across those borders, yes, mostly with no ill intent, most with the same purpose of my grandparents and perhaps yours, who came to seek a better life. But across those porous borders also come other people, people with much more dangerous motives. And you see, Mr. Speaker, we have not figured out a way to create a sieve on the border that effectively siphons out those people who are coming across with no ill intent and keeps out those who have other purposes in mind. We do not know how to do that. So, therefore, the border is open and we are fearful of closing it. Because if you close the border, if you seal your borders and only allow people to come in legally, then you stop the flow of illegal immigration. And the country of Mexico becomes disturbed by that, because now they have to deal with the problem of unemployment, the problem of their own sinking economy, and the fact that the United States Government may not be quite as sympathetic to their particular concerns. So they do not like the idea of closing those borders and they, in fact, make demands upon the United States to keep those borders open and let their people come through. They even provide buses for them, observed on our side of the border through binoculars; buses that come up to the border and unload people who walk across into the United States. These buses are part of a governmental project, a governmental agency. We do nothing about it because we are fearful of the response. We do not like the possibility that the political ramifications in the United States to either party might be detrimental. So we put this Nation at risk, we put our very lives at risk, and we damage not only our national security apparatus and we place upon those agencies given the responsibility for internal security issues, finding out who is here to do us harm, we place upon them enormous burdens of trying to identify people in a sea of people who are here as immigrants. This is not good for the United States. Beyond that, I go back to the original part of my discussion here this evening. It does something to us, Mr. Speaker, in our inability to create a society that has a singleness of purpose and an understanding of exactly who and what we are. I had the opportunity to have lunch not too long ago with a Catholic bishop in Denver by the name of Bishop Gomez, a very fine gentleman who happens to disagree with me entirely on this issue. And he said to me at lunch, Congressman, I do not know why you get so exercised about this. He said, you know, for the most part, these people coming here from Mexico today, they do not want to be Americans. They do not want to be Americans. He was thinking that would alleviate my concerns. I said, well, of course, Bishop, that is the problem. The other thing is, the agency I mentioned earlier, the Ministry for Mexicans Living in the United States, the other thing that was stated by Mr. Hernandez in that very candid conversation that we had was that part of his responsibility was to work with the Mexican nationals who had come to the United States to make sure that they retained, as he said, a connection to Mexico, a political, cultural, linguistic connection to Mexico. Because they want them, he said, to continue to have that loyalty to Mexico. Otherwise, pretty soon they are not sending home the kind of money that they are today, and also they are not agitating for any sort of change in American policy to Mexico if they essentially go native. That is really what he was concerned about, that the Mexicans would come here and essentially become part of the American mainstream, integrate into the American culture, become Americans. But as Bishop Gomez says, that is not their intent. That is not their desire. They are here to get a job, make some money, send it back, perhaps go home later. Well, you see, many people could have come here over the centuries for that same purpose, without any strong desire to become American, but in fact this country forced them into it. There was no such thing as a multiculturalist philosophy that permeated American culture. We did not allow for people to remain segregated for all that long. We required, in order for them to, as my grandfather had to do, in order to achieve anything in this country, he had to do a couple of things. One was to learn English. And my grandfather, and perhaps yours, and certainly most people that I know, their grandparents came here with a strong desire to separate themselves from the past and from the countries from which they came. No desire to hang on to that. A desire to become American. And there were obstacles put up sometimes in this country. You know, we were antagonistic to immigrants many times. But over the course of time, and with a strong desire to integrate, what we saw was this infusion of people into the American mainstream that made us a great Nation. Diversity, in fact, can be a good thing. But unity is also a good thing. E pluribus unum, out of many, one. Not out of many, many, which is today's concept, today's admonition. So I think this issue of immigration has many implications, far far greater than, as I say, are discussed most of the time with regard to issues like jobs and other things. This will determine, Mr. Speaker, I believe, not just what kind of country we will be, that is divided or united, but this issue will determine whether we will be a country at all; whether we will be a Nation at all. That is why it is worthy of our debate on this floor and in this House. We are challenged by a variety of things in this world, and our ability to succeed will be based almost entirely upon our ability to defend, understand and, therefore, defend the principles of western civilization. And I think it is something worth thinking about. And as I say, Mr. Speaker, I may be wrong. I may be totally wrong; completely, 100 percent, wrong. I want the debate, however. Is that too much to ask, I wonder? And let us determine the course of our Nation. Let it not happen in a way that does not allow for the intelligent analysis of the events and their implications. Let us think about who we are, what we are, where we are going, and what we have to do to get there. We can certainly allow people into this country from all over the world, from Mexico and Africa and Asia and Europe. We can allow them from all over the world, but we have to determine how this will happen and it has to be a process that we determine to be governed by the rule of law. How you come into this country should be a factor of the laws that we pass in this body, and that is all I ask. That is the plea I make tonight. It is for the United States, it is for Western Civilization, and for the threats that I see that are aligned and arrayed against it.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, today we have successfully debated and passed a bill to provide an extension of unemployment benefits to millions of Americans who find themselves out of work. This is a laudable activity for us to be involved with and I was proud to be able to support that particular piece of legislation. I find, however, that we are soon going to be debating another piece of legislation that is referred to as an economic stimulus package, and during the course of that debate we will undoubtedly be talking about the number of jobs that need to be created in the United States in order for our economy to get moving again. All of these things I support and I believe need to be done, but I also believe that there is something which has been left out of the equation and left out of the discussion when it comes to jobs and providing economic benefits for American citizens. I underline the word ``citizens'' because what has happened over the course of the last decade is that we have allowed into this country, illegally we have allowed into this country between 8 and 13 million people. We do not know for sure, of course, because they came without our permission. They came across the borders. We are told that they are here working and taking jobs no other Americans would take. Mr. Speaker, I get many, many letters from people in my district who are out of work and they tell me that they would take any job available to them. There are steelworkers out of work, factory workers up and down the East Coast, all across the rust belt, these people are willing to take any job available; but, of course, other people have gotten there before them. But, who are these people? Up to 13 million of them are people who are not citizens of this country. We import them. Of course it is true that many businesses hire people who are here illegally, even knowingly hire people who are here illegally because they believe they will work for less, they will work under conditions that perhaps other people would not. We take advantage of many people. They are oftentimes manipulated by unscrupulous employers once they get here. This is all bad, it is all illegal, but we ignore it and we suggest that we have to do something else to provide jobs for people who are here. But why do we not look at the fact that if we secure our own borders, if we ask people who are here illegally to return to their country of origin, that we would immediately provide millions of jobs for American citizens? Only we would not have to spend another dollar; we would not have to appropriate any more money. Today it was 7 or $8 billion for the extension of unemployment benefits, but doing what I ask, and that is to secure our borders, to identify people who are here illegally and deport them. This does not really cost all that much. That is what the Federal Government should be doing. That is our role and responsibility, to secure the border, to know who is coming into this country, for how long and for what purpose. We choose not to do that. We choose not to do that because there are political implications there, and there are political ramifications of such a decision. If we were to actually defend our own borders and control the process so that people coming into this country would do so in a legal process, we would, of course, diminish the flow of illegal immigrants. That would upset the Democrats because they would say that this would impede their ability to gain potential voters, knowing that many immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, would flock to the Democratic Party. On the other hand, we have the Republican Party which says that if we were to secure our own borders, if we were to stop the flow of illegal immigrants into the country, that would impede the ability of businesses to hire cheap labor. Both of these reasons are, I think, bogus. They do not reflect what we should be doing in this body and, that is, to uphold the law. We should be demanding that the INS, we should be demanding that this administration uphold the law and that we address the issue of border patrol, increasing border patrol and also putting the military on the border which is absolutely necessary in order for us to achieve any degree of security on our borders and on our coastline. That is imperative. But we refuse to do it. We are fearful of doing it. At the same time, there have been attempts on this floor, there have been attempts in this body to provide amnesty for people who are here illegally, to reward people who have come here illegally and give them the opportunities that are usually provided for people who have gone through the process, who have spent the time, who have spent the money, who have had the brain damage of having to go through sometimes years of bureaucratic wrangling to come into the country legally. They have waited in line. They have done it the right way. But we keep proposing to give people who have broken the law, who have snuck into the country, we keep proposing to give them amnesty. What does that concept tell everybody who has done it the right way? It tells them that they were essentially suckers and that they should have simply snuck into the country, we would eventually give them amnesty and they would get all the benefits that anyone here legally would enjoy. Speaking of those benefits, Mr. Speaker, let me tell you about another phenomenon that is going on throughout the country. There is a process, something called the matricula consular. This is a card, an identification card that is being handed out by the Mexican Government to Mexican nationals in the United States.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I want to commend my colleagues for their diligent work in bringing this piece of legislation to the floor. It is certainly an admirable goal that we seek to achieve here today, trying to bring some relief to the people who find themselves unemployed in this economy, and I intend to support the legislation. I must, however, say that there is a bit of irony here that I wanted to bring to the attention of the body, and that is that we are debating what we should do to help people who are unemployed. Again, appropriate. But we have steadfastly refused as a body and, as a matter of fact, as a government, to debate one other aspect of this, and that is the fact that many people are unemployed today in the United States because there are people here from other countries, here illegally, I should say, who have taken jobs. It is not just those jobs that we hear about all the time from people who say, well, there are jobs Americans will not take. I assure my colleagues, we can go to any factory town in America, we can go to any of the States that are identified in this bill that have significant unemployment, and we can find out whether or not people are willing to accept jobs that ``others will not take.'' I assure my colleagues, American citizens are willing to do so, citizens who are willing to take jobs that are being taken by people with H1B visas, people who are willing to take jobs from people who are here, as I say, illegally, and are working in menial jobs with low wages. There are still many American citizens willing to take jobs that are being taken by between 8 million and 13 million people who are here illegally; and we refuse to debate that point while we come here today, of course, to do again, what I say is the right thing to do, and I will support it. But it is just an irony that I wanted to bring to the attention of the body. There is an aspect of this that we steadfastly, both sides, both parties, refuse to debate, and that is a shame.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the Nurse Loan Forgiveness Act of 2002. Across the United States, and specifically in my District in Colorado, health care facilities are experiencing a loss of full-time registered nurses. As aging nurses retire, there are not enough persons willing to enter the field to replace them. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing estimates that within the next 10 years, the average age of registered nurses is forecasted to be 45.4 years old, with more than 40 percent of the registered nurse work force expected to be older than 50. Currently, there are more than 126,000 hospital nursing positions that need to be filled. I am deeply concerned about this issue and the care of our elderly, especially in a time when the nation's baby boomers are aging and require increasing health care services. The Nurse Loan Forgiveness Act establishes a student loan program for nurses and in doing so, it encourages young people to enter and continue in the nursing profession. Since enrollment in entry-level nursing schools continues to decline, this legislation provides an incentive to study, work, and more importantly, stay in the nursing profession. Not only will this enhance patient care, but also it will create a new generation of nurses. For nurses that stay in a medical facility or approved health care setting for at least three years, their loans can be forgiven up to $5,000. Additionally, those that work as nurses for five years, are eligible for loan forgiveness up to S 12,000. This is a temporary, five-year program, established during this time of crisis a time when our aging family members, friends and loved ones may not have the care they deserve or require. I urge my colleagues to support the Nurse Loan Forgiveness Act and aid our nation's health care professionals.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of House Resolution 468 which expresses the House's support for the further enlargement of NATO at the upcoming Prague summit. I believe that such an expansion would further U.S. foreign policy interests by ensuring peace and stability in Central Europe. As during the first round of enlargement in 1999, countries joining NATO must support and implement the democratic principles that serve as the foundation of the countries that established the alliance. It is essential to the continued viability of NATO that new members fully abide by Western values, including respect for religious and national minority rights. Mr. Speaker, over 2,000,000 Hungarians live as minorities in Romania and Slovakia as a result of borders being drawn without the affected populations allowed to express their views through plebiscites. These minority communities had their religious, educational and community properties confiscated by the Communist regimes. Following the historic changes of the early 1990s, laws had been passed in these countries providing for the restitution of or compensation for these confiscated properties. However, the implementation has been extremely slow, especially when it comes to the return of the properties of Hungarian religious and educational institutions. Mr. Speaker, I believe it is essential that countries seeking to join the alliance of free and democratic countries represented by NATO make significant strides to protect religious and minority rights and expeditiously restore or compensate the minority communities for the illegally confiscated properties. The stability of the region and indeed of NATO requires that the member countries take all measures necessary to ensure ethnic and religious harmony within their borders. Therefore, it is critical that the governments of Romania and Slovakia take immediate measures to ensure religious and minority rights and fully implement the laws designed to restore properties confiscated from the Hungarian and other minorities. NATO members must adhere to these minimum requirements of free democratic societies that the alliance and the United States represent.