Tom Tancredo

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Weldon).

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. The gentleman from Wisconsin, as is usually the case, did an excellent job in explaining the aspects of this particular piece of legislation. What he said was, for a long period of time, that we are dealing with an act that has been referred to as the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act. He spent 90 percent of the time explaining what that act is all about, and enhancing the visa protection provisions of the law is something with which I wholeheartedly agree. As a matter of fact, this particular part of the bill is something with which the entire House agreed because we passed it already. This part of the bill is done. It is finished. It passed this House by voice vote and went over to the Senate some time ago. So then what are we dealing with here? It is not, in fact, the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Reform Act, because that is done, it is finished, it is over with. What we are really doing here, and the only reason why we are here today, is to provide amnesty, amnesty for people who are here illegally. That is why we are on the floor today. It is not for the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act. It is done. It is being held up by one Member on the other side. That is their problem, not ours. This will not enhance our ability to get that law passed; this only makes it much more difficult because, of course, this does exactly the wrong thing. Regardless of how narrowly we try to define the scope of this amnesty act, it is in fact still amnesty. What we are telling the world and telling people who are here, came here legally, waded through the process, did all the right things, what we are telling them is, Do you know what? You are a bunch of suckers for doing it. What we are telling every single person all around the world who is in line, waiting, filling out the applications, going to the embassies and doing it right, what we are telling them is, You are a bunch of suckers. Here is the way to get into the United States and to get in the line for citizenship: Sneak in. Stay under the radar screen, get married, and even a bogus marriage document will do; because believe me, plenty of those developed, sham marriages, the last time we did this; Get a job, or at least present to the INS some indication that you have been employed; all of these things. Just do this, sneak in under the radar, stay here long enough, and do not worry, we will give you amnesty. That is what we are doing in this bill. That is the real purpose of the bill. As I say, all the rest of this stuff we have already passed. We are here for only one purpose, to grant amnesty. Again, we have done it. We did it in 1986. I assure the Members that the result of this will not be to have just simply the legally residing citizens of the country and all the rest of the folks who our hearts can go out for, it will not be to give them a better chance at the American dream. What it will do is exactly the opposite thing we want to accomplish here. We want people to come into the United States legally. That is why we set up a system. Admittedly, it is a flawed system, because it is turned over to the Mickey Mouse agency of the Federal Government we call the INS. But it is, nonetheless, the system we have established, that in order to come to the United States, they must have our permission. They come by visa or come in under some other status, but they do so legally. After all, we purport to be a nation of laws; we say that all the time. But this is absolutely the antithesis of that. This is saying, Break the law, come here illegally, and we will in fact reward you for it. This is why we have to vote no on this resolution, because it has absolutely nothing to do with enhanced border security and visa entry reforms. We have already passed it. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, is the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler) opposed to the motion?

Mr. TANCREDO. In that case, Mr. Speaker, I claim the time of the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler) to speak in opposition. Parliamentary Inquiry

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Hayworth).

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher), who is certainly well known as an expert on this issue.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode).

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. If somebody stood on this floor and experienced that old deja vu thing, when we talk about deja vu, I think we have seen this before, we have, in fact. It is called the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act, but we passed it. So please do not be confused by the rhetoric on the floor here that it is centered on that part of the bill. It is a good part of the bill. I support that part of the bill. But there is no reason to support it again because, guess what, we passed it. It is done. It is over there. What we have here is the same wording, they drug that back up, and stuck amnesty onto it so as to essentially, I would guess, well, I do not know, and I will not judge the motive, but I will simply say that it is somewhat confusing for Members when they think that they might be coming up here to vote on enhanced border security and, in fact, of course, they have already done it. In terms of whether or not we can rely upon the INS to accurately and conscientiously do the background work to determine whether or not the people who are making application are in fact legitimate in their request, let me just bring to the attention of my colleagues the most recent in a series of incredible, scathing reports about the INS. This one happens to be February 15. A GAO report finds pervasive and serious problems with immigration benefit fraud. In just one part here, a 90 percent fraud rate was found in the review of a targeted group of 5,000 petitions. These are the same kinds of things we are talking about here. A 90 percent fraud rate. A follow-up analysis of about 1,500 petitions found only one was not fraudulent. One. And we are turning this task, the task of determining who is going to be able to come into the country, whether or not they have been truthful in the information they have brought to the INS, we are entrusting this entity with that challenge. It is unfortunate, but true, that in the past when we did this, when we had another amnesty, admittedly broader in scope, but nonetheless an amnesty program in 1986, and one of the individuals who ended up as a perpetrator in the original bombings of the Federal building in New York, the office tower in New York, was someone who slipped through the cracks of that particular amnesty. He had been given amnesty on an agricultural visa because, of course, he lied and nobody checked, and nobody cared. And it is not that much different today. It is astounding to me that we are on this floor debating this possibility of amnesty and turning it over to the INS to have them determine whether or not this is a legal applicant or a legitimate applicant. They have not the foggiest idea. I assure my colleagues that when this passes, if this passes, and passes the other body, there will be a flood of applications. There will be literally millions. I would venture to guess that there will be millions of applications filed, and then the INS will have the responsibility of opening up the box at some period of time and going, ``Gee whiz, what are we going to do with this?'' I know exactly what they will do. They will get out this big stamp that says ``Approved'' and stamp it and dump it over here, because that is what they have done in the past. To suggest there is some degree of true conscientiousness in this process with the INS is ludicrous. We know that is not true. Every single member of this Committee on the Judiciary knows that it is not true. If anybody saw ``60 Minutes'' the night before last knows that even ``60 Minutes'' is aware of how incompetent this agency is. And this is the entity to whom we are going to entrust the responsibility for this Nation's safety. Regardless of who we think these people might be, no matter how pleasantly we paint the picture of who they are, just waiting to stay, the fact is, they are here illegally, or else, of course, we would not need to pass a law. They broke a law when they came into the country. There are all kinds of people trying to do it the right way. And to them we say, ``Hey, you know what, you really are stupid. You are really a big sucker. Why not do it this other way? Why not sneak in? Why not put pressure on the political establishment?'' Because, believe me, in a while we will cave in and we will have another amnesty, and another one and another one. I encourage my colleagues not to be confused about this other language about visa reform. It has nothing to do with this bill. We have already passed it. We are dealing with amnesty here. Defeat it.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. I yield to the gentleman from Connecticut.

Mr. TANCREDO. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Speaker, I would say to the gentleman that we will see how brilliant it is once we get a vote on this issue and whether or not we are able to convince anybody, but I thank the gentleman for those kind words. Mr. Speaker, I know there is an agreement of political muscle being applied on this. The Speaker of the House is going to bring it, the President of the United States wants it, but most people in this country do not. Even yesterday, Mr. Speaker, something very interesting happened. I was told about this, I did not witness it myself; but I understand the President was speaking to the National Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and he was getting applause in all the right places for everything he said and everything he was doing in talking about the troops, talking about our war against terrorism; and then he said, and by the way, I am going to push for 245(i) extension. There was not, as I am told, there was not a single person in the audience who put their hands together in applause. This is not something that most people who came here legally want. They understand the problem. They do not want to encourage illegal immigration. They came here legally. They know that that is the right way to do it. We should not be pandering to any other groups or organizations, to the immigration lobbyists. We should not be doing that. We are not going to benefit from it politically. Nothing we will ever do will ever satisfy groups like La Raza and others, these immigration advocacy groups. Nothing will ever satisfy them until the complete elimination of the borders actually occurs. It is not a good idea. Every time I go to Mexico and I talk to them in Mexico, I ask them, what is it they are looking for? They always talk to me about the circularity. They want people coming to the United States, said the foreign minister, we want people coming to the United States, we want them working, we want them sending money back to Mexico, and then, as President Vincente Fox said, I want them coming home to retire in Mexico. Well, I would say that I am all for the circularity issue, but I would narrow the time frame quite dramatically to something we call a ``guest worker program.'' People need a job, and people need workers. Great. We establish a guest worker program, one that really and truly is viable. People come in, they take the jobs that are available for them, and we protect their rights as workers. We do not let them be abused by employers who may want to take advantage of them because they would be here illegally under other circumstances. So we can protect their rights and also protect our own rights as a Nation by determining who comes and how many and how long they stay by establishing a good guest worker program. But they do not want that. They simply want us to abandon the border. They do not want people just coming to the United States working and then going home; they want them just coming to the United States. And, as I say, there are political reasons for that in Mexico; there are political reasons for that here in the United States. But we should at least speak out on it. We should at least speak out against it. For one thing, Mr. Speaker, we would be giving the task of determining who is eligible for this amnesty to the Department of Justice and, more specifically, to the, guess what, to the INS. Now, Mr. Speaker, what more do I have to say about this organization that could possibly convince the people here that this is not the right organization to give such a responsibility to? I cannot imagine that anybody thinks that fraud would not be rampant in all of the applications, or at least a huge majority that would be approved by this organization. Because, after a while, they just get the stamp out. As the clock winds out, they just get the stamp out. I would go back to this last comment that was made about the INS, about their only real intent is to move the paperwork quickly and efficiently. That is all they care about. So they get the stamp out, they will let people in, and they will not have gone through a background check that is the same kind of background check they would have in the country from which they originated. And, therefore, we become even more vulnerable to the kind of terrorist activity that we have seen and that we anticipate. Mr. Speaker, there are many, many battles that we will fight with regard to this immigration issue, some very, very broad in nature, some very specific. This is a specific one. Extension of 245(i). People listening to this might hear that, but that is simply a euphemism for the word ``amnesty.'' This is not a good thing for us to do. It is not good public policy. Most people in the United States agree with that statement. Why are we doing it? What is the reason we are in such a rush to get this in front of us? Why is there so much pressure being placed on us to do something most people in the country are absolutely opposed to, and in their heart of hearts, I think most Members are absolutely opposed to it? How they will vote, I am not sure, because there is, of course, this element of having the administration backing it. But I assure my colleagues that whether this administration or any other supports this kind of proposal, it is the wrong thing to do. And I for one will speak out against it as loudly as I can, as vociferously as I can, and as often as I can. I recognize fully well that there are only two things I have in this body, and that is my voice and my vote; and I will use both of them as effectively as I possibly can to stop what I believe to be a tragedy in the making, and that is the disuniting of America, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., puts it in his brilliant essay, ``The Disuniting of America.'' That is really what the issue is about here, whether this Nation will actually sustain itself. And, therefore, it is my responsibility to speak out against it regardless of who is pushing it, the President or Speaker.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, recently a study was conducted by the GAO, the General Accounting Office. It was to look into the degree of fraud in the immigration benefits program. I have oftentimes, Mr. Speaker, taken the microphone for the purpose of identifying what I believe to be our serious concerns in this particular agency. There are, of course, many people who work in this agency, many people who are assigned especially on the border, assigned with the task of trying to defend our borders, trying to actually make sure that people do not come into the country illegally. This is an overwhelming task. I commend those people for doing everything they can to uphold the laws of the United States. But it is something I have likened to trying to keep back a flood with a sieve because of the variety of conflicting laws that have been passed by this Congress, because of the culture within the INS which has absolutely no support for upholding the laws, the immigration laws of this land, and because they are just overwhelmed by the numbers. I have often brought those things to the attention of the Congress. I have personally been to the border. Several Members and I took a CODEL down there just a month and a half ago or so. We observed firsthand the problems that are confronted by our people there on the border. I know and I sympathize and I understand their problems. They not only face the daunting task of trying to deal with the hundreds of thousands of people a day that come into the United States and determine whether or not they are coming here legally, for what purpose, for how long and that sort of thing, and they not only face the, as I say, conflicting laws that have been passed by Congress, some designed to enhance border security, others designed to degrade it, but they are also, it is apparent now, working within a system that is broken beyond the ability for us to fix it. In their own system, they realize that they cannot look to anyone higher up on the ladder, those people that are there today who, as I say, are in the trenches, either on the borders or the people who work in customs, all of them recognize that the system in which they are operating is broken. Recently, I returned from overseas. As my wife and I were going through customs at JFK in New York, the lady looked up and she said, ``I think I recognize you. I actually watch C-SPAN. I think I recognize you. Aren't you on?'' I said, ``Yes, I have been on often talking about immigration-related issues.'' She just hung her head the minute I said it, she said, ``Oh, yeah, that's right, it is such a mess. Don't get me started on this. I don't know where to start. It is a mess.'' Her brief response to the word immigration, immigration policy, is I think probably the best analogy I can give you to the whole system. It is a mess. That is the best example I can give you, the best definition of the system I can give you. It is a mess. This recent report of the GAO is just the most recent example of the problem. We have actually had over the course of the last 10 years several reports done by a variety of different agencies all on the INS talking about the inefficiency in the organization, their inability to get the job done, even referencing their lack of a true desire to get the job done. Mr. Speaker, the INS, as you know, is divided into two parts at the present time. They have two different functions within the same organization. Maybe that is part of the problem, because these responsibilities conflict with one another. One part of the INS, Immigration and Naturalization Service, is designed to be what I call the immigration social work side, that is, to find benefits for people coming to the United States, hopefully legally, help them get their green card, help them get visas, all the things that are attendant to people coming into the United States legally and then being able to function when they get here. All of that stuff is part of their responsibility. Then on the other side, of course, is the enforcement arm. The INS is supposed to be the agency to which we go when we say, look, we are concerned about the number of people coming across the border illegally; we are concerned about not knowing who is here, when they are here and what they are doing here and we are supposed to rely on them to do something about it. But, as you know, as most of the Members of this body know, the INS is completely incapable and to some extent it is not really desirous of taking on that role. There are literally scores of examples to show that. The fact that 19 of these hijackers on September 11 came here on visas, some of them, of course, then expired, some people were here illegally at the time that it happened and the inability of the INS to control that process is a dramatic example, one dramatic event that happened as a result of their inability to actually know who is in the United States, know for what purpose they are here and know when they have overstayed their visa, for instance, so that they can in fact be deported. But the INS pays little, if any, attention; and they will tell you when you call them and ask them, do you actually go out and look for people who are here illegally. Their answer is, Well, of course not. That's not our job. I was on the radio not too long ago with a lady who is the spokesperson for the INS in the Denver area and she said, really, that is not what they do anymore. They do not go out on sites and look for people who are here illegally. Really, our job is just to explain to them why they are here illegally and then help them get benefits. That was her statement. It was almost incredible, but that was what she said. That is what they think, that it is not their job. They will say, well, we do not have the resources, we do not have the time; but what