Tom Tancredo

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, many of our colleagues have come to the floor today to express their deep commitment to doing everything that can be done to ensure the protection of the American people. It is a laudable sentiment, but one that rings hollow when juxtaposed against the fact that today our borders are just as porous and just as undefended as they were on September 11, 2001. We may indeed wish to go home to our constituents and tell them that we have done everything we can do, but that would be far from the truth. Just last week a television program documented the ease with which human smugglers illegally bring people into the United States, including potential terrorists. This is 10 months after September 11. This situation will improve only marginally by the creation of this new agency, and that is because of only one thing. It is the consolidation of the various border enforcement activities that now reside in a myriad of Federal agencies, each one operating within a vacuum, with little if any communication between and among them. But even this effort is being crippled because perhaps the most moribund of all of these agencies, namely, the Department of State does not want to give up a responsibility that they have so dismally failed to uphold. We have heard the horror stories, but it is not all due to just incompetence. Much of the slipshod process is a result of a culture within the Department of State. Consular officials are told that their primary responsibility is to treat every applicant for a visa as if they were a ``customer'' and to expedite the process as quickly as possible with as little inconvenience to the ``customer'' as possible. Hence, most interviews are completed literally in seconds. Of course, some of those ``customers'' showed their appreciation for this consideration by crashing airplanes into our buildings. Even today, attempts to enforce security standards are resisted by the State Department. In Mexico, consular officials today have been told to ignore FBI requests to fingerprint and record all applicants on particular watch lists. They are told that it would take, quote, ``too much time.'' I ask you, if you were leaving home at night, would the State Department be the type of neighbor with whom you would leave the keys to your house? Vote for the Weldon amendment.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, in my office hangs a picture of a woman-- Marta Farias holding a photograph of her son--Lazaro Planes Farias. Mr. Planes is one of an estimated 400 Cuban political prisoners who have been unjustly imprisoned for having the courage to publicly speak out against the Communist regime, a regime which lives in perpetual terror of its citizens exercising the most basic forms of human rights. The Cuban Government's official charge against Mr. Planes is that he committed ``disrespect and resistance.'' His ``disrespect'' was to have the audacity to form an opposition political party to promote freedom. knowing the grave risk he was taking by openly opposing Fidel Castro, Planes continued to speak out--demading human rights and democracy for all Cubans. He was released from prison following a request by Pope John Paul-- the Second in 1998, but soon after the Pope's visit--the Communist authorities deemed him too great a risk, and imprisoned him again. Planes suffers today in Castro's gulags--recognized by human rights groups as some of the worst prisons in the world. Castro has not allowed the International Committee of the Red Cross to inspect prison conditions since 1989. And it's no wonder--men and women who refuse to undergo ``re-education'' in the gulag are subjected to daily beatings, malnourishment and an appalling lack of medical care. The United States of America and the rest of the world can no longer remain silent. The struggle undertaken by these courageous men and women demands international recognition. That is why I have joined with 17 of my colleagues in the House and Senate in the Congressional Cuban Political Prisoners Initiative. Each month we will feature a new prisoner. And each month there will be a new name, a new face and a new story which strikes down Castro's lie that there are no political prisoners in Cuba. I am here today to urge my colleagues on both sides to stand with me in demanding the unconditional release of Mr. Farias and all Cuban political prisoners.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to offer an amendment that I hope will help those of us among the body who feel a terrible mistake was made in an earlier amendment that actually increased funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. My amendment reduces funding for the National Endowment for the Arts by $50 million and redirects the money into the budget for the U.S. Forest Service. We all know and certainly have had a lot of discussion about the devastating impact the fires have had on the American West, with hundreds of thousands of acres in Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, and my home State of Colorado reduced to charcoal by wildfire. In many of these States, the fire season is only now underway. According to the Forest Service, an additional 73 million acres remain at risk to catastrophic fire. To put it in perspective, 73 million acres is an area slightly larger than the State of Arizona. While this amendment only reduces its budget, few programs seem more worthy of outright elimination than the National Endowment for the Arts. First created in 1965, the NEA has been one of the most controversial government programs on the books, almost since its inception. The most notorious aspects of the NEA have been talked about for many years, and I will not go into them today. Instead of squandering nearly $100 million on questionable and offensive exhibits, we should utilize these funds in a way that better serve the public interest. In a lean budget year like this one, we ought to not squander limited resources on subsidizing the arts. Instead, I believe we should use these funds to increase the government's ability to help control and prevent wildfires in the American West. My amendment would do just that by redirecting the portion of the NEA budget to the U.S. Forest Service Wildland Fire Management Plan, splitting the dollars between fire suppression efforts and hazardous fuels reduction programs. Mr. Chairman, President Theodore Roosevelt's then agricultural secretary James Wilson wrote a letter where he said, ``And where conflicting interests must be reconciled, the question should always be decided from the standpoint of the greatest good for the greatest number over the long run.'' I ask my colleagues to let Mr. Wilson's words guide them in their actions today when making a decision on this amendment. Which program will do the greatest good for the greatest number.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, in listening to this debate, Members would think that in fact prior to the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts, prior to the hundreds of millions of dollars that we have taken away from our taxpayers and given to that organization, if we do not pass this amendment, there will be no art. All of the wonderful things that art has done through our history has been recounted by the supporters of this particular amendment. Of course, who can argue that art is not a good thing? It is a great thing. It is a wonderful thing. I am all for art. And I can assure Members, if we defeat this amendment, and if we struck all funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, there would still be art. It actually existed before the National Endowment for the Arts. It actually was able to thrive, to be nurtured by individuals, to somehow find its way into the public life before the National Endowment for the Arts and certainly before this amendment was even thought of. We have heard over and over again about the effect of art on students, that they learn more. The effect of art on the general population, that we are all somehow made better individually as a result of having art out there. That is probably true. I will not even deny that there is some effect on children's learning, on just the general nature of the population if you have a lot of art available to you. I have heard these things stated so far: It changed their lives, elevated their thinking, improved their test scores. It is about inspiration. Mr. Chairman, every single one of those things can be attributed to another aspect of our culture, and that is religion. As a matter of fact, children who come from religious households do score better on test scores. It is something that improves all of our lives, at least I believe. So why do we not appropriate $100 million a year to religion? It does all of the same things that this particular amendment does or that the National Endowment for the Arts says they do, but, of course, we do not appropriate money to religion because we would then argue about whose religion should be centered and identified and given the money. You are right. We should not do that. We should not appropriate money for religion. We should not appropriate money for the arts because it is in the eye of the beholder as to what is art. And to take money away from somebody in my district to determine what somebody in your district thinks is art is, I think, unfair. This amendment is, of course, unfair. The National Endowment for the Arts, as far as I am concerned, should not be funded at all. Certainly it should not be given the opportunity to have another grab at the apple.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, today I rise to honor the work of Arapahoe County Sheriff Patrick Sullivan who has chosen to retire after 19 years of service to his community, and his country. For the past 40 years, since he was a Littleton police officer and dispatcher, he has shown an unwavering devotion to ``serve and protect.'' In 1979, he joined the Arapahoe County sheriff's office as a patrol division commander. In 1983 he was named as the undersheriff and six months later appointed to the position of Arapahoe County Sheriff after the death of his predecessor Ed Nelson who suffered a heart attack. Sheriff Sullivan went on to win four popular elections and although he is still eligible for one additional term under Colorado's term-limit laws, he has chosen to serve as the security director of Cherry Creek School District. During his tenure as sheriff, Arapahoe County has grown from a relatively sparsely populated area of rural Colorado to a thriving suburb consisting of more than 500,000 and he has done an excellent job of dealing with the problems that arise with such rapid growth. He has served admirably and with distinction since being appointed in June, 1983. Sheriff Sullivan was named Sheriff of the Year by the National Sheriff's Association, during the 2000 election cycle, he was the Law Enforcement Chairman for the Colorado George W. Bush for President Committee and a member of the Law Enforcement Coalition for the Republican National Committee Victory 2000. He received the Valor Award by the Kiwanis Club of Littleton and was named one of the 10 ``Outstanding Men of the Decade'' by the Littleton Times newspaper as well as ``Man of the Decade'' by the Littleton Sentinel Independent. He received the Anti-Defamation League's Civil Rights Award, and was instrumental in discussions concerning Homeland Defense from the perspective of local law enforcement. It has been an honor to work with Sheriff Sullivan, particularly when difficult and tragic events in my district required the cool-minded consideration of experienced members of the law enforcement community. Pat Sullivan represents the best our country has to offer and in his retirement, I look forward to his continued friendship.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. Although the gentleman did say it very well, it was made even more profound, I think, and more articulate by the gentleman's brilliant analysis. I do sincerely appreciate the gentleman coming down this evening. The gentleman points out several ironic, would be one way to describe them, or infuriating is another way to describe these situations, these events, these things with which we are now dealing almost daily. It seems to me I confront something like this all the time where we hear something like this and we say, How could this be? This could not really be. For instance, four DUIs, and he cannot be deported? We have constructed on our Web site a list of things that we call ``incredible but true,'' and Members can go to that Web site, www.house.gov/Tancredo and go to the immigration page on that Web site, and Members will see these. If they wish, people are able to go to that Web site and sign a petition to the President of the United States asking him to please augment the forces that we presently have on the border, the Border Patrol people that are so, right now, inundated. They are so overrun, outgunned, outmanned by the people they are trying to keep out of this country that they are in desperate shape. So we are asking the President to actually help us help them by putting military on the border. Members can go there and sign a petition. I see that my colleague, the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher), has something else he wants to say.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I sincerely appreciate it. The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) has been also enormously helpful as a member of our committee and a person to whom I turn often for advice and consultation. It is important I think that we should point out that it was the amendments of the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) to the defense authorization bill that did, in fact, provide, if it is passed by the other body, signed into law, it will provide the President with that authorization. And I sincerely hope that it is retained by the Senate. This would not be the first time we have passed that resolution, and every time we have done so in the past the Senate has chosen to simply ignore it. This is, I hope, a change as a result of all of the events of the last several months. The last 10 months really would help the Members of the other body understand the need for doing this and certainly would help the President also. Mr. Speaker, again, I want to just say that there has been an enormous amount of talk about the need to protect the United States from future terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, there has not been enough action, certainly far more talk than action. Since 9-11, we are absolutely not one bit safer today in this country. Our borders are not one bit more secure than they were at the time that the terrorists flew the planes into the buildings here in the United States and killed 3,000 of our citizens. That is an unacceptable position to be in for the Members of this body. For the administration to ignore the security of our borders as one aspect of this war that we are fighting, is irresponsible to say the least. And all I can hope is that they will heed the advice of the colleagues that joined me tonight, especially the President, in putting troops on the borders, that is the number one thing, and the rest of the Members of this body to tighten up our immigration policy.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for joining us this evening. The gentleman brought up several interesting points, not the least of which is the cost of illegal immigration, the cost to the country. There are a whole host of ramifications of illegal immigration into the country. People do not like talking about any of them. But there is an enormous economic cost to illegal immigration, and it far outweighs the amount of money that is contributed, quote/unquote, to the American society by the taxes that many of these people pay. It is true that if they come here and they work and they are working for wages that can be taxed, that is to say they are not working under the counter, just being paid under the table, they will pay some sort of tax, and they pay a tax on the things they buy. But the reality is that for the most part 90-some percent of the people who are here and especially who are here illegally have the lowest-paying jobs. They are low-skilled people who, therefore, of course are employed at a marginal level. They pay relatively little, if anything, number one, in income tax and certainly not all that much even in the sales tax because their purchasing power is relatively low. We do not gain a tremendous amount of revenue from the people who come here and are working illegally. But we do gain a tremendous amount of cost. Recently Rice University estimated that the undocumented aliens in the United States cost taxpayers $24 billion every single year. And by the way, in Arizona a Federal judge has just added to that. To go on the list of incredible, but true, things about immigration, let us add this one: right now 175 illegals in Arizona are getting free kidney dialysis treatments, free kidney dialysis. Many of them came across the border to obtain this service. Now, it was supposed to end on June 30, but Judge Browning has extended the benefits for five illegals who are ``very ill.'' Now the question we have to ask ourselves, how many people in our own districts, how many people who have been here all their lives, that were born here, grandparents born here, that are citizens of the United States, paid taxes all their lives, how many of them can afford kidney dialysis or have it paid for or that were able to have it paid for by the State? And yet people who can come into this country illegally, take advantage of our system, take advantage of our laws, can receive this treatment? It is not fair. I am sorry for them that they need the treatment. How much can we possibly afford, is the question? How much can we afford? And why should we be doing it for people who are not citizens? There are a lot of people who would suggest that in reality there is nothing different from being just here physically in this country and being here as a citizen. But I suggest to you that there is an enormous amount of difference, and we should not ignore it. Another colleague who has joined me this evening, another member of our Immigration Reform Caucus and another member who, long before I came to the Congress, has been laboring in this vineyard and bringing to the attention of the American people concerns about illegal immigration, my colleague from Virginia (Mr. Goode).

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to bring to the attention of my colleagues a number of issues. I have listened, as I have been sitting here preparing my notes, to the previous speaker, and there are many concerns that he expresses that I certainly share. Before I get into the main part of my comments, I do just want to make one statement regarding the issue of wildfires and their cause, the reason for the severe nature of the fires we are having in my State and the others around the West. I certainly agree with the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) when he says that what has contributed to this condition in our Nation's forests has been 100 years of fire suppression philosophy. The idea that we had to try to put out every fire that started in our forests has undoubtedly been a wrong-headed approach. We recognize now that fires, of course, can be healthy. I say ``can be,'' because it is not necessarily the case. It is not always the case that every type of fire that you have is a ``healthy'' phenomenon. There are certain kinds of fires that are enormously destructive, not just in the terms that we naturally think of when we hear of a wildfire, but there are certainly other aspects of it. So not allowing for a natural process to occur, constantly getting in there and trying to stop all fires, is not good, and I agree. Now the question becomes one of how to deal with it. Is it to simply ignore the fact that we have forests in the Nation that have accumulated up to 400 tons, 400 tons per acre, of fuels, when the average amount, what we would call a healthy natural forest, is around 10 tons per acre? Is it to simply ignore that, leave it, and say because we do not like the idea that mankind, that governments have attempted to intervene in this process, and that has been problematic, is it to suggest that we have no role to play? I would state categorically that it is just the opposite. Now that we know what the problem is, now that we have some sense of what has contributed to this enormous problem, then what we need to do as a government and as a public policy is to try to address it, and it is not to ignore it. It is not to pretend that the potential for these catastrophic fires does not exist and to simply walk away from the forests and the management thereof to some other kind of bucolic world in which, after all of the forests in the United States have burned to the ground, in a couple of hundred years they will all be back in a more natural and pristine state. That is essentially what our environmentalist friends are asking us to do. However, we do have options. We do have alternatives. What we have learned is that you can actually now reduce the catastrophic kind of fires that we are experiencing in the West by management, by enlightened forest management. Part of that is what we call controlled burning, where we go to the area, the Forest Service goes into a particular area and does in fact burn a lot of the underbrush and burn those fuels in an area and in a way that they can contain it so it does not, hopefully, get out of control. It has happened in the past, Los Alamos is a horrible example, but, for the most part, it does not happen that it gets out of control. We have in fact over the years had hundreds, if not thousands, of controlled burns. They have all worked perfectly well. It does help create a more natural environment. It also helps stop the spread of catastrophic fires like the one we are having. I have seen it with my own eyes in Colorado, in the forests we are now dealing with, with the firings we are now dealing with, where we have allowed for a controlled burn. The Hayman fire, which is the one that has consumed 150,000 acres, you can actually see where it has come up against what was called the Polhemus burn, which was a controlled burn, come up against that area, and essentially stopped because there was not the fuel to have it continue. We can manage the forests by controlled burns. We can also manage the forests by thinning, by going in and actually taking out a lot of this underbrush, by cutting down trees, yes, I am saying it, cutting down trees, especially the trees with the small circumference, and a lot of the underbrush that has been so problematic in these fires. We can do this. There are ways to manage forests, not to stop all fires, but to make the fires that do occur a product of or manifestation of that healthy ecosystem. It is this area, this point of conflict, that we find ourselves in with our friends in the environmental community, especially the more radical elements of that community, who have stopped every single attempt on the part of the government to try and manage the forests, of the Forest Service to try to manage those forests, and, as a matter of fact, were successful in stopping the Forest Service from doing any sort of thinning right in the middle of the area we now call the Hayman fire. A year-and-a-half ago the Forest Service proposed to go in there and thin parts of that area, to clean out that kind of underbrush. The environmentalist community filed appeals. They worked for a year-and-a- half with them to try to come to some resolution of their concerns. When the Forest Service thought the concerns were met, they went ahead to start the process. What do you think happened? Guess what? The environmentalists went in there and filed the appeal again, stopped the process again. That was a year-and-a-half ago, and, of course, now that issue is moot, irrelevant, because that part of the forest, along with another 150,000 acres, are simply pieces of charcoal. So we can do a lot to mitigate the disastrous effects of the fire. As for the wildlife wildland-urban interface, that is problematic. We can also control that. There are zoning laws we can adopt and, in many, many cases, have already. It is not the fault of an American who wants to live near a forest or in the forest area. It is not their fault that we have fires or that the fires are catastrophic. To this point, we have not had a fire in Colorado, of which I am aware, actually, that was started because someone was living near a forest. I am not saying that has not happened. Nothing I am aware of recently. None of the major fires were started by people who happened to live in or near the forests. Unfortunately, the two most horrendous fires we have burning or have just brought under control in the United States, one in Colorado and one in Arizona, were started by Forest Service personnel. In Colorado, the lady that started the fire apparently, apparently started the fire, I should say, is a Forest Service employee directly. The gentleman in Arizona who apparently started this fire is someone who is employed by the Forest Service to go in and help the Forest Service fight fires. He is a smoke jumper and he wanted to essentially be employed, so he started this fire thinking I will get the job; I can go in and fight the fire. It got away from him, and 500,000 acres burned down. An area actually now larger than the size of Los Angeles has burned in Arizona. So this idea that you have got people living on or near the land and therefore we have these big problems, that is really not it. Yes, there are homes that are destroyed, and it is true and horrible, but the people who have chosen to live there take that kind of risk and pay insurance premiums that reflect that, for the most part. Anyway, I just wanted to talk about that. There are many other issues, but that was not the main purpose of my coming to the floor tonight. I did want tonight to reflect upon another speaker who had the hour before the gentleman from Oregon, and this was my dear friend and colleague, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul), a gentleman whom, by the way, I respect enormously and whose opinions and attitudes I believe are incredibly profound and need to be heard. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul) is a devout libertarian who has in many, many cases and many, many times, I think, been a lone voice for a variety of different causes here and a perspective that is not heard often enough. Of course, there are certain aspects of his presentation, of his discussion tonight, with which I must disagree, especially in terms of what our responsibility is as a Nation to defend ourselves against the war that we are now involved in and whether or not we can argue about the purpose of the war, I should say the genesis of it. But I do not think we can argue about the fact that we are in one. The question that I think this House must always deal with, and I commend my colleague, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul), for being such an articulate defender of the fact or the idea, the philosophy, that we must never surrender individual freedom and liberty in the pursuit of ultimate security. I certainly agree with that, that that is a terribly difficult balance that we are asked to try and maintain here in this Congress. And the issue is to what extent does this government have a responsibility to actually try to defend itself against the threat that we, I think, that we now face, and what are the measures that we can legitimately take to defend ourselves, considering the nature of our opponent, our enemy. That is really the ultimate debate we are having. What is the nature of the fight we are in? Is it just against this small band of terrorists who have, as we have been told, hijacked a particular religious philosophy? And, if so, if it is just against a small band? Maybe we can name them al Qaeda. If that is it, if that is our only war, I would agree with my colleague, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul), that the steps presently taken, the steps we have taken up to this point in time, may have been overreaction, because it is a relatively small group and we can identify who they are by name, we can go after them wherever they are, find them, arrest them, kill them, if that is the only alternative. But I believe that that is not the nature of the battle or of the enemy that we face. I believe it is much broader than that. I believe it is in fact fundamentalist Islam that we are fighting tonight, today, yesterday, and will be fighting for many years to come. It is something far larger than this small group of people. Tonight, maybe, during this discussion we will have the opportunity to go through this at greater length, to determine what exactly it is then our Nation should do, if we are faced with that broader, more broadly defined enemy. One of the things I believe we must absolutely do is to work to control our borders. It is incumbent upon us, it is incumbent upon us because we call ourselves a Nation State, because we believe ourselves to be a sovereign Nation. We claim that, and I believe we are, I believe we are separate and distinct from the other nations of the world. I believe that becoming an American citizen, for instance, means more and should mean more than simply crossing a line, simply stepping over a boundary. I believe there are all kinds of things that are incumbent upon an individual when they become a citizen of this country, and I believe that there are people in this world, there are, in fact, far too many people in this world, that would destroy this Nation, everything we stand for, everything we believe in, and physically destroy us, not just our philosophy, but all of us living here. I believe that that is the nature of the fight we are in, and I believe that there are many things we need to do. Among them is to actually secure our own borders. It is to say to the world that we have a right, a responsibility, to defend ourselves. Part of that may be to seek out our enemies in Afghanistan and in Iraq and in the Philippines or wherever they may be hiding. But it is also to defend our own borders from those who would come across for the purpose of doing us harm. And I do not think we should be condemned for that or called myopic or xenophobic or anti-individual freedom. It is the least that our citizens can expect of us, to defend them, so that they can be free to practice their religion and their political philosophies and their individual ways of life. I see that I am joined tonight by the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher) and another colleague whom I will introduce in just a moment. I am glad that they are here. I will gladly yield to my colleague.