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, a unique expedition is now underway out West to draw attention to America's public lands legacy. “American Frontiers: A Public Lands Journey”, began July 31 and will conclude September 28 in Salt Lake City. Two teams of adventurers are traveling by foot, horseback, ATV, canoe, boat and bicycle entirely over public lands on this 3,000-mile trek. Along the way, they are sharing their experiences and thoughts with school children, local communities and the world via videophones and an interactive Internet website, www.americanfrontiers.net. In Colorado, as in much of the rugged American West, our public lands play an important role in our lives, our economies, and our communities. We take pleasure in hiking, biking, skiing, rafting and hunting on public lands. And the natural resources on our public lands provide us with the timber, energy, water, minerals and livestock forage that support our unique quality of life. I applaud this effort to encourage a better understanding of the importance of America's public lands spearheaded by the Public Lands Interpretive Association. Those participants in this endeavor who complete this journey should be congratulated for the pioneering and age-old spirit of the American West that they embody as they persevere along the trail. I hope all Americans will join in celebrating our shared legacy—and the accomplishments of the American Frontiers adventurers—on National Public Lands Day, this Saturday, September 28.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, as I was sitting here preparing my remarks, I listened to the remarks of my colleagues; and it is encouraging, to say the least, to think that there are people on both sides of the aisle who have concern about the fiscal house that we try to keep in order around here. It is discouraging to think about the fact that regardless of who happens to run this place, the Republicans or the Democrats, it appears to me, anyway, as we look over the numbers over the last couple of decades, that it really hardly matters most of the time; that we are spending certainly more than we should and that our deficits are a result of our inability as a body, not as a party, but as a body, to control our appetites, to control the willingness, the desire, the need to respond to a plethora of programs and supporters of programs throughout the Nation that constantly demand more. Nonetheless, I am glad to hear it, and I am always hopeful that we will be able to actually change the situation around here when it comes to spending. I do not hold much hope out for it, but I have that spark of hope that does remain alive. Mr. Speaker, before I get on to the issue that usually brings me to the floor of the House, which is, of course, immigration and immigration-related issues, I would like to just for a few moments talk about something that I am also very, very concerned about and also, I think, should be a concern of the Members of the body, and that is the situation in Sudan, a country that has experienced at least a decade, actually 2 decades of incredible internal conflict, a country that has experienced more casualties of its population, 2 million dead at the present time, more than 4 million displaced. These are numbers that are far higher and far more significant, frankly, than any other country since the Second World War. Yet, little is known about the situation in Sudan. Unfortunately, relatively few people seem to care. But there are folks who do care. Since this past Wednesday, people have been gathering in Galvez Park here in Washington, D.C. to pray and stand for the people of Sudan, who are subjects of a brutal, genocidal campaign. Saturday, September 21, high school and college students led an all- day vigil. These young people represent the best of American ideals. They are acting on behalf of the people that they have never met, but whom they know are being oppressed. We should marvel at their commitment, but more so, we should join them. I stand here today to talk about what has brought these young people from across the country here to the Nation's capital, and to talk about how the government of the Sudan, the National Islamic Front, has for years and continues today mercilessly to drive back Christians and animists from their homes, starve them, kill them because they are not Arab Muslims. I want to tell the Members about the bombing. The government of Sudan has converted Russian cargo planes into primitive bombers called Antonovs. These planes regularly fly over villages and towns in southern Sudan, far from the front lines of the fighting. These villages have no military value, the only people who live there are civilians; yet, still the bombers come. Sometimes they drop bombs; sometimes they do not. That is part of the terror campaign the government is waging. No one in southern Sudan knows if they will be next. When the planes drop bombs, they are not precision weapons, like we used in Afghanistan, to avoid civilian casualties. Rather, they are crude homemade bombs, sometimes 55-gallon drums packed with explosives and nails, designed to maximize civilian casualties. These primitive bombs are rolled out of the back of planes, falling at random on those below. These bombs maim and kill, they destroy crops and homes, they fall on hospitals and churches. No one in southern Sudan is immune from their reach, and it may be only a matter of the shifting winds whether you or your neighbor is hit by a bomb. The first country I visited as a Member of Congress, and I had only been here as a Member of this body for a few months, and this was a little over 3\1/2\ years ago, the first country I ever visited was Sudan. I went there with a delegation led by Senator Brownback. I will never forget, we went into a little town called Yei. When we got there, all the kids in the village gathered around us very closely, and they would hardly move. As we tried to move through the village, they were almost stuck to us. They were yelling something. Of course, I did not understand it. I asked our guide to interpret for me, what was going on; why were they clustering around us so closely. He said, it is because they believe that because you are an American Congressman, they won't be bombed; they cannot be hit by a bomb, if one flies over; that they won't bomb you because you are here from the United States. Of course, I was hoping the same thing, to tell you the truth. The reality is, of course, there was no such discrimination, and there were bombs that fell, even while we were there. They destroyed hospitals and they destroyed schools and they destroyed people. The government targets churches, relief compounds, hospitals, markets, fields, and homes. It rains bombs down on villages with no military value except to further the government's campaign of terror. The barbaric bombing is going on as we speak. On September 9, the bombs came down on the town of Yabus, killing two children, ages 4 and 7, and wounding eight. Yabus has no military value, but is one of the major staging areas for the relief workers in Sudan. Last Thursday, the government bombed the town of Lui, the site of no military installations, but of a large hospital run by Samaritan's Purse, a Christian relief organization headed by the Reverend Franklin Graham. This is the only hospital serving approximately 400,000 people. Yet, the town has been bombed repeatedly. These attacks are appalling, and they are plainly directed at killing civilians, either directly, or by denying them food and medical aid. It is an unimaginable horror. The people in Galvez Park prayed all week for the victims of these bombings. We must join with them. We cannot tolerate the Khartoum regime's brutal actions. We must stand firm with the people of Sudan in their quest for peace and for life. Mr. Speaker, this House passed a bill that I sponsored called the Sudan Peace Act. It went to the Senate, where it has languished. Senator Brownback has introduced an amendment to the bill that I hope will be the thing that actually does allow it to move forward. I believe that will happen relatively soon. I hope it will happen in time to save the lives of the people who are now so directly affected by this campaign of terror, the most recent campaign of terror. Only a few days ago, really, I had the opportunity to meet with some representatives of the Khartoum government in Sudan. They assured me that there was no such action; that they were being cautious in the way they advanced the efforts on the part of the military, and that the bombing of civilians and the strafing of civilians was absolutely prohibited. But, of course, that is apparently not true. I do hope that the good Lord hears the prayers of the people that have been gathered here in Washington all week for those in the Sudan who hunger for nothing but peace, but who, for now a generation, have heard nothing but war and seen nothing but war. I hope that the Sudan Peace Act quickly comes back to the House and we are able, in a conference committee, we are able to address this issue as a body, as a Congress, I should say; and that the President will sign it, and that will affect the outcome of this war, that it will bring it to a quick close. Let me now talk about another issue that of course is of great concern to me, and is oftentimes an issue that is not very well addressed, or not very well amplified, either in the media or even here in the House. That is the issue of immigration and immigration reform. In my own district, Mr. Speaker, over the last week or so, a little over a week now, we have had the most extraordinary discussion, I guess I should put it that way, public discussion in the press and in the media in general. Of course, on the radio and talk shows everybody is talking about a couple of things that I want to address tonight, address to the Members tonight. As a matter of fact, the issues have spread beyond my district. They are now being discussed, as I see the clips coming into my office, they are being discussed in cities all over the country. These are two events in Denver, Colorado. Let me briefly review them. A little over 1\1/2\ months ago, the Denver Post, which is the major newspaper in Colorado, printed a story, a front-page story, about a family, the Apodaca family. It was a story, according to the author of that particular piece, that was brought to the Post by the Mexican consulate in Denver. The name of the family was provided by the consul, and the purpose of this collaboration was to set the stage for a more general debate on an issue of state politics. In this particular case, we are talking about whether or not people in the State of Colorado and in the United States, for that matter, illegally, that is to say, people who came into this country without our permission, whether they should be given the same opportunities for subsidized educational expenses, in this case, higher education, as a citizen of the State of Colorado and as a citizen of the United States of America. This is not unique to Colorado, this is happening all over the country. Legislatures in Utah, Texas, and California are dealing with this. Some have dealt with it already, and passed laws that will allow people who are here illegally to attend institutions of higher education and have their education subsidized by the taxpayers of the State. This is being pushed by immigration advocates, immigration advocate groups all over the country. It is being pushed even by representatives of the Mexican government; as I say, the Mexican consul. The story focused, as I say, on one family, the Apodaca family; in particular, the oldest boy of this family, who wanted to go to the University of Colorado, but could not afford it if he did not have that experience paid for by the taxpayers of the State. It presented them in a very sympathetic light. They are, apparently, by all accounts very fine people, a nice family. The father is employed in some business that was not identified in Greeley, Colorado. They have, I think, maybe four or five kids. This particular young man that wanted to go on to school was an A student. So certainly, the story appealed to the emotional side and said, look, here are folks who have been here, they are hard-working, the kids have been in school. Why should we not give them access to higher education at taxpayer expense? This goes along with the agenda or this is part of an agenda throughout the country to obtain all kinds of benefits for people who are here illegally: driver's licenses, welfare, tuition payments, and the like. The hope or the desire is that eventually we will eliminate all of those things in this Nation that would distinguish one as being here illegally. That is to say, if they can come into the country illegally but have their children educated, as they can today; go through the public school system at our expense, at taxpayer expense; if they can have access to all of the social services that any other citizen of the United States has access to; if they can obtain a driver's license as their sort of passport into society, which a driver's license is in our country; if they can have all of these things, then there is very little, if anything, that can distinguish them as someone here illegally. They are just here. They are just simply in the United States, and therefore, they have all the rights and privileges of a citizen of the United States. That is the desire of the folks who push this agenda. They used the Apodaca family perhaps willingly; that is to say that, for all I know, the Apodaca family was quite willing to expose themselves to the public as being here illegally, as having entered this country without our permission. But they did not really have, or it did not seem from the story that they had a very big concern about that. In a way, of course, we can understand why they could have been encouraged to come forward without some great fear of repercussions. There are 9 million to 13 million people living in this country illegally. The INS has done little if anything about it. This government has done little if anything about it. There are many reasons why we have shirked our responsibility as a Federal government to assure the sanctity and integrity of our own borders, but for all the reasons that exist that have caused this situation to occur, we now see, as I say, people willing to come forward in the press and say, I am here illegally; essentially, what are you going to do about it? I do not know about the Speaker, but here is what I thought when I read that article. I thought, is it not amazing? I am sure the Speaker, like every other Member of this body, is confronted by people in his office who is asking us to help them adjust their status in the United States; to obtain some sort of INS recognition that would allow them to stay legally. We all know that there are literally millions of people around the country trying to come to the United States legally. We know there are people that have spent years in the process, filling out the forms, taking language courses, doing everything that we ask them to do to become American citizens legally. They do it. God bless them for doing it. I speak to these folks as often as I get a chance. I have spoken to groups that have become citizens of the United States when they are taking their oath of citizenship; and I tell them, first of all, welcome to the United States, almost. Secondly, I thank them for doing this the right way, for coming here and working through the process to become an American citizen even though I know it is challenging, it is onerous; but I thank them for doing it the right way. It was ironic in a way that several days after this story appeared, there was a very small story that appeared in both papers in Denver about all of the immigrants that were being sworn in as legal citizens of the United States, a small story relative to what this family, who chose not to come that route, but to come here illegally, small, small story compared to what the Apodacas got. I thought that was unfair, simply and basically unfair. If a person comes to this country legally and they go through the process to have the newspapers showcase a family who has done it the other way, snuck into the country, albeit these folks are I am sure fine people, I have nothing against them. They seem like, from what I read in the paper, to be people we would be happy to have as neighbors and friends, but that is irrelevant to the situation. The situation is they came here illegally, and they are being showcased; and we are being asked to give them a special advantage, an advantage that we give usually to citizens. So we are telling all of the people who have come here the right way that they are nothing but suckers and that really they could have saved themselves a lot of time and money and certainly a lot of brain damage going through the bureaucratic hoops that they are put through to come here legally by simply sneaking into the country, staying under the radar screen, eventually we will give them all the same amenities, all of the privileges of citizenship. That is what that story said to me. It was unfair. About a month after the story appeared, I called the INS in Denver, the head of the INS, a gentleman by the name of Mr. Comfort; and I said to Mr. Comfort, I have a question for you, a hypothetical question, and that is, What would you do if somebody came up to you on the street today, as you were exiting your building, and said you know, I am a good guy, I have a wife and family and a job and everything but I am here illegally and so is my family, what would you do about that if they confronted you with it? Well, of course, I would have to take them into custody, and I said, Really? He said, Yes. I said, Then what would happen? He said, Then we would have to go through a hearing process and if they were determined to be here illegally then, of course, we would set up deportation arrangements. I said, Well, that is interesting. What did you do about the family that told you that in the paper about a month ago, the Apodaca family? He said, Well, we have not done anything about it. He said, We really do not have the resources; it is really not the same because it is not coming up to me on the street, even though, yes, it is on the front page of the Denver Post, and they tell you the name and where they are. He said, It is not the same. He said, And I do not have the resources to go after them. I said, I am not really asking you to send in the SWAT team or devote any resources away from the very important tasks with which you are involved, catching terrorists and felons who are here illegally; but I do wonder whether or not you would not just send a letter, why would you not just send a letter maybe to the family and ask them to come in and talk to you because they are saying that they are here illegally and you want to talk about the status. He agreed that that could be done and that that would be done, and I hung up the phone. The next day, the Denver Post printed another story and the headline was ``Congressman Tancredo Demands Deportation of Jesus Apodaca.'' Although I never mentioned him nor did I demand anything, that is the way the Post chose to portray this story; and they ran a picture of this young man, again a very sympathetic figure in this whole thing. He came here, of course, as a young kid with his parents. He had no choice in the matter, and I can certainly understand his plight. This grew into a huge, huge debate in Colorado with everybody taking sides and the media getting involved and that sort