they actually should add to it is, we do not have the inclination. It is really not in our makeup. It is not what we want to do. We want to be the social work side of it. That is what we can do well. We do not really do this very well, this sort of becoming a policeman. We do not like that idea. So they shy away from it. We have had calls in my office from incredibly frustrated INS inspectors, from INS agents, sometimes who have been on board for 30 years. The caucus that I head, the Immigration Reform Caucus, has actually held hearings bringing these people in so they can talk and vent some of their frustration. It is incredible the stories they tell. They have every reason to be frustrated, because they work for an agency that is dysfunctional; and they are trying to do a job that is not supported by the agency itself. It would drive you nuts. I can certainly understand it. We have had calls from judges who will tell us that they are immigration law judges, and they are also frustrated by the fact that day after day after day they see people in front of them who have committed crimes in the United States besides, by the way, being here, probably many of them, illegally but they have committed crimes and they are aliens and so they are ordered to be deported by a judge. But because they turn that function over to the INS right after the gavel falls and the person is ordered to be deported, they turn that function over to the INS and the INS simply looks the other way. So at this point in time, we have at least, and I underline at least, because when you ask the INS for specific information, they come back with the same response. In fact, it is the logo that I have designed for the INS. It should be on their letterhead. It should be on their Web site. When you click on INS, a little figure should pop up that looks like this, a guy shrugging his shoulders going, ``I don't know, I'm not sure. Maybe. Could be.'' Because when you ask them anything, that is exactly what happens. They respond with, ``I don't know. I'm not sure. Could be.'' When you ask them how many people have actually been ordered to be deported but have not in fact left the country, you get this: ``I'm not sure. I don't know.'' Probably around 300,000, they will say, 300,000 people. Remember, Mr. Speaker, we are not talking about people who are just here illegally. As we know, that is probably 10 or 11 million people here illegally. We are not talking about people who have just overstayed their visas. Certainly they number in the millions, also. We are talking about people who have violated the law. They have robbed a bank, they stole money from somebody on the street, they shot somebody, they raped somebody and then they got arrested. And because of their violation of an American law, they were ordered to be deported. But they do not get deported. They walk away. No one has the slightest idea where they are, 300,000 of them. But the INS says, well, that is not really my thing, that is not really what I am too interested in. We are really on the immigration social work side of things. That is where we concentrate our efforts and that is certainly where we concentrate all of our resources. We have quadrupled the budget for the INS over the last several years. Quadrupled. It has gone almost entirely to the social work side. Very little has gone into defending our borders. Time and time again we have seen that the INS has absolutely no concern about the people who are here illegally. If you call right now, if a local policeman, for instance, picks somebody up on the street, it may be a traffic violation, it may be disturbance of the peace, whatever, and they find that that person is here illegally, they could, although hardly anyone does anymore because they know it is futile, they could call the INS and they could say, look, I have someone here who has done X, Y and Z and they are here illegally. What do you want me to do? The INS would say, well, go ahead, let them go. Get their name, and we will try to get back to them. Sometimes even people that have gone through this process and are ordered to be deported or who are coming up for their deportation will get a letter, it is actually called a ``run letter'' in the lexicon because it means the minute you get it, it says something like, look, we know you have violated the law so please report here in 2\1/2\ months for deportation. Yes, right, thank you, of course I will be there with my bags all packed. I do not think many people show up. It is called a run letter for a purpose, because when they get it they run. It is idiotic. Why should we even waste the stamp? The local law enforcement agency calls up and says, these people are here illegally and they tell them, let them go. We have had in Colorado instances where people have been picked up on the highway for violating some traffic law, the van opens, there are 15 people inside, they are all illegal. That is when they are lucky, that is when they have not run off the road and had the van get into an accident. We have had, of course, many people killed on the highways. It ended up that they were being transported through the State of Colorado. It is a big transportation hub, I am told, for illegal immigration. But, of course, we call the INS and nothing happens. They tell them, we really have not got the time, we have not got the people, so just forget about it. So at this time very few people actually even do anything; very few law enforcement agencies do anything like, say, call the INS because they have got somebody. They know it is futile. They know there is absolutely no reason to do it. And even after September 11, even after that, we find very little happening inside the INS that would lead us to believe there is a change of heart, a change of the culture, an emphasis on trying to actually keep people out of the country who are here illegally. It is incredible that we can say that after the most horrific event this country has ever experienced in terms of an act of terror, and, I pray to God, the most horrific event it will ever experience. But, of course, you and I know, Mr. Speaker, we have been told over and over and over again by our Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence here in the House, by members of that committee, we have been told by members of the Armed Forces, we hear it from the Secretary of Defense almost nightly that, in fact, we probably will be experiencing other acts of violence of this nature, of terrorism. Once again I pray to God that none of them would ever reach the level of damage as that that occurred on the 11th of September, but we do not know. We know, we believe, something will happen. We hear that all the time. There are alerts that are being offered, issued all the time. Yet even with all of that, we have not been able to get the INS, and this Congress, as a matter of fact, we have not been able to get anything out of this Congress that would force the INS to do a better job. Amazing. We have responded to the President's call by increasing the budget for the armed services and for the homeland defense, and I am totally in favor of it. I vote in favor of very few budget increases on this floor, but I certainly do vote for increases in the area of defense for one reason: It is our single responsibility. It is the most important thing we do here. I know it is hard to believe, but I certainly think the Constitution would back me up when I say it is more important; the defense of this Nation is more important than health and human services. It is more important than the education budget. It is more important than transportation. It is more important than anything else we do. So I am more than willing to increase the budget for those agencies through my vote. But what is amazing is that we have taken very specific and very direct action in beefing up the military, and thank God we have. They will, as the President said so eloquently when he addressed the Nation, they will always make us proud, and they do. They are fighting overseas today as we speak. American blood is being shed in foreign lands in defense of this Nation, and it is the right and proper thing to do. Who knows? We may soon be in other countries besides Afghanistan. I would agree with the proposal that we need to do something wherever terrorism raises its head or shows its tentacle, whether it is in Iran, Iraq, Georgia, or the Philippines. Wherever it is, I am willing to say we should try and go there and stamp it out. But why is it, Mr. Speaker, that we are so willing and able as a body to do that, while we are just as unwilling to do anything significant to improve our own defenses here in this country? How is it that we can ignore the fact that we still have people coming across the borders illegally? We still have thousands of people coming across the border every single day illegally. We have not really paid much attention to that. We have paid mostly lip service to it. It is, for one thing, a fact of political life that we are concerned about raising the issue of immigration reform for fear of the political fallout in the United States. But from whom, I ask, Mr. Speaker. From whom should we be expecting opposition? Yes, certainly from the Democratic Party, because they recognize that massive immigration will eventually lead to what they believe will lead to more voters for the Democrat candidate. So they will do anything they can, and have done everything they can, to stop any sort of immigration reform, and they want them essentially to come in, legally or illegally, it does not matter. Eventually, they believe it will accrue to their political benefit. On our side, we, of course, hear from people who are business owners, who say to us, I have to have these people because no one else will do the job. So turn a blind eye to illegal immigration. Let them come in. We need them. We certainly do not want to be seen as a party that is anti- immigration, or anti-ethnic group; and certainly, I guarantee my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, I am not either of those two things. I am not anti-immigration. I certainly have nothing against any ethnic group coming into this country. The issue is, how much, how many, for what purpose, and will we be able to control it? That is the issue. Do we want open borders? Do we want the elimination of our borders? There are people who, in fact, do. President Vicente Fox has stated very publicly that he expects in the next 20 years to not have a border between the United States and Mexico. I have talked with members of his cabinet who share that exact same vision: The head of a newly created agency in Mexico that would translate into the Ministry for Mexicans Living Outside of Mexico, an interesting cabinet level position, I would certainly say. I have talked to Mr. Hernandez, the newly appointed minister in this particular cabinet level department, and he has stated clearly to me that he does not believe that there are two countries. He says they are just a region. That is all. It is not two countries, he says. Well, now, this may be a very legitimate debate topic. There may very well be people on the floor of the House and in the administration in the United States, and certainly we know in Mexico, who believe that we should not have borders, that we should meld ourselves into sort of a United States of the North American continent and beyond, perhaps. South America, too. A European Union model. I know all of these things are actually in the sights of many people. That is what they think we are going to do. Well, okay, let us debate that issue, right here, a bill on the floor. I would like a bill to go the committee of reference to eliminate the borders and to join hands with all of the people on the North American continent in some sort of confederation, with common currency, all of the stuff that the European Union is doing. I will vote no, I will tell my colleagues. I will vote no. But that is okay. That is just my vote. If a majority of the Members of this body and the President agree, that is the way it will be. But what I do not like happening, Mr. Speaker, is that that is exactly where we are heading, only without any sort of legal justification, without an actual law being passed, without a decision being made by this Congress or by this President. We will look at some point in time in the future back and say, gee, how did all of this happen? We sort of eliminated the borders. They do not really exist anymore. Well, that may be true; and, as I say, it may be a good thing. I do not think so, but let us debate. Let us at least have this issue come to the floor. Let us not pretend that we are not just expanding immigration for all of these altruistic reasons. There are political reasons, both in the United States and in Mexico, for massive immigration. It is the hope of a number of people in Mexico, of the government of Mexico that enough people will be here to eventually influence the policy of the United States vis-a-vis Mexico. It is the hope of people in the United States that we can somehow attract these people and get them involved. It is the hope of the labor unions that they can get all of the newly arrived immigrants, whether they are legal or illegal, into labor unions, so all of a sudden we have labor in support of massive immigration. And then there are certainly altruistic reasons why even the President of the United States will support it. I believe that the President is a man who does speak from his heart. I believe that. I go to bed every single night thanking God that George Bush is the President of the United States. Let me get that clear and out here on the table. And especially not the alternative that we had in the last election. So that is not an issue. I am a 100 percent solid supporter. No, I am not 100 percent, because this issue is one with which I disagree with the President. But I believe it comes from his heart when he is saying that he wants to expand immigration. I just think he is wrong. I have a responsibility here to vote my conscience, and I certainly will do that, and I will speak out against it. It is not being disloyal to the President. It is simply an issue with which I disagree that he brings up, his point of view. I believe that there are massive implications for immigration in the United States, especially in the numbers that we are talking about today. It is something we are going to have to deal with politically, economically, culturally. There are a whole raft of fascinating topics that can be brought up when we begin to debate on immigration. But as long as we are going to have borders, however, as long as there are still lines on a map that actually divide the United States from other places in the world, from other countries, then, of course, they should be meaningful. What is the purpose of a border, we should ask ourselves, and what is our responsibility as a national government to defend them? It is again a unique position we find ourselves in at the Federal level, establishing immigration policy. States cannot do it. States have to deal with our decisions. With our decisions to abandon the border comes a host of problems that confront every State in the Nation, some more dramatically than others. California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Florida and other States that face massive immigration, legal and illegal, are faced with building schools as fast as they can, building highways, building hospitals, their social service budgets are busting at the seams, all because they are being inundated by people coming here, as they have come for many years, to seek a better life. There is one unique kind of situation that is developing, however, Mr. Speaker, in that we are witnessing an interesting phenomenon with the recent arrivals into the United States. Undeniably, they are coming here because they want a better life, because they see job opportunities that are not available to them in their homeland. That is exactly why most of our relatives, most of our grandparents or great grandparents or whatever, this is why they came. That is not different. But, in the past, the vast majority of people coming into the United States were seeking not only economic opportunity but they were seeking a new life, a new experience, a new country that they could become a part of, and they were anxious to cut the ties that bound them to the country of their origin. They were willing to speak the language for a while but very, very intent upon moving to the English language as quickly as possible, because they recognized that it was the way they could move up the economic ladder in this country. And it was also because, as my grandparents used to say to each other, they would say ``speak America,'' not English, but ``speak America.'' They were the immigrants of the late 1800s, early 1900s. They would get into arguments. I remember Sunday drives, and they would get in an argument in the back seat and my grandmother would yell at my grandfather, ``speak America,'' because it meant more to her. She knew that the word was ``English,'' but what she was conveying was something else. She was intent, as was my grandfather, on making themselves and their children and their grandchildren American in every way that they could. Mr. Speaker, I am a relatively new immigrant, in a way. That is to say, I was born here, but my family is only third generation. I am only third generation. My grandparents came here, as I said, in the late 1800s; and it is intriguing to me that in my life, the second generation after that, there was absolutely no attachment to the country of my grandparents' birth, other than I knew where it was. We had the cuisine that represented Italian ancestry, and that was it, really. That was it. There was certainly no political allegiance that my or my grandparents or my parents held to the country from which they came. Today, however, we are witnessing something quite different. We are witnessing a flood of people into the United States who do not wish to cut those ties. They wish to retain the political, cultural, and linguistic ties of the country of their origin, and we encourage it in the United States. Believe me, our own policies here, this radical, what I would call radical, multiculturalism certainly encourages that kind of separate status, the Balkanization of America. I can tell my colleagues that this is the case. We can actually show empirical evidence. This is not just theory. It is a different sort of situation today because I think that has always been brought up whenever immigration issues are discussed that, well, it is different today than it was before. Well, it is different today. Today, there are 6 million people here in the United States, at least; this is our best estimate so far, at least 6 million people in the United States who claim dual citizenship. Now, this is an interesting thing. It has never been this high. Well, for the longest time one could not do that in the United States, and one is not really supposed to now. You cannot really become a citizen. You are supposed to swear allegiance to the United States and no allegiance to any foreign dictator or potentate, I think the word is. But, in fact, people do retain their citizenship, as a result of Mexico allowing their citizens to retain their citizenship just a few years ago, and the numbers shot up to 6 million people. Now, I am stating, Mr. Speaker, that I do not believe that we would have had this same phenomenon, not even the same percentage of immigrants coming to the United States in the early 1900s, late 1800s. I do not believe we would have had the same percentage of people seeking to retain their citizenship of the country of origin. Because they came for a different purpose. Now, I am not suggesting that this is a nefarious thing, that these are not people coming here with the intent to do us harm for the most part. That is certainly true. But it does, in fact, bode ill for the United States. It really puts the emphasis on pluribus and not on unum. Out of many, one. It puts the emphasis on many, and we really do not get to the one. And that is happening to us, and most people I think understand it. I know that most Americans understand it. Poll after poll after poll indicates a desire on the part of the American people and, by the way, even recent immigrants to reduce the number of people coming, to take a break, take a breather here, to not let people come in illegally, and to not do something like give amnesty for those people who are here illegally. I will get to that in just a moment because, I am afraid to say it, but I am disappointed that I have to say it, but the fact is we will probably be once again facing this proposal. I know the White House is pushing it. I understand the leadership of the Congress, at least the House anyway, has agreed to bring it up, maybe even as soon as next week. But let me go back for a moment to the INS and talk about