Mr. TANCREDO. Reclaiming some of my time, I want to say that the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher) has been enormously flattering in his description of my efforts, and I sincerely appreciate it. But I also know that long before I came to this Congress, there were people here laboring in this vineyard, and the gentleman is one. I want to tell the gentleman how much I appreciate what he has done in this area. It is by circumstance and event and whatever that I ended up in the position of being the spokesman for our caucus, but it is only because of work like the gentleman has done and another colleague I will introduce right now that we have the ability to actually bring, I think, some sanity to this discussion. It is because they have been here for some time, and they have been really and truly pressing this issue. Now, of course, it is on everybody's plate. It is on everybody's top list of things to be concerned about. Why? Only because of horrendous events. They should have been listening to my colleagues a long time ago. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Deal).

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time for just a minute, the gentleman makes a very interesting and, I think, dramatic point here, something I did not know, something that I think a majority of Americans did not know. And I will guarantee my colleagues this: What my colleague has just stated about the status of the gentleman who was here and killed those two people at El Al, that fact, I would be willing to bet anyone dinner and anything else, would never, ever, ever have come out had it not been for the dogged determination of the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher). These are the things that we hear about, but the INS will never admit to. And I hope to see, but I wonder if tomorrow morning we will see on the front page of every newspaper in this country and on every talk show in the country this fact, the fact that my colleague has just pointed out to us; and I will bet again, if it is brought up at all, it will probably be buried, except for the very few parts of the media that have a tendency to support our point of view on this.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, absolutely. Here is the thing: we are now 10 months past 9-11. We can talk about the errors we have made in the Congress in the past and the errors this government has made in the past in the crazy-quilt patchwork type of immigration policy that we have been dealing with here for years, and we can affix blame there, and rightly so. But would the gentleman not think that subsequent to 9-11, subsequent to that horrible event, we would have done something to correct this action, to say, okay, we have made mistakes and we recognize it? But not only have we not done anything significant to correct it, but an interesting article that I came across just the other day said that, since 9-11, we have given out over 50,000 visas to people from countries on the terrorist watch list. This is not just people from countries that are kind of on the fringe; these are people from the countries on the terrorist watch list. We have given out 50,000 visas since then. It is still the case that if people live in Saudi Arabia and want to come to the United States they do not have to go see an actual counselor; they can put it in a drop-box. They can get the visa. No one interviews them. This is coming from Saudi Arabia, a country that we already know many people have come from who have done horrible, horrible things to the United States.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, as I sat here and listened to the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne), I am made even more proud of the folks who represent our side in this great deliberative body that we call the Congress of the United States; and the heartfelt plea that he makes to the Nation I think is, and the rhetoric, the chosen selective rhetoric that he used should certainly be an example for all of us to follow in terms of how to explain an issue and a position that stems solely out of true moral courage, and really no politics are involved at all. I guess I would just like to say to I am proud that I know him, and I am proud to serve in the same assembly that he serves in today. Also, I must add that waiting to address this body and to discuss the issues that I have on my agenda today, I have, of course, listened to my friends from the other side talk about another issue; and they did so at great length, talked about the upcoming debate on a proposal for Medicare, specifically for drug benefits, and how we will provide these drug benefits to senior citizens in this country. In a way, I think it was a great example. It was almost like a class discussion of cynical politics 101. That is all I could think of while I listened to it. Because, as my colleagues know, Mr. Speaker, I have on several occasions sat here waiting for my turn to address the body and listened to my friends on the other side of the aisle talk about a variety of issues, but in the last several weeks, I have noticed that every single time I have been here, and to the best of my recollection almost every time that Members of the other side have taken the floor, they have done so to attack what they call the Republican raid on Social Security and suggests that the profligate spending of this Congress for a variety of programs and specifically the war on terror will cost us a lot of money, money that we do not have and money that we will, therefore, have to borrow from the American public. And that is absolutely true. They have gone on and on and on and on. If anybody has observed the debate in this House over the last several weeks, they have turned every single issue that we are debating into a debate on this raid of the Social Security trust fund in the hope that they could scare the bulk of the voters in this country, especially the elderly voters, into siding with them come November. Presenting a point of view, a reasoned, logical, truthful point of view is one thing, but this attack on the majority party for what is perceived to be our predilection to profligate spending, this is what I call I guess the cynical politics 101 that everyone should pay close attention to this evening and, as a matter of fact, on into the November elections. For weeks, we have talked about and the folks on the other side have condemned this Congress for spending money in the areas I have described. Specifically, of course, it is the war on terror, combined with the downturn in the economy, that have caused us to go into deficit spending; and they have condemned this. Forget about the fact that for the 40 years prior to this Congress or at least this House being in control of the Republican party that we were never ever, ever able to achieve a balanced budget. Forget that. While the other side had control, we were in deficit spending every single year, and nobody even thought about the possibility that might not be good for America. Forget about that. Let us now turn to today's discussion. We heard for the hour prior to the gentleman from Nebraska's (Mr. Osborne) taking the floor that the Democrats have a better plan for Medicare and specifically for the drug benefits for American seniors and that our plan is too stingy, our plan is complicated by issues of choice, the fact that we would give seniors the opportunity to choose among a variety of different alternatives for their drug benefit. They characterize that as immoral and something that we should avoid at all costs. And they suggest that their alternative plan, one that is essentially socialized medicine for all Americans, is better. But I just ask, Mr. Speaker, that we all think about this: How can we spend weeks and weeks and weeks on this floor talking about the fear of raiding the Social Security fund to pay for other programs while completely ignoring the fact that the plan being presented by my Democrat colleagues will cost about $1 trillion over 10 years, $1 trillion over 10 years, and yet that is not, of course, raiding the Social Security trust fund? That somehow is figured into a budget, which of course we do not have; a budget that they refuse to propose. It is a course in politics, as I say politics 101, maybe cynical politics 101, that we should be observing tonight, that we should be referencing, because it is easy for someone out of power to suggest that the majority should do something quite irresponsible. It is easy to do that. It is very difficult to govern. The fearful thing I have in my heart is that some day they may be in power and do exactly what they are suggesting, and that we may turn this entire Nation, the entire Nation's health care system over to the Federal Government. That is a very alluring thing to a lot of people. They just do not want to think about health care costs. This is something so close to one's own emotional hot button that it is very difficult to discuss this logically, and that is something that we on this side of the aisle, I think, try to do often. We try to address these issues from a logical standpoint, not an emotional standpoint. But we are always at a disadvantage in that debate. It is easier to make the case that no one should worry about health care and that the government essentially should be relied upon to keep everybody alive forever, to do everything possible to keep everybody alive forever no matter how much that costs. There are a lot of people out there tonight, I think, Mr. Speaker, who would say, yes, I do not care about future generations, and I do not care about the war on terror, and I do not care about all the other things this Nation spends money on. I care about getting my prescription drugs at a lower cost. And if that means passing it on to someone else, a younger person, a healthier person, so be it; that is the way it should be done. I do not care, because of course I will be dead before too long and who knows and who cares what happens after that. That is a way a lot of people look at this issue, and we hear from them all the time. I do. I am sure the Speaker does, and I know all of our colleagues do. People tell us, I really do not care about the cost. I do not caring about the dollars. We are told that over and over again by people who take polls, people who provide some sort of political consultation to us. They always say, look, the Republicans get too much into detail. Nobody cares about dollars; nobody cares about the detail. Well, I guess that may be true; but I cannot avoid that discussion. I cannot help but talk about the problems this Nation faces from a fiscal standpoint and the degree to which irresponsible spending is a threat to the Nation, is a threat to our own security. Now, I cannot tell my colleagues that I have all the confidence in the world in the Republican plan for Medicare and prescription drug benefits, because, in fact, I may be a ``no'' vote on that bill, but it is not because I think the Democratic plan is better. I think our plan costs $350 billion over 10 years, the Democratic plan $1 trillion. I do not think that our plan is that much better; it is just that their plan is so much worse. I would like to see, frankly, a couple of things. I would like to see the government actually get out of the business of determining what is the appropriate service that any individual in Medicare can have and how much we should pay for that. That is really not my business. I do not know what is the best service, and I do not think any bureaucrat has the slightest idea how much we should pay for it. But that is the Medicare plan that we created in the 1960s. It has grown. It has grown so fast that in the first year of its existence it actually surpassed what Lyndon Johnson said it would cost us in 20 years. It could consume the entire national budget. It easily could do that. Health care costs are astronomical. There is no real market. That is one problem. The other problem is that everything is exacerbated by government bureaucracies. But I am here to say that we need to do a couple of things in that area; and regardless of what we do, it should not cost us a lot more money. It is not something that the Federal Government should actually even be too involved in except to say that if there are people who are in dire straits, people that cannot afford health care costs because they have reached that point in life when they are on fixed incomes and the cost of medication and the cost of health care in general has gone beyond their ability to pay, okay. Okay. If we just do that, if we just focus on that, then we should come up with a true Medicare reform proposal that is something like the following: The Federal Government should say to everybody eligible for Medicare that we will accept a certain amount dollar-wise, in terms of our responsibility for their health care costs, and we will give it to them in the form of a voucher. They can then use that voucher for the purchase of insurance from any of the wide variety of vendors. But our job, the Federal Government's job, is not to determine which provider gives them the service and how much and how many benefits they should derive from their insurance company. That is not our business. If we have a responsibility, if this body determines that we have a responsibility to older Americans for health care costs, it should be in the manner I have described: to say to them, here it is, here is what we have determined. Somewhere between $4,000 and $5,000 a year we are spending per recipient on Medicare, is what I am told, so simply give a Medicare recipient a voucher and have them go out and buy the insurance that will cover their medical costs, which includes, by the way, the cost of prescription drugs. We ought to get out of the business of determining who pays for the doctor, what doctor is eligible, what procedure is eligible, and how much it should cost. That is a plan for disaster. The other side, the Democratic Party, the Democratic suggestion, of course, is a plan for an even greater disaster, because not only will it destroy health care in America and turn us into a Nation similar to those who have already attempted nationalized health care and whose people now come to the United States for their own care, but it will also essentially bankrupt the Nation. Now, I know there are a lot of people out there, as I say, who tell us, I do not care, I do not care what it costs; it is of no consequence to me because someone else will be paying for it. I know there are many people who feel that way. I certainly hear from a lot of them. But I do care, because we are not simply talking about just another one of those government programs. Tonight, Mr. Speaker, as I was walking in, a gentleman asked me if I was going to support the bailout for Amtrak. He thought that I should do so because, after all, the government, as he says, supports a lot of dysfunctional programs. I cannot argue that. I cannot argue that we in fact do support a lot of dysfunctional programs. But I have tried my best, for as long as I have been here anyway, to vote against every one of them. Now, sometimes you get caught up by having to vote for a major piece of legislation that has a lot of dysfunctional programs under it, but we are trying to accomplish a greater goal. That is what we have done, and that is what we have promised people, and that is what they think government is all about. I suggest that every single person who believes that the government is responsible for their health care should go to the Constitution and seek the specific citation in the Constitution that provides that particular responsibility to the Federal Government, that gives that responsibility to the Federal Government. I cannot find it when I look for it. Of course, we do lots of things that are unconstitutional, that are not provided for in the Constitution. I realize that. But, again, as I say, I try my best to vote against them. So unless we do a number of things in that particular piece of legislation, I plan to vote against it. Either way, certainly our side and certainly the other side's position. I would like to see us create a real market system for the purchase of drugs, a market system that allows for drugs to be purchased in every country based upon what the going rate is around the world, not just in one country. I would like us to be able to have people in America buy drugs from Canada or Mexico or China or anyplace else if the drugs were that much cheaper, because that is a worldwide market. Now, I recognize that people say, well, we cannot guaranty the wholesomeness of the drug. But right now, as my friend and colleague, the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht), says all the time, we import literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of prescription drugs every single year from Canada and Mexico. We do it kind of illegally, on the sly. People go down and get it because it is against the law for us to import a drug from these other countries. But people do it because it is so much cheaper, and so far not one single person has died as a result of taking an imported drug. So I must say that, yes, there may be a risk involved; but there is also the fact that there will be enormous, enormous savings to the American consumer by implementing a true market system in the area of drug benefits. The government really has no ability to guaranty everybody cheap drugs or health care that is the finest that the world can provide and that everybody else will pay for. We try our best, and I think our Nation is to be commended for what we do for senior citizens, certainly what we did for my parents, my father, who is in a nursing home and on Medicaid and a recipient of government largess. I understand the incredible value here. I just suggest to us all that we have to at some point, at some point we have to think about what we cannot afford any more; and I would certainly suggest that a plan that costs us $1 trillion today is not something we can afford, and especially presented after weeks and weeks and weeks of attacks on our party, on the Republican Party, for what they determined to be profligate spending and the raiding of the Social Security trust fund. I assure my colleagues that the Social Security trust fund will be a footnote, a small tiny footnote in the entire cost of the Democrat plan for prescription drugs, for socialized medicine. What they say is, we will pay for everything. Go get your drugs; we will pay for it all. That is nice to say. It sounds so wonderful. And it will gain them votes, I have no doubt about that. It will garner them votes. But at what cost? Well, $1 trillion. But even beyond the actual monetary cost, there is a cost to the Nation in terms of our own stability, or financial stability. Mr. Speaker, I want to go on to another issue tonight, and that is the fact the State of Colorado is experiencing what I know other States in the Nation, especially Arizona are experiencing tonight, the ravages of wildfires. Arizona is in a situation that almost dwarfs our own situation in Colorado, which is horrendous. Right now, we have the biggest fire in Colorado essentially under control or contained, I should say. There are other fires that are ravaging the State that are not quite as threatening as the Hayman fire, which is the largest fire in terms of acreage consumed in the State's history. It is, as I say, partially contained. As indicated here by this picture that was taken from the Space Shuttle, there are other fires burning in Colorado. This is the Hayman fire. There is the fire by Durango and the fire in Glenwood Springs and several started over the weekend by lightning. The Durango fire is really progressing quite rapidly. Tonight I want to simply do one thing when it comes to this particular issue, and that is to thank the many people around this country who have come to the rescue of the people who are adjacent to these fires, helped save their homes; and they have come from 25 different States in the Nation, firefighters from all over the country. I know the prayers of millions of Americans have gone out in order to bring these things under control, bring these fires under control. Sunday I had the opportunity to once again fly over the Hayman fire, the scene of so much destruction. Although it was disheartening in many ways, it was also encouraging because you can see that the fire has, in fact, been contained. It is due to a variety of reasons. Of course, weather has something to do with it. We have had a little more humidity, a little cooler days, but it also has to do with the fact that literally thousands of people have risked their lives and put themselves in harm's way to help stop this fire. I want to simply come to the floor tonight to say thank you to them. Four of those folks were killed in an automobile accident on the way to fight the fire; and there have been many memorials in our State and in the State of Oregon that have been offered up in memory of these people, of these brave young folks who set out to do something good for someone else and whose journey ended in such a tragedy. Our thoughts, our prayers, and our solace go out to the parents and to the relatives of the people who died in that horrible car crash coming to Colorado to help us. We have learned several things. I have been in Congress a relatively short time. This is only my second term; and, unfortunately, I have experienced several tragedies as a result of what has happened in my district during that time. Of course, the first was Columbine High School. I had only been here a few months when that occurred and had to try to figure out how to deal with that and bring some sort of closure to the issue and to the horrible, horrible events of that day in April. One of the things that I realize that happened during that time is that, no matter how horrible an event is, and the Columbine experience was far worse than even these fires. These fires have cost lives, it is true, but nothing can be compared to the loss of lives of the children who were killed at Columbine, and the adult. But out of every single tragedy something good can develop and usually does. No matter how horrible it is, we have to try to concentrate on the fact that something good can happen. In Columbine, I saw many things happen that I can describe as positive, even as a result of this horrible tragedy. First of all, I can tell Members that families, not just in the Columbine area but all across the Nation, families re-evaluated their relationships and became I think a little more in touch with the fact that life is so precious and that their children should be valued above all. We did have sort of a coming together of families that I think perhaps we would not have had under other circumstances. Hundreds of thousands, and I know that is maybe stretching it in some people's minds, but I believe it is true that hundreds of thousands of people, especially young people, came to Christ as a result of the kind of stories that were told about some of the young people that died in Columbine; and their own commitment to the Lord and the courage that they showed in this horrible, horrible time was an inspiration for many, many people, adults and children. In this fire which is a tragedy, not reaching the proportions of Columbine but a tragedy nonetheless, and as I say there have been deaths, four people coming to fight the fire and one individual that has been identified as a result of the fire, a lady who had a severe asthma attack as a result of the smoke from the fire and has perished, but out of it can come something of value to the Nation, something good. That is that we will have some idea how not to just prevent but perhaps control these horrendous events. For years now the Forest Service of the United States has been in a quagmire, constructed somewhat as a result of the impositions that we have placed upon them from this body, the government of the United States, the Congress of the United States, passing law after law after law which impeded their ability to actually fight fires. That is on one side. On the other side is the environmental community that has taken advantage of all of those obstacles to in fact file appeal after appeal after appeal and lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit to stop the Forest Service from actually managing forests. Those two things have combined to create a disastrous situation, one that is exemplified by the fires that we see this year brought on by incredible drought and careless activity on the part of human beings, but made far worse by the fact that we have not been able to actually manage the forests. We have not been able to clean the forests and take out a lot of the fuel loads. The General Accounting Office reports that one in three forests in America is dead or dying. This after how many years of environmental impact statements, literally hundreds of steps that have to be taken by every agency dealing with the forest, whether it is the Forest Service themselves, the Division of Wildlife, every single entity, BLM, Bureau of Land Management, to have to go through the hoops that have been created by us and by the environmentalists, we now find one in three forests dead or dying. The Clinton administration cut back timber harvesting by 80 percent and used laws and lawsuits to make swathes of land off limits to commercial use. I am quoting from a Wall Street Journal article of June 21. We now see that millions of acres are choked with dead wood, infected trees and underbrush. Many areas have more than 400 tons of dry fuel per acre, 10 times the manageable level. This tinder turns into small fires which turn into infernos, outrunning fire control and killing every fuzzy and endangered animal in sight. In 2000 alone, fires destroyed 8.4 million acres, the worse fire year since the 1950s. Some 800 structures were destroyed. Control and recovery cost nearly $3 billion. Maybe the good thing to come out of all of this is that we have learned something about how to minimize the effects of wildfires in the forests of our Nation. And maybe, just maybe, we will be able to do something in the Congress of the United States to reduce the number of obstacles in the path of those folks trying to do their best, Forest Service personnel especially, to keep our forests in a way that they can be enjoyed by all people in this country. I do not know if we will accomplish it. The obstacles are great internally within the Forest Service itself and externally in the environmental community. They believe that no people should be in the forest, that no activity should be allowed because any activity is ``unnatural,'' close quote. The fires that I saw in my State, I wish I could have taken every single environmentalist who had filed an appeal stopping the Forest Service from doing any work in the 5,000 acres of what we call part of the national forest