of thing, the media actually promoting it certainly, because here we had set up this interesting debate; and it was worthy, I think, of the interest of the media, not to mention the way in which a portion of the media, in this case the Denver Post, chose to spin the story. I assure my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, that if the Apodaca family is here illegally as they claim to be, of course I do not know whether they are or not. I do not know whether they were put up to this or not. They may be perfectly legal, but they were used in order to advance this agenda that I was talking about of getting tuition and driver's licenses and all the rest of it; but if they are, in fact, here illegally, as they claim to be, then the law says they should face deportation hearings, and if the judge says that they should be deported, they should be deported. I am absolutely in support of that process. I have no great hope that the INS will diligently pursue this, knowing the INS; but I think they should at least do what they told me they would do, that is, to write a letter to the family, ask them to come in and discuss this issue with them. This, as I say, was playing out in the paper over several days when all of the sudden another story appeared. This was a front page, above- the-fold story again in the Denver Post. This was, I think, last Thursday or Friday. Apparently, according to the Post, two people came into the Post, the Denver Post, and identified themselves as being here illegally, in and of itself an interesting situation. I mean, do people really just advance that? Of course they do because they were put on the front page of the paper and no big deal; but they went one step further, and they said not only are we here illegally, but we are felons. We falsified the documents that we supplied to our employer so that we could get hired. That is a felony. They said we were hired by a company, a construction company that eventually did work in Congressman Tancredo's basement. They put in a home theater and finished our basement. So the above-the-fold headline, banner headline in the Denver Post, remember this story took precedent over the situation we were in with Iraq, the economy, a variety of things that I actually consider to be even more important, but the Post did not. The Post thought this was deserving of that kind of placement, and the headline was something like Tancredo Hires Illegal Aliens to Finish His Basement. Of course, no one knows the truth of that story and the reality is, Mr. Speaker, that that story could not have passed the discretion of a high school newspaper editor because, of course, what do we have here? We have an allegation made by two people who were not identified about their relationship to a company that I hired to finish my basement, a situation over which, of course, I have absolutely no control. I did not hire the folks that actually did the labor. I hired the contractor. It is a reputable firm in Denver. According to the newspaper, they have all of the documentation necessary by the law to confirm that these people were here illegally. What do we have? What is this story? This is a fascinating thing. The story is that two people alleged, and they are themselves alleged to exist. I do not know that they exist. I do not know even if two people came to the Denver Post and claimed that they, in fact, were ever in my home. Let us face it, Mr. Speaker, this is a very, very emotional issue. It is possible that people would even make up something like that in order to advance a particular agenda. It is possible. I am not saying it happened. It is possible. I do not know what happened. Neither would I suggest does the Denver Post. Of course, there is no way to tell. No one can judge the merit, the truth of this matter because they will not tell who these people are. They are withholding their names because the Post said they fear that these people will then be prosecuted. So the Denver Post, if they believe these people, they are harboring felons who have given false information in order to be hired. Again, I do not know whether the people who worked in my basement, who were employees of the company that I did hire, were here legally or not. I have not the foggiest idea, to tell my colleagues the truth. It is not my responsibility to try and do that. As a matter of fact, Mr. Speaker, if I were to go to them and ask them after they were hired, let us say they are working in my basement and I heard them down there and said I am just going to go down there and find out if these folks are here illegally, and if I went down there and said, hey, stop for a second, are you legal, I want to see your papers, of course, I would be sued. Of course, I can be sued under the Civil Rights Act because you cannot ask people like that. Only the employer can request that kind of documentation. Even the employer cannot say things like, are you here legally. They can say I need the documentation that you are a citizen. I have to fill out an I-9 and need Social Security and driver's license. If you are presented with that as the employer, that is what you keep on file, which according to the newspaper, this particular company I hired, has on file. So what is the story? What is the story here that commanded front page, above-the-fold attention? Fascinating. I do not where this will go. I have no idea. Will the INS investigate? I cannot get them to. I have a hard time getting them to actually do anything about people who are here illegally and that have been absconders; 360,000 people so far have been ordered deported already from the United States for various violations from rape, robbery, murder, just name it. They have been ordered to be deported. They have simply walked away from the courtroom, and the INS has never found them or gone after them. So I doubt very much whether the INS is going to get too involved in either of these two cases; and as I say, I certainly do not want them and I do not rank these cases on the same level as the potential terrorists that are here, the felons that are here. I want them to devote a lot of time to that; but they should not ignore this case, either one really now because this is such big news. They certainly should not ignore the Apodacas. I have not yet seen in the paper any company that comes and says, I would like you to showcase me because I hire illegal aliens, but they are all nice guys; so we should change the law. I have not seen that. I assure you, Mr. Speaker, that should that be on the front page of the Post, I will call the INS and I will say, I would like to know, what are you going to do about this? I cannot demand anything because frankly I cannot. It is an executive branch agency. But I can inquire and I would inquire if some company did what the Apodacas did. I would inquire. I would say here are people that are blatantly claiming their status as illegal and/or claiming to have violated the law by knowingly hiring people who are here illegally. Either of those two cases, I think, demands a little bit of attention, if it is nothing more than a letter. But the Post has written in the last 10 days, I think 28 articles so far. There have been 28 articles, editorials and/or commentary about this. I have never seen really anything command so much attention as long as I have been in political life, which has been a long time, and I am a very controversial figure; but I do not remember anything like this. That is just that newspaper. The Rocky Mountain News has also written story after story. It has been on the news. I get clips from California and Texas and Chicago and calls from all over the country about these two stories, the Apodaca case and my basement. The issue of course is not the Apodacas. The issue that we should be really debating and discussing is not just the companies out here that are alleged to have hired illegal aliens or the companies that do, because of course we all know there are plenty of them. I do not doubt for a moment that I have had dinner at a restaurant and been served by or had my meal prepared by someone who was in fact here illegally. I would bet any money that has happened. I would bet that I have gotten in a cab in this city and have been driven to a location by someone who is here illegally. We all know this happens. The issue is not just the individual who has done that. The issue is the whole concept of immigration, immigration reform, and the integrity of borders. That is what we have to talk about tonight, and I hope night after night after night after night and day after day that is what we have to talk about because the ramifications of illegal immigration into this country, massive immigration, both legal and illegal, are enormous. As I have said on many occasions, they will determine not just what kind of country we are, that is to say, balkanized, factionalized, or united; but it will also determine if we will be a country. That is why I devote as much time and attention to this issue as I do. It is not an issue that is easy for us to talk about. The stories that I have just described that were in the paper have caused a lot of people a lot of pain. The company that I hired was identified. It has received calls from people who have threatened them and left messages of the most vial nature. Families, a lot of people have been affected by it. Certainly I guarantee that our office has received a similar type of response along with, of course, an overwhelming number of people who are supportive of our efforts in this regard. This is an issue America is talking about whether we want to talk about it or not. It is an issue that Americans care about whether we care about it or not. It is an issue that Americans want us to deal with whether we want to deal with it or not. Poll after poll after poll tells us that the American people want us to crack down on illegal immigration, want us to crack down on employers who are employing these people, want us to reduce the number of people coming into the country even legally because they know there is something happening in the United States that needs discussion and warrants their concern. We choose not to deal with it because we are fearful of the consequences. We are fearful of the kind of response that the stories in the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News have elicited, the vitriolic antagonistic sort of communications that we get when we start talking about this. Nobody likes this stuff, Mr. Speaker. Certainly I do not. Nobody likes being called names. Nobody likes being vilified in the press or anywhere else, I assume. And I assure that if I did not think that this issue merited the attention of this body and of this government, I would not bring it up. There are other things that I also believe are important; but this issue has, as I say, an overwhelming importance I think to the American public and to me, and it has got nothing to do with race and it has got nothing to do with ethnicity, although that is always the card that is played when one talks about it. But what is interesting, Mr. Speaker, is that I went on a television station in Denver, I think it was yesterday morning, as a matter of fact, and did just a 2- or 3-minute explanation of this issue, and as I was leaving, a young man came up to me who was evidently a staff person there, who had on a little microphone thing and earphones. He came up to me as I was leaving and he spoke with a bit of an accent, and he said to me, Congressman, I want to tell you that I absolutely agree with you, 100 percent agree with you. You know what I had to go through to get here legally, and I just got my papers a little bit ago. And I thought this guy speaks for millions of people who do not get publicized by the Denver Post. His picture will not be on the front of the Denver Post. He did it the right way. But there are millions of people out there who recognize the injustice here, the unfairness of a system that in fact sets up these huge barriers and tells people that if they come to the United States and they want to be a citizen, here is what they have got to do. It is a very heavy responsibility, and here are all of the things that one must do to become a citizen and here are all the papers one has to fill out to become a citizen, and we will have to wait for years and we will go through processes, and one might have to go to court and might have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to become a citizen, to come here legally; and yet people do it. While at the same time, the same government turns a blind eye to all of the folks coming across that border at their will? Am I the only person who sees the injustice here, the unfairness of it? I guarantee I am not because I guarantee, Mr. Speaker, that we have heard from thousands of people in my office over the course of time who feel exactly the same way, and I know there are millions of people out there who also feel the same way. But we ignore it; we pretend it does not exist because there are all kinds of political pressures here. The Democratic Party does not want to deal with this issue because they know it means votes and the more folks they can bring in here, legally or illegally, the more folks will eventually end up in the camp of the Democratic Party. That is their experience; that is what they believe. On the other hand, the Republican Party is loath to discuss this issue because there are of course workers, laborers who come here and compete for jobs and therefore keep wages low; and so as long as we can ensure the flow of low-skilled, low-wage workers, we will have the Denver Post and certainly the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal pressing for more and more immigration, both legal and illegal. We have the administration that wants to make it a wedge issue in the next election; and, Mr. Speaker, even though we have gone through all of the debates in this body in the last several months over things like amnesty for people who are here illegally and we have been able to stop it from happening, I assure that after this next election when things quiet down and we have 2 more years before we have to face our electorate, there will be another push to provide amnesty for people who are here illegally and to essentially open the borders. Here is what I suggest that we all do. I suggest that we have a larger debate on the topic of borders: whether or not they should exist, whether or not we should have them. What is the purpose? What purpose do borders serve? Are they anachronisms as some of our colleagues would suggest? Are they simply impediments to the free flow of goods and services? Or are they meaningful? Do they distinguish nation states? Do they indicate and actually give as an example what sovereignty is all about? I think borders are important, but I may be in the minority, Mr. Speaker. Maybe a majority of the people in this House and the President of the United States believe that borders are of no significance. That could be. If that is the case and my side of this debate comes up short of the votes to sustain our position, so be it. That is the Nation in which we live. That is the democracy we all here take an oath to support. But let us at least have a debate. Let us at least have the bill. I want to see people go on record. I want to see people stand up and make a vote as to whether or not they want borders or they do not. Because, Mr. Speaker, if we have them, if we decide to have them, then that means something. It means they have to have integrity. It means they have to be defended and not in the halfway measures that we are presently doing, not just putting some folks down on the border putting their lives in peril as we are doing. One young man a little over a month ago, Kris Eggle, 28 years old, a park ranger in Arizona, Organ Pipe Cactus National Park. Mr. Eggle and a border patrol agent interdicted a couple of people coming across the border from Mexico who had just killed four people in Mexico as a result of some drug war-type of thing. And Mr. Eggle got out of his car to go over and stop these people to put them under arrest. They got out of their car with automatic weapons and killed him. Mr. Eggle's face has not appeared on any newspaper that I know of, and his story has not been told by any major newspaper of which I am aware, but he died in the line of service to this country. He died because we told him to go down there along with his comrades in the border patrol and the custom agents and the U.S. Forest Service. We told him to protect our borders, protect the sovereignty of the Nation. But, Mr. Speaker, we do not believe in that war. We sacrificed Kris Eggle. And 2 weeks ago, two FBI agents were dragged across the border into Mexico and beaten almost to death with rocks. They are now in a hospital in Texas, both of whom, as I understand, in critical condition in a coma. Their faces have not appeared on any major newspapers that I have seen. The story has not been told. May 27, a Mexican vehicle from the Mexican Army, a Mexican Humvee comes across into the United States, is confronted by a border patrol agent and is fired upon by Mexican military. The bullet goes through the rear window of the vehicle and ricochets off the metal screen that separates the cab and the back and goes out the right window. A foreign power, the military of a military power comes into the United States, and what they are doing, frankly, is protecting drug shipments. Many of the people on that border, many of the Mexican military and Mexican police are actually working for the drug cartels and protecting drug shipments into the United States. On the northern border, we have drug shipments coming across in huge proportions. There are cartels up there that are run by Muslim individuals. There are 25,000 Muslims living in Calgary, Canada. A portion of them are involved with a drug trade into the United States, according to Mr. Hutchinson, our drug czar. A portion are involved with smuggling drugs into the United States, mostly methamphetamine components, which are cooked down here, sold down here, the funds go back up there, and they support terrorist activities throughout the world. Both of our borders are places of warfare. The Denver Post and newspapers all over this land want to portray the face of illegal immigration as the Apodaca family, benign, good citizens, sympathetic in every respect. That is what they want Americans to believe is the face of illegal immigration. But the face of illegal immigration on the borders is something much uglier. It is the face of murder, of rape, of robbery, of drug cartels, drug smuggling, and of people coming into this country for the purpose of doing us great harm, terrorist infiltration. Go to the southern borders and the northern borders, see what I have seen. Look in the faces of the Border Patrol who know that they have been asked to hold back a flood, and have been given a sieve. They know that their lives are in danger, and we do not give