my concerns there. I have already discussed the incredible degree of dysfunctionality, if you will, in that particular agency, especially on the enforcement side. They are incapable or nondesirous of actually doing anything for enforcement. I think that is blatantly clear. I cannot imagine anybody here, no matter how supportive they are of immigration, I cannot imagine anybody actually defending the INS and their ability to actually accomplish anything. And we must not think very much of it, Mr. Speaker. We must not think very much of the agency itself, because we just appointed a guy to the head of it, a good friend of the minority leader in the other body, a good friend of a number of Members in the other body. This is a gentleman that we appointed to head the INS. A nice man. I have met him. Let me tell what you his qualifications are for the job. He was the Sergeant at Arms of the other body. That is it. That is it. He had been a staffer, I think, some many years back. He had been the Sergeant of Arms for years. Of course, he knew many Members over there; and, lo and behold, he is the new head of the INS. So we must not think very much of the agency, I suppose. It is sort of a toss or a throwaway. We should think more about it because it is charged with an incredibly important function. It just does not carry it out, and it really cannot because not only, as I say, is the problem with the enforcement side but now comes that GAO report that I mentioned earlier on. February 15 the report was issued, titled ``GAO Report Finds `Pervasive and Serious Problems With Immigration Benefit Fraud' ''. Now, remember, Mr. Speaker, this is the other side of what they do. This is what they are supposed to do well. This is the social work side, and this is what they tout. This is what they will state that they are really all about. The lady that I debated who was the spokesperson for the INS in Denver, this is what she said they do. They help people. They are there to get people their benefits. That is what she said. Well, here is what the GAO report just found. ``Immigration benefit fraud is a significant problem that threatens the integrity of the legal immigration system. Aliens apply to the Immigration and Naturalization Service for such benefits as naturalization, work authorization and adjustment of status. Immigrants benefit fraud involves attempts by aliens to obtain such benefits through illegal means.'' Oh, my goodness. Could that be happening? Ask the INS, how much fraud is there, and they give you the low go. I am not sure. Probably a lot. ``The report also details the Immigration and Naturalization Service failure to root out fraud in the immigration benefits application process.'' In other words, they know there is fraud. They do not care. The Chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner), stated, and I quote, ``This report raises a whole host of troubling homeland security threats posed by an immigration benefits process wrought with fraud. In fact, the GAO study finds the INS does not know the extent of the problem.'' There we go again. Hey, who knows? Probably a lot. The gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner) continues, ``Based on this report I am not confident that the INS is not giving green cards to al Qaeda operatives. We have a complete failure by the INS to take the steps necessary to protect the people of the United States and the immigration system itself from criminals manipulating the benefits process. These findings support the urgent need for a comprehensive legislative restructuring of the INS.'' Is that not the truth? Underline comprehensive, by the way. Underline comprehensive. We know what will happen in this body, Mr. Speaker. I am sure you are aware as much as anyone else how difficult it is to actually reform an agency of the Federal government and do so quite significantly, comprehensively, very difficult. We will take a stab at it. We will introduce something. It will get watered down in both Houses, and we will end up thinking, was this really what we were trying to do? Is this really reform? Maybe we have changed a few names. I am worried about it, but, nonetheless, we have got to try to do something, again, as the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner) says, ``comprehensively.'' Here are some of the findings from the GAO report. Now, please understand that the GAO is not an agency with a given bias here. These people, if anything, we would expect them to be more on the side of the agency itself that they are investigating. But get this, Mr. Speaker. A 90 percent fraud rate. A 90 percent fraud rate was found in one review of a targeted group of 5,000 petitions. A follow-up analysis of about 1,500 petitions found only one was not fraudulent. Please let me repeat that. I just do not know if you got that. A 90 percent fraud rate was found in the review of the targeted group of 5,000 petitions. Follow-up analysis of about 1,500 found only that one was not fraudulent. This is what they are supposed to do well, remember. ``Benefit fraud is a comparatively low priority within the INS,'' it went on to say. ``Without improvement in its benefit fraud investigations the INS's inability to detect the number of ineligible aliens improperly applying for benefits will be hampered.'' Next, ``A senior INS official has testified to Congress that criminal aliens and terrorists manipulate the benefit application process to facilitate expansion of their illegal activities, such as crimes of violence, narcotic trafficking, terrorism and entitlement fraud. GAO was told by an INS official that fraud is probably involved in about 20 to 30 percent of all applications filed.'' They wish it was that low. ``The INS approach to addressing benefit fraud is fragmented and unfocused. There is no assurance that INS reviews are adequate for detecting non-compliance or abuse during application processing.'' These are all findings of the GAO study. This is not my analysis. This is the GAO policy of the part of the activity of the INS that they are supposed to do well. ``Some adjudication officers had to sneak over to the operations unit to discuss fraud-related issues because adjudication officers are discouraged from taking the time to discuss questionable cases with investigators. ``INS officials said that fraud is rampant across the country and out of control.'' That is the part they are probably sure of. I know there is a lot of it, they would say. ``INS officials indicate that the immigration benefit fraud problem will increase as smugglers and other criminal enterprises use fraud as other means of bringing illegal aliens, including criminal aliens, into the country.'' By the way, please understand we are not talking about Mexico here for these types of problems. We are talking about Russia. We are talking about China. We are talking about countries all over the world who are perpetrating this fraud in order to advance certain illegal activities. ``The INS fails to balance its responsibility to provide immigration benefits with its duty to detect fraud in the immigration process. The GAO concluded that emphasis has been placed on timely processing of applications, allowing quality to suffer. This has contributed to the increase in benefit fraud.'' Now, this is the GAO report; and it probably, as most reports of this nature, only skims the surface. This is probably just the tip of the iceberg. But even if it is the whole thing, for heaven's sake, why would we not say we have a massive problem here? Mr. Speaker, with this in mind, with this picture I have tried to paint of an agency, dysfunctional in nature, incompetent, inefficiently run, headed by a gentleman, again, nice enough fellow but who was the Sergeant of Arms at the Senate, that is it. That is it. This is the agency to which we entrust the sanctity of our border, maintaining that, creating it, because that certainly is not a place with which you can apply that term today. This is to whom we turn in a time when terrorism poses enormous threats to our very survival. This is the agency that we turn to. Now, when we were on the border, Mr. Speaker, as I mentioned to you not too long ago, several Members and I went down on a congressional delegation. We talked to literally scores of people who were working on the border at the time. We talked to our immigration officials. We talked to people in the embassy, people who were important for visa processing. We talked to people right on the border, border control agents; and to a person they recognized that they were facing unbelievable challenges and that they were not really doing all that well. But what they said to us is, please do not do anything to make the job worse. And we said, well, like what? They said, like this amnesty issue. Do not do that again. Every time you start talking about amnesty up there, meaning here, the flood turns into a tidal wave. Because, of course, what do we think would happen? Is it illogical to assume that if we allow everybody who is here legally or even a large portion of them if they are here illegally, if we allow them amnesty, would that not simply encourage a lot of people to come across the border in hopes of obtaining exactly the same thing in a short time and not going through the regular process, not doing what millions of other people have to do, fill out the paperwork, go through the process of immigration, wait in line and wait your turn? Why would not they just simply come across? Well, they do. Of course they do. And they said, please do not do that again. I got back here that night to find that, in fact, we were preparing an amendment to do exactly that. The President had asked for it. The leadership was preparing it. We had quite a little tussle in our conference about that, and a decision was made shortly thereafter to not pursue it. A wise decision, I think. But because the President is going to Mexico in just a few weeks, just a couple of weeks, there is strong desire on the part of the administration to allow him to take with him this issue, an amnesty. So I am told in a relatively short time, maybe next week, the House will be once again debating whether or not we are going to give amnesty to people here illegally. Now, again, it is almost incredible that we have to say that this is a bad idea. Again, I support the President in almost every single one of his efforts, domestic and foreign policy combined. But on this he is wrong. We should not reward people for breaking our laws. And whether we call it a fine or just a revenue enhancement thing, having them pay a little extra money to get in here, I am told that maybe the thinking is having them pay $1,000 and that would be the fine for having broken our laws. What does that mean to the whole world? Come up with a grand and come on in. That is all it means. It means do not go through the system. Do not be a fool. Why would you actually go through the system? Why would you wait in line? Why would you do it legally? There is an easier way. Come across the border, get into the United States through a visa, by any way you can, by ship, by plane, just get here, stay here, overstay your visa, meld into the populace at large and forget about it. Because pretty soon somebody will say ``Olly, Olly, Ox In Free,'' and we will let them in. This is a bad idea. It may be done for political reasons; it may be done out of all truism. I do not know. It does not matter. It is a bad idea. There is a security issue we must deal with.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Madam Speaker, I come before the body tonight to talk about an issue that has often times been in the forefront in my thinking and a concern about the direction of the Nation; and that, of course, is immigration and the effect of massive immigration on our country. Madam Speaker, I and my wife and several other members of the Congress of the House of Representatives just returned from a trip to Turkey, and it was a very interesting, very fascinating trip. And as we got back into the United States and were coming through customs, the young lady who was the customs official that was stamping our passport and checking to see what we have and that sort of thing at JFK looked up at me and said, I think I have seen you some place before, maybe on C-SPAN. And I said, Well, perhaps because I often am doing exactly what I am doing here tonight. I have spoken often on the issue of immigration. And she just had immediately got this sort of dejected look on her face and said, What a mess. What a mess. And she said it in a way that says it all. Here is an official charged with the responsibility of implementing part of our immigration laws; and she, as well as so many other of her colleagues working in that area, recognize that it is in fact a mess. Now, I have often come before this body and stood at this particular microphone and talked about the implications, well, more importantly the incredible situation we face with an organization, the INS, that is dysfunctional, to say the least. We have a situation where we have literally millions of people coming across our borders every single year that cannot be accounted for, millions of people who actually end up staying here beyond the time that they were allowed to come in under visas. And many people, of course, coming across the border every single year without any sort of visa or permission from this government to do. There are many implications as a result of having this kind of situation, a country that is completely unable to defend its own borders. That is the situation that we face tonight. And I have talked on many occasions about the implications of that situation, the economic implications in this country, the incredible costs that we incur. In a recent article in the Denver Post, a columnist by the name of Al Knight identified the costs to just the city and county of Denver for the purpose of providing services for immigrants, both legal and illegal, who come into the city in order to have their children, have a baby. And then Medicaid picks up the cost of it for the most part, in fact, 100 percent of it. And how much then it ends up costing every citizen just for that one little chunk of the action. And it goes on, of course, schools, roads, housing, welfare, enormous economic costs, infrastructural costs for a Nation that cannot defend its own borders. There are political ramifications. There are cultural ramifications. And there are, of course, even security, national security issues that are all too evident for us here tonight as a result of the September 11 events. And we have talked about these things, and I try to bring them to the attention of my colleagues because, of course, I believe that they are worthy of that attention, those issues. Tonight I am going to focus just on a little bit of a different side of this because as I said I just came back from a country that is a fascinating place, and it is in a part of the world that is experiencing enormous difficulties. Of course, that has probably been the case for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And I have been, therefore, thinking about this issue that Huntington calls the ``clash of civilizations'' because we were there where we saw civilizations clashing. And Mr. Huntington in his book, ``Clash of Civilizations,'' points out that there are today no real ideologies clashing. There are really not nations fighting nations so much as there are civilizations clashing with each other. And this does have relevance to the issue of immigration and certain other aspects of our national policy. So I am going to focus on that for just some time tonight because I do think again that is a side of this immigration issue that has not really been discussed to the extent that it is warranted. Madam Speaker, I wonder whether or not we have given enough thought to some of the philosophical questions that develop as a result of massive immigration into this country and combining massive immigration with another phenomenon in America that I will call radical multiculturalism. Another great book, while I am speaking of that, is a book called the Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. He speaks to this problem, and he says what happens when people of different ethnic origins, speaking different languages and professing different religions, settle on the same geographical locality, live under the same political sovereignty, unless a common purpose binds them together, tribal antagonisms will drive them apart. In the century darkly ahead, civilization faces a critical question, he says. What is it that holds a nation together? And that is what I am going to address here for just a little bit this evening. He goes on to say, no one in the 19th century thought more carefully about representative government than John Stewart Mill. The two elements that defined a nation, as Mill saw it, were the desire on the part of the inhabitants to be governed together and the common sympathy instilled by shared history, values and language. Free institutions, he wrote, are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among the people without fellow feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, united public opinion, necessary for the working of representative government, cannot exist. It is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of government should coincide in the main with those of nationalities. Of course, that is happening less and less in this world. It is happening less and less in the United States. One can say and be accurate I think to suggest that America has for a long time shown itself to be something in opposition to this definition that Mr. Mill has given us of a cohesive country. After all, we are a Nation that was born out of many ethnic origins, people from a variety of different countries, of course, coming here to create what we now call the United States of America; and many of them spoke different languages and had different values and different religions and that sort of thing, but they came together in this country and created a new experiment, new experiment in the way we govern ourselves. We call it a republic. So how could it be then that the possibility or the problem of massive immigration could possibly in the United States, which as I say has a history of immigration, of course, people coming from all over the world and having formed a very prosperous and workable country, how could it be that we then look at the possibility that that might not be the future for the United States? Let me suggest, Madam Speaker, that there are some major and significant differences between massive immigration today in the United States and the immigration that brought this country into an existence, its existence. For the most part, it is my belief, it is my understanding of history, of our history especially, that it indeed is a country to which many people came from different places but came with a common purpose for the most part. They came here with the idea that they were in fact joining something new, participating in a new experiment in government, seeking a new life and seeking, most importantly, to break the ties to the old, and this is a very important distinction that I think we have to address. And when they came, the way that the culture existed and, up until just recently anyway, all the forces internally in the United States, the cultural and political forces, were driving people into an amalgamation, if you will, a homogeneity, the melting pot. That is where it comes from, where people came from a lot of places but became one. E pluribus unum. That amazing sort of phenomenon created this incredibly wonderful country, and it held us together through a revolution and civil war, World War I, World War II, Depression, all of the other things that provided a threat to the national existence. It held us together. Something is happening that I think we have to pay attention to. Today and for the last actually I think probably almost 40 years, we have seen a difference in the kind of immigration and the kind of people who are coming to the United States, the kind of connections they have to the countries from which they came and their desire to maintain them, their desire to maintain another language, different customs, different habits and even, even a desire to maintain some sort of political affinity to the country from which they came. This I suggest, Madam Speaker, is a new thing with which we must deal, a new phenomenon, and we could deal with it still in this country, this massive country if we were talking about immigration at the numbers that were even high at the turn of the century, couple hundred thousand people a year at the turn of the late 1800s, early 1900s. That was it. That was the highest we ever got 220 some thousand people coming to the United States. We could handle that. But we are, of course, far above that today. When we combine the massive