that was identified as roadless area. A year and a half ago we could have been in there beginning the work, beginning to thin that area so as not to be so susceptible to these incredible forest fires. Appeal after appeal was filed. We were never able to go in and do the work, and now there is no use in filing any appeals because that part of the forest is long gone. It is nothing but charcoal. Maybe that is what environmentalists think is natural. Maybe they look at that same scene and think, that is just nature's way. Of course, fires are nature's way. Fires can be healthy things in a forest, but not the kind of forest fires that we are looking at today, not the Hayman fire, not the Glenwood Springs fire, not the Durango fire, not the fire in Arizona now 300,000 acres and growing. In Colorado, we have, as long as we have kept records, we have the most severe fire, the fire that has been the most destructive prior to the Hayman fire, which has consumed 140,000 acres so far; but prior to that in 1876, I believe, we had the other most destructive fire that the State of Colorado has ever experienced in record-keeping time. That was 26,000 acres. I assure you, Mr. Speaker, between 1876 and today, we have had many, many droughts. We have had many, many times when the forests were tinder dry, as they say, and susceptible to horrendous damage if a fire started. But in fact when fire started naturally or even in those days caused by man, they did not consume 100,000 acres. The reason is because there was not a fuel load in the forest to allow that to occur. Today there is. Why? Because 100 years of fire suppression has created this incredible amount of fuel on the forest floor. This fuel burns hotter and faster and more destructibly than a normal or a, quote, natural fire, so destructively that it will actually burn the ground, burn the soil, it gets so hot; and for several inches down, everything is essentially sterilized. Nature puts down a barrier below that called a hydrophobic barrier that actually, when this occurs, when it does that, it is actually impermeable. What nature is trying to do is hold the rest of the mountain together. But that means that everything above that barrier will go the minute we have rain. And where does it go? It will go into, in this case, the Denver water supply and will have to be filtered, will cost us hundreds of millions of dollars perhaps to do that because this particular fire is incredibly damaging in that respect. Thank God and thank the firefighters that have come into Colorado. We lost around 117 homes in the Hayman fire. But if this fire happens again, because it certainly could, all the conditions are exactly the same and right on target for another disastrous fire at any time in any other part of the forest, if it happens just a few miles north of where this one occurred, we will see thousands of homes go up in smoke and thousands of lives shattered, another 100,000 or more acres destroyed, habitat for many, many endangered species. Here is one little interesting tidbit that we have to deal with, Mr. Speaker, when we talk about the idiotic environmental problems we face with trying to manage forests. Today in Colorado we have had the opportunity to do a controlled burn. This is part of forest management, where you go into a particular area and you will have create a fire, you will burn the underbrush but you keep it under control so that you burn away a lot of those fuels and do not ignite the whole forest on fire. There is an area called the Polhemus Burn in Colorado. It took ages for them to agree to get the EPA to allow this burn to occur, because the EPA said that a controlled burn of 5,000 to 8,000 acres would actually cause a problem. The smoke would cause a problem with the system designed to keep the air pure and that sort of thing and the plan for Colorado, the air quality plan in Colorado. So it took forever for them to agree to it. They are always putting up obstacles to a controlled burn because of the smoke that they say that the EPA said would pollute the atmosphere if you burned 5,000 acres. So we have burned 140,000 acres in one fire alone in Colorado and guess what? That does not count against the air quality standards. We could burn down the entire forest if it is done by an illegal campfire or by a lightning strike. We could burn a million acres, 5 million acres, 10 million acres, and it would not count. Let me tell you what that means right now. Right now, with 140,000 acres in the Hayman fire, every morning when I got up this weekend when I was home, I would look out and you could not see the mountains really. There was a haze over the mountains. And I live not too far from the mountains. This is a peculiar site in Colorado which has prided itself for many years of having this pristine scene, the mountains, the clear blue sky. You cannot even see the mountains. One lady has died already because of the pollution in the air. The ashes will accumulate all over. I went out. I was blowing out my garage and driveway. I am a little anal about this. I want to keep it clean. I was blowing it all out. This huge cloud of smoke comes up from my driveway because of all the ashes that had accumulated there. I live 25 or 30 miles from the fire. But that does not count. That does not count against our air pollution control, air pollution cleanliness thing set by the EPA. That does not count. We can do that. But we cannot do a controlled burn. Let me tell you about the Polhemus Burn. It happens to be on the periphery of the Hayman fire. I flew over it. Mr. Speaker, it was incredibly interesting. Because, as you fly over the fire, you see that where we did the burn just a little more than a year ago, the fire actually stopped. The Polhemus Burn was a buffer against that fire moving farther east and into homes along the front range. You can see where what we have done has worked, but we have to fight every single step of the way with the EPA to do a controlled burn of 8,000 acres. But 100,000, 200,000 acres, no problem as long as it was started by a campfire or a lightning strike. That is okay. That pollutes the air for weeks and weeks and months to come. But, no problem. This is the idiocy of trying to actually have a Federal control of this process that really and truly does not allow for the kind of thing I have just described here. It does not allow us to actually manage the forest. These are idiotic laws, idiotic regulations that have cost us severely. We have to change it; and maybe, maybe, the outcome of these horrendous fires will move this Congress in that direction. Maybe we will do something to try and reduce the possibility of the lawsuits, the frivolous lawsuits, the frivolous appeals and the internal inertia in the Forest Service. Those two things have combined to create this event, captured by the space shuttle. You can blame that on the things I have just described, bureaucratic inertia and environmentalists, extreme environmentalists, obstacles they have placed in the way of trying to manage a forest. I am not saying the fire happened because of those things. I am saying that the seriousness of the fire, the severity of the fire is directly a result of poor management; and the poor management is a result of the things that I have described. So maybe we can overcome this. I do not know. I certainly hope so, because something good has to come out of this, that at least we can eventually, several years from today can say, well, we learned a lesson from this. Yes, it was a terrible price to pay, hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of acres gone, the watershed destroyed, wildlife habitat destroyed. It will take 100 years for what has been burned to be replaced by something that looks like a forest again, 100 years. I will not see it. I do not even think my kids will see it. What worries me is that this is June 23 or June 24. We are at the beginning of the season. How much more will it be on fire this year? I do not know, and next year. Because, believe me, even if we implemented, even if tomorrow we started to do everything we needed to do in terms of forest management, it will take us years to clean the forests and get them back to a position that they can sustain these kinds of fires in a natural setting. But it is an example of good ideas gone awry. It is an example of so many things we see here in government, where everybody thinks they are doing the right thing. Law upon law upon law upon law is passed every year; and each one, if studied individually, yeah, that seems right, absolutely, we should do that. But when you put them all together, they combine to create this kind of problem. Once again, I want to thank all those people across the Nation for their prayers and for their help in fighting these fires. Many men and women are on the line tonight in Colorado and in Arizona and in other western States. We owe them a debt of gratitude that I want to express as best I can here on the floor of the House tonight. Mr. Speaker, in the time I have available, I am going to move to another issue, not one that is completely unfamiliar to the people who may be observing us tonight or listening. In a way this has got to do with immigration reform, but in a bigger picture. Something happened in the last week that I feel compelled to bring to the attention of my colleagues here on the floor and those who may be observing it. The Bill Bennett organization, Bill Bennett was the Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration, was my boss for several years. I was the regional director for the U.S. Department of Education. His organization did a poll recently, asking college students a variety of questions. Some of the answers that they gave to these questions, although surprising to some, were not surprising to me, although they were certainly disheartening. What I want to do tonight in the minutes I have remaining to me is to explain one of the things that motivates, perhaps the most important issue I feel compelled to actually try to advance or discuss when it comes to the issue of immigration, immigration reform and some of the major ramifications of massive immigration into the United States. It is hard sometimes to get the big picture out there, but in a way this poll that was taken of American college students helps me try to do that. Mr. Speaker, let me say this. I believe that we are in this Nation and as a member of western civilization as perhaps the leading Nation in what can be described as western civilization, we are in a conflict. It is a conflict that is really quite old in origin. It has been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years. It flares up at certain points of time and subsides at others, but it is nonetheless an ongoing conflict. There are those certainly who would suggest that the threat to the United States is posed by an organization often referred to as al Qaeda and that it is a relatively small group of people around the world who have the intent to do America great harm. I would suggest that a thorough study of world history would bring one to a different perspective, and that is this, and I am condensing an awful lot of information into a relatively small period of time here, I recognize. I would suggest that our foes, that is, the foes of western civilization and all that it represents, republican form of government, reliance on individual responsibility, individual freedom being a sort of mainstay of western civilization, the rule of law and not of men being the mainstay of western civilization, these are the philosophies, these are the ideas that we have brought the world, and these ideas are in conflict with other civilizations. I suggest that it is not just al Qaeda that we are fighting. It is not just a small group of individuals out there, the tentacles here and there in several countries. Believe me, Mr. Speaker, by the way, I should say I am in total support of the President's attempts to try and stamp them out, to try to go wherever they are and eradicate them. I absolutely agree with it. But I think it is foolhardy for us to assume that, even if we were actually able to either kill or arrest every single member of the al Qaeda organization, that America would be safe. Because I think our battle is with something bigger. It is with fundamentalist Islam in this case. That is part of the clash of civilizations. That is the one we are now dealing with most directly. As I say, over the course of history, world history, you will find that it has happened often, that these flash points have occurred, that there have been times when we can see a much more direct, a much more identifiable conflict, when armies met, Crusaders against the Saracens. But we can see that, as times change, we no longer will be fighting wars with major armies facing each other in some remote corner of the world, the winner and the outcome of the battle determining the winners and losers of the war. That is not the kind of war we are fighting today; it is not the world in which we live. The world in which we live is a war fought by people blowing themselves up on buses in Jerusalem or in the West Bank. It is a war being fought by people who take airplanes and crash them into buildings in the hopes of destroying a different civilization. It is American civilization; it is Western civilization that our opponents hate. It is not just an issue of Israel versus Palestine. That is only one front where fighting is actually going on in this clash of civilizations. At least that is my belief. If one looks at this I think from a bigger perspective, that is the conclusion to which one must come. Now, how does this fit with what I started off talking about in terms of Bill Bennett's organization and the poll they took? Well, for us to be successful in this clash of civilization, for us to actually hope to be able to win this war, we have to recognize that we are, number one, fighting that kind of a war. It is not just simply a small sort of tactical attack that we are focusing on here and dealing with, on one subgroup of fundamentalist Islam. It is a much bigger problem, and it will go on for a long, long time. In order to be successful, we as Americans have to know who we are, what we stand for, and believe in Western civilization, because that is what we are actually fighting for. It is not just to stop people from crashing into a building in New York. It is our very survival. I assure my colleagues that the folks who want to do us ill want to do so as a result of the fact of who we are, what we believe in, what we exemplify. That is what they hate, and they will not stop ever until that particular goal is accomplished, and that is the eradication of Western civilization. It is, I think, that big an issue with which we deal. So it is important for us to understand that when we ask American students what they think of America, what they think of America vis-a- vis other countries, how they actually kind of rate our system and our society versus other societies, it is disheartening to hear and see the following results: American students, according to this poll, intensely and overwhelmingly disagree with the statement that Western culture is superior to Arab culture. Only 16 percent believe Western culture is superior to Arab culture, but 79 percent do not. Now, that is the result I suggest, Mr. Speaker, of a deliberate, sort of philosophical point of view that has been expressed in schools, in classrooms in colleges all over America for at least a decade or more, longer than that, 20 years at least; and that is what I refer to as cultural relativism, that it is all the same; that we should never, ever think of another culture as different or certainly less deserving, less important than our own. Well, in fact, Mr. Speaker, the reality of the world is this: that we do have something unique in the United States, and it is not chauvinistic to express that point of view. In fact, we must believe in that if we are to win the war to which I refer in this clash of civilizations. If we believe that all cultures are the same, that there is nothing different between the United States, between Western civilization, between a liberal democracy, between the rule of law, between the intent or the belief that people have the ultimate responsibility for their own lives; if we do not believe in that, then we cannot be successful over the long, long haul in this clash, and it is going to be a long haul. And if we think for a moment that we are in a Nation that is less desirable than any other, or equally desirable as all others, then all we have to do is to raise the gates all over the world, raise the gates and allow people to flee from whatever country they live in to the country they want to go to. Does anybody think for a moment that there is going to be a mass exodus from the United States to Saudi Arabia or to Afghanistan? I do not think so. Does anybody think for a moment that if we actually raise all of the gates that there would not be a huge influx of people from all over the world, including the Middle Eastern countries, to the United States where life is better, and it is better because of Western civilization? I am not ashamed to say that; and I am, in fact, proud to say it, because I believe it. I believe it is empirically provable that life is better. There is a great satirical piece that was done, my son sent it to me, it came off the Internet, something called ``James: The Screed.'' I do not know to what that refers, but he is doing a satirical piece on this poll. And he is suggesting that this is an essay question that is typical today in a college classroom. Remember, this is satire, okay? Here is the essay question: ``Two choices: life as a gay atheist in Fargo, North Dakota, or life as a Christian gay in Riyadh. Write 1,000 words describing how each faces equal hardship. If your essay contains less than 1,000 words, you will either be docked one grade or have your left hand removed with an ornately engraved scimitar, depending on which morally-equal culture the teaching assistant wishes to consult.'' This is great stuff. ``B: Western culture is equal or inferior to Arab culture because: (check any you believe to apply)'' of the following: ``Number 1, Our so-called democracies are fronts for corporate interests. Nadar doesn't win here, Nadar doesn't win in Syria. What's the difference? ``2, our so-called freedom of scientific inquiry unshackled from religious strictures is a sham. Galileo was oppressed by the Catholic Church, wasn't he? Didn't every American moon shot end in failure because we believed the sun revolved around the earth and we failed to account for the gravitational pull? Stupid Pope! ``3,'' this is another option that you can check: ``We spend more on flavored massage oil than we do on foreign aid, which is so, like, typical. Saudi Arabia spends more on mosques here in the United States than their citizens spend on ``Hustler,'' which should tell you something. ``4, they may stone adulterers, but we are equally puritanical about sex, as evidenced by the recent refusal of the Toledo City Council to grant medical benefits to the pets of cohabitating transgendered city employees.'' It goes on. I mean it is a great, great satire, and I encourage everyone, Mr. Speaker, here to go on the Web site and look it up. It is called ``The Screed.'' It is an ``attempt to disassemble the indefensible.'' It is very, very good. Very interesting. But what it does is point out that we need to know who we are; we need to actually defend that point of view and Western civilization as we know it. And when we talk about how this actually connects to immigration, I suggest to my colleagues that we do need to actually have a country that is a country connected by people who can speak to each other in one language and share a common set of values and ideas. Massive immigration is a threat to that particular philosophy and idea. Not immigration itself. Immigration is a fine thing that has helped the country and has been wonderful in many ways. But the massive immigration we are witnessing today does not help us create a cohesive country, a country that does share one language, one set of ideas, one set of principles. We are becoming Balkanized and, as a result, unable to effectively fight this war in this clash of civilizations.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I have often come to the floor of the House to discuss the issue of immigration and immigration reform. I have also had that opportunity to do so in a variety of different settings over the last several years. I have watched with interest in the way that this debate has evolved, or some may say degenerated. The fact is that it does seem to me that the debate over immigration reform is entering a new phase, and unfortunately I think not a productive one. Nonetheless, it is a phase in which the opponents of immigration reform have moved from a thoughtful, sometimes thoughtful, I should say, analysis of a major public policy issue to a darker, more sinister and far less intellectually based discussion. I say that because of an article that was run in the Dallas newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, and I will get to it because it describes an event and some of the activities surrounding an event that I attended in Guanajuato, Mexico, a few weeks ago. The event was an annual meeting of American Congressmen and Mexican parlimentarians and legislators. It is an annual event, and I think this is the 21st or 22nd year of its existence. I was asked to attend this year, I am not sure exactly why, but nonetheless I was asked to attend. I did so, and found it to be a very stimulating and rewarding experience, stimulating because the debate on immigration and immigration reform is one that raises a lot of concerns and a lot of emotions; productive because at the end of the 2 days, 2.5 that we were there, I walked away with a feeling that at least my colleagues from the Congress of the United States and our colleagues in the Mexican Congress were much more understanding of the position that I hold vis-a-vis immigration and immigration reform, and that which is held by a relatively large majority of the people in this country. I made it a point to explain that my observations with regard to immigration are not borne out of any hostility towards Mexico, any feelings of ill will, and certainly not any feeling about Mexican immigrants themselves. In fact, my feelings about immigration are not in any way, shape or form the result of opinions I have about anyone's ethnicity or nationality. They are irrelevant. I view everyone who comes into this country the same way I view my grandfather and great- grandparents who came to this country at the turn of the century. They are people for the most part seeking a better life. They come to the United States for promises of economic prosperity and political freedom. These are, of course, laudable goals. And if I were in their position, I have no doubt I would be doing exactly the same thing. I would be looking for ways to come to the United States in order to better my life and the prospects of a good life for my children, grandchildren and future generations. I blame no immigrant for the problems we have in the United States with regard to immigration. They are two different things entirely. I am not anti-immigrant. I am certainly concerned about the effects of massive immigration into this country. And it really does not matter the country of origin from which the people coming here emanate. What matters to me most is the numbers. And the fact that massive immigration has an effect on many aspects of our society seems to me to make that particular subject worthy of civil debate. I think it is hard to suggest that the growing numbers of Americans and/or people living in this country without benefit of citizenship, many of whom live here without benefit of legal status, it is hard to suggest that that growing number of people in this country does not represent some intriguing opportunities and/or problems. Economic problems certainly, in terms of the cost, the infrastructure that needs to be created to support the many millions coming into the United States, the schools, the hospitals, the social services. The other economic issues deal with jobs. Some suggest that everyone coming to the United States is taking jobs that no one here will take. Others, and certainly I side with those who suggest that that needs far deeper review than what has been given it, and that there are many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, even perhaps millions of Americans who are today looking for a job that someone else holds and that someone else may very well not even be a citizen of the United States, or even here legally for that matter. Then, of course, there is the national security issue. It is undeniably true that the most recent terrorist activities that have plagued the United States have been perpetrated by people who have come into the country as visitors on visas. Some of them overstayed their visas. Some of them lied about what they were going to do here and could have been and should have been deported. Others, one in particular, actually violated the status of his visa by leaving the country, I believe that was Mohamed Atta, and could have been kept from returning to the United States, or he could have been deported once he came back after violating that visa status. Nonetheless, all were here and all did their deeds. As we look at the future, there is a great possibility, even probability, that the United States will suffer other similar types of terrorist attacks. And there is a great possibility that these attacks will be perpetrated by people who come to this country from somewhere else, either by sneaking into the country or coming here on some sort of legal status but only for the purpose of doing us harm. And so our ability to control our own borders, limited as they may be because of the length of the borders, because of the fact that we have about 500 million visits a year into the United States, those complicating factors make it more difficult for us to control our borders but do not in any way, I think, give us the right to ignore the borders as a place where we should be concentrating our efforts in terms of national security. We may not be able to stop everyone who is trying to come into the United States illegally. That is surely true. But it is just as true that we can do so much better than we are presently doing. Tomorrow we will have a press conference at which we will discuss one aspect of border security that is available immediately to us, and it only needs the signature of the President of the United States to put into effect. But that is for tomorrow. I wanted to lay out briefly my own position on the issue of immigration and immigration reform, because I will share with you, Mr. Speaker, and actually I am going to quote liberally