them any support. We do not really want to close those borders because it would mean the end of the flow of cheap labor, and the end of the flow of potential voters for the Democratic Party. How vile the motive. That is why we do not do it. If people cared about these folks, if people really cared about the safety and security of even the people coming across illegally, they would stand with me to try and stop that illegal immigration. It is a dangerous thing for these folks. They hire people, called coyotes, who bring them up to the United States, and sneak them in. Often the women are raped, the men are robbed and they are pushed into the United States into some desert area where they perish. Hundreds have perished. They are abused on the way, they are abused when they get to the border, and they are abused many times by unscrupulous employers in the United States who take advantage of them. Knowing that they are here illegally, they will pay them less, and not give them the benefits that they deserve, and they are cast aside. If we cared about them, we would do something about our borders and we would do something about our immigration policy. We would create a guest worker program that would allow people to come into the United States legally to take the jobs that, quote, no one else will take, which we have heard and which I will challenge. If there are such jobs, fine. There are ways in which people can come into this country legally, that their rights can be protected. They do not have to hire coyotes. They do not have to come up here and be abused by employers. We can tell who they are, how long they are here, who they are working for, and when they return. But no, that program will not be adopted. I have a bill for that purpose. It will not be heard because it is easier, of course, to simply ignore the folks coming across illegally. It is easier to hire them. People do not have to go through all of the paperwork. Just open your door and say where is your green card, where is your work permit, and those things are purchasable at just about any flea market in America. You can buy your Social Security card and any other kind of identification you want. So employers would just as soon not have that kind of burden. Of course as I have stated already, there are a lot of people here who want to simply abolish the borders. If we have a true guest worker program, then you need borders. Borders mean something then because then you are distinguishing who can come across them and who cannot. But if you do not want borders, then why would you want a guest worker program. You would not. What you want is to allow as many people as possible into the country, then chip away at every single law in the country that distinguishes someone as a citizen, that confers some right on them as a citizen. There are municipalities in this Nation, in this city, as a matter of fact, that are pushing for voting privileges for people here illegally. Okay, as I say, Mr. Speaker, if that is where we are going, fine. Just make a decision. Make a conscious decision as to the direction this Nation is going. Abandon the borders or protect them. That is really and truly the choice we have. As long as we ignore it and as long as we maintain this half-baked posture, we are abandoning them. That is exactly what is happening. We are doing that, I think, to our peril. I have a dear friend by the name of Hugh Fowler. Hugh and Shirley Fowler have been friends of ours for 30 years or more. They gave me a great book. It is called ``Crowded Land of Liberty'' by Dirk Chase Elderidge, and I certainly recommend it to anyone. It talks about the impact of massive immigration. There are all kinds of ramifications, as I mentioned, Mr. Speaker. Certainly just in terms of the numbers, the growth in our population, and everyone wonders how it is in Colorado we have this huge number of people coming into the State every year. Growth has gone wild. We are building highways and schools and hospitals. California has to build a school a day to keep up with the numbers. Where are they coming from? Is this the natural birth rate of the country? No, of course not. Our natural birth rate is almost replenishment level. It is almost 2.1. The increase in population in this country is as a result of immigration. Immigrants coming in, immigrants having children. That is the population increase. There are ramifications. Crowded conditions, crowded public lands. Rocky Mountain National Park, Yellowstone, which you cannot get to any more. You have to wait in long lines. Pretty soon you will have to have reservations to go to scenic spots in America, and there are not that many scenic spots left any more because houses are popping up where there once was pristine grasslands. This is happening because of population pressure, population growth. Where is it coming from? It is coming from immigration. Now, it could be okay. That may be absolutely all right with everybody, but it should be a condition that we establish in this country followed by an honest debate over a controversial issue. Mr. Speaker, these are difficult issues. There is certainly no two ways about it, and difficult for us to discuss and deal with. I just want to say from a personal standpoint, it is good for us all to kind of stand back once in a while and think about things that put everything in perspective because we have a tendency for all of us to get wrapped up in this stuff. A little over a week ago my youngest son and his wife had a baby. My daughter-in-law gave birth to a little boy named Gabriel. I went out to California the Saturday before last to see him. When my son walked out of the delivery room carrying him and handed him to me and I took him in my arms, I thought, This does put the world in perspective. It is for Gabriel and it is for Thomas, my oldest grandson, and for William, his brother, that we do all of these things, that we try all of us, not just Members of Congress, everyone I know, that is what we labor for. It is the future. And it is for them, Mr. Speaker, that I do in fact try to advance this issue. I believe it is an important one. I want to leave them a country as good if not better than the one I grew up in. That is why we labor here.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I want to address the House tonight on an issue of importance, I think, to the Nation in terms of what we are facing in the area of domestic policy decision, which I think is an extremely important one for the country. Not surprisingly, I am going to be talking about immigration and immigration reform and a number of related issues this evening. Mr. Speaker, recently in the Colorado newspapers there have been a series of stories and editorials about an incident that occurred some time ago that was brought to the attention of the public as a result of a story published in the Denver Post maybe a month ago, perhaps a little more than that. The story was one that identified a particular individual in Colorado, actually a particular family in Colorado who were illegal immigrants to the United States. According to the news reports, even the Denver Post went to the Mexican consul in Denver or the Mexican consul went to the Post, I am not sure which way it happened, but somehow or other they got together and decided to write a story about a family, the Apodaca family. They decided to highlight a particular individual, a young man that is the oldest son of the family, I believe, who is graduating from a school in Aurora, Colorado, in my district, who has evidently been a model student with very good grades who is now faced with a dilemma. The dilemma is what to do about going to college; how is he going to pay for it. Mr. Speaker, across the country there are several attempts being made to change State laws with regard to illegal immigrants' access to higher education. I believe several States have actually changed their laws that will allow in-state tuition for kids who are themselves illegal or parents of illegal immigrants. This is a major push on the part of the Mexican Government through the Mexican consuls throughout the United States, and it is a major push by immigration advocates all over the country and groups like La Raza and others who want a variety of things, including free K-12 education which they already have, free or taxpayer-subsidized public education, which they do not now have, and driver's licenses and welfare and a number of other things that would add up to citizenship. That is really the point of all of this. The attempt is being made to erase anything that would be a distinguishment of someone being here illegally. Because after all, if you can come to the United States illegally, put your kids into school, which you can today under Supreme Court rules, have them educated at taxpayer expense, if you can eventually get taxpayers to subsidize their higher education, if you can get taxpayers to subsidize welfare, to pay for welfare for illegal immigrants into the country, if you can get State legislatures to change their laws to provide driver's licenses to people who are here illegally, then what happens, after a while there is nothing that separates you from anyone who is here legally. If you are present, if you are physically present in the country that we call the United States, you will have all of the benefits of being a citizen, and it does not matter how you got here. This is the desire. This is the hope; this is the plan. To some extent it has been successful, as I say, in several State legislatures. I think California is one, perhaps Utah is another. But the same thing is going on in Colorado. So there was this plan, if you will, to begin a lobbying process to change our laws in Colorado to allow people who are here, who are in the country and in Colorado in this particular case illegally, to have access to higher education. So the Mexican consul provided the names of a family, the Apodaca family, to the Denver Post. This was a particularly sympathetic case because apparently these folks came here 7 or 8 years ago, by their own admission illegally, but have so far lived the lives of model citizens. They send their kids to school. They are employed, or at least the husband is employed; and so they now are in this precarious position. They are trying to figure out what to do about the problem they face. How do you send your kids to higher ed, to the University of Colorado? So about a month ago, as I say, the Denver Post highlighted these people. They in fact put them on the front page of the Denver Post, this family, put in a picture and ran this very, very long story about the family and said, gee, these people, yes, they are here illegally, but they are not concerned about that. They are, as I say, giving their names and locales to the paper and we should in fact now be, of course, cognizant of and sympathetic to their plight. I read this story as did hundreds of thousands of other people in Colorado and thought, is it not interesting that we are now at the point where people who are here illegally can be so brazen as to make that known publicly without the slightest fear of any sort of negative ramifications? Is it not amazing, I thought, that the Mexican consul would be so audacious as to become involved in domestic politics in the United States? And, more importantly, is it not an affront to every single person who has come to this country legally? Is it not a slap in the face to every single person in this country who has gone through the brain damage and the expense of coming here through the legal process? Mr. Speaker, I have been able to go up to Commerce City, Colorado, where we have had and where they still have ceremonies to recognize people who are now taking their oath of citizenship to the country. They are becoming new citizens. I have gone there and I have spoken to these groups and I have said, first of all, I want to welcome you to the United States. Secondly, I want to thank you for doing it the right way, for going through the process, for spending the time, the money, for being inconvenienced as I know you are, for trying to learn the language as you are supposed to do. I want to thank you for all of that, because you are acting as good citizens. And every time that we do things like provide amnesty for people who come here illegally, it is a slap in the face to all those who have done it the right way. Mr. Speaker, I have in my office as I know you do and every Member of this Congress, we have lists of people who have applied for some sort of change in their immigration status and they have asked us to help. And we have. Well over 100 I saw at last count in our office alone. I know that in certain other districts, certain other congressional districts, the numbers are higher; but in mine, a relatively suburban district, 100, that is quite a few for us. We have actually two people assigned to helping those folks come into the United States or if they are here, to get their status adjusted under the law. That is a resource allocation that I think is unique. I do not believe I have two people among my staff who have a single responsibility or at least have some partial responsibility for a single issue. But that is the load we have, and that is the dedication I have to trying to help. I thought to myself when I read this story on the front page of the Denver Post that it is amazing that we are so blatant, so fearless about the fact that you do not have to go through that process; that, in fact, you are suckers if you do; that you are being naive if you try to abide by the laws; that you will become celebrities. You will be on the front page of the Denver Post. You will be characterized as heroes because you have lived a good life and you have done what is expected of you in America, you have had a job and you send your kids to school; and therefore because you are an ``A'' student, we should ignore the fact that you are here illegally and tell everyone in America who is here because they came the right way that they have been suckers. It also tells everybody in the world who is waiting for the opportunity to come to the United States legally that they should probably simply ignore the bureaucracy, which can be daunting in terms of the obstacles it sets up, and they should simply go to the head of the line. They should simply pass by everybody waiting and enter the gate. That is what amnesty does and that is what we tell people when we showcase them for being here illegally. Mr. Speaker, I do not know the Apodacas. From everything I have read, they seem to be very fine people who have, as I say, tried to come to the United States for the same reasons that my grandparents, perhaps yours, came here, looking for a better life. I do not blame them for wanting it. But I must admit to you that when the decision was made by the Denver Post and the family and the Mexican consul to showcase these people, they put those folks in jeopardy. Because somebody is going to say, Is this right that you can violate the laws of the Nation with such impunity? Is it right that all those who have attempted to do it the right way should be so insulted? I certainly did not think so when I read the story. So I waited about 3 weeks or more and finally I called the INS office in Denver and I said, can I please speak to the head of the agency? It was a gentleman by the name of Mr. Comfort. Again, a very nice fellow whom I have met with in the past. I asked him in the beginning of our conversation, I have a hypothetical situation to present to you and that is this: today, Mr. Comfort, you as the head of the regional office for the INS, if you walked out of the office and were heading over to lunch at a restaurant across the street and somebody came up to you on the street and said, I want to tell you something if you don't mind. I am a person who is a good citizen. I have a job. I have never been in trouble with the law. I send my kids to school. I'm trying to get them an education, but I have this one problem. I am here illegally. What would you do under those circumstances? He said, Well, of course I would have to take them into custody. Those were his exact words. I would have to take them into custody at that point, and I would have to then put them through the judicial process. They would have a hearing. It would be determined by an immigration law judge as to whether or not they should be deported. I said, That is interesting to me, because I am wondering what you did about the family that told you that, told not you that, but told the entire State of Colorado that 3 or 4 weeks ago. They said they were here illegally. They were looking for someone to help support their son's higher education goals and expenses. He said, Yeah, we saw that; we looked into it, but we're not going to do anything about it. I said, How come? I just asked you what you would do if this happened to you on the street. He said, It's a resource thing. I don't have the resources to actually go after these people. I said, I'm not asking you to send in a SWAT team. I'm not asking you to devote any resources to this issue that would jeopardize the major tasks you have in terms of felons who are here illegally and potential terrorists and all that sort of thing. I don't want you to do that. I'm just asking you what you do when somebody tells you this, as these people did and as the Denver Post and as the Mexican consul did. He said, I really don't know what to say. We don't have the resources. He kept saying, We don't have the resources. I said, again, What does it take? Would you send a letter? Would you at least send a letter to the folks and ask them to please come in and talk to you about the fact that they have stated publicly that they are here illegally? He said, yes, that they would do that. Shortly thereafter, I received a call from the Denver Post wanting a follow-up interview to the original story about these folks. I told the Denver Post, it was amazingly coincidental, but I had just talked to the INS and I told them this story. The next day the Denver Post wrote a story, it appeared again on the front page and it was entitled something like ``Tancredo Demands the Deportation of this 'A' Student.'' Forget about the fact that that was an interesting spin that they put on it because I never even mentioned the student in my conversations with the INS. I was talking about the family who had made this statement to the Post. But, regardless, that was the story. It has been amazing in terms of the reaction to it. I have had literally thousands of e-mail and telephone calls and letters about this into my office. Overwhelmingly, I should say that the letters and e-mails are supportive. But the Denver Post is very upset about the fact that I did this. I have tried to explain to them that really what I did was what hundreds of other citizens I know have tried to do and that is to talk to the INS, get them to look into the situation, the situation that individuals may feel exists out there in terms