numbers of people coming into the United States with this different philosophical background and difference in terms of what they are looking for, what they want to be when they get here and add to the mix this multiculturalism, this concept, this idea taught in the schools, the idea promulgated by the media, the idea promulgated certainly by what some people have termed the elite in our society, this idea being that all cultures are the same, that no nation state is really any different than any other nation state, that there is nothing unique about the United States, that we should not look to our past because they are nothing really, just a bunch of dead white males who made up our history, we should eschew that, we should move away from that, we should condemn that, we should disconnect ourselves from that history and embrace this multicultural concept. I would suggest that these two phenomena, these two things, this massive immigration with people coming with a different purpose in mind and combined with this multiculturalism, I would say radical multiculturalism, this is concocting a deadly mixture for the United States. This manifests itself in a variety of ways, and there are some very interesting statistics which point this out, what is happening to us. We have allowed for many, many years, we have allowed people to live in the United States while claiming citizenship in another country. Relatively few people have ever done that in our Nation's history frankly, but recently we have noticed a significant increase. There are now estimates of six, seven or eight million people in the United States who are claiming dual citizenship, and that is really probably a very conservative estimate. Because between 1961 and 1997, 22 million legal immigrants, that is just legal, came to this country. Seventy-five percent of them came from countries that allowed dual citizenship; and many millions, as I say, now claim that. Interestingly, a couple of years ago Mexico changed its laws and allowed its citizens immigrating from Mexico to retain their citizenship. They have even gone farther than that, and they are now encouraging Mexicans in the United States to vote in both the United States and in elections in Mexico. We were recently in Mexico. I will never forget sitting at a luncheon and sitting next to a gentleman by the name of Eddie Levy. Eddie Levy, his name tag in front of us there. When we went around, introduced ourselves, Mr. Levy introduced himself as a member of the Mexican Congress. And indeed he was. He was a citizen of Los Angeles, but he is also a member of the Mexican Congress. There are cities in southern Texas where the mayor of the city is a Mexican national. There is a city that has actually said that none of its documents will be written in English anymore, will all be in Spanish. It has actually said that nobody employed by the city can enforce any immigration laws, any American immigration laws. This is a city inside the United States. The President of Mexico recently, he has something he calls the Vision 20/20 plan for homogenous Americas. He is unabashedly staking Mexico's future and fortunes on greener pastures in the north. This is from a Gwinnett News Service article, February 21. He delights in describing a borderless region, symbiotic in its relations, similar in principle to the European Economic Union where jobs and people and the Euro cross most borders as easily as the wind. This is the President of Mexico. When we think of 2025, year 2025, there is not going to be a border, Mr. Fox has said. Soon there will be free movement of people, just like the free movement of goods. We were in Mexico, as I say, not too long ago. We met with a representative of the Mexican government who is a newly appointed cabinet minister there for a newly created cabinet in the Mexican government. His name is Juan Hernandez, and Mr. Hernandez's title translates something like minister in charge of Mexicans living outside of Mexico. It is a very interesting title, of course, and he was also unabashed in what he described as the future he saw. It is one in which essentially millions of Mexican citizens will be coming to the United States, legally and illegally. He sees really no difference. Because, as he told me, really there are not two countries here, he said. We are just talking a region. This is a member of the Mexican government. So there is a blending, that is for sure, there is a blending of culture. There is a blending, and the border is in many respects almost eliminated. It is gone, for all intents and purposes. There can be a legitimate debate, as I have said often, as to whether or not we should abolish the border between the United States and Mexico, between the United States and Canada and form this sort of European Union model that Mr. Fox wants and that many Members of this Congress want, maybe even members of our administration want. We can debate this point. A bill could arise for that purpose. We could have a national debate as to whether or not we want to eliminate the borders. I would vote ``no.'' I believe that there is a purpose served by them, borders, that is; and they go beyond just the need for our own immediate security. They go into this bigger issue that I am talking about in terms of what makes a nation; what, in fact, holds a nation together. But, nonetheless, it is a legitimate topic. We can debate it, if that is where we are going. The problem I have, Madam Speaker, is that that is where we are going; but it is without the debate. We will not hear on the floor of this House, we will not hear in any committee of this Congress a discussion as to the efficacy of doing something like eliminating our borders. We will talk about the need to revamp the INS and all that, and I am all for it; but I really do think that the whole battle over immigration is really a battle as to whether or not we should have borders. And the people who are the ultimate sort of multiculturalists, the people who do not see a reason to attach any significance to what we describe as the United States of America, its uniqueness and the validity of our civilization, of Western Civilization, essentially, in this clash of civilizations that we now face in the world, the people who push that concept will push for the elimination of our borders. And they are aided in that if they cannot get it via a bill through this Congress, signed by the President, then they will get it as a result of changing who we are and what we are in the United States. As I say, it is not just massive immigration that is the problem. It is massive immigration connected with this multiculturalism that infects our system, our culture. It is the kind of thing that says that schoolchildren cannot say the Pledge any more; it is the kind of thing that will not allow flags to be flown in our schools and in public institutions. Even after the outpouring of patriotic fervor after September 11, there were places throughout the United States that disallowed the flying of the flag because they said it may in fact anger people; it may be an affront to somebody; that it may make them uncomfortable. The flying of the flag may make them uncomfortable. No, Madam Speaker, the elimination of any sort of recognition of uniqueness of America from our public schools under this cloak of multiculturalism, I guess I will call it, has resulted in a situation where we have at least a generation, maybe two, who are incredibly illiterate when it comes to American history and the American ideal. I am a teacher by background. I taught for 8 years in Jefferson County, Colorado. I taught civics, as a matter of fact. And I can attest to something that I think is pretty much common sense, but it is a fact that children are not born with an appreciation, an innate appreciation of the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights, who we are as a Nation. They do not understand that innately. They have to be taught. It has to be something that is appreciated in their homes and reinforced in the school, the same way that most children do not come to school with an appreciation of great art or great literature or great music. We have to teach them that. They do not come to it naturally. The same thing happens with teaching them about America and about the uniqueness of this country and about what it means to be an American, how it separates us from the rest of the world. But even saying that today in a public school could get someone in trouble. Today, if a teacher in a public school in this land actually said that there is something unique about America, it separates us from the rest of the world and it is better, they would be in trouble. There are politicians that may be in trouble for saying it. There are certainly people in the media who would rail against such a concept. I see aspects of this all the time. I think there are major implications to issues like drawing lines, congressional lines, just for certain ethnic groups, and even caucuses here in the Congress of the United States, where Black, Hispanic and others are based on ethnicity. I always wonder about how that helps us come together as a Nation; how does this help us actually define ourselves as a Nation, the common set of ideals, of values, of languages? Now, I am Italian. I am 100 percent Italian. I am a recent arrival, as a matter of fact, by heritage. My grandparents came to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s, along with the wave of immigration all over the world. As I say, both sides came from Italy, so I am relatively new, if you want to think of it that way. I cannot trace my heritage back to the Mayflower. So I am a relatively new American, if you want to think of it that way. Yet I must say, Madam Speaker, that in growing up, all the textbooks I was given in school, all the things that I was told in my home, all of the influences of my life, and all of the references to my history, our history, if you want to say it that way, was all American history. I grew up thinking of Jefferson and Madison and Adams, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin. These were the heroes of my history. That is what I was taught, both at home and in school. There was never any idea that we were somehow still tied politically or linguistically to Italy. As a matter of fact, and perhaps even unfortunately, Italian was not allowed to be spoken in my grandparents' home. It was an indication of their desire to separate themselves from the nation of their birth and to come here and start anew. That, as I say, is what I think has changed. I believe our schools do not teach that. I believe that we are witnessing this significant shift in culture, and I think it is something worthy of us to discuss. Massive immigration, combined with radical multi- culturalism spells disaster, as far as I am concerned, Madam Speaker. As I say, I have often come to the floor to talk about the other implications of immigration, but tonight I just wanted to address this topic for a short period of time because I do think it is worthy of note. Perhaps it is because I just came back from overseas where I could see the effects of this clash of civilizations; that everywhere we look around the world, as a matter of fact, we can see tribalism breaking up nation states, and that is the new world in which we live. It is happening all over. Countries are facing this kind of problem, and I worry about our own future. And I think that in order for us to sustain ourselves, in order for the United States to sustain itself and be the leader of Western Civilization, that we have to have a cohesion, we have to have a homogenous society. Now, I am not suggesting for a moment that anybody has to ignore their background. Certainly I do not. Certainly I appreciate my own, and I appreciate anybody else's desire to revel in their own cultural background and heritage. That is not the issue at all. It is the issue of whether or not we disconnect, though, politically, from what we were to who we are today. And I worry that that is not happening. There are certainly indications that something very, very different is occurring in America today as a result of massive immigration into the United States. Uncontrolled immigration. We can, in fact, still have immigration. We do not have to slam any doors shut. We simply have to reduce the number; and we have to, on the other side of the coin, begin to once again focus on what it means to be an American in our public schools, in our institutions, in our leaders. I think the President of the United States and all people entrusted with the responsibility of leadership in America should focus on that and talk about it. It is imperative now, I think, as we enter into this new world, this clash of civilizations that I mentioned. It is imperative that we identify for the world at large and for our own citizens exactly who we are and why there is the struggle against the evil that we have identified as the terrorists in the world. It is in a way a clash of civilizations, certainly; and it is important for Americans to understand who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. We need a cohesive society. We need a language in which we can all communicate. Even that, of course, as you know, is being challenged continually. Bilingual education, as an example, is where children are placed in classes and taught in a language other than English for the purpose, they say, of increasing their educational attainment levels. But even when it is shown over and over again that there is no actual increase in educational attainment levels, people still push bilingual education. So you have to ask yourself why. What is the purpose? If it is not to actually help a child accomplish something, accomplish a better education, obtain a better education, then why are we doing it? It is, I suggest, Madam Speaker, as a result of this radical multiculturalism; the idea that we do not want people to disconnect from that other culture, wherever they came from and what they were, and connect to a new one. We want to foster this Balkanizing sort of phenomenon that we are experiencing in the United States. All very dangerous stuff.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to talk on a subject that often brings me to the floor of the House, and that is immigration and immigration reform. Before I do that, I have had the opportunity to sit here and listen to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle discuss the upcoming legislation referred to as campaign finance reform or the Shays-Meehan bill which we will be discussing tomorrow. It strikes me that some other viewpoints may need to be made this evening. First of all, it is intriguing in the way that we can actually identify a piece of legislation to fit our personal desires, as the Members that have introduced it have done. Certainly I have done it. I introduced the Sudan Peace Act. I hope if it passes, eventually we will have peace; but I have no hope that it will happen immediately, or the day after. Nonetheless, it is interesting how we characterize pieces of legislation here with terms and titles and phrases that we want to put it in a certain light, and we call this thing that we will be discussing tomorrow campaign finance reform. But, Mr. Speaker, it is anything but that, as many of us know. I have often had the opportunity to discuss this issue and to refer to a game that I am aware of. When I was much younger, I used to work at an amusement park in Denver, Colorado, called Elitch Gardens. I started there as a sweeper when I was 16 years old, and stayed every summer. Pretty soon I was the rides manager of the park and then the summer manager of the park. It put me through college. It was a great place to work. One of the things that we had in that amusement park was a game, and it was called Whack a Mole. It is a game which at that time the player put in a quarter and took a little hammer out, and the game started. Little mole heads would start popping up. The player would hit the mole here, and it went down, and then the player would hit it over here. And then it started moving faster and faster and faster, and the player tried to keep up with it. And pretty soon the player realized they probably were not going to win. The player probably could not win because it would keep popping up faster. You never could actually beat it. Mr. Speaker, every time I hear a debate on campaign finance reform, I think of that game because really that is what we are talking about here. We are talking about trying to stop the flow of money into the process of politics. Living in a free society, living in a society governed by the rule of law and the Constitution, in this case the Constitution of the United States which equates and has said over and over again, in politics money is speech; and, therefore, we have a right to free speech, we will never, ever, ever, stop the flow of money into politics. Now, let us recognize that at the beginning of this discussion. It is never going to happen. If there is anyone out there who thinks it is, and anyone who thinks that it happens anywhere else in the world under any system, let me disabuse that Member of that idea. Money does flow into politics. Is it all because there are people who want to work their way with the Congress of the United States? Undoubtedly some people contribute for that purpose. But the fact is for this country's history, far more, millions more people contribute to the political process with their money not because they want to get something special, not because they want to buy off the politician that they are giving the money to, but because they are supporting people who feel as they feel about issues. It is as simple as that. Mr. Speaker, in my last campaign I was trying to recollect what we raised, and it was over a million dollars, I know that. I cannot remember the exact amount right now. But I also know when we averaged out the contributions to the campaign, it came to something like $55 per person. I assure you that the literally thousands of people that contributed to my campaign in amounts of $1, $2, $3, $5, $10, $25, I do not think any of them really believed they were buying my vote on any particular thing. As a matter of fact, I do not believe that most of the people who gave me $1,000 believed they were buying my vote and that if they gave me $1,000, which is the maximum, that somehow I would change who I am, what I believe and what I think and vote for them, for their way, for their attitude and idea. Mr. Speaker, what really and truly I have to say to the people in this body, to the people listening this evening: if there is a single Member of this body who in their whole career on this floor or in this House has ever cast a vote against their conscience and because a large donor wanted that vote, then they should vote for Shays-Meehan. Because, Mr. Speaker, they need that kind of rationalization, they need to salve their conscience maybe. They need to somehow get out from this feeling that they are being bought. I have heard colleagues stand up here, and in the other body, and say, ``The system is corrupt, we're all bought, we're all paid for,'' and that sort of thing. Maybe they are. Maybe they are. But I must tell you, Mr. Speaker, they do not speak for me. There are issues on which I feel very strongly. I express them here on the floor. I express them in my vote. In the conference I try to convince my colleagues to see things as I see them, to vote my way. Yes, I came here because I believe in issues. I love the debate. But I should tell you, Mr. Speaker, that people support me, I think, not because they are hoping to change my opinion but because they like my opinion. They want that opinion expressed. As an example, I am known in, certainly Colorado, for being a very strong critic of the public school system, especially the monopoly system that runs the public schools, not for the teachers themselves, not for the people who work so hard trying to accomplish a task, but the teachers union. I attack it all the time because I think they are an obstacle to education reform. The teachers union, the NEA, the National Education Association, has never given me a dime, not a penny. Nor should they. And I am positive that this thought has never crossed their mind, that maybe if we give Tom Tancredo $1,000 or $5,000 from their PAC, he will start voting on our side on this issue. They know that is not true. They do not give me money. No matter how much money they gave me, I would not vote on that side of the issue. And they know it. That is the way, I am sure, that most of my colleagues are. We came here with a set of principles, a set of ideas that we want to advance and we tell our constituents what we are and who we are and what we believe in. And they elect us or they do not. And if they elect us, then they expect us to come here and be as forceful as we can, to advocate those positions. And