from two different articles that I think are very important as we enter this next stage of this debate that I mentioned to you. It is apparent to me that the point of view that I represent here this evening with regard to immigration control is gaining in acceptability and gaining in political power because the opposition to it is becoming more frightened, more vitriolic, more bombastic. That is always an indication that we have struck a nerve and that something out there has forced the opponents of immigration reform into this new accusatory mode. An example of what I am describing is an article, as I mentioned earlier, that appeared in the Dallas Morning News on June 16 which ostensibly is to describe this meeting that I have mentioned in Guanajuato, Mexico. It is also designed to focus on me in particular, my background; my, quote, supporters; the people that I, quote, represent; and paints a rather negative picture, I should say, of all of those things. It certainly presents me as someone who is more intent upon keeping Mexicans out of the United States than I am about general immigration reform. Remember, the meeting we were having was in Mexico. The discussion we were having was pertinent to Mexican immigration into the United States. Mexican immigration into the United States does in fact represent the largest percentage of immigrants; and, therefore, of course, it is hard to talk about immigration reform without referencing periodically Mexico. But the tone of the article that says, ``Colorado Politician on Guard at Mexican Border,'' that is the heading, would certainly lead one to believe, if you were to accept everything that is written here, that there is some great conspiracy or cabal in the works that I have aligned myself with, as they keep saying here, and I am quoting, unsavory supporters and unsavory characters. The article said that all of the people in Mexico, all of the Republicans and all of the Democrats plus all the people who were on the other side, the Mexican legislators, were careful to distance themselves from my views which are widely seen as, quote, anti-Mexican. It goes on to say, Mr. Tancredo's message, quote, Mexican immigration is leading to the balkanization of America. It says, he supports a temporary guest worker program for Mexicans. Mr. Tancredo opposes allowing more Mexicans into the United States on a permanent basis. He even blames Mexican immigration for California's energy crisis. I am called anti-Hispanic throughout this thing. Certainly anti-Mexican. That is quoted a couple of times. Suffice it to say that I have been on the floor of the House many, many times, spent many, many hours in debate on this issue, or discussion or monologues on this issue as I am doing tonight. I would challenge anyone to review any of the hundreds, for all I know thousands, of pages of testimony that I have given either in front of committees or the transcript from the many hours I have spent on this floor doing exactly what I am doing now, or the literally thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of words that have been printed in the media about my position on issues, on this issue in particular, and I challenge anyone to go to anything I have ever said that would lead anybody to believe that I have only one concern about immigration and, that is, Mexico or Mexicans. As I say, we spend a good deal of time talking about Mexican immigration. It represents the greatest number. But it is never ever, and I have never suggested that our efforts to try and curb immigration be solely directed at Mexico. I have stated here, on I do not know how many occasions, that it is not the ethnicity, it is not the nationality, it is not the country of origin, it is the numbers. It is how many come from a certain place, not necessarily where they come from. And I am just as concerned about the northern border as I am about the southern border. I believe there is, if not more insecurity at the northern border than there is at the southern border, it is certainly equally as disconcerting when we look at the situation that exists on both the northern and southern borders. I am concerned about our ports of entry on both coasts. I am concerned about the ability of people to come into the United States via air traffic into any city in the United States, into any international airport in the United States, coming from countries all over the world who come here without giving us really a clear indication of who they are, come here without us knowing exactly what it is they are going to do here, come here and overstay their visas which for the most part I think accounts for a huge number of people who are here illegally. They are not just people who cross the border from Mexico. There are people who came into the United States from a variety of different ways and a variety of different ports of entry, most of them coming in with visa status, with a legitimate visa status, many of them with bogus visa status, but nonetheless coming that way and then simply overstaying their visa and staying here illegally. I do not know the percentage, but I would suggest to you it is a huge percentage of the nearly 13 million people who are here illegally. But this article would suggest that everything I say and everything I do is designed to attack Mexico or Mexicans. Why would they say a thing like this? Well, we know why, Mr. Speaker. It is because, of course, if they can cast me in the light of a racist, someone who is anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant in general, then they can marginalize me and hence the things I say. This article goes on at length to talk about the immigration reform caucus which I formed here, a Member of Congress, one of I do not know how many literally, probably hundreds of caucuses there are here in the Congress, and it is exactly like any other caucus. Members join it voluntarily. We have no outside support. They suggest that we get funding from these nefarious groups and that my campaigns are supported by, quote, what they say are unsavory characters. Quote, his critics say that money comes from unsavory supporters. Mr. Speaker, ``his critics say that money comes from unsavory supporters.'' Who are my critics? Who are their names? What are their names? And who are these unsatisfactory supporters? They just use that phrase ``unsatisfactory supporters.'' Mr. Speaker, the last time I checked, we had something like 7,000 individual contributors who contributed less than $50 to any of my campaigns, which, by the way, represents the greatest amount of money that I have ever collected in the two campaigns that I have waged to become a Congressman; $50 or less from thousands of people across the country. These are the ``unsatisfactory characters'' to whom they refer? What makes them unsatisfactory? Just because they gave to my campaign, in the eyes of my ``critics''? Who are these critics? Of course, nothing like this would ever hold up in a court of law. You have to name your critics, and you have to name these people who you call unsatisfactory. But in an article that is masquerading as an article and is really an editorial, an opinion by the two authors, Alfredo Corchado and Ricardo Sandoval, this is their editorial opinion they have worked masterfully, I must say, into this ``article,'' an article that is supposed to be an objective analysis of a news event. What is objective about ``his critics say that his money comes from unsatisfactory supporters?'' Anybody could state a thing like this, because you do not name anyone here. Who are my critics that say such a thing? Then they go on to identify someone later, a Ms. Hernandez. She is, let me see here, the head of the Latin American Research Service Industry, a civil rights group in Denver. Now, I do not know who Ms. Hernandez is, and I have never heard of the Latin American Research Service Industry in my life; but they are quoted here, of course, as some sort of expert on things, and she says that my rhetoric is anti- Hispanic as well as just anti-immigrant. Now, they finally did quote a critic of mine in this place; but, of course, they did not quote anyone who suggests that I am not anti- Hispanic or anti-immigrant, and there are many people, even, believe this or not, in the Hispanic community, people who write us all of the time, people who run organizations even in Denver, organizations that are devoted to helping immigrants in Colorado, who have met with me, who have indicated their support for my position, who recognize that there is nothing in me or what I say that can be taken by a thoughtful person as being anti-Hispanic, anti-Mexican, or even really anti- immigrant. The article goes on to quote the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Southern Poverty Law Center did a ``four-month investigation'' which is going to be featured in something they call the intelligence project. I would question that descriptor there of ``intelligence.'' It charged that many in the anti-immigrant network are ``increasingly tied to openly white supremacist organizations and are steadily gaining power in Mr. Tancredo's Immigration Reform Caucus.'' Let me restate the nature of a caucus in the House of Representatives. It is made up of Members. Are they saying that Members of our caucus are tied to openly white supremacist organizations? I would like to know who those people are. I have never actually even met anybody in this body who is tied to an openly white supremacist organization. To tell you the truth, I do not think I have ever met anybody in my life in that category. They are certainly out there, I have no doubt; I just do not know them. I have never come across them. I am lucky in that regard. I have never really had to discuss anything with people like that, at least to the best of my knowledge. But they are suggesting in this phrase, look at the way that was printed, charged that ``many in the anti-immigration network.'' What are these phrases? Many? Who are they? ``Anti-immigration network, increasingly tied to openly white supremacist organizations.'' What are these ties? What are these ties that connect us to some white supremacist organization, and how dare anybody say anything like that and do so in a way, again, that is designed rhetorically to poke at those very hot-button emotional issues in America? A quote here from Martin Potok, the editor of this intelligence report. This is talking about our caucus Web page. This is the main page of a large caucus, a group of Congressmen directly linked in the front page to hate groups. It goes on: ``Tancredo has become an unofficial mouthpiece for some very unsatisfactory characters. His message is eerily similar to theirs.'' This is an article. This is not an editorial. This is not some sort of novel in the stage of trying to get it printed or something. This is something that purports itself to be an objective analysis of the issue of immigration, immigration reform, and certainly our own caucus and who I am. Well, it goes on like that at length, and it relies heavily on the information from this thing, this organization called the Southern Poverty Law Center. I have noticed in the past that many people have relied on it, they will use this Southern Poverty Law Center headed by a gentleman by the name of Morris Dees, as some sort of credible organization, and that we should somehow pay attention to what this outfit says about who is a hate group and who is not. So, therefore, I looked back at some interesting research that was done into this particular group, organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and now I am going to quote heavily from an article that was written a little over a year and a half ago by a gentleman by the name of Ken Silverstein for Harper's Magazine. This was November of 2000, to be specific. It is called ``How the Southern Poverty Law Center Profits From Intolerance.'' He spends a good deal of time focusing in on this Mr. Dees, Morris Dees, who is the head of this organization. It says here, ``Cofounded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum-direct marketing millionaire, Morris Dees, a leading critic of `hate groups' and a man so beatific that he was the subject of a made-for-movie TV, the SPLC spent much of its early years defending prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing to desegregate all white institutions, like Alabama's Highway Patrol.'' That was then, this is now. ``Today, the SPLC spends most of its time and money on a relentless fund-raising campaign peddling memberships in the Church of Tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit court rider passing the collection plate. He is the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement, renowned anti-death penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, though I do not mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.'' The center earned $44 million last year alone.'' Remember, this would be 1999, ``$27 million came from fund-raising and $17 million from stock and other investments. But the organization only spent $13 million on civil rights programs, making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.'' Mr. Speaker, as an aside, we have been hearing lately about many organizations, from the Red Cross to others, that have improperly, or perhaps at least alleged to have improperly, used the funds that people have given them, charitable organizations that spend way too much in overhead, paid salaries, paid too high salaries to their administrators and the like, and really do not do what they should in order to protect the people they are supposed to be on whose behalf they are supposed to be advocating. But, interestingly, in the general media we have never heard much about this particular organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center; and I suggest to you it is because this organization's focus is primarily defending liberal causes, liberal positions, and to the extent that they are doing even what they say they are doing, or should be doing, they could still be quite a reputable organization. But this outfit is anything but reputable. Mr. Dees, it goes on to talk about this gentleman, and since they spent so much time in these articles and the law center has evidently chosen to point fingers at me and my associates, I suppose it is only fair that we turn the mirror on them, which I am doing, with the help of this article by Mr. Silverstein. ``Mr. Dees, who made millions hawking by direct mail such humble commodities as birthday cakes, cookbooks, tractor seat cushions and rat poison in exchange for mailing lists containing 700,000 names, including Presidential candidate George McGovern, he is nothing if not a good salesman. So good that in fact in 1998,'' 2 years before this article came out, ``the Direct Marketing Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame. He says 'I learned everything I know about hustling from the Baptist Church.''' This is Mr. Dees's quote. ``In fact Mr. Dees,'' it goes on to say here, ``does not need anyone's financial support anymore. The Southern Poverty Law Center is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America, though the letter-writing campaign, the solicitations campaigns, naturally omit that fact. Other solicitations have been more flagrantly misleading. One pitch sent out in 1995, when the center had more than $60 million in reserves, informed would-be donors that the 'strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25 year history.' ``Now, back in 1978, when the center had less than $10 million, Dees promised that his organization would quit fund raising and live off the interest as soon as its endowment hit $55 million. But as it approached that figure, the Southern Poverty Law Center upped the bar to $100 million, a sum that one 1989 newsletter promised would allow the center to 'cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund-raising.' Today the Southern Poverty Law Center's Treasury bulges with $120 million,'' remember, that is 2 years ago, ``and it spends twice as much on fund- raising, $5.76 million last year, as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses. ``The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax deductible cent from well-meaning people.'' In 1986, this well-respected center, this place that this article refers to in some reverential tone, as if we are supposed to be concerned and listen carefully to the accusations made by this outfit, this center's entire legal staff quit in protest of Mr. Dees's refusal to address issues such as homelessness, voter registration, and affirmative action that they considered far more pertinent to poor minorities, yet far less marketable to affluent benefactors than fighting the KKK, which is like their main thing. They keep sending out things about the KKK. The KKK is a bad outfit, I am sure of that; and this outfit, the SPLC, keeps resurrecting that ghost. It says here they had 4 million members in the 1920s to about 2,000 today, and as many as 10 percent of them are thought to be FBI informants. So I would not consider the KKK to be the kind of threat it was in 1920, but this outfit still uses them as their poster boy, sort of, to get money. Because the KKK, everybody says, oh, my God, send this money, or the KKK will rise again. This outfit is a fraud. The article ends up with this. This is again, quoting back here from the Church of Morris Dees, the article name. Until the early 1960s, Morris Dees sat on the sidelines honing his direct marketing skills and practicing law while the civil rights movement engulfed The South. ``'Morris and I shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money,' recalls Dees' business partner, a lawyer named Millard Fuller. `we were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich.' They were so unparticular, in fact, that in 1961, they defended a man guilty of beating up a journalist covering the Freedom Riders whose legal fees were paid for by the Klan.'' ``In 1965, Fuller sold out to Dees. Fuller donated his money to charity and later started Habitat for Humanity,'' a well-respected, this is a personal observation, a well-respected organization as far as I know, and certainly one that deserves the support of all of us who are concerned about homelessness. Dees, with his share of the money, bought a 200-acre estate appointed with tennis courts, a pool, and stables, and then in 1971 founded the Southern Poverty Law Center where his compensation has risen in proportion to fund-raising revenues, from nothing in the early 1970s to $273,000 last year, again, 1999. ``A National Journal survey of salaries paid to the top officers of advocacy groups shows that Dees earned more in 1998 than nearly all of the 78 listed, tens of thousands more than the heads of such groups as the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Children's Defense Fund. The more money that the SPLC receives, the less that goes to other civil rights organizations, many of which, including the NAACP, have struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. Dees' compensation alone amounts to one-quarter the annual budget of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, which handles several dozen death penalty cases a year. `You are a fraud and a con man,' the Southern Center'S Director Stephen Bright wrote in a 1996 letter to Dees and proceeded to list his many reasons for thinking so, which included, 'Your failure to respond to the most desperate need of the poor and powerless, despite your millions upon millions. Your fund- raising techniques and the fact that you spend so much accomplishing so little and promote yourself so shamelessly.' '' Soon, the SPLC will move into a new six-story headquarters in downtown Montgomery, just across the street from its current headquarters, a building known locally as the Poverty Palace. That is the Southern Poverty Law Center. That is the organization to which we are supposed to pay attention when it comes to determining who in America is to be trusted and who is to be characterized in unsavory terms. Mr. Dees uses a tactic that has been around for a long time. Perhaps the most familiar, perhaps the most famous individual in recent American history that perfected a tactic of guilt by association, of using that guilt by association to attack his enemies, of using innuendo, half truths, out-of-context quotes, all of the things that we know to be the tactics of unscrupulous individuals, perhaps we all know that Joe McCarthy, a Senator from Minnesota, was and has been characterized as the kind of poster boy for this kind of activity. He made a career out of destroying other people's careers. He was responsible for ending the careers and some say the lives, some people I understand even took their own lives because of the destruction he wrought upon them and their families. I do not know the degree to which Mr. McCarthy's accusations were accurate or not; I know that he is characterized as being a totally unscrupulous individual. But I suggest to my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, that Mr. Dees and this Southern Poverty Law Center together rival Mr. McCarthy in terms of the way they can manipulate, they have attempted to manipulate. And I should say the authors of the article that I mentioned earlier, Mr. Corchado and Mr. Sandoval, the way that they use phrases, the way that they use things like what ``critics,'' unnamed critics say; the way they use heavily loaded, emotionally loaded language to try and characterize in this case me and anybody else who believes, as I do, about immigration reform as people that do not deserve to be heard. It is McCarthyism. I am glad we have actually coined that term in America, because everybody now knows what one means when they say McCarthyism. And it is in its most despicable form that we see here the reincarnation of it, in this article and in the work of this organization. Mr. Dees apparently, according to this article, uses it to line his own pocketbook. Others use it because they want to advance themselves politically and/or destroy the reputations of people with whom they disagree. Name-calling, calling people racist as they do in here, suggesting that that is the motivating factor, that is the last refuge of a scoundrel. And someone who has shrunk from the intellectual debate that should occur about this very serious topic, their hope is that we will cease and desist, that we will shrink from them, and shrink from this battle because of the fear that someone will think ill of us, and that someone will believe the scurrilous things that they print. Well, some may, in fact, do that, Mr. Speaker. I recognize that, and I am sorry about that. I know what motivates me. I know what is in my heart. I know it has nothing to do with race. I know it has everything to do with what I consider to be an enormously complex and challenging public policy issue. I believe it deserves debate in this place that we call the open marketplace of ideas. But if these people had their way, we would be silent. If these people had their way, I would refrain from any references to immigration reform for fear that they will come after me, that they will write nasty things about me, that they will try to destroy my political career or even my own reputation. Well, I assure my colleagues I will not stop this discussion, I will not stop participating in this discussion. And I challenge all of those who find this an uncomfortable situation and discussion to be in; and I agree with my colleagues, I wish, in fact, we could move on to other topics. I wish we could do that, but we cannot, because this issue is not solved, the problem is not solved. We have not as a country faced up to the problems of immigration on the scale that we presently see it. It will change America, maybe for the good, maybe for ill. But regardless of one's position on this, as I say, I believe it deserves the debate that this kind of a forum offers.