of illegals being here and that the INS routinely ignores those inquiries and/or reports from John Q. Citizen. In this case because I was able to get the head of the INS on the phone and speak to him directly, they were perhaps less able to ignore my request to them to look into the issue. I did not demand, I should say, anyone's deportation, not Jesus Apodaca who was the young man that was identified in this story as being the ``A'' student who is looking for a college education, or anyone else. I simply said, Would you look into this, would you simply send a letter and ask these people to come in and talk to you? But the press has portrayed this in a way, as you might imagine, to make it appear as though I have taken it upon myself to become the head of the INS and ``bully,'' I think is the word they use most often, and ``mean- spirited,'' another one that they throw in there. Then yesterday we got a call from the same reporter who had done this story, and he said, we have found out because of good reporting that Congressman Tancredo has hired people to work in his home, in his home, in this case to finish a basement, and they were illegal, they were here illegally, and they wanted to know whether we had a response. My response was, I in fact did hire a company, a very reputable company to finish my basement and to put in a home theater for a Christmas present to my family. It was truly an expensive one, but it is one that we were able to pay for by refinancing my home, which is what we did. I went to a company in Denver, I purchased the equipment, and I asked if they also installed. They said yes. I said I also need the basement to be finished for this. They said they could do that. A part of their company was also a construction company. I hired them for this purpose. They were expensive, it is true, but we checked out their references and they were good. And we felt because they had promised me to get it done by Christmas last year, that we would go ahead and pay the extra money that we thought we were paying compared to other estimates to get this job done. So we hired them. Now, Mr. Speaker, frankly, as you know, we are not home often, especially if you live as far away from Washington as I do. We are home sometimes on the weekend and during break. But we put a lockbox on our door and we gave the key to the lockbox to the construction company. And they were absolutely efficient and they did a great job, and I can say nothing but good things about the experience. They finished exactly when they said they were going to finish. The job is a great job. I have nothing to complain about whatsoever. Now, I have no idea who they hired, where they came from or anything else. But, anyway, the Denver Post tomorrow is going to run a story, we are told, they called us tonight to tell us they are going to run a story tomorrow that states what I have just told you, that we have had people working in our home who were in fact illegal immigrants. Somehow, of course, I know they are going to try and tie this to me, that I either knew, or, I do not know exactly what the point of it is, but I know they are very upset about the fact that we have called them on this issue of highlighting the Apodaca family. So, as a ``result of good reporting,'' they have uncovered some more illegal aliens who are in Colorado, and they are going to publish a story tomorrow about that. Now, I have to tell you, Mr. Speaker, that I have been called a bully, I have been called mean-spirited, because I called the INS and asked them to look into the Apodaca story, which had been printed in the paper serial several weeks before. But, Mr. Speaker, I have to also tell you that I do not seek out people who are here illegally. I do not ask people who may be serving me at a restaurant, who may be doing my lawn work or putting on the roof of my house, or, in this case, the laborers of a company that I hired to put in a home theater system and finish my basement, I do not ask them to show me proof of the fact that the people, I do not say, you know, the waiter that you sent me last night could not speak English very well, or the cab driver that I got when I came over here could not speak English very well, so I would like to see whether or not they are here illegally. I do not do that. I think that would be sort of mean-spirited, frankly. I do not do that. I only got into this issue, became even acquainted with the Apodaca family, because the Post and Mexican Consul and the family themselves choose to make themselves known to me and to the rest of the people in Colorado, the entire citizenry. So, I do not know, Mr. Speaker, frankly, I have not the foggiest idea of whether or not the people who were employed by the company that I hired were illegal. I know they were good workers and did a great job. That is all I know. But if the Denver Post continues to press this, if they identify people and companies, then, of course, I would tell the INS the same thing: ``Look, the Denver Post is once again pointing out people who are here illegally. Are you going to do something about it?'' But I want to try to just make people understand the nature of this debate. I know that I suffer the slings and arrows. I know that I am going to be vilified in the paper. Tomorrow I am sure that the article that the Denver Post writes about me will not be complimentary. But, you know, I guess I am really thinking aloud here with you tonight, and that is, who is really the bully? Who is really mean-spirited here? I hope that we will enforce our immigration laws in this country. I hope that we will stiffen those laws. I hope that we will in fact even put military troops on the border to help enforce immigration laws. But I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, quite honestly, that if this Nation decides that it does not wish to enforce immigration laws, that if we do not wish to have a border that requires somebody to get permission to cross, that is okay with me. It is not okay, I would be a no vote on that bill, but let us assume for a moment that this House and the Senate, the other body, I should say, and the President agree that we should abandon this whole concept of border security and immigration policy. If it is the will of the majority, I would live by it. The idea that we can have a law in place that says you cannot enter the country illegally, but, on the other hand, if you do, and if you are a nice guy and if you have got a kid who is an A student, I do not know, if he is a B student, I am not sure we would cut him this slack, or C or D or F, or maybe if he does not go to school at all, maybe then we should try to deport him. So maybe we should make an immigration policy that depends upon someone's grade point average, or whether or not they have simply been in the country a while and kept a job and stayed out of trouble. You know, whatever we do, whatever this Congress and the Senate decide to do, the other body decides to do, and the President agrees to, that is the law of the land and I certainly would abide by it. But if we, unfortunately for the Apodacas, have a law that says if you come into the country illegally you are subject to deportation, even if your child is an A student, even if you have lived in the country as model citizens, you do not have the right to citizenship, as long as that is the law of the land, then let me ask you, is it being a bully to ask the INS to enforce the law? Now, again, Mr. Speaker, I want to say we know there are between 9 million and 13 million people who are here illegally. That is true. I have not the foggiest idea how many people I may have hired in the past as taxi drivers, as waiters, waitresses, home improvement people. I have not the foggiest idea how many of those people may have been here illegally, and it is not my job to ask them. In fact, Mr. Speaker, it is against the law to do so. You could be sued under the Civil Rights Act if you go out and ask people that have been hired by somebody else if they are here illegally or not. I do not do that. I do not inquire. If you go to the Denver Post or any other newspaper and you say, ``I am here illegally and here is the benefits that I want,'' then, of course, I think it is a different situation, and the Denver Post and the Mexican Consul and this family have to take some responsibility for making the choice to become prominently displayed on the front page of a major newspaper. Now, I know that this is a very controversial and very emotional issue. I know that, and I do not relish the idea of being here and discussing it. Frankly, there are other things that are also important to me, other issues; the tax policy of the country, the war, the potential war with Iraq, there are a whole bunch of things that weigh on my conscience very heavily and weigh on my mind, as I know they do on yours, Mr. Speaker, and every other Member of this body. But I must admit to you that what is happening here by attempts in this case by the Mexican Consul and sympathetic news media, the attempts to characterize illegal immigration as benign, that is wrong and it is dangerous. The Apodaca family, certainly from all accounts I have read, anyway, are no danger to the United States. They pose no danger. They seem like good people, people I would be happy to have as neighbors and friends. But it is irrelevant to the issue as to whether or not they have broken the law to come into the country. What is the most discouraging or disconcerting aspect of this whole thing is that when trying to characterize and personify the illegal immigration issue by using the Apodacas, what you do is ignore another face of illegal immigration that is much, much uglier, much nastier. That is the face of illegal immigration that you confront on the borders of this country, both the Canadian border and the Mexican border. It is the face of murder, it is the face of infiltration into the country of people who are coming to do us great harm, it is the face of drug smuggling. It is the face of rape and robbery, because coyotes who often bring these people, in this case from Mexico, into the United States, they charge them sometimes $1,000 or $1,500 to bring them into the United States illegally, and when they get to the borders they rape the women, they steal the money, they force the people into the United States into some of the most inhospitable parts of the country in terms of the desert, and they die out there. This is an ugly thing. It is the face of murder, where a little over a month and a half ago a young man by the name of Kris Eggle, who was a Park Service employee, he was a Park Ranger in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona, and Chris, who was 28 years old, along with a colleague in the Border Patrol, stopped two Mexicans who had come across the border after having murdered four people in Mexico in some sort of drug deal type of thing that went awry, or they were hit men for some cartel, I do not know all of the details. But they came into the United States. They were stopped by this young man, 28 years old, and when he got out of the car, he was killed. They opened up on him with automatic weapons and killed him. I went to his funeral in Ajo, Arizona, where I saw his mother and his father, I saw all of his colleagues from the Border Patrol, from the Park Service, from the Customs agency, all of them coming to pay their respects. But I saw no one else from the government. I saw no members of the media to talk about that face of illegal immigration into the country. I have not heard a thing about the fact that a short time ago, maybe less than a week ago, two FBI agents on the border near El Paso, I believe, were abducted, dragged across the line and beaten almost to death. They are both in the hospital in Texas in critical condition. I have seen nothing about that face of illegal immigration. I have seen nothing about the fact that hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds of illegal narcotics are confiscated on our borders with both Canada and Mexico every year, and I have seen nothing about the fact that agents are routinely placed in harm's way, Border Patrol agents, U.S. Forest Service personnel, are placed in harm's way and injured and in fact killed in defense of the Nation's immigration policy, so-called immigration policy. I have seen nothing about that in the Denver Post. I have seen nothing about the fact that I received the following message from someone who will remain anonymous, but here is what he says: ``Sir: Until about 5 months ago I was a U.S. Border Patrol agent. I was recently informed by a friend who is still with the U.S. Border Patrol of another Ramirez-type incident that Border Patrol agents had been ordered not to talk about and that the Border Patrol is desperately trying to keep away from the media. A Catholic nun was recently raped and murdered in Oregon by a Mexican illegal alien who was apprehended earlier by U.S. Border Patrol agents in Deming, New Mexico. The IDENT/ENFORCE system worked and the system alerted the agent that the alien was a violent criminal. The subject was released back into Mexico where he promptly made his way back into the United States, traveled to Oregon and raped two nuns, one of which was also murdered. The Border Patrol has put the word out to its agents that this information is not to be divulged to anyone outside the U.S. Border Patrol. The patrol agent in charge of the Deming, New Mexico station has been relieved and temporarily assigned to the sector headquarters in El Paso, Texas. The killing of the nun made the news, but the fact that the killer is an illegal alien recently captured and released by the U.S. Border Patrol did not. Hopefully, you can change that. Keep up the good work.'' Well, thank you, sir, for your courage in telling me and telling, therefore, the country about this. Because I can assure my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, that this will not be on the front page of the Denver Post tomorrow. The fact that I hired a company that purportedly hired illegal aliens to work on my basement, according to what we were told tonight by the Post, but this will not, although the story has certainly made news earlier, they said it was news in Oregon, it will not be there, because this is not the face of illegal immigration that the press wants to present to the American public. However, this is the face of illegal immigration on our borders. Mr. Speaker, I have come to this floor many times. I have no doubt that my concerns about illegal immigration, about the immigration issue have made me a number of very powerful enemies. I have no doubt that they will from this point on hound me, dog me, find out who delivers the milk to my house, who cuts our lawn. I mean, I have no idea to what extent they will go to try and vilify me for bringing the message. I guess, of course, it is an intimidating thing, but I also know that, because I have to ask myself and my own conscience, is this the right thing to do. I have to search my own conscience, Mr. Speaker, about why I do it. Is it out of some sort of animosity or animus that I have? I truly do not believe that is the case. I know that I would be doing essentially the same thing, as millions of others who are seeking a better life in the United States, I would be looking for a way into the country. I do not necessarily blame the people who come here illegally. I blame our own government for encouraging it on the one hand by refusing to actually secure our borders, and periodically giving amnesty so as to tell people all over the world that the message is, by the way, to come into the United States, and for not cracking down on people who hire illegal aliens. If they knowingly hire somebody who is here illegally, then, of course, there is a price to pay. And I only suggest that if we want to have an immigration policy that establishes what the borders of the United States are and that one must ask permission to come across them, as we must do going to either Canada or Mexico, that the law, and that those borders, ought to be actually upheld. It is amazing to me and incredibly ironic in a way that the Mexican consul has been so actively involved with trying to change our immigration status. It is amazing to me that the Mexican consul and advocates for immigration policies, for liberal immigration policies continually ignore the laws that are in place in our neighboring countries, Canada and Mexico. I have yet to see in the Mexican press or the Canadian press negative stories about the fact that in these countries if you enter illegally, you can be prosecuted for that. I have yet to see a story in the press about the fact that neither Canada nor Mexico, nor any other country of which I am aware, will allow you to go to school at their expense, at the taxpayers' expense of that country, go on to higher education at the taxpayers' expense of that country, if you are not a citizen of that country. I have never seen an article written attacking any country for their mean-spirited immigration policy. I have never seen the Mexican consul speak out in the United States, and certainly I would be amazed if they did, of course, against the repressive actions taken by the Mexican Government against Guatemalans who periodically come into the country of Mexico illegally. Often, the Mexican Government will send troops to that southern border, to their southern border and they will also, by the way, round up, and I mean that in the ugliest sense of the words, round up illegal Guatemalans, illegal aliens into Mexico from Guatemala, they will round them up, send them back, they will incarcerate them. Mr. Speaker, I have actually been in detention facilities in Mexico for people who have entered their country illegally. They are not nice places. I assure my colleagues that the detention facilities that we have in the United States are more like Hilton hotels than in comparison to the detention facility for illegal entrance into Mexico. But there has not been a word of concern about that, has there? Have I missed it? Has any paper in the United States attacked the Mexican Government for their attitude about illegal immigrants into Mexico? Has any media outlet in this country suggested that Mexico should begin educating all children who go to Mexico, regardless of where they are from, at the expense of the Mexican taxpayer? We do that. We do that because the Supreme Court has ruled that if you are here, even if you are illegal, we need to give you a K-12 education. Now, so far they have not ruled that we have to give you a higher education at taxpayers' expense, but that is what they are seeking. That is what the people that support a liberalized immigration policy, that is what they are seeking. I have never heard anybody else, any other country chastised because they do not do what they are demanding of us. So is it mean-spirited, truly, for me to suggest that if we have an immigration policy, we should uphold it; if we do not wish to do so, we