because some people give me money for my campaign who happen to also believe what I believe, would I not be doing them a disservice if I did not try my best to advance those issues? But I again say, if you are afraid of this, if somehow or other you feel you have been bought and that you cannot withstand the pressure of a large donor that is maybe wanting you to vote for something you do not believe in your conscience, vote for Shays-Meehan. Maybe somehow that will get you off the hook. But I assure you, Mr. Speaker, it will not really change the process. We will once again hit the mole on the head, and it will go down; but it will pop up here and there and everywhere. As you know, Mr. Speaker, when they talk about soft money and hard money, for the most part I think most Americans have not the foggiest idea what we are talking about here. But they maybe like the sound of it: ``We're going to stop soft money from coming into the Congress.'' ``Oh, right, good, great. That's exactly what I hope they do.'' The reality is, of course, even in this bill that is being brought forward, and it will be brought forward tomorrow afternoon, we do not stop soft money. We do not stop even really the contribution of hard money. We will still have millions of dollars flowing into the system. They will find other ways to come up. The mole's head will come up in a variety of other holes, and it will come into the system. I say, look, who cares? Eliminate this charade that we are playing here. Forget about it. I really wish we would remove all restrictions and just say we report every dime. Mr. Speaker, on my campaigns, I report every single penny that comes in, as long as we can identify it. If somebody sends $5 without a name, I guess we cannot. But if someone tells me who they are and they contribute to my campaign, we post it, even though we are not required by law to do that; I think it is anything less than $200. But I post it all, every single penny. Then people can make their own decisions. They can look and say, gee whiz, look, he got all this money from Enron, which I did not get any money from Enron; but from any of these organizations or people, let them make their own conclusions as to whether or not that influenced my vote. Does that change who I am because they gave this to me? Frankly, Mr. Speaker, it is a charade. That is what is so discouraging. Many of my colleagues stood up in the previous hour and they talked about how cynical people are about the system, that the American public, I think that is the word they used over and over again, that they are cynical. I can understand that. I can understand that. Because if you listened to what was said tonight, you may come away, if you are not really perhaps well aware of the way the process works, you may come away from the debate, you may have come away from our colleagues and said, you know, I think if we pass this bill, there will be no more, quote, ``soft money,'' and that we will have reformed the system, no one here will come to this body influenced by contributions. If they think that, and if we pass this piece of legislation and then a year from now, two years from now we will read accounts of millions of dollars being spent, hundreds of thousands, we will say, ``Gee whiz, I thought they took care of that. Wasn't that called Shays-Meehan campaign finance reform? Wasn't that supposed to have taken care of it?'' Lo and behold, it did not. If you want to make people cynical, Mr. Speaker, then pretend that we are going to be doing something incredibly significant here tomorrow, eliminating the influence of money in this body. You and I, and I think even Members of the other side, well, both sides who support this certainly know in their heart of hearts that really things are not going to change that much except they can claim some sort of rationalization later on and say, ``Well, we voted for Shays-Meehan.'' In a couple of years, Common Cause, other organizations, whatever, other Members of the body will be up here saying we have to stop this hole that this mole's head is coming out of; and there will be a great hue and cry, there will be a big battle between both sides and the press will get into this because, remember, in any way, shape or form could we ever stop them. Of course the press is all in favor of reducing our ability or the ability of other people to have an influence and have their say in government; but you never hear them talking about reducing their own freedoms. And I do not want to. There is the first amendment which, of course, is going to make most of Shays-Meehan unconstitutional, anyway. But the reality is this, that we should not be so focused, we should not get carried away, we should not place more emphasis on all this than it warrants, and it warrants very little, because it really, really and truly will not change much except it very well may do exactly what the proponents suggest is the problem today, it may exacerbate that and make people even more cynical about this process. But I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, that I will be a ``no'' vote on that bill, as I was the last time around. Maybe I should not be, because as an incumbent, maybe we should support this kind of legislation, because it does put more of a burden on somebody else to raise money. After all, I have got the advantage of incumbency, I have got the advantage of name recognition and all the things that come with it; and so maybe I should just vote for this bill because it puts us in a better situation, vis-a-vis some opponent who comes and tries to get elected without the benefit of personal money. Because if you are not personally wealthy, it may be harder for you to get your name out, to get known, to get people to understand your position on issues under this kind of legislation. That is true. If you are wealthy enough, of course, you cannot be stopped. There is a provision in this that says something like if you put more than a certain amount of your own money in, the other limits are raised or whatever; but the reality is, Mr. Speaker, that the Supreme Court has ruled over and over again, you cannot limit someone's ability to put their own money into their own campaign. It is impossible. There are Senators who, of course, as we know put 30 million or more dollars in; but there are other people who put in millions of dollars and lost. I am not personally a wealthy person. I could never fund my own campaigns out of my pocket. No way. Impossible. I cannot do it. So I have to rely on contributions from other people. Every time I have run, I have run against someone far more wealthy than I, and God bless them for it. That is not a crime. I wish I were in that situation. But I am not. And so I have to rely on the contributions of others to help me level that playing field. That is never going to change. If you want to turn this place into a body of the wealthiest of us, who have the ability to fund their own campaigns, who are not the slightest bit concerned about corporate or political or any other kind of PAC, then fine, Shays-Meehan helps you accomplish that goal. But it does not improve this process, and it does not improve the body as a whole. I worry, because I do think people become cynical. Undeniably, they become cynical. As I mentioned, Mr. Speaker, that was not the original purpose of my requesting this hour, but as often happens while I sit here and wait for my turn at the plate, I do have the desire to respond to some of the things that I have heard. I am sure there will be others tomorrow who will be more articulate in their observations, in expressing their observations about this bill; but this is the opportunity I have selected for tonight. Let me get on for a few more minutes and discuss another topic. Here we are 5 months and 1 day from the tragic events of September 11, 5 months and 1 day in which an enormous amount of activity has occurred. The Nation has gone through a gut-wrenching experience. We have responded in ways and as a result of the leadership of our President; we have really risen to the challenge in many respects. In a little over 5 months, we have deployed American forces halfway around the world, we have stopped and defeated a terrorist regime in Afghanistan, we have probably identified terrorists and stopped actions that would have been taken up to this point in time. We are on the way to the next series of steps in that particular war, although I hesitate to call it war. We have not actually declared war. I wish we had done that. But the fact is that we have done an enormous number of things and to our credit, to the credit of this Nation, to the people of this Nation, to the President of the United States, to the men and women in our Armed Forces, God bless them all. I am proud of them, I am sure, as almost every American is in their heart of hearts. They are proud of what we have been able to accomplish in a relatively short time, with such little bloodshed, especially on our part, on the part of American servicemen and women, but even, quite frankly, on the part of the aggressors in Afghanistan. The reality is that far fewer of them were injured or killed than would have been the case in almost any other conflict of this nature, because our technology and our will is such that we are able to confine the damage to a relatively small area and identify our targets carefully and that sort of thing. So again, I am proud, I am happy that we have accomplished what we have accomplished. But, Mr. Speaker, we could in fact bomb Afghanistan into dust, into rubble. We could do the same thing in a variety of other countries. We can use our military might and that of our allies to help stop aggression, to help stop terrorism in other countries around the world, and I expect that we may be doing that. It is covertly now, overtly in some time to come, and I am completely supportive of those efforts. But one thing we have failed to do, one horrible, terrible failure, is that we have failed as of this point in time, 5 months and 1 day, we have failed to secure our own borders. Mr. Speaker, as I have said on this floor so many times, the defense of this Nation begins at the defense of our borders. We can do everything we are doing all around the world to try and protect American citizens from the threat of terrorism, but, in reality, we must deal with the issue of the defense of our borders, securing our borders, because everything we do externally, everything we do around the world, will never actually work to stop that one ultimate threat, and that is of somebody coming across our borders for the purpose of doing us harm; coming across our borders without us knowing it, without us knowing exactly who they are, what they are intent on doing here, how long they are going to stay here, what they do or are doing while they are here. We have done nothing really to change that. It is amazing. We have, even in this House, attempted to pass one piece of legislation to address this issue specifically, and that is a bill called the Feinstein-Kyl bill, a Senate bill we passed on the House side, which has been bottled up in the Senate by one Member from West Virginia, one Member of the Senate over there. They have these strange rules in the other body, as you know, Mr. Speaker, that allows this person to work his or her will over that of the majority, and because this one Member of the Senate has chosen to put a hold on that bill, we have not even been able to pass a piece of legislation that deals with the issue of student visas and tightening up the regulations and requirements on student visas. For heaven's sake, that one thing has not been able to pass. Needless to say, we have not been able to do an even more important thing. We have not been able to reform the Immigration and Naturalization Service, referred to as the INS. This is the body in which we entrust the responsibility of protecting our borders and determining who is, in fact, here illegally and removing them from this Nation. We have not done that. We have entrusted that body, but, unfortunately, that organization, the INS, is absolutely incompetent, incapable of doing what we ask of them in the area of enforcement of immigration law. They are both incapable and unwilling, and that is a problem that is very difficult to deal with, because if they had the heart for it, then we could address the issue with resources. If they wanted to do it, then it would be up to us to say, let us see what can we do in this body to make sure you can get the job done. How many dollars will it take? How many field agents will you need? How many people will you need? Tell us, and we will try to address the issue. But, unfortunately, that is not the real problem. Money is not the problem. In fact, Mr. Speaker, the INS budget from 1993 to the year 2002 went from $1.5 billion to $5.6 billion. It almost quadrupled. The President's budget for 2003 has another $1.2 billion increase, to a total of $6.8 billion. In all that time and with all that amount of resources available to it, the INS has been incapable and unwilling to defend our borders and to secure internally in the United States our system and our people against the activities of people who come here, terrorists who come here illegally, and also they have not been able to do even the minimum, and that is to actually stop the flow of illegal immigrants across the borders, both north and south, and that is a shame. That is not just a shame, it is a travesty, because, of course, we gave them the money. They chose to use it someplace else. Now, there are two sides to INS. It is divided into two parts. One is what I call the immigration social worker side, and this is the side that is supposed to help people get their green cards; help people come here and immigrate into the country legally and make sure that they are provided with benefits and that sort of thing and show them how the system works and help them get through it. They do not do that very well either. That is where their heart is and where almost all of their resources go. The other thing they are supposed to be involved with is enforcement, the actual enforcement of immigration law. But, of course, we know that they turn a blind eye to people coming across this border illegally, so much so that to this point in time we now believe there are at least 11 million, I think it is even higher than that, but at least 11 million people here in this country illegally. They did not come through the process, we do not know who they are, we do not know what they are doing here, and we certainly do not know if they ever go back to wherever they came from. We do not know anything about it. In fact, when we ask the INS, that is the answer we get for almost every single question; when we pose a question to them, they say, ``I am not sure.'' I have suggested on more than one occasion a new logo for the INS, on their Web site, printed on all their stationary, a new logo, just a person going like this, Mr. Speaker, a shrug of the shoulders. ``I do not know.'' Because that is all you get from them. ``I am not sure.'' ``I do not know.'' ``How many people? We are not positive.'' ``Where are they? We do not know.'' Let me ask you, do you know how many people are here in the United States who have overstayed their visa? ``Oh, a lot. Millions.'' ``I am not sure.'' After a while you just realize there is not really any purpose to ask, because this the answer you get: ``I do not know.'' ``I am not sure.'' ``I have no idea.'' We think so little of this agency, and it really and truly has been sort of one of those stepchildren that you just go, you know, let us not really pay a lot of attention to it, to the point where we have actually appointed someone as the new Director. Now, this is a time when, as I say, we are facing an enormous, enormous challenge, not just from the possibility of terrorists coming across the border that we do not know about and we do not know who they are and that sort of thing, coming in here illegally, but we are, of course, in the middle of a flood of illegal immigrants, and that has incredible implications for our society. Infrastructure costs, political, economic, you name it, there are going to be massive implications as a result of the huge numbers of people coming into the United States, both legally and illegally. Yet the INS we know to be incapable of dealing with it, and we have known for some time. In many ways there are many people in this body who really and truly do not care. They want to kind of cast a blind eye to it, to say, ``Oh, well, that is true. Millions are coming across, but we need the help, we need the labor, we need the people to work in certain areas.'' Plus, of course, there are political issues on the Democratic side of the aisle. They recognize that massive immigration eventually translates into votes for them. On our side of the aisle we believe that massive numbers of low-wage earners and low-skill workers will, of course, keep wages down, supply employers with a large pool of potential workers. So everybody wants to turn a blind eye, and everybody wants the vote. They want the vote of these people coming in. And so we are afraid. We are very, very uptight about this. It makes us very skittish to talk about immigration reform, about reducing the numbers of illegal immigrants. To talk about trying to do something about illegal immigration makes people skittish, let alone reduce the number of legal immigrants, which I believe firmly we should do. But, nonetheless, we have chosen to ignore it, to pretend it does not exist, to look the other way for political reasons, and so, therefore, we have not paid much attention to the INS, and we really do not care that they are as incompetent as they are and unwilling to do their job, and we keep giving them money, and they keep, of course, misusing it or transferring it to activities that have nothing to do with enforcement. We have even gotten to the point, Mr. Speaker, if you can believe this, but we just appointed a new Director, a new Director of the INS. This agency, of course, oversees a budget of $6.8 billion. Thousands of people work for it. It has the responsibility of one of the most serious activities of the Federal Government, one of the few responsibilities that is uniquely Federal Government. We debate education issues here and welfare issues here, none of which is truly a Federal responsibility, but this area of immigration, that is uniquely Federal. We take an organization like that, an organization to which we give $6.8 billion, and we appointed an individual as head of it whose only experience in this particular arena in terms of identifying who is coming and going across borders and that sort of thing is who is coming and going in the door of the other body, because it was the Sergeant at Arms for a lot of years. A nice guy, I am sure. He is the head of the INS. Maybe we should not be too surprised when people in the INS say things like Fred Alexander, Deputy Director for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, publicly told a group of ``undocumented day laborers,'' this is the Deputy Director for INS, talking to a group of illegal aliens, right, who he should, of course, have had arrested, but, no, he is speaking to them, like at a rally. But, of course, they had nothing to worry about. They were, I am sure, all applauding and having a great time, because he said to them, Mr. Speaker, believe it or not, this is on the list we have on our Web site, we have a list called unbelievable but true immigration stories, and some of them I will go through, because they are astounding. Fred Alexander publicly told a group of ``undocumented day laborers'' that ``it is not a crime to be in the U.S. illegally.'' It is not a crime to be in the U.S. illegally. ``It is a violation,'' he says, ``of civil law.'' Oh, heck. Well, gee, you know, I do not know why I was so confused by the words ``law'' and ``legal'' and stuff like that. Here he is, ``Hey, do not worry. It is not against the law. Come on in.'' This is the Deputy Director of the INS. I mean, this would be a joke. It would be a Saturday Night Live skit. It would be great, wonderful. There are lots of them, believe me. If the producers of Saturday Night Live are looking for any sort of material, just go to our Web site, the immigration reform Web site on our Tancredo Web site, and you will see we have, what have I got here, 54 little vignettes so far, and, believe me, they keep coming in every single day, things just as bizarre as that. The INS spent $31.2 million on a computer system to track down whether visa holders overstayed their visa. The system does not work. They say they need an additional $57 million for the system. Believe me, if we gave them $570 million, or $5 billion, they could not make it work. It is not the hardware that is the problem here. So I guess again it would not be surprising that we take the Sergeant at Arms from the other body and