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, as we stand here tonight on the floor of the House, fires are raging in my State of Colorado, fires so devastating, fires so great in proportion. Historically, they are great in proportion, and they are so big that they can be seen, as we are told now, from the Space Shuttle. The smoke and ash from the fires in Colorado can be seen by the people on the Space Shuttle. These are in every sense of the word catastrophic fires. The one burning closest to my home, the Hayman fire, is over 100,000 acres, I understand, and will probably be burning all summer long. Hard for people to understand that, hard for anybody to get a handle on that concept; but it will probably be burning all summer long we are told, and that is just one fire. There are several others going. There are several starting also, and this one started last Friday. Many of these are being started by arsonists. It is incredible, but that is what is happening in and around Colorado. Of course, in other States they are experiencing similar types of situations. Now, every ounce of our effort at the present time should be and is directed to trying to fight these fires, and that is certainly appropriate. There will be plenty of time for recriminations as to how and what would be the best way to deal with these things, what would be some of the things we can do to make sure that fires of this nature do not start again, at least to the extent we are able to prevent them. This was started by a careless camper. He had a fire, illegally. We were at a time that there were no fires allowed in the national forest, no campfires whatsoever. But the law was disregarded by some selfish and unenlightened soul. The fire got out of control, and within just really a very short period of time it had already consumed a good part of the forest around it, and is now, of course, as I say, approaching 100,000 acres, if it is not over that already, 100,000 acres. Putting that in perspective, we are probably reaching the point when it would be about three times the size of the District of Columbia, just for people to understand what a 100,000 acre fire is. Combined, of course, with all of the other fires going on right now in Colorado, I am sure we are approaching that total. Now, as I say, this fire was started by an illegal campfire that got away, that was left essentially unattended and got away from its confined area. There will always be fires in the forest. That is part of the natural order of things. There is no two ways about that. We cannot and should not prevent all fires. So the issue here is not the extent to which the fire that we are witnessing right now could have been prevented. Of course, it could have been prevented, if someone had not carelessly ignited a fire at a campground. But, beyond that, it could not have been prevented even if we had done a lot of work in that forest, because right now, of course, we are in the midst of a horrendous drought. It goes all the way, frankly, from the Canadian to the Mexican border. The middle part of the United States is facing a drought, is facing drought conditions that are unprecedented in recent history. Certainly in the last 100 years we have not seen anything like this. The snow pack is very low. I was amazed on Monday when I had the opportunity to fly into the fire area and observe the fire, to observe the damage, I was amazed as I looked at Pike's Peak, which is not too far from the site of this fire, and saw just a few ribbons of snow still there. Usually, you can see snow on Pike's Peak in July, sometimes August. I have lived in Colorado all of my life, and I can remember many, many summer days getting up in the morning, going out to get the paper, looking up at the mountains, and seeing a snow-capped mountain range in front of me in June or July. There is nothing. There was nothing last Monday when I went through this area. There was no snow. There has been no rain, and there are no prospects for rain that we can see on the horizon. So that is why we are going to have massive forest fires, drought, hot weather and densely forested areas. Now, here is where we can do something about it, and this is what is important for us to try and tackle, because we do have some ability to deal with this situation. We cannot, as I say, nor should we even try, to stop natural fires from occurring. We simply should make sure, to the extent possible, that they occur in areas that have been managed, that is to say, thinned; where the undergrowth of the past 100 years of fire suppression efforts, the result of fire suppression efforts, has accumulated to the extent that we have now this tinderbox called the national forest. It really has been man's ineptness, man's inability to manage the forest properly over the last 100 years, that has helped cause this situation, our fire suppression efforts, which has been the main thing everybody has been focused on for 100 years. This is as seen from the space shuttle. This is the fire in Colorado. You can see the smoke plume and the fire down here. The fact is that there are fires all over the United States, of course. There are fires burning down there. There are fires in several other locations. But this is the one that is incredible. Here is the Glenwood Springs fire. This is the one I was referring to as the Hayman fire. This is my home right here. Down by Durango we have another fire, near Trinidad, Glenwood Springs, and over here by the Utah border, just inside the Utah border. These are the fires in Colorado at the present time. Mr. Speaker, the fact that for 100 years we have attempted to follow a policy to suppress all fires has created a devastating situation, a very, very dangerous situation in our forests. Suppression has meant that we have allowed old timber to fall, to fall to the ground, to decay and to dry out, and that becomes part, of course, of the fuel. We have allowed a tremendous amount of small saplings to grow, and that has become part of the fuel, because they stay relatively small. The forest canopy does not allow for them to grow quickly. It becomes part of the undergrowth. When it gets like this, when it gets as dry as it is now, that is what we could certainly call a tinderbox, and it takes very little to set it off. Of course, lightning will do it. Time and time again, that is the natural way of fires to start in the forests. However, when a forest has been thinned by our efforts, by the efforts of the Forest Service or anyone else, when the forest has been thinned, it is simply a logical situation where you will have less opportunity for these catastrophic fires to burn as quickly as they do and as hot as they do. These fires that are burning now are so hot that they scorch the Earth below them. Three or four inches down there will be nothing. When this fire passes, there will be nothing there but what we cannot really call Earth, because there is no organic material in it. It has been scorched to 3 or 4, sometimes 6 inches deep. Nature lays down a hyperbolic blanket below that through which nothing can permeate, so regardless of how much rain you get, it does not let it go farther down, because nature is trying to actually save the soil below that layer of impermeable matter. But what happens above that, of course, is the next time it does rain, all of that will wash away. It will wash down the sides of the slopes into the tributaries; and, in this case, it will run into the Denver water supply, the reservoirs that form the water supply for the Denver metropolitan area. So once this fire is put out, whether it is in 90 days from now or not, whether it is all summer long, whenever it is put out, that is only the beginning of the problem. Erosion then begins to occur, and the next time it does rain or snow all of this will move, all of the material will move, the ground cover will slide down and end up as silt in these reservoirs. It will cost millions of dollars. We have already spent, I think, approaching $40 million for this fire. It was $20 million the last I looked; it is probably double that now because it has been twice as long since I heard that figure; $40 million for the fire, but that will be dwarfed by the amount of money that we have to spend in order to try to repair, to the extent we can, the ground itself, and also to filter out the Denver water supply. Now, there are ways in which man can positively affect the forest environment. There are ways that we can now deal with the land that can reduce the severity of the fires. We are never going to, as I say, nor should we try, to stop all fires. That is really what has gotten us into the situation we have now. We know that is wrong. But we also know that to the extent that we do go in and thin out a forest area, we actually accomplish some very positive goals. Fire will not burn as quickly, it will not burn as hot, it will not burn through the forest if, in fact, it comes to an area that has been treated. Now, this is very difficult to see and probably impossible, but I will try, nonetheless, to explain what we have here, a couple of pictures of where there was treated area and where there was not. The fire burned right up to it, burned every single thing in its path in the area that was untreated. This is called the Bucktail fire in Colorado. It came up to and stopped, essentially stopped at the treated areas. The fire comes down out of the trees, goes on to the ground and eventually burns itself out in these treated areas. It is amazing to see. I have seen it with my own eyes. I saw it 2 weeks ago when we were in Colorado and went back to the district and were looking at the effects of other fires, earlier fires, High Meadows and the Snaking fire, they were called. And we could stand on a line and look straight down that line and on the right-hand side where the area had been treated, the fire had stopped. All the way on the left- hand side for as far as one could see, everything was destroyed; just these black spindles sticking up out of a lunar landscape. Everything was destroyed and, as I say, even the ground was seared. We got to that line, and it dropped down out of the trees just like it is supposed to and burned some cover on the ground and burned itself out. Now, this fire, I do not know how much less severe it would have been had we been able to get in there and do some of the things that the Forest Service had planned on. There was only one area, a roadless area, that was in the middle of this Hayman fire area which had been identified by the Forest Service as the place in which they were going to do thinning. About a year and a half ago when they were ready to start the job of thinning that area, a group of environmental organizations filed an appeal to stop them, stop the Forest Service. This is modus operandi; it happens all the time. The Forest Service goes into negotiation with the environmental groups to try and solve the problems that are presented to them, try to meet the needs of the environmental community in their plan to remove these trees, in the Forest Service plan to remove these trees and underbrush. It goes on negotiating for about a year and a half. We come to the end of that period of time when we think there is an agreement with the environmental community on exactly how the efforts to thin that area of the forest should go on, and the next thing we know, they file another appeal, stopping the whole thing. We were unable to get in there, therefore. The Forest Service was unable to do any thinning in this particular part of the forest, and I am referring to this roadless area. Well, there is nothing to really worry about now. There is no reason for the environmental groups to file any other appeals, because the forest that they were concerned about is gone. It is all ash. And as I say, it looks like a lunar landscape. It is devastating beyond anybody's ability to describe it accurately, I guess; but one has to see it to believe it. Twenty-one homes so far, probably more than that, but that is what we know so far that are gone; at least 5,000 people evacuated, 40,000 people getting ready to evacuate. The impact, as I say, on the environment as a result of the fire will be enormous. It will be much greater than we can possibly imagine, because this is a bigger fire than we can possibly imagine. So all of the things that happen as a result of a catastrophic fire like this are just waiting for us to try and deal with as time goes by. There are hundreds and hundreds of firefighters on the line, but there is little that they can do. The breadth of the fire is so wide, the intensity so great that there is really little they can do. They are dropping, of course, retardant, they are dropping water; but a lot of the water I am told that is dropping out of the buckets that are being carried in there is actually evaporating before it hits the fire, it is so hot, the air is so dry. This is a horrendous fire. I want to emphasize that I do not blame environmental groups for starting this fire. Of course not. They had nothing to do with the cause of the fire. It is just that we could have had perhaps a much less severe fire had we been able to get in there and thin this land. Now, I am proposing a piece of legislation that we started on 2 or 3 weeks ago; it was before this most recent fire started. It was after we went up and looked at the results of the Buffalo Creek and High Meadows and Snaking fires in Colorado. There were two things that I was confronted with when I got up there and when we were talking about it. One was that the fine for people starting illegal fires in the forest, illegal camp fires in a Federal area, anyway, is ridiculously small. It was like $25 in that part of the forest where I visited, the Pike National Forest that I visited a couple of weeks ago; and I think it is about $50 in the part of the forest that is presently on fire. A $50 fine or a $25 fine for starting something that could lead to this kind of enormous devastation. That has to be dealt with. That cannot be allowed to continue. We actually had instances. I was told by the fire people, by the fire rangers up there 2 weeks ago that we had people who would chip in. When a fire ranger got there and told them they had started a fire illegally and the fine was $25, the people just reached into their pockets and everybody chipped in 5 bucks and they handed him the money. So what? For 25 bucks. The other day when I was up there, when I was up there on Monday at the new fire, a forest ranger told me that she had talked to somebody on the phone, I do not remember if it was a day or so before, who wanted to know if they could pay the fine in advance, like a fee, for instance. In this case it was 50 bucks, and they wanted to just send them the ``fee'' or the fine to pay in advance to go up and start a fire in the national forest when it is in the middle of the most horrible drought we have had in 100 years. No one is ever going to lose money in trying to underestimate the stupidity of people like this. It is amazing. So I have proposed legislation to increase that to a $1,000 fine and the possibility of a year in jail if you end up doing something like this fire, or causing something like this fire. That is for starters. Then we tried to deal with the issue of, again, what were the reasons, what were the problems that prevented the Forest Service from being able to get in there and clear the land. They really revolved around two things: internal inertia within the Forest Service, internal bureaucratic problems, process problems; it is called analysis paralysis. That is the phrase they use to describe it. Because they spend days, months, years in the analysis of minutia because there might possibly be a challenge, there might possibly be a court challenge, there might possibly be an appeal, so everybody spends 40 or 50 percent of the time they have, instead of actually managing the forest, writing reports that are designed as sort of CYAs, if you will, in case somebody has an objection to what you want to do, and nothing ever happens. That is internally. Externally, we have groups, organizations that are dedicated to stopping any sort of activity in the forest carried on by mankind. There are the extremists on the one side that say there is absolutely no forest that really man should be in. Forests are nature's preserves and man does not have a place there. And they want to stop any activity whatsoever: no road building, no logging, no recreation. Just stay out. Forests are not for people. That is their motto. Forests are for animals and other forest denizens. And their continued legal battle with the Forest Service always spills into courtrooms or through the bureaucratic process of appeals. So what we have is between the Forest Service's inability to act just, as I say, internally, and the lawsuits filed by groups like the Wilderness Society that filed the appeals on the thinning proposals for the Pike National Forest. The two things combined are deadly. They lead to this. This is the result. Again, not fires that they start, simply fires that grow faster and are more serious and more severe than they otherwise would have been. What we are hoping to do is actually return parts of the forest, as much as we can, to a more natural state by thinning. It is imperative that we do this and do it as quickly as possible, or this is going to be the way in which our forests will be consumed in the next year or so. We have already burned more acres in Colorado this summer, and it is not even mid June, than we did all of last year, and I am sure that we are at historical levels. I do not think we have ever had as much land on fire in Colorado. I believe that that is what is going to happen all over the West as this drought continues, and as we keep putting obstacles in the path of the Forest Service to try and deal with this. There is another bill, therefore, that we introduced that tries to accommodate the needs of everyone involved here. It is called the charter forest idea, the charter forest plan. It was originally proposed by the President. The concept was proposed by the President. We have taken it, I guess this is the first such attempt in the Nation to actually write a Forest Service plan placed on a charter forest. The idea is this: that the local community and the Forest Service will get together on a management plan. Everybody will be at the table during the discussion: environmental groups, business groups, local authorities, county, State, and municipal officials, and, of course, the Forest Service. Everyone will have the opportunity to develop a forest plan, and it will be managed at the local level, for the most part; and it will be freed of many of the bureaucratic obstacles that presently stop other forest management plans from being implemented. And we will be able to then accomplish some of our goals in terms of positive, healthy forest management. I stress that everybody will have a role to play; everyone will have the ability to discuss the concerns they have about the forest plan; but once it is adopted, then that is the way in which that forest will be operated for at least 10 years. Then we will review it, we will review it actually midpoint at 5 years and again in 10 years to see how well that plan has worked and whether or not the whole concept of charter forest is viable. It is built really on the charter school concept. That is where it gets its name. Because we have seen for years and years and years that public schools are unable to actually accomplish their tasks many times because of the bureaucratic problems they confront, that people taking the responsibility into their own hands for their children's education will start charter schools. They write a charter and they say, here is the kind of curriculum we want, here is the kind of teachers we want, here is the length of school day we are going to have, here is the number of school days, here is where the setting is going to be; and they write their own school charter and run it themselves at the local level, and we free up and take away many of the regulations and give them a much broader hand in actually running this school. Well, that is exactly what we are talking about with a charter forest. We are going to reduce the regulatory burden, and we are going to add responsibility to the people at the local level to manage the forest. So I hope that these concepts will move forward. And I hope that we will be able to quickly get into the forests all around this Nation. If we started tomorrow, of course, it would take us many years to really reduce the fuel loads throughout the forest. But we have to start somewhere. We cannot let fires like this do it for us because, of course, it will be 100 years before this forest will return to anything that looks like a forest. We will all be long gone, and our children will have very little opportunity to enjoy the wonders of this magnificent natural wonderland. So I hope that we can do that quickly. Now, there is one other area, and this leads me to the next part of my discussion, which will surprise no one; it has to do a little bit with immigration reform. There is another forest that has suffered severe fire damage in the last several months. It is the Coronado Forest in Arizona. I had gone down there a little bit before I went to visit the forest in Colorado; actually, I am sorry, it was about a month before, and we went down there because I am a member of the Committee on Resources and we had heard about the incredible environmental damage that was being done in that area and to the Coronado Forest. Now, this damage was many-faceted. It was actually the result of literally hundreds of thousands of people coming through this illegally, coming from Mexico into the United States and using the rough terrain and the heavy brush to stay undetected while they came through, either individually seeking whatever they were seeking in America, most of them I am sure looking for jobs, and/or bringing in narcotics, illegal drugs. The area has now become the most heavily trafficked area along the border for people coming in illegally and bringing in illegal drugs. What we saw were the folks on the border doing yeoman's work, the Border Patrol, in trying to interdict this flow of both people and drugs. I think something like 90,000 pounds of marijuana and I have forgotten how much of cocaine and heroin have been confiscated already this year, but it still is coming; and it comes as a result of people carrying about 60 pounds of the narcotics on their backs in these homemade backpacks. They come through the forest. They come by so many numbers, in such large numbers, that of course they begin to wear footpaths throughout the forest. This is a very delicate ecosystem. It does not take much, it does not take many feet on the ground to actually wear a path into the ground in a very short time; and it does not go away for a long, long, long, long time. It is almost like the tundra in that respect. And just then, you will see that after they follow that path for a while, they will move off because they think that there are sensors that have been placed, and sometimes there are sensors that have been placed by our Border Patrol people to try to catch them, so they move over a little and create another path. When we fly over that forest, we look down and what we see is a spider web of paths, paths through the forest. They are also bringing both mules and horses through loaded with narcotics. Then they will get to a certain place in the forest sometimes 5, 10, 15 miles up, and they will unload their goods. Another truck will come in on a road that is not a forest road, it will just be a road that was created by so many trucks coming in, pick-up trucks, Suburbans, large vans, SUVs, and they will come in and load the drugs on these trucks and take them out of there. Of course, all that activity causes damage. There are roads all over the Coronado which are not Forest Service roads. They are simply drug dealer roads, but there are more of them than there are Forest Service roads. There is more activity in that forest with drug dealers than there is of any other thing; more than the campers, more than the hikers, more than the bikers. There are far more people coming through that place with guns protecting drug loads than there are people coming through to enjoy the scenery of a national forest; one of the oldest national forests in the United States, I should add. It was created, I think, in 1903. That is not all that they have done to the forest. This packing material where they carry these backpacks made of this nylon fiber, where they unload, they just stack up these homemade backpacks that are nothing but, just like I say, these kinds of nylon rope things, but they will be coming in with huge stacks of them. The birds come and take it, build their nests out of it, and sometimes of course they get entangled in it. There are all kinds of environmental problems. The trash is incredible. As we ride through the forest, as I was able to do on horseback the first day, then we flew over by helicopter the next day, but the first day everywhere we looked along these paths were empty bottles from water, plastic water bottles everywhere, clothes everywhere, tin cans where they made campfires and just cooked something over a fire in tin cans, and they were strewn all over the place. This was not a national forest; it was a national dump. Now, the other thing that was happening, of course, was that these fires that they were setting at night, these campfires illegally set by people coming in illegally, were catching fire the next day. These people would walk away from it and not pay much attention to it; and of course it would catch fire. This area is also a place of incredible drought. It is a desert anyway, but right now it is even more dangerous in terms of fire. The day we left there a month ago Sunday, a fire broke out that by the time we got back here had already consumed 35,000 acres. There was another one just a couple of weeks ago that started the same way with people coming through there illegally, people coming into the United States illegally, carelessly starting these fires, walking on and destroying part of the forest. Now here is an intriguing aspect of it. We were told by the forest manager there that for many of the fires that they fight they cannot even use the typical firefighter methods. They cannot fly in slurry and drop it because there are so many people in the forest, so many illegals coming through the forest, that it actually would harm them. It would get on them. This retardant material might get on them, and we would get sued because we were trying to put out a fire; we dropped the fire retardant, but we have illegals coming through. I am sure Members are aware of the fact that not too long ago a family of 11 people who died coming into the United States, coming in illegally, they died of thirst and dehydration, or in some way of the elements coming across the desert; and we are being sued by $3.75 million for each one of them, as if it was our fault; we have a burden, and this is our responsibility. Well, we cannot even fight the fires because there are so many people. We do not even put people up there at night to fight the fires because there are so many people coming through with guns protecting drug traffickers. And about a little over 3 weeks ago, we had an incident that was very peculiar, and unfortunately, not all that unusual. I thought it was, when I first heard about it; but come to find out it is not all that odd. Here is what happened. It is a Friday, as I say, maybe 3 weeks ago. Just south of Ajo, Arizona, on the Tohono O'odham Indian reservation, the Indian police came across a Mexican humvee with Mexican military markings on it, and Mexican military inside of it. This was inside the United States of America. This was on the Indian reservation, the Tohono O'odham Indian reservation. There was a confrontation, and finally the humvee turned around and went away and went back to Mexico. The Indian police called the Border Patrol and the INS, and we sent the cavalry and got down there, and the Mexican military vehicle had turned around. What in the world were they doing there? What is going on? A little bit later in the day it turns out we interdict a drug shipment. We seize it, it is 1,200 pounds of narcotics, probably marijuana, I am not sure, that were coming through in that same area. Hmmm. Coincidence? It could be. We have a Mexican military vehicle in the United States; we have this shipment of drugs coming through a little bit later that we interdict. Later on that night, the United States Border Patrol was going along the border, and it comes across that same or another humvee of a similar type, we do not know which because they all look alike, but there is Mexican military inside and Mexican military markings on it. They are ordered to turn around and go back. The Border Patrol agent is under orders to turn around and go back when he confronts this kind of situation. For one thing, they are outgunned. One of the peculiar things we have done in order to satisfy some of the concerns expressed by the Mexican Government is that we have taken many of the M-16s away from our Border Patrol people, taken them away and changed them into single-shot as opposed to automatic weapons, so we are outgunned at the border, quite frankly, and certainly outmanned. He turned around to leave, and a shot rings out and goes through the back window of his vehicle, this is the Border Patrol vehicle, goes through the back window, hits a wire cage that separates the front seat from the back and ricochets off and goes out the right rear window, certainly coming close to killing this agent, this Border Patrol agent and officer. Now, no one had heard about this. This had happened on a Friday. It was not until Tuesday that I got an e-mail