should abandon it? I assure my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, and I have said this on the floor many times, that I wish there was someone with the courage to introduce a bill into this House that says we will abandon our borders, there is no need for them, we want the free flow of goods, services, and people. And if it passes, over my ``no'' vote, if it passes and if it passes the other body, and if it is signed by the President, that is the law of the land, and I walk away from the issue. But if, on the other hand, we pretend that we have borders and that for some reason that is important, which I think it is, then should we not do everything possible to uphold the law about those borders, especially, especially, Mr. Speaker, in times like these, in times that present the United States with the potential for catastrophic terrorist activity, catastrophic events that could be perpetrated by people who have come across our borders illegally? Should we not try to defend those borders? Should we not try? When we go to the American public, either the administration or the Congress goes to the American public and says, we are trying to do everything we can, we are doing everything we can to protect you, can we be truthful in that, Mr. Speaker? Do we believe that we are doing everything we can to protect America? If that is the case, then why is it still possible for, say, one mile on either side of any port of entry in the country, you can walk across and no one is going to stop you? Is that really doing everything that we can to protect the United States of America? Should we not be as interested in defending our own borders as we are in defending the borders of Korea or Kosovo? Should we not be as concerned about our own safety in this country as we are about perhaps deposing Saddam Hussein and, therefore, removing a threat to the United States, which I happen to agree with? I mean, I agree that he is a threat and that we should depose him. But is it not just as important for us to defend our own country at the closest point of vulnerability, and that point is the northern, the southern, eastern and western borders of the United States? I cannot for the life of me understand why we do not pursue that as aggressively as we do a war with Iraq. If we go to war with Iraq, does anyone not believe that the danger to the United States increases exponentially, that the danger will not come on the battlefields of Iraq necessarily, although that is certainly a dangerous place, but it will also come as a result of increased infiltration into the United States of fundamentalist Islamic cells designed and with the purpose, I should say, of doing us great harm? Would that not be only logical to assume as a possibility? And should any country not do the rational thing and try to actually defend those borders, even if it means preventing the flow of illegal immigrants into the country who are not coming to harm us? But, Mr. Speaker, we cannot set up a sieve that distinguishes that. We cannot really expect people on the border to go, I see you coming across here, you look to me to be someone who is just coming across for a job and a better education for your kids, so I am going to let you come by. But you, you look like someone who might be coming across to do us great harm. No, of course, we cannot do that. I mean, even if we tried, the ACLU would go crazy and call it racial profiling or something. So we cannot do that. We either defend our borders or we do not. Either walk away from this and stop putting our Border Patrol, or Forest Service people, our Park Service employees, our Customs agents, stop putting them in jeopardy of their lives for a principle one is not willing to uphold. One or the other, Mr. President and Mr. Speaker, one or the other. Uphold the law or abandon the law, repeal the law. Those are our choices. But this half-baked approach is the worst possible way to deal with it. And I will suffer the slings and arrows of an angry media and of angry constituents and of angry members of the Hispanic and immigrant communities in the United States, although I must say, Mr. Speaker, that we get many, many supportive e-mails and calls and letters from Hispanic Americans who consider themselves to be Americans only, Americans. No hyphenated part in there, and they are worried about this country's survival, and they are worried about the effects of massive immigration, legal and illegal, and they support this position. It has got nothing to do with ethnicity. I said this a thousand times if I said it once. It has got nothing to do with the countries of origin. We are talking about whether or not we are in fact a sovereign State or whether we are not, and if we choose not to be, if we choose to go the route of the European Union and begin the process of eliminating borders, creating common currency and all that, that is okay as long as it is done as a result of a legal process. It is called this body. We vote on it. We make a decision on behalf of our constituents. That is the way it should be done. It should not be done in a de facto way, just having it happen and then 10 years from now we say, ``Gee, how did this occur? Remember when there used to be an actual border between Canada and the United States and Mexico and the United States? Remember when we used to ask people flying in for visas and things like that? I wonder why we do not do that any more. What has happened to the whole American experiment?'' So I guess I will continue to raise my voice in defense of the American experiment, in defense of the people who have come here over the last 250-odd years, who have come here seeking a better life, who have come here legally. I speak in defense of them. I speak in defense of all those folks who do not have the money to plead their case, I suppose, with the INS, but they are in line, they are following the rules, they are hoping that we will let them in and they will have a shot at the good life. God bless them, I say. God bless them. They are doing it the right way. And every time we slap them in the face, all I can say is I am sorry. It is rude, it is mean-spirited and it is ugly. Again, I tell them thank you for doing it the right way, for coming to the United States legally, welcome to the United States to everyone in this Nation who has come here the right way. I hope, Mr. Speaker, that this issue eventually resolves itself so that our Nation is defended and that the idea of sovereignty is upheld and the hopes and dreams of millions of people seeking to come here will be fulfilled, seeking to come here legally.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for the opportunity to speak on behalf of this bill and to once again state the obvious, and that is, in fact, the poor will benefit. I do not know how many ways we can put this. This is an above-the- line deduction that we are proposing. It does not matter about the deductions that they have. It is above-the-line. It will come to them regardless. It will, in fact, help the poor. I do not know how many ways there are to say that in order to, in fact, get people to understand the nature of an above-the-line deduction which is being proposed here. Let us also talk about the possibility that this thing may not become law. Well, I do not know what will happen from this point on with this bill. My only responsibility is to determine how I should vote on this bill before me at this time and why. And I recognize that it may not become law. I recognize that there are many forces arrayed against it, mostly the forces of monopoly education, those people who say there is only one way to educate a child. It is our way or the highway; that the only money that can be possibly be spent on education is in the system we, the government, can control. We know that that is where the real opposition is in this bill. It has nothing to do with the amount of money being spent. For heaven's sake, Members of the Committee on Ways and Means, Democratic Members of the Committee on Ways and Means have introduced 6 bills that I have in front of me that take an awful lot more money away from education than this even purports to, and this, of course, puts it into education. It is just not their kind of education. Not the education system that is run by the government that gets all of the money. It will get 90 percent of it. But a tiny little trickle may end up going to a private school and God knows we cannot have that. Why? Because we do not have control over that process. Well, I tell you we should not. The only people that should have control over that process are the parents of the kids that are being sent to those schools. They are the ones who should make this determination as to where their kids are going to be educated, where the best educational experience can be obtained. We do not mind having that happen for people who are rich, for people who can any single day stand up and say I want my child in this district or in this school and I am willing and able to pay for it. We do not do that. Why do we do it to the poor?

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, one of the ways in which this whole issue can be described includes a connection to the war on terrorism. Because it is not only the southern border where we see this kind of activity, but, as I say, I just returned a little bit ago from the northern border, a place near the Canadian border called Bonners Ferry, Idaho. And all of the activities up there of the border patrol, of the U.S. Forest Service, and in this case, there were 100 Marines that had been assigned the task of trying to determine whether they could interact with the border patrol and the U.S. Forest Service for the purpose of trying to defend one little chunk of border. Just see what we can do if we combine our efforts. One hundred Marines, 3 drones. They were using old UAVs, those unmanned aerial vehicles, flying along the border. It is the same ones, the first generation type we used in the first Gulf War, and a couple of radar towers. And, of course, what we saw was a large amount of drug activity, a large amount of people coming across that area carrying drugs. When I was up there I was told that there is a very large Muslim population in Calgary, Canada. Again, kind of surprising in a way. Almost 25,000 people, Muslims living there. They were connected, a large number of them are connected with the trade in the component parts of methamphetamines, shipping them into the United States through Canada. They took it down here, make the drugs, sell it, and the money goes back to the Muslims in Calgary to this group, the drug trade group, and they use the money to support terrorist activities all over the world. When we keep talking about this, about there being a war on our borders, it is quite literally a war. Again, something I think that so few of our colleagues even perhaps understand. They look at it again as just what they see in their own districts. That is understandable. But when you get to the border, as we say, you see illegal immigration in the form of drug trafficking, drug running, illicit sex trade, human smuggling, economic crimes. These are all part of what is going on on the border. Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to say that it is a pleasure to be here with my colleague, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra), to honor as little as we can here. As I said at Kris's funeral, when someone has given the full measure of devotion, what word can we possibly use to try and salve the wounds that are created by that event? There are few, if any, that we can utter that will give solace to his parents, give comfort to his friends, and rest to his soul. God is in charge of that, and we place his family, his friends, and all of the people who work every single day in the same capacity as Kris to help defend America, we place them in God's hands and ask for His blessing on them all; and for us here in this body, for the task that lays ahead of us, to help support him and America. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friend for joining me today.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise this afternoon in order to bring to the attention of the body a serious, in fact I think an extremely dangerous, problem that the United States faces in the area of immigration and immigration reform and specifically the problems we face on our borders with people coming across this country without our permission, people we do not know, people we do not know why they are coming, we do not know who they are, we do not know what they are going to do here; and they are coming through in huge numbers. The face of illegal immigration in my district may be people wanting to do work in the entertainment industry, people wanting to do work in the landscaping area, people working in restaurants; but the face of illegal immigration on the borders is much uglier, much nastier. The face of illegal immigration on our borders is one of murder, one of drug smuggling, one of vandalism for all the communities along the border, and one of infiltration of people coming into this country for purposes to do us great harm. Most recently, an incident occurred in Arizona near the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument that I want to begin our discussion with today. The situation in that part of the country is actually incredible. I cannot think of a way to describe it except to say that we are under siege, that there is an invasion. Near the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation in Arizona, we have about a 76-mile coterminous border with Mexico and this particular reservation. The Tohono O'odham are the second largest tribe in the United States, second only to the Navajo; and they have been living peacefully in this area for centuries. But in the last several months, things have gotten very, very bad in this particular area as a result of the fact that there have been some efforts on the part of the INS, and also the Border Patrol, to strengthen our border security posts around Nogales and Tucson and San Diego. As a result, we have created sort of a funnel effect where 1,500 people a day are now coming across that 76-mile border, coming across illegally, through the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation and up into Arizona, and, of course, spreading across the United States. These are not just people looking for a job. They are not just folks coming because they are seeking the American dream. These people, many of them are coming because they are transporting drugs, working for Mexican drug cartels. Many of them are coming for purposes, as I say, that have nothing to do with the benign or even, some might suggest, positive intent of seeking work in the United States. Just a few weeks ago, in this same area, we had a situation where two Mexicans had committed a series of murders in Mexico that were connected to drug activity. These people were evidently professional assassins. They killed four people in Mexico that were in a rival gang, in a rival drug cartel; and they were escaping into the United States where they were confronted by a member of the Border Patrol and a member of the Park Service, a park ranger. When they stepped out of their cars, when our folks stepped out of their cars to go and confront these people, they were met by two individuals who opened fire with automatic weapons; and one man, Christopher Eggle, was killed. A 28-year-old park ranger was killed. He was killed in the line of duty. He laid down his life in the defense of others, in the defense of this country, just exactly the same way men and women in Afghanistan, in the Gulf War, in wars throughout our history have done. Yet very little has been heard about his death here in this country, very little news has been made by this death, and I wonder why. Well, I am here today, along with my friend and colleague, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra), who has in his district the parents of Mr. Eggle; and we are here today to make sure that people do hear about this event and that we do bring to the attention of the Nation and our colleagues the fact that people like Mr. Eggle are in fact putting their lives on the line on our borders; and they deserve every bit as much of our support and attention and concern as we approach 9-11 as all of the other folks who heroically defend America, whether they are the fire and police people in New York, or whether they are our troops that are perhaps being readied to go off to war in Iraq. We need to bring Mr. Eggle and his comrades to the attention of our body. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) to also say a few words here in this regard.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I thank my dear friend and colleague, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra). This is something that, when I say it is a pleasure in terms of being able to represent this body, it is certainly not a pleasurable experience, but being able to represent us at the funeral of Kris Eggle, I was glad to be able to do that, because I wanted his parents to see that someone does know, someone does care; that the Congress of the United States, at least many Members of it, are well aware of the sacrifice, the ultimate sacrifice that was given by their son, Kris, and by them giving their son in that regard. The statements that were made that day, it was an enormously emotional funeral, as Members can imagine, of a young man well loved by all of his colleagues. There must have been a couple of hundred people there, 90 percent of whom were members of the Border Patrol, members of the Park Service, Forest Service employees and customs agents, all of them comrades-in-arms with Kris, and all of them talking about him in the most loving and glowing terms, those that knew him personally. I remember his colleagues talking about how each day they would go out and he would be so enthusiastic about the job, about his responsibilities for the day. He would turn to his colleague and his co-worker and almost every day say something to the effect of, is there anything I can do for you today? That was one way of describing what Kris was like. I also remember that his supervisor, the head of the Park Service in that area, got up and said, this death cannot be in vain. We have to recognize that there are things that this country needs to do in order to assure that someone else's son or daughter does not face the same fate. We are at war on our borders. There is no other way of describing it. We ask men and women to go down there and put their lives on the line, just like we ask men and women to do it in the Armed Forces of the United States. But the difference with the war on our borders and perhaps the war that we are pressing, let us say, against terrorism is that I do not know if we have the will as a government to actually win that war. I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra).