make him the head of the INS. Who cares, he is a nice guy, a friend of a lot of people in the other body, and, why not? He probably wanted to be appointed to something. Why not the INS? Certainly we do not care. It is no big issue, no big deal. Well, Mr. Speaker, it is a big deal. It is a very big deal. And it is incredible almost to me that we treat it with such, I do not know, disdain is not the word, I treat it with disdain because it deserves it, but we treat it in a way that it does not reflect its importance to the Nation. It should be completely reformed. When I say reformed, Mr. Speaker, I do not mean just some cosmetic attempt to pretend like we have actually separated the two sides out, and now we will have one guy that is just the head of enforcement and one guy the head of the social services. No, we need something far more than that. Right now, Mr. Speaker, we have to actually reform the INS in a way that means abolishing that part of the INS that does any work in immigration enforcement. We have to take its responsibility away from INS; we have to take the responsibility away from the Coast Guard, from Agriculture, from DEA, from all of the other agencies that presently have some role to play. By the way, I have been on the border, and I have witnessed firsthand the work that our border folks do, that the Border Patrol does; and to them I give all the credit in the world. They work as hard as they can. It is not their fault. Please do not get me wrong in that there are people listening tonight, Mr. Speaker, that have friends, relatives or are themselves employed by the INS. For the most part, they are doing everything they can. We hear from them every day. People call my office every day. INS, people who are agents and have been agents for 30 years, some of them want to speak without going on the record, some of them are willing to become whistleblowers; but almost to a person, they talk about their frustration in trying to do a job that they are incapable of doing as a result of an incompetent administration, as a result of a whole bunch of stupid rules that this Congress has passed. Come to think of it, and I am sure it is on here in our list of ``Amazing But True,'' and it goes to show you it is not all entirely the INS that is goofball in this area, as I have described, but other groups play a role. On the INS Web site, one can go to it today, tonight, and one can pull up a temporary visa application form. About the third or fourth question that one has to fill out if one is trying to come into the country is one that says, and I am paraphrasing because I do not have it in front of me, it says, are you a terrorist? Have you ever belonged to an organization that has expressed a desire to commit acts of terror in the United States? Are you a member of the Nazi Party? Did you ever do anything in the concentration camps? Answer yes or no. There is this little box that one checks. And one thinks to themselves, well, okay, goofy as that sounds, maybe we are using that if somebody checked no, but then comes in and does something wrong, we can say, we caught you because you lied on your form. We can make the case that is necessary. But get this: as a result of a member of the other body, a gentleman from Massachusetts who has been around a long time, and he happens to be also the chairman of the immigration committee in the Senate today, he added a provision in 1990 to this that said, by the way, if you check ``yes'' up here to that question, do not worry, because that is not a reason to keep you out of the United States. So, as I say, they are confronted with a lot of very, very difficult, the INS, even the people who are trying to do their job, are confronted with a variety of mixed messages. Strange, but true, as I say. Incredible, but true. Please believe me, there are so many stories like that, I do not even know where to begin. But they are all metaphors, in a way. I use them as a metaphor for the whole problem, the whole situation we face. That one form, that front page of that temporary visitor visa; and here is another one, Mr. Speaker. We were down on the border in El Paso about a month and a half ago, I guess; and we were watching people come through, and we have now set up, and we have paid a lot of money to have a card given to all of the people coming through, especially for just day trips or something like that, and we paid a lot of money for these machines so that the border agent can swipe the card through the machine, and on the screen it will come up and say who this person is, whether or not we know something about them that we do not like. It gives some information and background. Logical. Good idea. Well, of course, there are so many people coming across, the line goes up over the bridge and into Mexico, and there are literally thousands; I cannot even imagine how many thousands of people were waiting to come across. There are like four or five stations with a Border Patrol agent there. But the crush of humanity is so great that they simply do not swipe the card. The person coming in holds the card up next to their face and walks by, and the agent is like this saying, I am sure that face goes with that card, oh, yes, absolutely. Of course, it is a joke. It is ridiculous. But again, that is a metaphor for the whole system. I am not even saying that this is a bad idea; I am just saying it is another one of those kind of amazing but true things. But they showed us a door frame. Now, that is all it was, Mr. Speaker, a door frame on wheels. And periodically they would wheel this thing out, and on it in Spanish it is written ``drug-sniffing door frame.'' And they wheel this thing out, and they wait to see if anybody sort of balks at going through it. Excuse me, but the picture always does make me laugh; it is sort of humorous. In a way, listen, they are trying anything. If it works, it works, okay. But it is a metaphor for this whole system. It is completely and totally shot. This thing does not work, Mr. Speaker. It does not work. The best thing we got going for us is a door frame that says ``automatic drug-sniffing door frame.'' Oh, my goodness. But the people do try. They are overwhelmed. They are overwhelmed. One of the things they told us while we were down there, the people were really working as hard as they could. They knew that the task ahead of them was incredible. They said, you know, the only thing we ask is please do not do something up there that is going to make this job even more difficult. I said, well, like what? And they said, well, for instance, every time you guys start talking about amnesty for all of the people who are here illegally, they said. Do you know what that does here? I mean, the numbers swell. We are trying to hold back a flood; and if you give amnesty again like we did in 1986, telling everybody who came here illegally, oh, that is all right, all is forgiven, of course the flood turns into a tidal wave. Why would we think anything else? Why would we imagine that that would not be the case? That is exactly what would happen. Yet, we still talk about it here. The night before we adjourned in the last session, we almost passed an amendment to that visa bill I mentioned earlier, the Feinstein-Kyle bill, that would have been an extension of 245(i), which is legalese for amnesty. We almost did it. Thanks to an outcry by literally thousands of people across this country who e-mailed their Congressman or Congresswoman and told them that they really and truly were not excited about that possibility, thanks to doing that, it was pulled; and we did not, in fact, pass an extension of 245(i). But, Mr. Speaker, I will tell my colleagues what that is. It is another game. I assure my colleagues that it is going to come up again. I assure my colleagues that there are people here in this body, certainly even in the administration, who are trying to figure out a way, along with the President of Mexico and the Government of Mexico, they are trying to figure out a way to bring back 245(i) extension. This is wrongheaded for a wide variety of reasons, of course, not the least of which is the fact that we could not possibly in a million years, the agency we presently have that we call the INS, could not begin to handle the flood of applications that they would get almost immediately from people that they will not be able to tell; now, the applications will come in and it will say, yes, I have been here a long time and here are some receipts from my rent and whatever, but of course they could be fake; and we will never know exactly who these people are, because we will not have time to do any background checks. Just like the last time around, we let so many people in and then the last administration, the Clinton administration, pushed to get as many as they could made citizens as quickly as they could; and we ended up making thousands, if memory serves me right, it was something like 60,000 people became citizens of the United States under that process who were felons, because we did not know about it. We could not find out. We did not have time. So that is one problem, saying, for instance, that within the next 4 months, everybody who is here illegally, come in, get some paperwork in and we will verify it, quote, ``verify it,'' and if we do, you will be given amnesty and on the road to becoming a citizen. Mr. Speaker, I believe that citizenship in this country is more important and it means more than simply stepping over a line that separates two countries. There is much more to it than that. We should be much more concerned about who we let in, how many we let in, and what they are coming here for. Like every other country on the planet who understands that it is their sovereign right to actually determine who comes into the country and when, how many, and what for. We have abandoned that for a variety of reasons, some political, some idealistic in terms of what people think the world should look like, a place without borders. But I can assure my colleagues that the consequences of a borderless society are significant and dramatic. Some of them can be characterized by the kind of events we experienced on September 11. But that is, nonetheless, the elimination of the borders, that is exactly where many people want to go; people here in this body, some people in the administration, certainly people in the administrations of other countries for their own reasons and for their own purposes. Mr. Speaker, there are many, there are legitimate reasons, there are legitimate debates that can be held about whether or not borders should be eliminated; and I have many times suggested that that be the basis of any debate on the issue of immigration; that everyone, everyone should ask themselves, everyone here, everyone in the United States should ask themselves this question, and try to answer it as honestly as they possibly can: Do you believe that borders are necessary in the Nation? Is there a reason for it? Now, some may say, oh, well, that is silly, of course. No, no, listen. Believe me, there are people who would suggest that borders are not necessary, that they are anachronisms, that they prohibit the free flow of trade, of money, and of people, and therefore should simply be eliminated, as is happening. Frankly, the European Union is based on this model that will essentially eliminate borders and all the things that separate countries, establish a common currency, a new governmental system, a European Parliament, and who knows how far that will go; but that is the new world order. And again, it is a legitimate debate topic, but I just want to have the debate. I want us in this body to actually enter into a debate on that one very basic idea: Do we need borders or not? If Members come down on the side of wanting borders, needing borders, believing that they are necessary, then, of course, we must decide what that means. If we have a border between a country, what do we do about that? Do we actually defend it? Do we actually try to stop people from coming across without permission? Do we provide resources to make sure that the border is meaningful or not? Because if we do not, then of course we should simply side with the group that says eliminate them. After all, we are spending $6.8 billion in just the INS, let alone all the other agencies that have some responsibility for border enforcement. Let us stop this wasteful expenditure. Let us go ahead and say we do not need borders, we do not want them, we just want people to come and go as they please and not spend the money on borders. Now, I happen to be totally opposed to that concept, but there are people in this body who believe in it. The people at the Cato Institute, a very influential think tank here in this town, who believe in it. There are, as I said before, there are members of the administration, there are people we have spoken in other countries, specifically Mexico, who absolutely believe in it. One member of the Mexican Government, a gentleman by the name of Juan Hernandez, he is appointed to the newest agency, just been created, and it is a cabinet level agency in Mexico, and his title translates into something like Minister in Charge of Mexicans Living Outside of Mexico. Interesting job. Interesting job title. Mr. Hernandez happens to be, by the way, an American citizen and also a Mexican citizen. He lives part of the time in Texas and part of the time in Mexico City. He was a teacher at a college in Mexico and a very, very interesting gentleman. Very pleasant individual to speak to, very intelligent. He has a great command of the language. He is a good representative of his particular point of view. In our discussions when we were in Mexico, several Members and I were meeting with him, and he kept using the word ``migration'' to describe this process of people coming across the border. By the way, that is typical. Many, many people today have chosen to use the word ``migration'' to explain the phenomena of people coming across the border into the United States at their will. And so I always stop people when they are doing that, and I stopped this gentleman at the time and I said, you are like many people who talk about this, but you are really incorrectly using the word ``migration.'' It is not migration. Migration is when people move through a country, but when they reach the border of that country and cross it, it is called immigration, and when they do so without the permission of the host country to which they are coming, it is called illegal immigration. Mr. Hernandez turned to me and the other two Members that were with me and said, Congressman, we are really not talking about two countries here. It is just a region. It is just a region. That was a very, very interesting statement, and a very candid one on his part. And that is what I appreciate about Mr. Hernandez. He was up front with us the whole time. He essentially agreed with the proposition that the United States public policy is. He understands it is made as a result of voting blocs. He wants public policy in the United States to change vis-a-vis Mexico. How do you do that? Well, you have millions of people here in the United States who have cultural and linguistic ties to Mexico and who will vote for a policy shift in the United States. I mean, he was absolutely clear about it. This is not just some sort of, I do not know, hypothetical that he was talking about. It is not a conspiracy with deep, dark secrets. He was explaining exactly. It is a very logical political strategy if you think about it. There was a time especially in Mexico that people leaving Mexico were thought of in derogatory and spoken of derogatorily as people who were abandoning their homes, but that has changed. But now they are encouraged, in fact, to do so, but remain connected somehow linguistically, politically to Mexico. These are interesting facets of the problem we face, and they are part of what should be the debate that goes on in this body and throughout the country over whether or not we should eliminate borders. But if we are going to maintain borders, or at least the facade of a border, then it behooves us, I think, Mr. Speaker, to try and do everything we can to provide integrity to the process. The first thing we need to do is abolish the INS or that portion of it that deals with enforcement. The first thing we need to do is create a brand new, a brand new agency. We can call it a lot of things. I would suggest that it would be something that would be attached to Governor Ridge's Office of Homeland Security. But whatever we do, we need a brand new structure, one that has a clear line of authority, that has a singleness of purpose, that is given the resources necessary. We should take away the responsibility from Customs and from the Agricultural Department and all the other agencies that now get in each other's way essentially at the border trying to do their job which sometimes conflicts with the other agencies' jobs and makes it easier for people to come across the border here. Here is another one of those amazing but true things I was telling you about earlier, Mr. Speaker, another interesting point. Because we have so many different agencies handling our border security, they are assigned each one of stations that people are coming through in their cars. One may be run by Customs. One may be run by Agriculture. One may be run by INS, but each of them have different responsibilities, and different ways of dealing with the issue, and different questions they ask and different things they are looking for. So people actually will sit on the hills observing this situation down on the border, people coming through; and they will watch through binoculars to see which line is being managed by which agencies. And if you are smuggling people in, you will want to come in through this line. And if you are smuggling drugs through, you will want to come through that line because they have a different sort of emphasis. Amazing, but true. We have to stop that. We have to combine the agencies, take the responsibilities away and create a brand new one. That is not easy to do here. As you know, Mr. Speaker, this body and the government is not set up to allow tough issues to advance very far. Everybody gets very jealous, very, very guarded about their little kingdom, their little piece of the action here. So when recently Governor Ridge and his staff developed a white paper on border security, and it said that we needed to do exactly what I have just described, it said we must take all of these responsibilities away from the other agencies, we must create one new agency with a singleness of purpose, a clear line of authority and all the rest of it, it set off a firestorm of protest. I think that is the way the article characterized it, a firestorm of protests within the administration, within all the agencies that would be affected. So we called over there. My office called the Office of Homeland Security; and we said, we were reading an article in the New York Times about this white paper. They said, we do not know what you are talking about. They are taking on the INS logo. I do not know. I am not sure. And we do not know. We said we are reading, we have a white paper that talks about how we should create the new border control agency. They said, no, no, it is all theoretical. Nothing is on paper. Of course, that is not true. As a matter of fact, maybe I am breaking the news here to the Office of Homeland Security, but the paper is out. The media has it. The one you say does not exist exists. So you might as well 'fess up to it and let us get on with it. Let us try to do it regardless of whether or not the INS gets mad, regardless of whether or not the Department of Agriculture gets mad, regardless of whether or not Treasury gets upset because some sort of their little bailiwick will be affected. Who cares? Who cares? The job of this body is not to protect any particular agency. The job of this body is to protect the United States of America. And it is impossible to do in this way on the particular system we have created and it is being maintained. So now we are seeing one or two bills that will come to the floor, and we will try to tinker with it and pretend the rest of it is not a problem. And if we separate the agency into the two parts, enforcement and social services, everything will be okay. But it will not, Mr. Speaker. It will not be okay at all. The problems will remain, and what we will have done here so many times is create an illusion, created an illusion. We have fixed the problem with INS, we will say. It will not be fixed. People will still stream across the border illegally. Thousands upon thousands of people will be here. Right now there are at least 300,000 people who are here in this country who have been ordered deported. They have actually somehow gotten arrested. Now, be sure and understand, Mr. Speaker, we are not talking about people who overstayed their visa and we somehow found out about it. I mean, the INS was out there doing their job and said, you know what? I think so-and-so may have overstayed their visa. Let us go find them. No. No. That is not what happened, of course. What happened was so-and-so violated a law, broke a law, broke some other law. They violated one law because they overstayed their visa, but then many times they also robbed somebody, they raped somebody, they murdered somebody, whatever, but they have been found. They have been brought to trial. Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to once again consider the importance of this issue of immigration reform and treat it with the respect that it deserves and do not just create another illusion.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to mark a sad development in my district. I recently learned that one of Colorado's great educators will be retiring at the end of the current school year. Mrs. Barb Vogel will soon be leaving her post at Highline Community Elementary School in Aurora, Colorado. Barb is an outstanding teacher in all respects, but her passion to end slavery around the world, Mr. Speaker, has given me great strength during my short time here in Congress. Mrs. Vogel and her class of fourth and fifth graders learned of the slave trade in Southern Sudan in 1998 after reading an article about it. Her students, outraged at the realization that slavery still exists in the world today, began to raise money to free Sudanese slaves by manning lemonade stands and collecting change in a jar. In remarkably little time, Mrs. Vogel's ``little abolitionists'' had raised enough money to free one thousand slaves. The class formed the ``Slavery That Oppresses People (STOP)'' campaign to help educate students around the world about the horror of slavery as it still exists in Sudan and elsewhere. When I first came to this body, determined to try to do something about the horrific war in Sudan, remarkably few of my colleagues knew the details of the conflict or the extent of the suffering taking place there. The STOP group has helped immeasurably in the fight against that lack of awareness, with two trips to Washington, including one to give testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and one to meet with senior administration officials. I cannot help but wonder, Mr. Speaker, whether the efforts of Barb Vogel and the STOP campaign have done more to free Sudan from slavery and oppression than have three years of legislative and diplomatic wrangling. In the process of doing so, Barb succeeded in teaching scores of her students that a determined few who are willing to work hard can change the hearts and minds of millions. It is no small feat that she helped her students to prove to the world that one need not be rich or powerful or even grown-up to take a stand against evil. I have no doubt that the work of the STOP Campaign, led by Mrs. Vogel, will continue after she leaves the classroom in June, and for that, Mr. Speaker, we should all be grateful. I wish Mrs. Vogel the happiest of retirement, for she has certainly earned it.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the retirement of John ``Chip'' Roberts, Director of the Colorado Division of State and Veterans Nursing Homes. John ``Chip'' Roberts retired on January 15, 2002. He served older Americans for nearly twenty-two years. For the past eleven years, Chip worked for the Colorado Department of Human Services as Director of the Colorado Division of State and Veterans Nursing Homes. Previously, he worked in the private sector as both a nursing home administrator and a regional director. As Division Director of the Colorado State and Veterans Homes, Mr. Roberts oversaw the operations of five State nursing facilities totaling 582 beds. Four of the State homes provide skilled nursing care to military veterans and their spouses and widows. Under Mr. Roberts' leadership, the State homes program made numerous improvements in service delivery. Chip was always quick to credit the dedicated staff at each facility for the overall success of the program. Since 1997, in response to legislation authorizing the construction of a new State veterans home at the former Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora, Colorado, Chip was deeply involved in the design and development of the new 180 bed facility. Throughout the project, Chip continually encouraged the need to be highly flexible in the design in order to allow for the future health care needs of the residents. In addition, to skilled nursing care, the Fitzsimons facility will offer dementia services and adult day care. During his years of service to the State of Colorado, Chip's dedication to veterans and their families was readily apparent. He made frequent presentations to publicize the State and veterans homes programs and to inform various organizations of the services available. He has been steadfast in his commitment to ``serve those who have served.'' Chip and his wife of twenty-seven years, Judith, are looking forward to retirement with the shared desire to continue serving others, especially in their local church and the city of Arvada. The Roberts' have one daughter, Vanessa, a recent graduate from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Besides volunteer service, Chip is looking forward to enjoying the great Colorado outdoors: hiking, hunting, and fishing. I wish them Godspeed.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to Marine Cpl. Christopher Chandler--who is without a doubt one of America's finest soldiers who fought in Operation Enduring Freedom. On Sunday, December 16th, our nation learned that Marine Cpl. Christopher Chandler--of the 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division--lost his leg in a land mine explosion while guarding explosive-clearing teams at the Kandahar International airport in Afghanistan--his mission--to clear unexploded munitions and mines to help launch international humanitarian efforts and other military operations in the area. Injured with Cpl. Chandler were Sgt. Adrian Aranda and Lance Cpl. Nicholas Sovereign, who suffered serious shrapnel wounds in the explosion. Chandler, a 21-year-old soldier from Aurora, Colorado, entered the Marine Corp. in June 1998, immediately after graduating from Gateway High School. Mr. Speaker, I am honored to represent Cpl. Chandler, his parents Kenneth and Rumi, and sister Stephanie in the U.S. House of Representatives. Our nation is forever indebted to Cpl. Chandler for his self-sacrifice and admirable actions taken on Sunday, December 16, 2001--for they will be etched in the memory of America's new war against terrorism and never forgotten.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, as we bring this discussion to a close, I want to let individuals know there is a way to contact us about this issue, especially people who want to know more about the impact of illegal immigration and what they can do about it. This is the e-mail address and fax number. It is a way in which people can get connected to this subject and perhaps help convince their congressman of the need for reform. We desperately need a change. I thank the gentleman for joining me.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, there is a program called the H-1B program, and I am sure the gentleman is well aware what it is about. You can obtain a visa to come into the United States because your skill is so great and there is such a need that we cannot find American workers. Therefore, Congress has increased the ceiling on H-1Bs to 195,000. They usually go into the area of high tech. Most of these people are working in the computer industry, computer programmers and the like. That industry has suffered the largest decline in this recession. Hundreds of thousands of people have been laid off, but we in Congress continue to allow H-1B workers to come into the country and take the jobs that would be there for American citizens. Get this, we found the other day another thing for the list of incredible but true. Remember I said these are high tech, skilled workers. When we talk to people in the industry, they say we cannot find these people here. They have Ph.D.s in esoteric areas. We have to get special permission to bring them in. Mr. Speaker, get this. Five hundred visas are specially set aside for models. Super models. You know, ladies that walk around; models. This is high tech? I mean, I think we have enough beautiful people in the United States, do we really need a special visa category. There are 500 H-1Bs for super models coming into the United States. Believe me, there are a lot of people who I think could take those jobs. But it is just a tiny example of how idiotic this whole thing is.

Mr. TANCREDO. Reclaiming my time, the gentleman is absolutely correct. Study after study, even from those kinds of institutions that are pro immigration, study after study shows that the people hurt most by illegal immigration into the country are people at the bottom rung of the ladder, people who are working for minimum wage. The millions of people coming in without skills end up competing for those jobs. Today I heard the report of the unemployment rate, and it is going up. High tech got hit first. Now we are seeing a major increase in the unemployment rate for people with low job skills, people who are often brought to our attention by the other side of the aisle, the homeless rate is going up, the number of people seeking welfare and food stamps is going up. All of that discussion about all those people, but never once have I heard those Members stand up and say we have at least 11 million people in this country illegally who are competing for those jobs. Nobody cares about that because that is part of their voter base.

Mr. TANCREDO. The gentleman is so correct. And let me say, first of all, that long before I came to the Congress of the United States, there was an individual, maybe more than one, but one I know of who has been such a stalwart on the issue of immigration, the safety of the American people brought about through the defense of our borders, and it is definitely the gentleman who has joined me on the floor tonight, the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher). I am proud that the gentleman is here and that he is a strong supporter of our efforts. When we talk about who are we representing, it is fascinating, because most of the immigrants into this country, legal immigrants, people who are here relatively recently and have just come into the country, most of them support our desire to try and reform immigration. So when the gentleman says, who are we representing, it is true that it is as if the majority of the body is actually representing people who are not American citizens and who are attempting to come into the country illegally. That is what it seems like we are representing here instead of our own constituency, instead of the best interests of the country. David Letterman said on TV not too long ago in his opening monologue, he said, ``The Taliban is on the run and don't know where to go. Pakistan doesn't want them. Iran doesn't want them. Of course, they will have no problem getting into this country.'' And he is absolutely right. Unfortunately, it is true. I do not know if the gentleman from California heard when I was talking earlier about the INS and their attitude about 245(i), but even after everything that has happened, the gentleman who is the commissioner of the INS, James Ziglar, was speaking in front of a Senate committee and said essentially that ``we've not abandoned this idea of 245(i) extension.'' He says, ``We're just going to be on a slower track until the climate dies down.''

Mr. TANCREDO. It is called the catch and release policy.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, although I can certainly agree with many of the comments of the previous speakers with regard to what this Congress has accomplished to date, there is an issue, of course, that I must bring to the attention of the Congress, of my colleagues, and the Speaker, that has not been dealt with. It is almost incredible to stand here and say this in light of everything that has happened since September 11. We have, indeed, prosecuted a war against the perpetrators of the September 11 tragedy, and we have prosecuted it successfully. I am immensely grateful to the President of the United States for his efforts to bring these people to justice. In many ways, I am pleased with what the Congress of the United States has done in efforts, as has been stated earlier, at least on the House side, in terms of enhancing the economic viability of the Nation, passing a stimulus package, and the rest. However, while we focus on issues like those that have been described here, having just passed a massive education bill earlier this afternoon, we have abandoned, we have refused to deal with one of the most important, one of the most significant and uniquely Federal responsibilities given to us under the Constitution, and that is the issue of immigration control, immigration reform, and the security of our borders. Amazingly, I say, we have refused to do that. Here we are approaching the end of this particular session of Congress. I would have hoped that all of our colleagues could have seen what most Americans see. Poll after poll after poll by Americans of every stripe, of every political philosophy, of every ethnic background, every single poll tells us something we evidently do not understand in this Congress, and that is the American people want immigration reform. They want us to do everything we can to gain control of our borders, to make them more secure, so that while we are bombing the people, al Qaeda and others responsible for the terrorist acts of September 11, while we are bombing them in Afghanistan, the people of the United States want to know that the Government of the United States is doing everything it can to protect them from more of these folks coming across these borders with the intent to do harm. Yet nothing has been done. Nothing. We have passed stimulus packages, we have passed education reform, we have done a number of things, again, that many people can be quite proud of; but amazingly, we have refused to deal with this issue. Mr. Speaker, I used to stand up here on the floor of the House and talk about the need for immigration reform at a point in time when there were relatively few Members of this body who were interested in doing that. I recognize that it was not a popular issue to address. Many Members on both sides have very deep-seated feelings about this issue. Some of them revolve around the political imperatives that they face in their own districts, the recognition that to talk about immigration reform always puts one into the position of being attacked for a variety of reasons, all of them unrelated to the real issue of immigration reform. But I felt it was necessary to do so. But I also understood entirely the political dynamics of this body. I am a political person; I do understand what motivates individuals in terms of their voting record. I recognize fully well that it would be difficult to ever move this issue forward in this session, the next session, or the one after that. That was several months ago that I had that impression and knew that I was fighting an uphill battle. I used to talk about the importance of gaining control of our borders and the importance of security, and I would reference the fact that we have had several instances of terrorists doing things in the United States, certainly not to the extent in terms of the damage caused by the September 11 events, but we have had similar events. We have had all kinds of warning signs that something like September 11 was coming. In the spring of 1993, Mr. Speaker, a Middle East terrorist named Mohammad Salameh struck the first blow at the World Trade Center. He, if Members will recall, detonated a bomb in the garage. It killed eight and it wounded many. The mastermind of the plot was a notorious Egyptian sheikh named Omar Abdul Rahman. The sheikh had been behind the assassination attempt or the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, had fled his own country, and was on the State Department's list of known terrorists. However, recognizing his background, knowing who he was and what he was responsible for and what he wanted to do to us, all he had to do was to walk into an American embassy in Khartoum, claim refugee status because he had been driven out of Egypt for the murder of the President, and get it, get refugee status, and come to the United States of America, come specifically to New Jersey and begin recruiting terrorists, which he did, begin spouting his hatred of the United States, of this great satan, in the mosque in New Jersey; recruiting people into his organization, one of them being Mr. Salameh, the perpetrator of the crime in the World Trade Center. That did not warn us? That did not tell us something about the nature of our immigration system, about the nature of our visa process, about our need to actually control the flow? That did not tell us something, that a man like this sheikh could get into this country by simply claiming refugee status, and then we, of course, open the door wide? We now hand out refugee status like it was candy. Refugee status used to mean something. People used to have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that their lives were in danger in the country they came from for political reasons, and that they were not, at the same time, a threat to the United States of America. It means nothing today. We hand it out like candy. In fact, approximately 93 percent of the people who come to the United States who claim refugee status may not obtain it originally, but they simply walk away after they claim it, because at that time when you claim refugee status, you can stay while a process is under way to find out whether or not you get it, even though in New York City alone, the port of New York, at JFK, only a few thousand will be granted refugee status originally, but all the rest who claim it simply walk out the door. They become, essentially, refugees in the United States because no one ever goes after them; no one has the slightest idea who or where they are. When one goes to the INS and asks them, where are the people who have come here as refugees, but you have denied refugee status to them, they do what I call this logo, and this should be the logo of the INS. It is simply this: a person standing there shrugging his shoulders, hands out, saying essentially, ``I don't know.'' For almost everything we ask the INS about in these kinds of situations, that is the response we get: ``I don't know; cannot tell you; I am not sure; I do not know; we have no figures on that; we do not keep records on that.'' That is the most constant refrain we get. So in the spring of 1993, again, it should have told us something; but amazingly, it evidently did not, not enough to get this body and the administration to move in the area of border security. Why? Because there is a fear of doing so. There is a fear of alienating a certain segment of the population in the United States, newly arrived immigrants, immigrant families, whatever; maybe the fear of alienating other nations, other countries, to tell them to try and please help us gain control of our borders. Whatever it is, and there are plenty of reasons why we have refused to move forward, we did not. We did nothing. In 1993, another asylum seeker entered the United States. His name was Mir Aimal Kansi, K-A-N-S-I. Mr. Kansi, as Members might recall, later shot and killed six people as they waited in their cars outside the CIA offices in McLean, Virginia. He fled back to Pakistan, probably with the aid of the Pakistani Government, and has never been seen since. Time and time again, we have been shown that we are vulnerable; that people coming into the United States, if we do not be careful, if we do not clear them, if we do not know for sure who they are and keep track of them when they are here, if we do not do that, we are putting ourselves in jeopardy. We had all of these warning signs. There were many more, many more times when people were apprehended for totally separate events. There was a guy caught trying to come across to the United States, come into the United States through Canada with all the bomb-making equipment and that sort of thing; and just by happenstance, totally serendipitously, it turned out he was prevented from coming in. But we know, actually now we know that thousands of people are here in the United States who we suspect now of coming in here with devious intents. Now, when I talk about these people, I am not just talking about the people who are here illegally; they just simply come across the borders of the United States, north, south, east, and west, and are here illegally pursuing their lifestyle, attempting to achieve a better life. Everybody knows a story of