message from a Border Patrol officer in the area telling us about this. I, of course, think that this is incredible. I think it is almost enormously challenging to the United States how this could happen, and how we do not say a thing about it in the United States. No news program covered this; no newspaper in Arizona covered this. I mean, do Members not think it is newsworthy, Mr. Speaker? I certainly do. I cannot imagine this happening. Let us turn everything around. Let us say armed military of the United States went into some other country and started shooting at their federal police. What do we think would happen? Do we think we would be hearing about that from the state department of the country where this incursion occurred? I think so. It turns out we have had 118 incursions of a similar nature. Luckily, most of them did not involve firearms, or they did not involve the discharge of firearms. About 90 percent of these incidents were with people carrying guns, but only a small percentage of these things actually ended up in firearms being discharged. However, 118 times since 1997 we have had incursions into the United States by Mexican military troops or members of the Mexican Federal police, 118 times. These are confirmed, by the way. I am told by the Border Patrol that there are far more times than that that this has happened, but the status of ``confirmed'' is difficult to get, so 118 is what we have confirmed. I kept saying, what are you talking about, 118 times people have come into the United States from a foreign country? Why, I said? Were they lost? And, of course, there were chuckles around the table. Everybody thought that was pretty humorous that I would ask the question. But I said, I do not understand it. Were they lost? What were they doing in the United States? The answer given to me every single time by the people down there was, it is drug related. It is the opinion of almost every single one, no, not almost, but of every single person that we asked on the border as to what was the nature of these incursions, why would we have Mexican military, Mexican federal police in the United States, and they said it is because they were either protecting or creating a diversion for, the same thing, protecting a large drug shipment that was going through. They are not there all the time because most of the drug shipments are relatively small. It is a few people carrying these 60-pound backpacks, and there maybe 20 of them. They are usually preceded by a guy with an M-16 and followed up by a guy with an M-16 as they go through. Imagine Mom and Dad camper at the forest there at the campsite, and all of a sudden going across the parking lot were 20 people, going across with narcotics in their backpacks, and followed by somebody with an M-16. It would be an interesting sight to behold, but I think a little more than they were bargaining for when they bought their parks pass. But that is what is happening in the forest and it is actually being abetted by the Mexican government. This is incredible and yet we do nothing about it. The forest is ablaze down there just like ours, not to the same extent, but it is ablaze. But why will we not say anything about that forest? It is also, by the way, closed. They have closed the Coronado to anybody coming through. No more tourists coming through. But of course, they cannot close Coronado to the illegal traffic coming through. They can only close the Coronado to the people who want to just recreate there. But it is too dangerous. The fire danger is too great. The danger also of confronting somebody that is armed is too great. The forest manager of that area told me that his greatest nightmare is that one of these days there is going to be a shootout, there is going to be some sort of event that occurs that confronts tourists and/ or some of his own people with people taking narcotics through there and somebody is going to get killed. It almost happened, like I say, about 3 weeks ago on a Friday when the Federal border patrol agent was almost killed. But we hear nothing about it. The reason we hear nothing about it is because it is a very sensitive topic. When I called the State Department and asked them about it, they said, Congressman, we are taking this up at the highest levels of government. I said, How long have you been taking this up? This has been happening since 1997. When do you think we are going to get an answer? I wrote a letter to the Mexican President Vicente Fox and said, I would like to know what you know about these events. I would like to know what you are doing to stop these events. He did not write me back. I got a letter back from the ambassador from Mexico that said we do not like the tone of your letter and these incidents are being dealt with. I am amazed that I have to sort of talk about this on the floor of the House to let people know what has happened. It should be a matter that is on every single news program in the United States. It should be something we talk about in the newspaper, something we talk about in our committees, in the Committee on Armed Services, in the Committee on International Relations. We should be discussing these things. We are not because we know that this is a very dangerous situation, very touchy situation, very sensitive. Why is it sensitive? It is sensitive because if the American public knew about these things, the extent to which they exist, combined with what the American public already knows about the porous nature of our borders and the ability for people to come across them at will and maybe to do us great harm, that the American public would rise up and demand from their representatives that they do something to secure this border, our borders. And I do not mean just the border between the United States and Mexico. I am talking about the border all the way around this country, north, south, east and west. We have to do far more than we have done to secure those borders. We have sent troops thousands of miles away to defend the borders of other countries, but we refuse to put troops on our own border to defend our own country. Does this make sense to anyone? The defense of this Nation, as I said a hundred times, begins at the defense of border. And if you do not think that we have a problem just because people are coming here illegally and they are just benign, they are just looking for jobs and why try to stop them, well, you are right. Most people coming into the country illegally are just looking for jobs and why try to stop them? But a lot of people are coming in with dangerous stuff on their backs, in this case, dangerous narcotics on their back. What is to say the next person who wants to do something to the United States like a terrorist attack will not bring in something a heck of a lot worse on their back? And what is to stop them? I guarantee you if you look at the border you will find there is nothing to stop them. It is 5,500 miles, some delineated or demarcated by barbed wire fence and periodic ports of entry. As if anybody coming into the United States illegally is going to go through the ports of entry and say can I come in. I just do not have a pass right now. Of course not. Why do you not walk a mile down the road and walk across the line into the United States? You can do it. There is no problem. Why? Because we cannot possibly defend our borders, can we? We cannot possibly defend 5,500 miles of border. You know what? We can. We choose not to. Can we make so it is impossible for anybody coming into the United States and do us harm? No. I know we cannot seal the border. It is impossible. It is impossible. We would not want to. There are trade issues and all the rest of that stuff. But can we do more than we are today to protect our borders? Yes, we can. The President made a good first step when he announced last week when he is asking for the Congress to take action and create the Homeland Defense Agency that includes all of the disparate parts of border security. I am all for it. I commend him for doing that. I will do everything I can to support that effort. I hope that the Congress of the United States will act quickly to implement it. That will not be easy. We all know here that one of the major obstacles to surrendering a little part of your turf is there are egos involved, and God forbid that anybody think that there are people around here with big egos. But let us face it, turf battles here are the deadliest and nastiest thing you will ever see. This will be a massive turf battle because we will take agencies away from a committee of reference and put them over here, and every chairman will be very upset about the fact that they are losing their little bit of power. It will not happen easily, but it is our responsibility to do it. We are not at the end of the road there. There are other things that can be done. Certainly the military can be implemented in a much better way than we have used them so far in the protection of borders. We will have more to say about this issue next week. But for the time being, it behooves us, it seems to me, to do everything we can to protect and defend these borders. And although there are plenty of people who do not like it, plenty of people here in this body, even in the administration, plenty of people in Mexico, maybe in Canada, who want to see open borders, the elimination of borders, it is such a nice idealistic concept, no borders, it is kumbaya time, everybody grabs hands and sings, and why can't we all just get along, as the old saying was. Well, you know what, there are reasons for borders. There are reasons. And the idealism of libertarian concept of open borders just does not fit with the real world. September 11 of last year should teach us the importance of borders and well-defended borders. It should teach us the importance of trying to identify who comes into the United States and why and for how long and what are they doing here once they get here, and do they leave when they are supposed to? Other countries are able to handle that. You would think a country the size of the United States with the resources of the United States would figure out a way to actually identify the people coming in, determine how long they are going to be able to stay here, and determine when they leave. And if they do not leave, find them, deport them. You would think we would be able to do that. It is a big country. It would be hard, but it is not impossible. We can do it, Mr. Speaker, and we must do it. That is the thing. We have no options, really, because frankly our responsibility as a Congress and as a Federal Government is primarily to defend the lives and properties of the people in this country. That is number one. All of the other stuff we do around here is not as important. The hundreds of millions of dollars, the hundreds of billions of dollars we have appropriated to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education and the Department of Transportation, all of that money, really and truly, although some of it may be well spent, the fact is it has nothing to do with the primary goal of this country and the Federal government, I should say, the responsibility of the Federal Government. Nothing to do with that. But it has everything to do with our responsibility to establish border security. I have talked on this issue many times and at great length, and I can only hope that we have moved the process along a little bit and that we are going to take steps soon to actually do something to secure those borders. And as I say, I am very happy with the President's proposal for consolidation of activities inside the Homeland Defense Agency. These are difficult times and we are challenged as perhaps we have never been challenged before. Because even in wars of the past we have been able to know exactly where the enemy was, confront them wherever they are, have the battle. We know who wins. We know who loses, and at the end of a period of time, thank God, the enemy surrendered and we know victory has been achieved and we can come home and begin our lives anew. But this is a different kind of war. We will never know perhaps when the battle is over with. We are challenged in a way we have never been challenged before as Americans. It now behooves all of us in this body to take the important steps that have to be taken to secure those borders. Even then, as I have said a hundred times, it will not assure us that someone does not get through; but you can do at least this. You can say to yourself, I did everything I could as a Member of this Congress, as the President of the United States, I have done everything I could possibly do to secure our borders and to make sure something like this never happens again. It could; but on the other hand, we need to do everything that we can do.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to first of all recognize and memorialize those whose lives were either given and/or risked on this date in 1945. We have heard many moving comments, many moving speeches in tribute to the D-Day heroes. I can add little to the beautiful oratory that has been exemplified here by a number of speakers with regard to D-Day and what we owe the folks who participated in that horrendous event. I also think to myself about the America for which those men either died or sacrificed their lives, and the kind of America that existed then, and, to a certain extent, the kind of America that exists today, and the difference that may exist. For the most part, it is the same America, and that is a good thing. But there are things that I think are somewhat disconcerting when we look at the Nation today. Not too long ago, I think it was about a week ago, actually, there was an article in my local paper, in the Denver Post. It talked about the difference in attitudes of people today who are 20 years old or younger, the difference in attitudes between them and people older than them with regard to patriotism or love of this country. It found that people 20 years old or younger really, perhaps to put it this way, knew very little about America. They really had very little understanding of who we are as a nation, who we are as a people, and the principles upon which this Nation was founded. They did not understand, in fact, the significance of September 11. Many of them stated that the event was not that significant, from their standpoint, and maybe we even deserved it. That was some of the discussion. I have heard, as a matter of fact, from many people who are in academia, many people in higher education, and one professor in particular, a professor of economics at the University of Colorado who came up to me at a dinner that I was at not too long ago, last week, I believe, and he talked about what happened in his classroom on September 11 and the day after. He said he came into his classroom and there was a buzz. He did not know what had happened yet. He had not seen the television accounts, but the kids had, the students had. This was at the University of Colorado, as I say. They asked him what he thought about that event. He, having just heard of it, said, I will think about it and talk to you about it tomorrow. What is your opinion? He said that most of them felt that we deserved it; that it was something that America, because we are a country that takes advantage of so many other people around the world, that our support for Israel really set us up for this, and for a variety of other reasons that we actually deserved it. This was on September 11, when most of us were reeling from the impact of that event on our minds and on our hearts. He said he went back the next day, and he said, I have thought about it. I thought to myself that perhaps the reason that you feel the way you do is because you do not believe in the rule of law. You do not believe that there is anything actually that you can describe as good or bad, evil or precious; that everything is the same, and that laws essentially, as a nation is created by law, is based on the concept of good and evil, and that once we destroy that concept in our own minds or that once we kind of buy into this idea that everything is essentially the same, that there are no actions that we can describe as bad, that there are in fact no countries that we can describe as evil, there are no cultures that are less deserving of our praise than others. Once we buy into that multiculturalism, cultural relativism, once we buy into that concept, then it is not hard to understand how they can come to believe that the United States probably deserved what happened to it. Because, after all, we are no better than anybody else on the planet, in fact, as we tell our children in school day in and day out, in schools throughout the Nation, in classrooms throughout the Nation, that there is nothing unique about America. We teach our children from the doctrine of relativism, cultural relativism. It permeates our schools and it permeates our lives. It permeates our philosophy of government, and has for far too long, and it has an effect. When we do that, when children do not understand who we are or what we are as a Nation, it is not surprising, then, that they would respond as they did in this professor at the University of Colorado's classroom. Why would we expect them to be shocked and just abhor what had gone on? Nothing is unique about America, nothing is good. As I say, mostly we tell them that everything is bad; that America's history is rife with examples of slavery and a variety of other ills, what we did to the Native Americans, and all the things that we heap upon ourselves, all the problems that were undeniably problems. They are nothing about which we should be proud, that is true. But if we only concentrate on that, if we think that is all America is is the maltreatment of Indians and/or the institution of slavery, if they think that is all there is, then no one could be expected to be enthusiastic about the concept of America. No one could be expected to be too upset when foreigners come to the country and drive airplanes into buildings, kill 3,000 people. It is illogical to assume that they would be anything else but what they are. There is a price that we pay in this country for that kind of education and for a lack on the part of many people in this country to actually even tell their own children about America. This fear that if you extol the virtues of America and explain that, yes, there was in fact slavery in the United States, but it was the United States, it was the West in general that has abolished slavery, Western European and American thought, Western European liberal democracy, actually brought this world far more good things than it ever did bring bad things. And that is something most people have to understand and do not now know or believe. Western civilization gave this world far more in terms of personal wealth, the rule of law, a philosophic basis for man to live in peace and harmony, and one in which, as I say, provided the most for the most, called democratic capitalism, free enterprise. These are all great parts of the Western civilization that we so often decry. And we do this at our peril. It will eventually eat away at the fiber of this country so that it is not just those children or those people here 20 years or younger who take this cynical view of America and who refuse to be excited by the flag. In this article they talked about the fact that they were not patriotic at all. They did not even think about the country in patriotic ways. And the only way they described patriotism was, as one person said, patriotism does not mean following your country blindly. Well, that is true, of course. It is absolutely true. It does not mean following your country or your government blindly. But it does mean understanding what the government is all about, what our Nation is all about and what we owe those people who died for it or gave their limbs, as my father-in-law did on the U.S.S. Hornet in the World War II where he lost both of his legs. The country for which those men gave their lives on D-Day is not the same country today in many ways. And it is, I think, discouraging. Now, that is not to say that there are not many millions of children, we had a lot of them here just a little bit ago, who exemplify the best in America, and who certainly are willing to talk about the United States in patriotic terms and certainly probably are willing to risk their life and limb to defend it; and we have hundreds of thousands of men and women presently in the Armed Forces of the United States doing exactly that, risking their safety, risking their life and limbs in service to the Nation and in defense of the Nation. And I say, God bless them. God bless those people who have given their lives in service of this Nation. I am reminded, however, of a poem that I had to learn when I was in high school, a poem by Thomas Macaulay, and it is called Horatius at the Gate. And I only remember a short bit of it. It went on for a lot longer than I can recall tonight. But it was something like this, again, Horatius at the Gate, and I have to explain the background of it for just a second. There was a time, I believe it was under the Emperor Trajen in ancient Rome when barbarians were at the gate of Rome and had conquered everything in between their land and Rome itself. And there was great panic and fear throughout Rome as to what was going to happen at the point in time that the barbarians breached the gates and came into the city. And as myth or story has it, a young man by the name of Horatius bravely volunteered to go to one end of a bridge that separated Rome from the horde that was invading. And he took two friends with him and they volunteered to go to the other side of the bridge and hold off the, because it was a narrow bridge, hold that as long as they could against the army oncoming while the rest of their compatriots cut down the bridge on the other side, therefore, of course, giving their lives in this cause. The poem, again, as I remember it by Thomas Macaulay says, ``Then out spake brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate: `To every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his father, and the temples of his gods.' ''. Now that is all I can recall of that poem. But I think about it often because I think to myself if we do not, in fact, tell our children about America, if we do not imbue them with a sense of history about who we are and what we are, and the good things of America, the wonderful, incredible things it has given the world, the things that make it the envy of the world, the things that make it the place to which if we raised all of the gates all over the world, everyone would come. And what does that tell you? All of those of you who have such a cynical view of America, all those of you who have this culturally relativistic view of America, what does that tell you that if you lift the gates they all come here? It tells you that there is something better about America, something unique. And you know that we have to tell our children this because, in fact, if we do not tell our children this, there is absolutely no reason to think that they would intuitively come to these conclusions. I taught for 8 years in the Jefferson County Public School system, and I can remember thinking to myself, no kid comes to this classroom with an appreciation of fine art. I was not an art teacher. No kid comes to school with an appreciation of fine music, classical music. Nobody just intuitively says, boy, I think I want to paint. They may want to paint, but they do not have an appreciation for fine art or fine classical music or classical literature. You do not just have that in you. Generally you have to be taught those things in life. I assure you, Mr. Speaker, that children do not innately understand the beauty of America. It is just a place to them. It is where they were born. It is like if I had not even seen anything else, this is the world to me, so what is the big deal. They have to be taught. We have to believe it, we as parents have to believe and pass this on to our children. And we are. And something is happening in our country that I believe deserves our attention. I do not mean that it is catastrophic. I am not claiming it is the end of civilization as we know it, especially Western civilization, although I am claiming it is a danger to Western civilization, and I do believe that we are in this world, as Mr. Huntington puts it in his book, ``Clash of Civilizations,'' we are, in fact, fighting, the West as a civilization is in a way at war. Not a war we have brought upon ourselves, but a war started a long time ago. It is a clash that we have been wrestling with, dealing with for literally hundreds of years. It is the West against radical Islam. That is the most dramatic clash of civilization that I can think of to date. And as I have said, it is a clash that has been going on for a long, long time. I must disagree with those among us, those political pundits, those observers of the scene who suggest that the war we are in today is a war with only a small element of the religion of Islam, somebody that has, in fact, some group that has in effect highjacked the religion. I believe it is much broader than that. I believe we are at war with fundamentalist Islam. And it is far, far more expansive than just a small group of people who happened to climb into planes on September 11. Speaking of that, one little interesting factoid I came across at some point in time, I cannot remember when, but in 1683 the Muslim armies made their greatest incursions into the West. It was the farthest they ever got and it was to the gates of Vienna. As we all know, the battle had been going on between the Crusaders and the Muslim world for some time and Islam, I should say, specifically for some time. And the farthest into the West that the Islamic armies were able to get was the gates of Vienna in 1683. There the King of Poland turned back the Islamic armies. That was the last great battle of that clash, of that particular clash. And it is interesting to note the date of that battle, 1683, as I said, but more specifically the date was September 11, 1683. Now, a coincidence, certainly very possible. An interesting little factoid, that is the way I always refer to it. But I am telling you that people in the Islamic world know this battle and know this date. It is not a tiny fragment of history to them. It is something very important to them. My point is here we are in a clash of civilizations, I believe. Samuel Huntington's book I have referenced before and I reference it again tonight because I believe it is enormously important. I believe every American should read it. And by the way, I do not get any royalties or anything else. I know I have talked about it a lot, but it is just because I consider it to be a very, very good analysis. I read it once in the mid 1990s when it first came out. After September 11 I went back and read