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I certainly hope we will do that. I hope we will begin a process that will eventually lead to our being able to tell our constituents that we are living up to the commitments we have made to try to protect and defend this Nation. No matter what we do, it is possible, of course, that someone may come across these borders to do us harm. We may not be able to get everyone who tries, that is true. But we can do so much more than we are presently doing. We can use technology along with human resources so much more effectively than what we are presently doing. It just takes will power. In many ways I look at Chris and others and I think of them as the folks who went to serve in Vietnam. We asked them to go. We put them in harm's way. We told them the country needed them but there was no real will to win the war, and we left them sort of out on a limb. And we are still paying the price for that, for what we did to the men and women who served in the armed forces in Vietnam by sending them to a war that we really and truly were not committed to win. That is how I view the situation on the border with Kris, the border patrol, the Park Service, Customs agents, Forest Service people. We put them there, but I do not know whether or not we have the will to really win this war. It tests our mettle here as well as theirs to determine how far are we willing to go, what are we willing to do here in this body to say that this is not going to happen again or to say that, in fact, we are serious about trying to defend the Nation. We are about, well, perhaps, we are going to be sending men and women off again into harm's way into Iraq. We are told that this is a distinct possibility. The President may be coming to the Congress in a very short time asking for our support of that endeavor. Do we think for a moment that if we in fact move forward on that, and I tend to believe that we have to do that, but do we think for a moment that there will not be ramifications in the United States? Do we think for a moment that Saddam Hussein believes he can win a war in Iraq against our military might? No. He knows that is not possible. He knows that we are most vulnerable here. And he will try to bring the battle to us. We are told every day that another attack in the United States is imminent. Well, how logical does it seem to you or any of our colleagues, I wonder, that we will spend an enormous amount of our treasury and our human resources in places thousands of miles away which, again, I am not going to argue right now as to whether or not it is appropriate. I tend to think it is. But we are doing nothing significant on our own border. Is this not the height of folly? Is this not so irresponsible to us to not recognize that we are laying ourselves bare, laying ourselves open to greater attacks? And, yes, we are looking internally on how to deal with it. Maybe we will try to find them when they are here. Why not try to stop them before they get here? We may not absolutely be able to do it for every single person, for every single threat, but we can do far more than we are doing. Just that, if we do that, if we commit to it. If we put the troops, if we use the military on our border to help support the Park Service, the border patrol and the forest service, we will have done, I think, a service to Kris Eggle and to the others who face danger every single day down there, and we will be doing our job. It is our responsibility here. It is not asking us to go the extra mile, for heaven's sake. It is asking us and the President of the United States to do exactly what we are supposed to do as well as the folks who are supposed to direct the resources of the Nation to its defense, and I fear that we are not doing it today. I, of course, represent Columbine, the school in which such a tragedy occurred just a few years ago, and it was the most horrendous event I have ever gone through in public life, and I keep thinking about the fact that there were some good things that happened, and in every single horrible event something good does come out of it. We have to pray that this is the case, and it usually is. Out of Kris's death, something good has got to happen here, and that is that we will, in fact, redouble our efforts, triple our efforts to protect his colleagues and our constituents from the forces of evil that are directed against us. I feel that that is what he would want us to do, and I do not mean just the al Qaeda agents, the cells that are operating. I mean the forces of evil that are importing drugs, sex slaves, all the rest that are coming across this border for the purposes of poisoning our children and our culture. We also have a responsibility internally to do what we can to restructure the culture, to reinvigorate our own culture and to imbue it with what is good and right and just, but at the same time, we must do everything we can to make sure that these people cannot just come into the country at their will; just as my colleague said, what he was talking about the fact that this is our, as a Congress, it is our responsibility. We cannot ignore it. We cannot walk away from it, and it would be the best possible memorial we could give, I think, to Kris Eggle.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I would tell the gentleman, it is nine rangers.

Mr. TANCREDO. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Speaker, it is a fascinating thing, because I do not know if a lot of our colleagues, and I certainly do not believe a lot of the citizens of the United States, know the exact situation that we face on these borders, in our parks and in our national monuments. Not too long ago I went down to the Coronado National Forest, not too far from Organ Pipes. The Coronado is one of the oldest national forests in the land. In 1906 it was created, a beautiful, beautiful environment that is being completely despoiled by the same thing, by massive numbers of people coming across illegally. These people find that the terrain is rugged. They can hide more easily; and now actually we can fly over that and we can see where tracks have been worn into the land by so many people, by hundreds of thousands of people, so it looks actually like a spider web going out all over that particular forest area. Those tracks will not go away for many, many, many years. Then they make a track and they think that we monitor it, so they will move over a little bit and move over a little. They think we put sensors out, so it just spreads out like that. Trash, and it is the same thing in all our national parks in this area, the trash is enormous. The problem is with plastic water bottles strewn everywhere, hundreds of thousands, and clothing just tossed aside. They come through and they start warming fires in the night and walk away in the morning leaving them go. When we got back from the Coronado, we left on a Sunday morning, and by the time we had gotten back, when I got back home to Colorado, 35,000 acres had been consumed in Coronado by one of these fires. I am told by these folks who have been fighting these incursions, I guess there is no other way to put it, for years, that we have always had a lot of people bringing drugs through in our southern and northern borders; and, by the way, it is not unique to the southern border, but before when they would confront them, by and large they would drop what they were carrying. They carry these 60- or 70-pound loads on their backs in these homemade backpacks, which, by the way, once they get to a part of the national park where another road has been cut in by their accomplices, a road used by trucks coming in to pick up the drugs, when they reach that, they unload the drugs and discard all of this backpacking material. They pile it up in huge, massive piles of this stuff all over the place. He said that before when they would confront them, they would simply drop it and run. But now they are not. Now they are fighting back. Now they are opening fire. They are preceded by a guy with an M-16 leading a bunch of people carrying the drugs, and he is followed by a guy with an M-16. Our park rangers, park rangers, for heaven's sakes, this is not really what they have been trained to deal with. Their responsibilities do not go to fighting drug cartels, but that is the position we have placed them in. To their credit, as my colleague, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra), has said, they have interdicted hundreds of thousands of pounds of illegal drugs over the course of just the last year. But it is getting rougher. It is getting tougher. It is getting meaner. The cartel members are actually holding hostage some of the family members of the people who are transporting the stuff for them, so unless they make it all the way across and to their appointed site where they dump it off to a truck, their family member in Mexico is killed. So that is why, that and other reasons, why we are now facing a different kind of threat down there. Besides that, we were told, there is an ever-increasing number of what they refer to as OTMs, other than Mexicans, coming across the border. Now we see what they call an alarming number of people coming through from China and from the Middle East, coming through these areas. For what purpose? What is our ability and desire to try to interdict it and try to stop it? If we do not intend to defend these borders, then we should not be putting people like Kris in harm's way. If it is not our intent to actually secure the border, and if that means putting the military in there to help Kris and his compatriots until we can stabilize the INS, until we can actually reform that organization and get the Border Patrol, and believe me, the folks on the line are doing a great job. These guys and the ladies down there who are Border Patrol agents, they are park rangers, they are Forest Service personnel, I take my hat off to them. It was my pleasure, as I say, to go down there and talk to them and see and visit them as often as I could during the break, both borders. But they need help. They cannot do this alone. We have asked them to try to hold back a flood, and we have given them a sieve. Unfortunately, this flood is getting more dangerous all the time. Not a month prior to this particular event, or no, I am sorry, it was May 27, again, not far from where this happened, not far from Organ Pipes in a place called Papago Farms, a Border Patrol agent on patrol confronted a Mexican military vehicle in the United States, a Mexican HMMWV with several members of the Mexican military on board. When he confronted them, they got out. He decided that discretion was the better part of valor, since he was certainly outgunned and outmanned. When he was turning around to go get help, a shot rang out from the Mexicans. It went through his back window, hit the metal grate that separates him from the back part of his vehicle, and went out the right rear window. That was on May 27. We have had up to this point in time 127 incursions of that nature since 1997, where Mexican military, Mexican federal police have come into the United States. Usually it is for the purpose of protecting a drug shipment. There is usually a large shipment coming through, so they will actually act as the protection for it, or they act as a diversionary tactic. They come in over here, and we naturally send people to find out what this is all about when we have Mexican military coming in; and a drug shipment comes through where we have pulled our people away. This is what has been happening. Again, nobody has talked about it. An American, a person that is a member of our Border Patrol, is actually fired upon by another person who is a member of a foreign military service, and nothing is said or done around here, all because we are fearful of discussing this issue of immigration and immigration control; all because we are fearful of the politics of it. I will tell the Members, and I know the gentleman feels this way, too, this issue, it is our responsibility, even if it is to our political peril, it is our responsibility as Members of Congress of the United States to live up to the oath of office that says we are going to protect this country, the people and the property of this country, from all those who intend to do us harm. Part of that duty is to defend this border, or, as I say, to leave it. But we cannot continue in this halfway mode of creating a facade of protection, sending people down there like Kris, telling them to hold back that flood, but not really and truly doing what is necessary for fear that we would actually stop the flow of illegal immigrants into the country. There are all kinds of ramifications of that, political and economic. We do not want to deal with that, and we do not want to adjust our policies because we are afraid of the politics. I am not, and I know the gentleman is not, and I know there are other Members of this body who are not afraid to address this issue. There are hundreds of thousands of people like Kris who serve every day on that line who look to us for that kind of leadership and support. They see us as their only hope to ever get the job done. And we have a duty to them to do everything we can. We ask them to do everything they can. We asked Kris Eggle to do everything he could do to protect that national monument, that national park; and he did everything that he could do. It is up to us to do everything that we can do in this body to make sure that his death was not in vain. Mr. Speaker, I yield to my colleague.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I join my colleague from Colorado tonight in raising some concerns about the present situation in which the United States finds itself in terms of its relationships around the world, and as we all know, we are about to begin the debate on one of the most serious, perhaps more, in fact, the most serious topic that can ever confront this or any legislative body, and that is, whether or not we should commit the young men and women of this Nation who have valiantly volunteered their services to the defense of the Nation, whether we should commit them into harm's way in a far-off land in a war that could certainly become catastrophic in its dimensions. We do not know, of course, how to plan for its outcome except to say that we do know that it will be fought, if, in fact, we engage in this thing, it will be fought by brave men and women who have always, as the President said, made us proud. If we commit those precious resources to the task at hand, the task that was laid out by the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. McInnis), then it appears to me we must do everything humanly possible, everything humanly possible to protect and defend them in their duty and to protect and defend the people of the United States of America. That is, after all, our primary responsibility, our raison d'etre, our reason for being. The Federal Government has assumed many responsibilities over the years since the Constitution was written, and we have assumed those responsibilities sometimes, I think, without regard to what constitutional restraints were so clearly identified by the Founding Fathers. We are involved in innumerable activities, programs and sponsorships that were never, ever contemplated by the Framers of the Constitution, but the one thing that we must carefully consider is the responsibility that we were given to protect and defend the people and the property of the United States of America. I can be persuaded by the gentleman from Colorado's (Mr. McInnis) arguments that our interests, our vital interests do, in fact, demand that we take a preemptive strike. I should say that we take preemptive action in Iraq. I can be persuaded that that is possibly the case. I must admit, however, that I need more information personally to cast a vote about which I have absolutely no misgivings if I am going to be voting to send sons and daughters off to war because I, I am sure like hopefully most of our colleagues in this body, will consider this in the following fashion. Do I believe personally that this problem we face, that the threat that we face in the United States is so great that I am willing to send my son off to war, not just vote to send someone else's son or daughter, but am I willing to do so myself? This is a very high standard, and it is one that I believe every single Member must establish for themselves, and I can be persuaded that it is necessary to do so. I must say that in this deliberation, there is something that is being left out. When people, even the President of the United States, says things like we will do everything necessary to defend the interests of this country, I like hearing it. I want to believe it. I want to believe that we will, in fact, do everything necessary to protect country, and while that might very well be to send men and women to Iraq, or places far flung all over the world, it is also completely logical, self-evident, that what we must do even before we do that in order to protect and defend the people of this country, what we must do is to defend our own borders, and this, I suggest, has not been done and is not being contemplated. Over my August district work period I went to the borders and went to the southern and northern borders of the country. I first went to Arizona and then on to California where I observed firsthand the problems that we face on those borders, and let me say, Mr. Speaker, that the face of illegal immigration into this country, people coming across our borders without our permission or without our knowledge, the face of illegal immigration in my district, in Littleton, Colorado, perhaps the Chair's in Arkansas, but the face of illegal immigration in my district is one of a benign activity for the most part, people working menial jobs, for the most part in restaurants and landscaping activities, and people we say to ourselves, well, yes, they are here illegally, but after all, they are just trying to make a living. The face of illegal immigration on the border, on our borders with Mexico and on our borders with Canada, that face is much, much uglier. That is the face of drug smuggling, of murder and of people coming into this country for the purposes of doing us great harm. That is what we see when we actually go to the border before it becomes diffuse throughout the land. I visited the Tohono O'odham Indian reservation where they are under siege, and I mean that in the most literal definition of the term. They are under siege. The Tohono O'odham Indians have a 76-mile border coterminous with Mexico. Across that 76-mile border come 1,500 illegal aliens a day, and they are not just people coming for the good life. They are not just people coming to work at some sort of menial task in the United States, a task that ``no American will take'' and send their money back home, in this case to Mexico for the most part. They are coming into the United States, many, in fact, perhaps even a majority, of the people coming across that border a day, 1,500 a day, it is estimated that well over 1,000 are involved with the drug trade and they are bringing with them literally tons of illegal drugs every single day. They have, in fact, put this Indian reservation into the status of being a captive nation. They have taken over two of the small communities in this reservation. When I say taken over, what I mean by that, I mean that they have threatened or coerced or bribed or addicted so many people in these two communities that they are essentially now nothing more than extensions of the drug trafficking of several Mexican cartels. I met with people who told me that they are afraid to go out on their street at night; that they cannot let their children out. I saw 5-year- olds who were stoned, who had been given drugs. Their parents had been given drugs in order to coerce them and/or entice them, is perhaps the better word in this case, into becoming part of the drug trafficking network established by these cartels. I saw the devastation to this particular Indian reservation. They are begging for help. As they say, their way of life is being destroyed. The vandalism, the robbery, the rapes, the incidence of all these things has gone up dramatically. Just one aspect, the trash alone that is hauled in and discarded by 1,500 people a day coming into their reservation is enormous. Where, may I ask, is the Sierra Club when we need them? Where are the Friends of the Earth? Where are all of the people who decry the devastation of our, of the natural habitats around the country and around the world? This Nation's natural habitat, their ecology is being destroyed by illegal immigrants coming across that border. Hundreds of thousands of plastic water bottles, clothing, trash of every kind and description, discarded everywhere along their path. People racing through their communities, either trying to escape the border patrol agents or simply trying to make their way north have endangered the lives of their children so that they do not allow their kids to go outside and play. What I have just described, Mr. Speaker, is the face of illegal immigration on the border. One of the things that they told us when we were down there is that it is not just Mexican nationals coming across now, but a dramatic increase, they have witnessed, in what they refer to as OTMs, or other than Mexicans. A dramatic increase in the number of Chinese coming through, a dramatic increase in the number of Asians from countries all over that part of the world, a dramatic number of Middle Easterners coming through. For what purpose, I would ask? Does anyone think these people are coming across in order to get landscaping jobs? Are the Middle Easterners that are coming across that border illegally looking to work in restaurants as dishwashers, cooks and servers? In my own State, and in my own city, the biggest gang element is Asian. And they are quite predominantly illegals. But beyond that, what, we may ask, I think, are the Middle Easterners coming in for? What are they doing here? Why are they coming in illegally through Mexico? Now, I suggest that there is a great possibility that they are coming in for purposes that are heinous. I do not know that. I have not been able to interview them because, of course, they come through without the slightest bit of intervention on our part. We do not stop them. We cannot stop them because we have no resources in place to do so. And even when we do stop them, even when they are interdicted farther inland, farther up into the United States, and when the INS is called and told we have a lot of people here in a van, in a truck, in a house, we have a lot of people here who are here illegally, the INS tells the local law enforcement agents, let them go, we do not have time. We do not have time. Twenty-five illegal aliens were caught in a tractor-trailer truck in Dallas on July 27. The INS initially detained several, then released even these and ``paroled them'' into the United States. They have an automatic parole process. The INS can do this. The INS can say we will parole these people we have just caught, let them go, and then we will send them a letter later on telling them to report for their deportation hearing. Now, this would be laughable, of course, if it were not so dangerous. This is a Saturday Night Live skit. ``Here is your letter. We know you have snuck into the United States, so please report in 6 months to the following location for your deportation hearing.'' Right. ``Thank you. Of course, I will.'' They actually call these letters ``run letters.'' What they mean by that is that when the people receive them, of course they run. They go away. They do not go back to their country of origin, they run into American society. Now, if we are so concerned about the possibility of a terrorist attack on the United States, which is the only thing we have heard again and again and again from the leadership, from Members of Congress who support our efforts, support the President in his desire to depose Saddam Hussein, if we are so concerned about that, and believe me, I am, then why would we not take just as much, no, not just as much, why would we not take even more care and concern about our own national borders? On August 4 in Rogers County, Oklahoma, State troopers caught seven aliens who admitted they were illegally present in the country. The INS again would not pick them up and remove them. During the Memorial Day weekend in New York the INS reportedly ``did not want to be bothered,'' so they refused to take custody of several Mid Eastern illegal aliens. Local police officers had caught them at the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel during a terror alert. I remember this incident, Mr. Speaker. They actually had these people in custody. These were Mid Eastern illegal aliens. They called the INS. It was Memorial Day weekend, and so the called was routed from New York, because no one was at their workstation, it was routed to Vermont, where the person answering said to the police in New York City, ``let them go.'' These are just a few of the literally hundreds, if not thousands, of cases like this that I could relate to the body tonight. With all of the talk about the need to increase our efforts of vigilance and be careful about things we see and things we hear, with all of that, and with all of the efforts being made now to extend the war against terrorism beyond Afghanistan and into other parts of the Middle East, it is amazing to me, it is incredible to me, and it should be to every single Member of this body, that we leave our own borders undefended. Does anyone believe for even a second that should we prosecute this war in a more aggressive fashion than is presently the situation that there will not be some reaction on the part of the people, specifically Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda and fundamentalist Islam? We are told that if we go into Iraq, we must be concerned about the ramifications throughout the Middle East; that perhaps other countries with governments more friendly to the United States may fall as a result of having internal dissent because the phenomenon of fundamentalist Islam is so pervasive in these countries. We are told that that is what we must watch out for, what we must be careful of. But we are not told, and there is no precaution being made right now, for our own security within this Nation. We know there will be a reaction. What will that reaction be? Does anybody think it will simply be confined to the Middle East? Now, everyone knows, certainly Saddam Hussein knows, that he cannot win in a conventional war against the United States. He can make it bloody. He can make it ugly. But he cannot win. He knows that. The world knows that. What makes us think for a moment that we will be left unscathed in the United States if we embark upon this path of action in the Middle East? Certainly the possibility exists that al Qaeda agents, that fundamentalist Islam will react in a way so as to increase the number of people that they already have in the United States, the cells that are operating here, that we are told by our Justice Department are operating, that are here in the United States and are ready to go into action at a moment's notice. We know there are cells operating in Canada. We know there are cells operating in Mexico. Why is it not the most logical thing for us to say, well, we have to be careful here. Before we even go into Iraq, we must secure our borders. The reason, I fear, Mr. Speaker, that we do not do that is because, as Governor Ridge said, right there in the well of the House, to a question posed to him from, I think, this microphone about his reluctance and the reluctance on the part of the administration, and in fact most of the Congress, I suppose. No, I should qualify that, because the House has in fact passed an amendment to the defense authorization bill allowing for the military to be used on the border, and we have done that year after year after year, but it has failed in the other body. But when asked why we have not used all of our resources to defend our borders, including the military, Governor Ridge said there are political and cultural reasons why we cannot do so. Well, there may be political and cultural prices to pay. I do not even know what he meant by cultural reasons. I do know what he meant by political reasons. We are concerned that if we in fact secure our borders and prevent people from coming into the United States illegally, we will in some way or other jeopardize our relationship with the government of Mexico and that we will simultaneously lose votes from Mexican Americans who somehow feel that this is a personal affront if we try to defend our own borders. Mr. Speaker, I do not believe that for a moment. I do not believe Mexican-Americans are any less concerned about the safety of themselves and their families than any other group of Americans. I believe that a case can be made to them and to every single person in the United States as to why it is imperative that we secure our own borders. I believe we can do that. I believe that we will benefit as a result in terms of the politics, but whether we do or do not benefit politically, who cares. Is it not our absolute and total responsibility to do so? There are cultural and political reasons why we cannot defend our own borders. I wonder how if there is another event of some great magnitude, which we all anticipate, which we hear every single day is a distinct not just possibility but probability, and if this is perpetuated by someone who has entered this country illegally, and/or people who have been recruited into a terrorist network by people who have come here illegally, I wonder what we will tell the spouses, the sons, the daughters of those people who are killed in that event. We will make many, many speeches about how heroic their loved ones were, how heroic the efforts were of the people who tried to save them. Will we also say, I wonder, that there were political and cultural reasons why we could not protect them? I do not know how anyone could look into the faces of the people whose loved ones have been lost in an event of that nature and say those words. But say them we would have to if we follow the path we are on today. The President has just submitted an action plan in which he calls for smart borders, and there is quite a lengthy list of things the administration has proposed: biometric identifiers, permanent resident cards, single alternative inspection systems, refugee and asylum processing reforms, handling of refugee asylum claims, visa policy coordination, air preclearance, advanced passenger information, joint passenger analysis, a lot of stuff about customs and how to bring goods into the United States; and I applaud them all. I do not for a moment suggest that these are not good and salutary measures to take; but I look in here, I look in vain for the most important measure we can take to create a smart border, and that is to put the military in place to defend that border. Right now we cannot do that. We cannot do it with the Border Patrol. They are inhibited from actually achieving the goals of securing our borders by the fact the administration, the INS, is incompetent and completely unmotivated to act in this particular capacity. They are restricted by a myriad of laws we have passed here, confusing, conflicting laws, allowing for people to be retained in this country even after they have been found to be here illegally. We have refused to provide the resources necessary to actually secure the borders for one reason and one reason only: because it is politically and culturally unacceptable. Well, I do not know who it is culturally unacceptable to. I do not know who it is politically unacceptable to, but those are not legitimate reasons for abandoning our own defenses. And no matter how much we do in the Middle East, no matter how many resources we put into accomplishing the goal of deposing Saddam Hussein, no matter what we do around the world to increase the number of countries that would be categorized as democracies rather than dictatorships, we will be at every step of the way in that process putting our own people in greater and greater danger if we do not do everything possible to secure our borders. I, of course, cannot promise even if we do everything I have asked for, even if we completely reform the INS, even if we give Border Patrol agents greater authority and ability to actually do their job, even if we put military on the border, I cannot promise that someone with malicious intent cannot or will not get through; but at least I can say we did everything we can do, which is living up to the President's admonition to us, that we must do everything that we can do. That includes defending our own border. What an amazing world we live in. What an interesting and incredible dilemma we face. We are told every day that it is a war that we are in, a war for our own survival, that America's way of life is at stake. What nation can we think of in history that knowing that that is the situation they face, have not in fact done the most obvious thing to try to protect themselves? What this demands is leadership. It demands that the President of the United States tell the people of the United States what needs to be done, even if there is a political price to pay. Mr. Speaker, I suggest that it would not be a negative reaction politically. I suggest that the people of this country are yearning for and desiring him to establish the exact nature of the conflict and also the exact way in which we are going to defend against it. They are hoping that he will say to them that we will in fact secure our borders, and this may mean that we will not have the opportunity to hire cheap labor or recruit people into a political party as new voters. But nonetheless, it has to be done, along with all of the other things that have been outlined by the President, with which I agree and for which I commend him. The border must be secured. I ask, no, I beg the President of the United States to use his power, to use his executive authority to do just that: protect our borders; order the military to the border, allow us to use the expertise and the technology and the manpower we have available to us on our first line of defense. I mentioned that I went recently to the Mexican border, but I also shortly thereafter went to the Canadian border, a little town called Bonner's Ferry, Idaho, where I witnessed a very interesting activity. At the time I got there, there were 100 Marines stationed there just to see whether or not they could in fact coordinate their activities and help the Border Patrol and the U.S. Forest Service and the customs agency control the northern border because I assure Members, although I have spent a great deal of time talking about the southern borders, I assure Members that the problems are just as large on the northern borders. There are over 20,000 Muslims living in Calgary, Canada, which brings into the United States component parts of methamphetamines. They are sold and the proceeds go back to the Muslim groups in Canada, and the money is used to finance terrorist activities throughout the world. Osama bin Laden, because of Canada's peculiar process of establishing who is or is not a refugee, Osama bin Laden could land in Ontario, claim he is Omar the tent maker, not show any identification, and walk immediately into Canadian society, and, of course, shortly thereafter walk unfettered probably into the United States. The problems up there are significant. So there are 100 Marines, and I do not know the genesis of the stationing of these people on that border. I do not know if it was part of a larger strategy or not, but they were using three UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, more often commonly referred to as drones, and a couple of radar stations that were to help identify people coming across that border illegally. It worked. The Marines told me that it was the best training they had ever received because it was real time, real bad guys, and very difficult terrain. We need the resources of the military. We do not have to put people arm in arm along 4,000 or 5,000 miles of border. We have the technology to aid in this. I saw it with my own eyes. It can work. We can make our borders very secure, not perfect but much more difficult to cross illegally than is presently the case. We can do it. The only thing we do not have is the will to do it. We unfortunately create a facade, a Potemkin Village. Prince Potemkin used to put up facades along the villages in his area and when Catherine the Great would sail down the river, she would see these beautiful villages. But behind these facades, of course, it was abject poverty. That is where the phrase Potemkin Village comes from. In a way that is what we have created or we have tried to create on the borders. We have increased the number of border patrol. We have established something called smart borders. We have told Americans that we are doing what is necessary to defend our borders, but it is nothing more than the creation of a Potemkin Village along the borders. They are just facades. They are not true defense mechanisms. Because what we are trying to do is to pretend to the American people that we are taking our responsibility of border defense seriously while at the same time assuring that people can come through illegally in order to, quote, take the jobs that no one else will take and in order to increase the ranks of political parties in the United States that benefit as a result of massive immigration, one particular political party, of course, the Democratic party, and the fear that if we actually got tough on the borders, there would be a political reaction. And there would be certainly outcries by immigration advocacy groups, especially immigration lawyers. They would raise Cain. But is our responsibility here to pander to those political extremists? Or is our responsibility to protect and defend the people and the property of the United States of America? Again what a strange world we live in, whereby we can be talking about going off to war, recognizing all of the danger that that entails for the people we are sending but also for the people who are here, the people who remain, and not do anything to protect us. What an amazing situation. Mr. Speaker, I hope and pray that our words, our admonitions, our concerns will be heeded by our other colleagues and by the administration. The stakes are so high, the risks are so great that we cannot possibly avoid doing what is right even at our own political peril should that be the case which, as I say, I do not believe for a moment would happen, but even if it did, that is what is required of us here, to do the right thing, even if it is politically or culturally problematic.

Mr. TANCREDO

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