it again because I found it to be quite profound and quite prophetic. Mr. Huntington talks about this clash of civilizations, which is the name of it. And I will not give a book report on it tonight, but I will say that for people who are still interested in analyzing the events leading up to September 11 and subsequent events, for people who are interested in looking at the background of the conflict right now going on in Israel with the Palestinians, the conflict that is now causing us to focus a great deal of attention on India and Pakistan, these are clashes of civilizations. It is a clash of civilizations that goes on in Sudan. Sudan is perhaps the quintessential clash of civilization. Or maybe put it this way, a flash point in this clash of civilization. It is perhaps the best example we can look at to explain what is going on in the world today. Arabic north, Islam is the religion. Black African in the south with Christianity and animism as the religion. Two different cultures. Two different languages. Actually, many different languages. But two different countries essentially that have been artificially bound together by the British after their colonization. And after they actually left the country they created this here kind of artificial country we call Sudan. I say it is artificial because the two people groups have absolutely nothing to do with each other. They have nothing in common with each other. They have been fighting now for 47 years. They will be fighting for the next 100 years if the country continues to stay as it is today, one nation surrounded by one boundary. I believe that Sudan needs to be divided into two nations. I believe the United States should recognize South Sudan as the new government of Sudan of the south. And we should do so quickly and provide them with whatever aid necessary to help them defend themselves against the Khartoum government. So all that said, let me get back just now to the idea that Horatius was at the gates, and my point here is that if we did not tell our children about who we are, if we do not, in fact, explain to them what the West really means, what Western civilization is all about, if we condemn Western civilization to the trash heap of history to our children via the way we explain it, via the way we teach it, then it is exactly where it will end up because when the time comes for the next Horatius to be at the gate, when the time comes for the next group of people to risk their lives on some beachhead far away or even nearby, where will they be? Where will they come from? Will Horatius be there for us? Who will be the next Horatius at our gate? As I say today, thank God, I believe there are hundreds of thousands or millions of people who are willing to stand at the gate. I just wonder how long that will be the case if the generation is already coming up here in the United States that thinks of this country as not really worth fighting for. I remember when I was in college, it was during the late 1960s, and we were in the midst of a very, very ugly war and a great deal of anti- war sentiment in the United States; and I remember a guy carrying a sign in a protest rally at my school, and it said there is nothing worth dying for. I remember thinking to myself at the time, I mean, here is a guy who looked like he had just gotten back from the spring break in Cozumel and who probably drove up to the campus in his BMW and really dressed really quite well under the circumstances, even though carrying a sign, not a lot of his friends were dressed very well, he was, and I remember thinking to myself, here is a person who lives in the greatest society ever created, ever to actually be on this planet, who has benefited in every possible way from the sacrifices of so many, here he is with a sign saying there is nothing worth dying for. The most depressing part of that to me, Mr. Speaker, was really what could have been written there on the other side of the sign is there is nothing worth living for, and that is really the only other way that I think we can look at what he was really saying there and what a dull, drab life that must be, a life that gives someone nothing worth dying for and essentially nothing worth living for. I think that although he may have been an aberration, that today there are far too many people that could hold up that same sign. They were in this professor's class at CU, as I mentioned earlier, and we have all come across them. The clash of civilization that I mentioned is the big picture; and it gets down to a very specific thing: how do we see it in the United States. We saw it on 9-11, a very specific clash point of the clash of civilizations. And one of the other things that Huntington points out in his book that I found so interesting is he talked about massive immigration not just into the United States but all around the world and how that affects how nations act and react, especially democracies; and it is interesting to note that it is becoming more and more difficult for our friends and allies in Europe to actually put themselves in the position of supporting the United States as we may go into Iraq or other areas of the Middle East. One of the reasons why they are having a difficult time doing that is, of course, over time, over the last decade or so, they have had a massive number of people come in who are Arabic, who are Muslim; and therefore they make up, of course, a bulk of the voting block in the country, and that puts pressure on a democratic government. Here in the United States, we have certainly a massive immigration, not from the Middle East, although we have quite a number, we have massive immigration primarily from Mexico; but we have massive immigration from all over the world. There is an effect of massive immigration into the United States. It will have an effect, and it is something that needs to be discussed. I know to many people it is kind of a frightening topic, one that a lot of people want to shy away from, but I believe that everything I have said tonight to date makes it imperative that we talk about this because it will impact who we are, what we are and whether we will in fact survive as a Nation and as the leader of the West in this clash. We are becoming a cleft Nation, I think that is the way Huntington put it, as a matter of fact, cleft, split in half, because of massive immigration. We are developing two countries within this country, a country with two different languages, two different cultures, sets of ideas. We have a strange phenomenon that has never, ever happened before in the history of immigration into this country, which we all recognize fully well is everyone's background here, everyone, including Native Americans. At some point they came across a land bridge from Siberia. So everybody in this Nation is a result of someone immigrating, emigrating from where they are, emigrating into the United States or into North America. Never before in the history of immigration into this Nation, even in the heyday, in the early 1900s, when my grandparents came, 1903 my grandfather came, never have we seen anything like this where people are refusing to actually disconnect from their country of origin and reconnect with America. This is evidenced by many things, not the least of which is the very dramatic and very easy to explain, I guess, aspect of this phenomenon, that is, that there are now at least 6 million people in the United States that claim dual citizenship. This is unique. That has never happened before in America. When most people I know came to the country, they did so, as I say, even if they wanted to, really if they wanted to stay connected to their country of origin, it was very difficult to do. They came to the United States, and they lived in ghettoes where they could speak the language of their home country; but in a relatively short time, they were either overwhelmed by the country or themselves were forced into the American mainstream. Again, this is not happening in America today. The multiculturalism phenomenon, the multiculturalism philosophy tells us we cannot forcibly have people integrate into our society; we have to teach them in their own language in our schools. We will do anything to help them actually separate themselves out of our society and create these Balkanized areas of the United States. What we do is to instead of accentuating our common desires and common traits and characteristics, we accentuate all of the differences. That creates a Balkanized society. It is not a good thing, I believe. I may be wrong. I certainly may be wrong in my interpretation of what massive immigration means to a culture, but I believe that at least it needs to be debated. That is the least we can expect when we recognize that the potential for having it affect America so dramatically is there. Of course, there is a national security issue. Of course, there is a national security issue. Who for a moment thinks that our borders can possibly remain undefended and essentially porous and that we will not be, therefore, prime, prime targets for the next person who wants to come into the United States and do something untoward? Not too long ago I was in Arizona, and we visited the border; and it is hard to believe that this is a picture of the border, but it is. On this side of this barb-wire fence here is the United States; on the other side, Mexico. There is a well-rutted road here, deeply rutted road, I should say, that comes through; and by the way, this road is not on any forest service map. This is not an official road. This is a road made by people coming into the country illegally. This is a gate they come through. On this side of the gate there is a sign with the following words: ``All persons and vehicles must enter the United States at designated ports of entry only.'' This is underlined, a designated port of entry. Any person or vehicle entering this point is in violation of the U.S. code such and such, et cetera, et cetera. This is a sign facing the United States in a place along the border that is completely undefended, and it is almost an interesting metaphor for the entire problem here on the border. Down here is another place along just a few miles from this one where this is Mexico on this side, this is the United States here, and there is a cattle guard at this gate. So no cattle can enter the country illegally at this point. We can rest assured of that. As we see, this road tells us anybody else can and they do, in fact, enter illegally all of the time, in fact, by the hundreds of thousands. This particular area has now become the most heavily trafficked area along the border for drugs coming into the United States and for people coming in illegally. So the idea that we have protected borders is an illusion; and so when we talk about immigration, when we talk about especially illegal immigration, which is really exemplified here, we have to understand there are implications for the United States. There are, as I say, cultural, political, economic and national security issues that we have to take into consideration when we talk about the border, and we may not like to. It is one of the things I know people, go, oh, geez, we are not going to talk about the border, not going to talk about immigration because we know a lot of people get upset when we talk about immigration. Well, that is true; but they are going to just have to get upset because I believe it is an enormously important topic. It has implications of great magnitude, far beyond just the things that we have a tendency of talking about in terms of jobs and resource allocation and all the rest of that stuff. It has very, very significant implications, massive immigration, into this country. It deserves our attention. Thank God tonight the President of the United States is going to be on nationwide television, I am told, in about 1\3/4\ hours, at which time he is going to announce a proposal which I can only say is the most hopeful thing I have heard so far in this debate or the discussion we have been having over the past several months about immigration and immigration control. It is a proposal to actually make the office of homeland defense a part of the Cabinet, a Cabinet-level Department with a lot of interesting responsibilities, and I do not know the extent to which the President will get into the details of this, but I will tell my colleagues that it is to his credit that he is bringing this up; and I do hope that the Congress of the United States responds quickly to his request for creation of this Cabinet-level Department, homeland security. Because in it I am assuming he will have to have that part of the INS which is now identified as the enforcement arm. I am assuming we are talking about moving that there. I am assuming a lot of things here tonight because, as I say, I do not have all of the details. I am assuming that we are going to take certain roles and responsibilities away from other agencies, like Customs and Treasury and Agriculture. All of these agencies have specific functions for border patrol, border control, enforcement of our immigration laws. And, of course, they are all confusing with each other. They do not talk to each other and do not operate under the same sort of rules, and they have different goals in mind. So you can actually have people on the border, down near Nogales and El Paso and along the border where we have a port of entry, who actually watch the border through binoculars because they know each one of the various stations are personed by someone else, by some other agency. And so they will watch to see which station is actually being guarded by border patrol, which is being guarded by Agriculture, which is being guarded by Customs, and if you are smuggling people in, you go through one; and if you are smuggling drugs in, you go through another. So you have somebody at the border watching through binoculars looking and radioing down and saying, go through this line, go through that line, depending on what you are smuggling in. That is how goofy the whole system is today, and that is what needs to be corrected, and I am assuming will be corrected when the President speaks to the Nation tonight in terms of at least his policy. Now, whether we will do anything about it is another question. Because as you know, Mr. Speaker, one of the most difficult jobs we have in this Congress is getting over not only the kind of philosophical hurdles that confront us with various pieces of legislation, but also there are massive egos involved. There is a news flash for you; that politicians have big egos. But there are a lot of people here in this body who, frankly, are going to be asked to have to give up some part of their committee oversight responsibility, and this will not go down well. You know and I know what will happen, Mr. Speaker, the minute that that comes before a committee chairman of long-standing who says, what, you mean to tell me my little part of this thing here is going to be taken away and given to somebody else? Not on your life. So we will start this horrendous battle in the Congress of the United States to see whose ego is able to keep this Nation from actually moving forward in terms of immigration reform. It is discouraging, but I predict that that is what is going to happen. The President, if he does what I think he is going to do here in 1 hour and 15 minutes, will set the ball in our court with this creation of the homeland defense agency, which has a specific purpose, and the purpose is to defend our borders. It will know what it is supposed to do, it will have a clear line of authority, it will have a lot of people who are employed there who have an understanding of exactly what it is we expect of them, as opposed to the situation today, where we have the INS, these two groups within INS, one enforcement and one I call the welcome wagon, and they really do not fit each other. And even if we change those groups, even if we split those functions, as the bill that passed this House sometime ago attempted to do, we will have exactly the same people mismanaging the new agency as we have mismanaging the present agency. We will have two different lines, two different little captions on their doors, that sort of thing, but the people will be the same. And that is the problem. We have to get out of that agency. We have to get a brand new agency constructed with new people, with a common purpose in mind, dedicated to their job, and that is to protect the borders of this country and, in fact, provide homeland security. This is a list that our immigration reform caucus came up with in October. This is actually October of 2001. We presented this list at a press conference, and we suggested that there were a lot of things we could be doing to improve the security of the border. Number one on this list is to create a unified border security agency. A new agency to be responsible for all aspects of securing the border, including, but not limited to, responsibilities currently handled by INS, State, Customs, and the Coast Guard. That was our number one priority back in October of 2001. I am so glad to say that it is at least now taking conceptual form, as the President of the United States is going to tell us about this evening. Or I guess I should say I hope. That is what I have been told is going to happen, and my comments tonight are all based upon that assumption. The next thing we said was to establish a unified interagency database for the purpose of conducting background checks on visa applicants. We passed that in the House on October 12, 2001. Number three. An automated entry and exit system for foreign visitors. This was passed and signed into law. This is the Feinstein- Kyl bill. The Justice Department announced just yesterday initial plans for implementing this particular part of the proposal. Number four. Maintain computerized database on foreign students. Also part of the Feinstein-Kyl bill that we have passed. Number five. Restore political ideologies grounds for exclusion and deportation. This did pass the House again on October 12, 2001. Number six. Restore authority of consular officers as their first line of defense. We have not done that. Number seven. Reestablish meaningful deterrents against illegal immigration. Well, that is certainly something we have not been able to accomplish so far. But I am hoping that part of what happens tonight with the creation of this new cabinet level agency will do that. We have, however, passed several pieces of legislation requiring the INS to hire more enforcement personnel. But because of the huge attrition rates in the INS, increasing the total number of agents has been very difficult. One of the things we put here is a sense of the Congress calling on governors of border States, both north and south, to place National Guard troops on their State borders, Canadian border, Mexican border. It was removed from the defense appropriation bill last year. We did pass something similar to that in the House not too long ago that will probably be taken up in the Senate. Eight. Restore asylum protection to its original intent. It is one of the most abused categories we presently have for people coming into the United States. They simply call themselves a refugee and immediately get asylum, and then we never see them again. They never come back to any sort of hearing to determine whether they are, and we allow this. We say that is all you have to do, just say you are a refugee and then come back in a couple of months and we will have a hearing. Of course, they say that when they get here, and we never see them again. We have not done anything about that. Number nine. Establish greater cooperation between local and Federal agencies and immigration law enforcement. This is an interesting one. The Justice Department considered a proposal to encourage cooperation between INS and local law enforcement, essentially deputizing local law enforcement agents as INS agents. After a backlash from the immigrant groups, the Department of Justice appears to have backed off of this particular proposal. Number 10. Establishing electronic verification of identity documents for employment. Have not done that yet. Number 11. Reject further extension of 245(i). 245(i) is amnesty. We have not rejected it, it has just not made it out of the Congress so far. We came close. We came within one vote of rejecting it on this House floor not too long ago. It now is over in the Senate, where I understand that a particular member of the other body has put a hold on this provision, the 245(i) extension. Twelve. Abolish the diversity visa program which awards large numbers of visas annually to states that sponsor terrorism. Have not done that. We should. In fact, at last count, 55,000 visas have been approved since September 11 to people from countries on the terrorist list; 55,000. Thirteen. Implement a temporary moratorium on immigration in order to reduce the workload of the INS, and give agencies time to implement the provisions of our entire plan. Include an executive waiver for national security reasons. Of course, that has not been done. I have a bill to put a moratorium on for at least 5 years. I do not think it will get heard, that is the best guess I have, anyway, in committee. Direct Immigration and Naturalization Service to begin identifying, finding and removing aliens against whom a deportation or removal order has been issued but not enforced. We have not done that. We have, since we published this, we have forced the INS to actually tell us how many people fit that category. How many people are in the country, we said, who have been ordered to be deported? Now, these people, by the way, these are not people who got a parking fine. These people raped, robbed, murdered, did something, violated our laws, committed a felony, ended up in court and were aliens and were, therefore, subject to deportation. A judge somewhere, an immigration judge, and by the way, these are not the hard core judges. These are not the hanging judges. These are immigration law judges who, more often than not, let you off with the slightest penalty. But a judge somewhere listened to the case and hammered down and said this person is out of here, is to be deported. Then they walk out the door and we never see them again. The INS does not take them into custody. Sometimes they will send them a letter saying please report back in 6 months for deportation. Of course, it is called a run letter because when people get it, they run. So we have not accomplished much here, except we have gotten them to finally tell us how many. First they said 300,000. They have revised it upward. They now think it is about 500,000; 500,000 people have been ordered deported from the United States for violating a law, and they have simply walked out the door and we have never seen them again. These are the INS numbers. So, believe me, take that with a grain of salt as to what the real numbers are. Well, again, I hope and pray that the President tonight is going to do what I have been told he is, what I have been told is going to happen, to announce the creation of this new department level agency, and perhaps we will know more about the specifics, what it will really mean. But as I say, Mr. Speaker, if this is what he does tonight, if this is what he proposes, then it is up to us to follow through. Because the next time something happens, we will only have ourselves to blame if we do not do everything that we can do.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, there are a number of issues, of course, that come to mind today for purposes of a discussion for a period of time here. Something brought to mind when I was listening to my colleague, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. McInnis), and he was talking about the propensity of this body especially to spend money in ways that I think we could call profligate. It is true, unfortunately, whether one party is in charge or the other, it seems like it hardly matters, we do spend a great deal of money, sometimes without benefit, I think, of enough analysis and enough debate. And a constituent of mine e-mailed us a couple of days ago concerned about everything he had been hearing with regard to the proposals on both sides of the aisle for support of a new program for Medicare, a program that provides for insurance and/or some subsidy in some way or other for prescription drugs. As my colleague from Colorado said, it is a compelling argument. We have all heard from constituents who over and over again explain to us the need for some help in procuring their prescription drugs, and our heart goes out to them because we recognize, just as I do with my own parents, and certainly I think everybody has someone who they can think of who is in desperate need for medication, the cost of which is skyrocketing. It seems like almost every week it goes up again and it becomes an incredible burden. And, naturally, that kind of thing happening out there will result in pressure here on this floor and in this body to do something about it to respond. The reaction that most of us have is to say, well, what is it that the Federal Government can do. But unfortunately I think the reaction that most of us should have, but do not, is what is it that the Federal Government is empowered to do, empowered by the Constitution. Day in and day out we confront issues here on this floor that are severe, they are significant, they matter to millions of people in this country, and because they matter and because people are interested in them and there are pressure groups that develop, we find ourselves responding over and over again to the political pressure that boils up. People say, well, is that not the purpose of a democracy? But, of course, this is a republic and not a democracy. This is a republic. And what that means is that we elect people to represent the interests of our constituents. We do not have a majority rule of the population of the country, which is what a true democracy is; everybody meeting all over the country on every issue and deciding the fate of that issue on an up-or-down vote. That is not what the Framers of the Constitution gave us and that is not what we should be about. It is mobocracy, perhaps would be a better way of describing it. A republican form of government charges us, the people who are elected, to come here and analyze the issue and cast our vote in the best way we think that will fit our constituency and our responsibilities as a Member of this Congress. And this is always a challenging experience because we are torn, every human being on this floor, every human being in the Congress of the United States is torn between doing what political pressure pushes them toward doing on the one hand, and on the other what the Constitution prevents them from doing. The Constitution cannot speak for itself. It has no voice here except that given to it by those of us who are concerned about it. It is just words. It is just words on a piece of paper, on a piece of parchment, actually, and, therefore, it can be interpreted, broadly, widely, liberally to say that everything we do here in this body is constitutionally approved. Well, of course, I think that if that were the case, we would not need a Constitution. We would not need a written document. Britain has, for centuries now, existed without a written constitution. Everybody sort of understands what the parameters are and tries to deal with it. But, of course, Britain is a far more socialistic economy than ours and far more down the path towards socialism than we are, thank goodness. And that is inevitable. Without the constraints of a constitution, it is inevitable that it will lead to a government that will respond to all political pressures by taking away someone's hard-earned money and giving it to someone else that we deem appropriate. This e-mail that I received had such a logical way of approaching it that I thought I would bring it to the floor for our edification. I received this from Randal Morgan, who lives in Aurora, Colorado. And he said, ``Are you willing to insert the Boortz amendment, the Boortz resolution in all legislation you introduce and/or support? It is as follows:'' And I must admit to you, Mr. Speaker, I had not heard of this particular resolution, that has evidently come up in the past, but I just did not know of it. It says: ``Every sponsor or cosponsor over this legislation hereby affirms his or her belief that the need for the Federal Government of the United States to spend taxpayer funds on the purposes outlined herein is of greater importance and urgency than the spending needs which the party or parties who actually earned these funds may have. Such needs being, but not necessarily limited to, spending for medical care, child care, housing, food, clothing, transportation, education, insurance, savings and retirement planning.'' Well, I think that is a great amendment to add to any bill that is passed by this House or introduced by any Member. Certainly I will be happy to do so if I am ever in the position of actually introducing legislation that spends money. So far, in my tenure in this Congress, I have been able to avoid that particular distinction. But should I ever find myself in that situation, I will be happy to add this particular resolution as an amendment. I think it is a great statement. It is saying what we all are in fact doing. It is saying, clearly, that we are making a decision, we as a body, that everyone here believes and understands that whatever we decide is the important cause for which we are on the floor imploring our colleagues to support is more important than the concerns and the needs of the people from whom we are taking the money. I mean that is exactly what we do here time and time again. Now, if we use the constraints of the Constitution as our guideline, then we will say that, yes, there are some things that we will take money away from all people in this republic to fund. Because we are charged with the responsibility of doing such. We are charged with the responsibility of maintaining the republic intact. And that is just my interpretation, now. I mean, I recognize that there are 534 other Members of the Congress who make their interpretation, but what it means to me is this; that the primary responsibility of the Federal Government is not education, it is not health and human services, it is not transportation, it is not energy policy. None of those things are the primary responsibility, yet we have committees and we have appropriation bills for all of these. We have 13 appropriation bills for 13 separate activities, and they encompass every imaginable activity, by the way, and some unimaginable, I should say. But if we were to analyze the Constitution and think of that as the template over which we overlay the proposal that we use to determine how we should vote on any particular issue, I think that we would all walk away from here after having voted no on about 99 percent of the things that confront us. Because if our primary responsibility is, as I believe it to be, the preservation of the republic, then the defense appropriation bill that comes before us every year is of primary concern to me. It is my responsibility to make a determination as to whether or not it is enough, but not whether or not it is the appropriate thing for the Federal Government to do. Of course it is. That is understood. It is understood that an agency like the Federal Government needs to be there for the coinage of money and for the regulation of the transportation of goods and services across State lines. There are a lot of things that the Federal Government has a responsibility for that the States do not. Mr. Speaker, I am more than willing to vote to take money away from people in this Republic and give it to others for the purpose of meeting the constitutional requirements placed upon us. Individuals cannot defend the country. They may hopefully be able to defend themselves if we let them keep their firearms, but they cannot defend the country. We have to organize for that, and that is the purpose of the appropriations bill for defense. So our only question at that point in time is: Is it right, is it enough, is it too much, and should we support it on that basis? But really not whether it is appropriate. But all of the other things we do here that do not fit into the constitutional framework can be called into question and they are, I think, by the e-mail to us from Mr. Morgan. I agree we do far, far too much. I also believe, Mr. Speaker, that we have gone far too far in the direction of federalizing crimes. The Constitution again gives us certain responsibilities, and we can interpret them in various ways, but it is difficult for me to understand how or why we can impose Federal statutory limitations on certain actions throughout the Nation that are not directly related to our role as the Federal Government and the Congress of the United States. I think that we have so strained the resources available to us, especially in the FBI, for instance, giving them now over 3,000 laws that they have to enforce, 3,000 criminal laws that they have to enforce. We have so overstrained their resources they find themselves in the position of not being able to do their primary job, and that is to protect the United States from those who will do us harm from internal or external threats as a Nation, not a bank robber, someone who has taken a hostage, taken a drug, something that they are now responsible for getting involved with because we have passed laws here forcing them to do so. And then we say how is it that we could have possibly missed so many clues, so many signs that there were people in the United States of America that were here to do us harm, and we should have known and done better. The FBI got information from the CIA. Did they not interpret it right? Frankly, they are doing a million things, and I am glad to see that the Attorney General has determined that there is going to be a priority for the Federal Government, especially FBI involvement, and it is going to start with threats to the Nation. That is where it should end. That is where it should end because we have this thing called States rights. We have this thing called the federalist system of government which delegates to States all of the responsibilities for law enforcement of other activities. Yet people come to us constantly and ask us, and it is hard to turn down a request to make a law against certain activities, to make a law against pedophilia and child molestation. I do not know anyone who supports that activity. But is that our role? Is that what the Constitution says the Federal Government should be doing? I suggest that because there have been so many attempts to federalize criminal statutes and federalize certain crimes, I should say, that we have now become bogged down in that quagmire of activity that could frankly take all of the resources that we could possibly devote and would never, ever solve the problem. We all need to know what our role is. What is the job of the Federal Government when it comes to enforcement of criminal statutes? What is the job of the counties and the cities? When each one knows what they are supposed to do, they can devote their resources to accomplishing that goal. But we have done far, far too much because we have responded, as is natural, to the requests, the demands, the political pressure, to make certain things a Federal crime. Guns, guns. Now, I happen to represent a constituency that has suffered through one of the most traumatic events that can possibly be described. Columbine High School haunts our memories. It is replayed even today on television stations, in the newspaper with charges of malfeasance, with charges of ineptness on the part of various officials who were responsible for dealing with the issue. Parents will actually never, ever feel the healing salve of forgiveness when it comes to this issue, and when it comes to what happened to their children, both those killed at Columbine High School and those who remain or were injured, both physically and mentally. The tragedy is horrendous. So what happens then is political pressure develops. People come to the Congress of the United States and demand action. Certainly I felt that pressure. People demanded that we take dramatic steps in trying to restrict someone's ability to own firearms. Mr. Speaker, I believe, let me say first of all and clearly, I believe there are people in this country that should not be able to own a firearm. Maybe that puts me in direct confrontation with those who say the second amendment says everyone should be able to own firearms. I disagree. We do not go through the penitentiary system in this country offering catalogues for people to order firearms. We restrict a lot of people from being able to own firearms, and logically so. We do not want felons, criminals, especially violent criminals, to be able to easily access a firearm. And I must tell Members that seems completely logical to me. We do not allow people who have certain mental instabilities to obtain firearms. That seems logical to me. But what is the Federal role? That is the question that one must ask themselves. What is the Federal Government's role in this prohibition? Now, there are people who are federally licensed to sell firearms, and because they have chosen individually and voluntarily to in fact make that determination as a federally licensed dealer, then they must be regulated by the Federal Government. They must accept that regulation. That is their decision. They chose to be federally licensed. That gives them certain responsibilities and certain abilities that other people do not have. It is a privilege, in a way. So we regulate it. I can understand that, and I can even support it. And I understand the desire of many, even here, to go far beyond that and regulate the ownership of firearms to anyone, regulate the ownership of various kinds of firearms and number, all those things that we are able to do. Where in the Constitution does it give us that responsibility? That is just one example; and as I say, believe me, I want to keep firearms out of the possession of people who should not get them to the extent we are able. We cannot create a perfect society. We cannot guarantee against every kind of risk, yet that is the constant pressure we face in the United States Congress. People want a risk-free society, and they expect us to deliver it. All of this comes about as a result of a misunderstanding of the form of government that we have, and the blame can be placed at least partially, if not squarely on the shoulders of our public education system that does not do a very good job of telling children who we are, what we are, and what this Nation was founded on, what principles we were founded on. Without that knowledge, Mr. Speaker, we are at a loss to understand what we should be doing here and what State legislatures and county and local governments should be doing. We would think, without the knowledge of the Constitution, we would think that we here should be doing everything. That we are the ultimate authority, and I suggest that it is a misinterpretation. It is a lack of knowledge of the Constitution and of basic American history that has placed us in that situation, along with just the dynamics of human nature that when they see a problem look to a legislative body for resolution of that problem. But we have to tell people that we have certain responsibilities, and those responsibilities are limited, limited by this thing we call the Constitution of the United States; and there is an important reason why we have such a document: it is to curtail power of the Federal Government. The Constitution is not something that is designed to broaden the power of the Federal Government; it is designed to limit the power of the Federal Government. And we should understand and appreciate that, and we should teach our children about that to the extent we are able, both as parents and as schools. Schools should be the reflection of these values and attitudes and ideas about our system of government. After all, although there are a lot of reasons why we should argue about what should be taught in a public school system with regard to morality and everything else, the fact is we are talking about a system of government that we all share, that we all have a responsibility for looking into and voting, and a variety of other things that demand our participation. When we do that, we should demand the participation of intelligent voters, people who understand what this process is all about. If we do that, Mr. Speaker, it would come naturally to mind the next, I guess, topic of my Special Order tonight, the issue of what is the proper Federal role in the government of this country. I will suggest that there is one area that is uniquely Federal in responsibility, and that is of course the area of determining who comes into this country, how many, for what purpose, from what countries, and how long they stay. We call that an immigration policy and no State can adopt one. The State of Ohio cannot determine who comes or goes across its borders, but the Federal Government can and should and has an absolute right to do so. There is a philosophy of government referred to often as libertarianism that suggests that borders are meaningless and that they should be erased for the purpose of advancing economic activity, that borders are anachronisms, that they do not in fact reflect today's reality and should be erased. This philosophy would suggest that the European Union is a good example of the elimination of borders, at least partially, and that everything that comes about as a result of that is good and that is a way of looking at life through strictly economic lenses, and there is something to be said for that. I mean certainly the philosophy has merit. The gentleman who wrote to us, who I referred to earlier, Mr. Morgan, tells me later on in this e-mail that he is in fact a libertarian. I guess I would challenge a libertarian's view of this particular issue. I would suggest that although an ideal world is one in which all movement of goods and services can flow without interdiction, the real world in which we live requires the existence of borders and there are a lot of good reasons why borders should exist, not the least of which is the fact that people coming across borders without permission of the country they are entering can do nasty things, do do nasty things if they do not like that country's government, if they do not like what that nation stands for. So of course we have seen this happen on September 11. We know that 19 people, actually several more came into the United States for the purposes of destroying as much of the country's governmental infrastructure as they possibly could, killing us here, killing civilians in the World Trade towers, crashing their planes into the Pentagon, hoping to crash them into the White House and, as I say, the Capitol. We face that dilemma. Libertarians face that dilemma. How do they rationalize their desire for a borderless world with a world in which people exist for the sole purpose of destroying others, in this case us? And that the economic system, whatever grows out of this dismantled world that would be the result of the elimination of borders, would not be one in which free enterprise would thrive, in which capitalist ideals would be upheld. It would be one, if it were democratic at all, in which the masses of people would vote if they had the opportunity to vote, for some sort of world government. I assure my colleagues that right now, knowing what we know about human nature and the lack of information and understanding we have in our own country about what a republic is designed to do, can we imagine what would happen if we overlaid that template across the world and said everyone is to vote for some sort of world government to control various aspects of human behavior which would, of course, be necessary? Even if we eliminated borders, there would be a world government that would be necessary. Does anyone think for a moment, Mr. Speaker, that that world government would be one that would advance the concepts of liberal, small L, democracy? And of private enterprise? And of capitalism? Does anybody believe for a moment that it would be that, as opposed to a world government in which everything would be taken from those who have and given to those who have not? I think it is simple and pure and it is again an ideal, but it is an ideal to which I do not aspire. Therefore, I say, Mr. Speaker, we need borders. This country, all countries, need borders. We need borders to distinguish who we are, where we are and why we are. It is true, I think, Mr. Speaker, that there are distinctions among countries, among governments. I believe with all my heart that there are differences among cultures and among political philosophies, and I believe some are better than others. I know that that is a frightening thing to say to some people, and they would see that as very chauvinistic. But the reality is if we raised all of the gates all over the world, where would people come? To what country would they come? How many people, do you think, Mr. Speaker, if all of the gates in the world were raised, would go to China? How many would go to Russia? How many would go to Mexico? That is a test of this theory that all cultures are the same, essentially, all systems are essentially the same, no real difference and, therefore, why should we worry about things called borders? I suggest that we should worry about it because we are different. The United States of America is different. It is, in fact, unique, and I will say unequivocally it is better. Because if we raised those gates, Mr. Speaker, they would all come here. There is, I think, no question about it. Millions of people every year attempt to come to the United States legally. Millions more come into the United States illegally. We for the most part have abandoned our borders at the present time. We have abandoned the borders for a variety of reasons, some of them purely cynical and purely political, some of them quite philosophical in nature, as I say, a libertarianesque attitude about the need for and importance of borders. But regardless of the reason we have done it, we have done it. For all intents and purposes, we really do not have borders. I was recently in Arizona in the Coronado National Forest that has a 60-mile coterminous border with Mexico. The forest manager there had asked for help because he has a total of four people to patrol that border of his forest, a 60-mile border with Mexico, and we are now getting hundreds of thousands of people coming across, some looking just for jobs, some looking for a better way of life that would be provided them even if they did not work because of the welfare system in the United States, and some of them coming across to carry the illegal drugs that are provided them by the cartels in Mexico. Regardless of their purpose or intent, they are coming in illegally and they are essentially destroying the forest. In a microcosm, what is happening in the Coronado forest could be said to be happening throughout the country, to our Nation in a way. We are essentially destroying the forest, the Coronado forest, because the human traffic through there is at such a level as to actually negatively affect the ecology. There are thousands of footpaths that have been worn into the ground by people coming across in a very fragile environment. There are thousands and thousands of water bottles that have been strewn. There are clothes. There are other aspects of human movement through there, human participation in the movement through that forest and it is degrading to the forest itself. People coming through there illegally at night start campfires to stay warm and in the daytime walk away from them and now over 50,000 acres this year have been destroyed through fire. If this were happening in any other forest in the Nation, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, a variety of other environmental organizations, would be up in arms. Well, they do not like arms. They would be irate. They would be chaining themselves to the scrub oak that comprise the forest. But there is not a word said about this forest degradation because, of course, it is a result of illegal immigration and something that many of these organizations, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and the rest, are averse to trying to criticize, essentially because of political correctness. So States look to us, the forest manager in the Coronado looks to the Federal Government and says, ``Help me do something about this.'' We turn a blind eye to it. I used to say all the time that the logo for the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, should be a guy who simply is shrugging his shoulders. That should be on the top of the page, a guy going, ``I don't know. Don't ask me. I have no idea,'' because every time we ask the INS about anything, any questions you have of them, no matter what it is, they give you that kind of an answer. But now there is another way I would like to describe the reaction of the Congress of the United States, the President of the United States to the issues of massive immigration, illegal and legal, and that is the classic see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, the three-monkey sort of statue we have seen before. That is the logo we should have here. No one wants to talk about this because it gets a little antsy. Are we actually talking about racial issues? Are we talking about just one country? Plus there are all those votes that are here in the United States. If we talk about trying to secure our borders, which is a Federal role, a uniquely Federal role as opposed to all the other things we do that I mentioned earlier in my discussion here tonight, the uniquely Federal role of immigration is disregarded because of the fear of the political backlash that would occur in this country from voters, from certainly minority groups and the desire on the part of the Democrats to enhance their numbers by a large pool of immigrants into the country. They recognize that they vote often for the Democratic party, so they are averse to doing anything that would stop the flow. We, on the other hand, are averse to doing anything because we are afraid of the economic ramifications of businesses coming to us and saying, ``I need cheap labor and I don't care if they are coming here legally or illegally.'' And there is that libertarian flow through the body that says we should just simply open the borders. So we have all of those converging pressures here that stops us from doing anything about this tragedy. It is a tragedy in the Coronado. It is a tragedy also for the United States. Any country that cannot define its own borders and cannot actually protect and defend them is not a nation. Any country that says we recognize that there is massive violation of our laws, of our immigration laws, but we choose not to do anything about it, does not deserve to be called a country, and one wonders for how long it can be called a country. Interestingly, this issue of elimination of borders and sort of a world economic system, or at least in this case a North and South American economic and political system that converges, this is not something that is a hidden agenda. There used to be people that I know, and the Speaker knows of many people, who would confront us at various meetings, town meetings and the like, with this world economic order, a new world order, and it is all very conspiratorial; and they feel that it is all in the hands of certain people who have economic interests. Well, this is not conspiratorial. This is out in the open. It is absolutely clear for anyone to see and hear. For instance, not too long ago, less than a week ago, I think, the President of Mexico, Vincente Fox, was speaking in Spain, and he said that all of his efforts, all of the government's efforts to try and liberalize immigration policy, were really devoted to one goal. This was incredibly insightful, hearing what he had to say. This is the President of Mexico, and he has said something similar on many occasions, but he said just the other day that his goal is to end up with a system that allows for the free flow of goods, of services, and he stopped for a minute, and he said of people, not inhibited by borders. He has said in the past that he believes in a relatively short time there will be no borders between the United States and Mexico. The gentleman who is the head of an agency of the Mexican Government that is called the Ministry for Mexicans Living Outside of Mexico said earlier, told me personally in Mexico, that there were, when I was questioning him about the use of his term of ``migration,'' and I said it is really immigration, and when they cross the border illegally it is called illegal immigration, and this is Mr. Juan Hernandez, who is, by the way, both a Mexican and an American citizen, he said to me, ``Congressman, it is not two countries; it is just a region.'' This, I suggest, Mr. Speaker, is the end goal of this game we are playing. It is debatable as to whether it is good or bad. I think it is bad. At least it deserves a debate, a national debate. Should we eliminate our borders, or not? That is where we are going. I want it to happen in a de jure way as opposed to a de facto way. Actually, I do not want it to happen at all, but, if it does, it has to be through a legal process and not one where we just several years from now look around and say, how did this happen to us? We lost our sovereignty as a Nation. I do not want to say I was responsible or had no part to play in that process.

Mr. TANCREDO

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