someone who has a family member or something who has come here, even illegally, with the intent of essentially just making a better life for themselves and not with the intent of doing harm to the United States. But I am talking about a lot of other people who have come here for other reasons. We know they are here, and we are not sure where. We are rounding people up, we are detaining them and trying to go through now and trying to find them. Just recently, we have indicted someone who we found was a co- conspirator or the allegation is that he is a co-conspirator with bin Laden and al Qaeda. Guess what? Guess what they got him on? Violation of his immigration status, violation of his visa. Every single one of the people on the planes that were here in the United States on September 11, the 19 people who in fact perpetrated the crime, all of them were here on some sort of visa status. Most of them had, as I understand it, violated their visa status in some way or another and could have been thrown out before September 11, had we paid the slightest bit of attention to the people who come in here and why they come and where they come from. But this was not the modus operandi of the INS. The focus of the INS at the time was to say that its real purpose had little if anything to do with the enforcement of our immigration laws, but it had everything to do with trying to make sure immigrants to the United States got services, benefits, as one of the individuals from INS told a radio audience in Denver when I was home not too long ago. She said, yes, we have a responsibility to go out there and look. We do not do this rounding up of people anymore, and going to worksites and any of that stuff. We find illegal aliens, and we try to explain to them they are here illegally, and then how they can get benefits. This is what she considered to be the job of the INS. We had great hopes that with the change of administration from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration there would also be a change in policy with regard to immigration; that we would be able to begin to control our own borders. A new person was put in place, Mr. Ziglar, who was appointed to head the INS. But again, I must say, Mr. Speaker, we have been disappointed, disappointed with the new director and with his lack of enthusiasm for the enforcement side of his job. As it turns out, Mr. Ziglar has an extensive background in the area of immigration law because evidently, according to his own testimony in the other body, he had been a staffer for a member over there, Mr. Kennedy, and actually helped write some of the legislation that we are now trying to deal with in terms of immigration reform, legislation that created so many loopholes, ultimately, that even Mr. Ziglar now says hampers their ability, the INS's ability, to actually get something done. He was actually a staff member of the committee, he told the committee he was testifying in front of the other day. So it is apparent that we have someone now running that agency who has no difference in terms of philosophy or what he believes the direction of the agency should be, no difference from any of his predecessors. He thinks of the INS as a great social service agency whose duty and responsibility is to get as many people into the country as possible and to ``get them benefits as quickly as possible once they get here.'' Interestingly, one of the other pieces of legislation, major pieces of legislation that was passed by this body, by this House not too long ago, just yesterday, was the so-called voter registration reform bill. After all of the problems we saw with regard to voting and the voting machines and the chads and all the rest of that stuff, there was a great clamour for some sort of reform in the process. So we are going to spend millions of dollars to help communities buy new machines and that sort of thing. Fascinatingly, fascinatingly, when I went to the author of the legislation and asked if there was anything in there to prevent people who are here illegally, people who are not citizens of the United States, if there was anything in the bill to prevent them from voting, he said they really could not get that through, and that he was hoping that the other body would in fact do that; that we could somehow, somewhere, add to the bill the requirement that one be a citizen to vote, ``But we were fearful that that cannot be fixed.'' Now, Mr. Speaker, I ask Members, am I the only one here, and my colleague, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Traficant) often says, beam me up, beam me up, Mr. Speaker, because he cannot believe what is going on around here. I would have to add my voice to his. Beam me up, also. Is it really true that this body cannot produce a piece of legislation that says one has to be a citizen in order to be able to vote? Much too controversial. The INS does not support it; the administration probably does not support it. Mr. Speaker, we have not changed our attitudes, even though there are over 3,000 dead in New York, even though a plane crashes into the Pentagon just a few miles from where we stand tonight, and even though the perpetrators were all themselves noncitizens of the United States; even though we know that time and time again people have come across our borders with the intent to do us harm and have carried out many actions; and even though we know that we cannot pass anything in this body that even remotely reflects our concern for the security of our border. Beam me up. Beam me up, Mr. Speaker. It is absolutely beyond my ability to understand why we are so fearful, why it has taken us so long, why we have yet to deal with this issue, and why there are still people who, although they will not say as much, they will not be quite as open, quite as vociferous, quite as demanding and visible today as they were prior to the September 11 about their desire to see open borders, people who still have a desire to provide amnesty for all the people who are here illegally. Although we do not get them saying that so often, we know that they are really still in control. I go back to Mr. Ziglar's testimony just the other day in front of the Senate committee. This is the INS commissioner, John Ziglar. When he fielded a question asking whether the administration is still considering an amnesty for Mexicans and why, if the INS needs more money, does not Congress pass 245(i) extension? Let me explain 245(i). This is simply another bureaucratic term for the process of amnesty. That is all, providing amnesty for people who are here illegally. This is a big issue in the Congress. We cannot do anything about border security, but they are still hoping that somehow, someway, we are going to be able to get an extension of 245(i) to provide amnesty to millions of people here illegally, to give them a reward for breaking the law. They are still trying to figure it out. They are still determining whether or not they can put it on to an appropriations bill, whether or not they can hide it in one of the bills we are going to be dealing with here next week, one of the three, two or three final appropriation bills we have in front of us, because if they can stick it in a huge package of legislation, it will be less likely for us to be able to defeat it, those of us who are opposed to it, and it will be much easier for people to vote for it because people will say I had to vote for the defense appropriation, did I not. So they are trying to figure out ways to do that. As we stand here tonight, they are trying to figure that out. They are not dealing with the issue of border security itself, amazing again, incredible, but true, but here is the commissioner of the INS, appointed by this administration. Remember, this is not a Clinton appointee. When he was asked about this, he responded regularization, this is a euphemism, regularization, this is a euphemism for amnesty, regularization has taken a back seat, but he said the President has not abandoned it, it is just going to be on a slower track until the climate dies down. Until the climate dies down, until we no longer have our sensitivity as acutely honed as we do today to the problems with illegal immigration into the country. When it is quieter, they will sneak it by us, that is what he is saying. This is the new commissioner of the INS. Someone ought to be beamed up and he is one. We have over 300,000 people, Mr. Speaker, approximately 318,000 that we can identify, 318,000 people who have been ordered to be deported from the United States over the last several years. We have about 100,000 go through this process every year, and some of them are actually deported, but 300,000 of them walk away. They simply walked out of the courtroom and into American society. Please understand, Mr. Speaker, these are people who did not simply overstay their visas. These people oftentimes have committed crimes against the United States. That is how they got caught. No one gets caught for simply overstaying their visa. No one gets caught for not having a visa. So no one should be surprised that no one goes after visa violators. When we ask the INS, how many people violate their visas every year, visa status? They go into their logo stance, I do not know, got me, probably a lot, we do not know, we do not keep track of them. Well, these 318,000 that we have found to be out there and only, by the way, after we pressed the INS for quite some time, did they release this information, when we brought every time we could possibly make the point, I would try, others would try to use this as an example of the problem, that 300,000 people were out there already, walked away and they had been ordered deported. No one had the slightest idea where they were, what they were doing. The other day the INS finally decided they would, in fact, allow other agencies access to the names, that they would put them into the crime database. So that now if a policeman in Jefferson County, sheriff in Jefferson County, Colorado, just happens to pull somebody over for drunken driving or running a red light or whatever and enters their name into the database in the computer, it may come up and say this guy, this person is here illegally, was ordered deported. That is a good step. I am very happy the INS did this, of course, do not get me wrong. This is what they considered to be, however, a major reform effort, putting the names into the database. I agree they should do that, do not get me wrong. The question now becomes one of what they will do once in a blue moon when somebody does, in fact, get arrested and are found to have been ordered deported, what will the INS do? Will they do what they have done up to this point in time when they are called by local officials who say we have got a bunch of people here we just rounded up, they are all here illegally, we just stopped a car on the road because it did not have any taillights, any headlights, broken windshields, and we found out there were six people hidden in the trunk, there were was a van with 19 in there and they are all here illegally, and what will the INS tell them? I do not know what to do, let them go. Hey, what the heck. We have not got time to come out there. They are just here illegally. Do my colleagues know what a previous INS assistant director said when he was speaking to, just a short time ago, just last year I think it was, speaking to a group of people who were here illegally? They were probably giving them a party, for all I know, probably like a cocktail party thrown by illegal aliens for the INS. It would not surprise me. It certainly should because I guarantee my colleagues they have nothing to worry about and they do owe a great deal to the INS, and the INS, this person, I wish I had the name in front of me, I have used it before on the floor, told the assembled group of illegals that being here illegally was not against the law. Now, I do not know if the people to whom he was speaking understood the English language well enough to understand the perversity of that statement. Yeah, he said being here illegally is not against the law. So this is what we have to deal with. Should we be surprised then that it is so difficult to get the INS to change their philosophy because we have got the same people, essentially the same ideas about who we are and what we are. I assure you, Mr. Speaker, that they will come in and say when we have asked them, why do not you try to do something about that? They will say, well, it is the resources. It is the fact that Congress has passed laws tying our hands. That is absolutely true. Plenty of dumb laws have been passed by the Congress. Plenty. Again, I do not know where to start. There are so many goofball things we have done here to try and encourage massive immigration into the country of illegals. But combine that stupid activity and the stupid actions of Congress over the past 10 years with the incompetence and the lack of willingness to enforce immigration laws that is inbred into the INS, and it is no wonder we have a disaster of the nature that we have faced and that we are still facing, we have faced on the 11th and we are still facing. Is there any Member of this body, is there anyone in the United States of America who does not think that there are still people either in the United States or trying to get into the United States but with the purpose of continuing the jihad against us? Is there a human being here who thinks that? Does anybody believe that even if we bomb Afghanistan into dust that our worries are over within terms of terrorist activity in the United States of America? Does anybody believe that? I cannot imagine there is anyone, certainly in this body, and I cannot imagine that there is a thinking person in the United States that would agree that all we have to do is destroy the al Qaeda network in Afghanistan and we are all going to be okay. So then what is it that we can and should be doing to ensure our safety in this Nation besides bombing Afghanistan? We should, of course, be defending our own borders. We should, of course, be using the National Guard to defend the borders and every State that is adjacent to the border of Canada and/or Mexico. We should be using technology to help stop people from coming. Now we will never be perfect. We cannot be perfect. I recognize that fully well. We will work and work as hard as we can to make sure our borders are not porous and we will never be able to make it perfect. But on the other hand, does that mean that we do nothing because we are afraid of the political ramifications of saying we are going to clamp down on immigration. We are afraid that the Hispanic community in the United States would vote against us. But I will say again, Mr. Speaker, the fascinating thing about this topic is that we can see by poll after poll after poll that those Hispanic Americans that have been here for generations, some of them a lot longer than my family has been in the United States, legal Americans, people who have been here, people who have recently immigrated to the United States legally and are of Hispanic descent, by large majorities they agree with us that the border should be enforced, the border immigration laws should be enforced. Seventy-three percent in a recent poll said, this is Hispanic Americans, said that employer sanctions ought to be enforced for people who hire illegal immigrants. It is fallacious to think that the entire community of Hispanics living in this country today would automatically in a knee jerk fashion vote out anybody who dared suggest that we should actually try to maintain integrity of our own borders. I will say, I would say, that regardless if I faced that kind of political problem which I may very well do. I mean, I get plenty of mail, I assure you, that suggests that my political days are numbered because of the position I have taken vis-a-vis immigration. So what? So what? Is it not our responsibility in this body to provide for the protection of the life and property of the people in the United States? Is not that primary? Is not that the most important thing we are here for? Is not it even more important than the education bill? Is not it even more important than the economic stimulus package? To protect the life, the property of the people of the United States. How do we do that if we ignore the fact that our borders are porous, that people can come into this country at will and do harm? How do we ignore this? Yet, we have. We are coming to the end of this session. We have ignored the most sacred responsibility we have as Members of this body. We have done so because of our fear, our fear that our actions would be either misinterpreted or for whatever reason, we will suffer political consequences. We have refused to do so because Members on the other side of the aisle recognize that massive immigration into this country, both legal and illegal, eventually turns into votes for them. That is what they believe. It may be true. It does not matter. It is more important to keep this Nation safe than to worry about our political future. Because, frankly, what does it matter what our political futures are if our Nation is being destroyed around us. And there are many ways that that destruction can come. It can come as a result of the bombs that people place in buildings, or the planes they turn into bombs and drive into buildings. And it can come from the disintegration from our own society that can happen as a result of massive immigration. Forty-five million Americans today do not speak English, cannot speak English. Forty-five million Americans cannot communicate with their fellow Americans in the language of this country. Forty-five million Americans, therefore, are inhibited from achieving full integration into this society. Many of them, of course, choose not to integrate. And many of them have no reason, they think, to do so, because essentially their culture, their ideas, their language came with them and now everybody in their community speaks a language other than English and so it is quite comfortable. And our schools, our schools continue to push bilingual education. Even today, when we passed this massive education reform bill, and this is one more thing to go on that list of incredible but true, because if we said to everyone in this Nation, if we asked everyone the following question, do you believe that a parent should have the right to determine whether or not their child should be placed into a bilingual education program, what do you think the response would be? I wonder, Mr. Speaker. I think, overwhelmingly, people would say, yes, absolutely. Seems only right. Yet we could not get that reform into this bill. Today, even after we passed this reform bill, children all over America will be placed, involuntarily, into bilingual education classes, classes so that they will be taught in a language other than English. Therefore, their ability to achieve success in our schools and, therefore, later in life in our system, is severely jeopardized. But they will be placed there, and then it will be incumbent upon a parent to go through the hoops to try to get them out. And that is what we call reform. But, of course, many of these parents do not understand the process all that well and are very, well, intimidated by the process; but they know in their hearts what is best for their children. They know that it would be good for the children to actually be taught in English, and to be taught English quickly, to be immersed in English, to move out of a language other than English and into the language of commerce, into the international language of commerce and trade. They know that in their hearts; yet their children will be placed in bilingual programs without their permission. This only helps the disintegration of the culture I have described. As I say, we can be attacked in a lot of ways, Mr. Speaker. It does not just have to be by bombs. And I believe there is a threat to the Nation that is represented by massive immigration, especially of illegal immigrants, that has to be addressed by this Congress. I am happy to see that one of my colleagues has joined us on the floor of the House, and I would definitely yield to the gentleman for his remarks on this subject.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, recently the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus held a hearing on INS reform, as well as the connections between immigration policy and terrorism. Our witnesses gave immensely insightful testimony. I am submitting the statement of Mr. Mike Cutler for the record. Testimony of Michael Cutler, INS Senior Special Agent Chairman Tancredo, members of the Congress, ladies and gentlemen, I greatly appreciate this opportunity to share my views and perspectives which I have acquired during my roughly 30 years as an immigration officer. I would like to start out by giving you an overview of my career with the INS, I will summarize it for you briefly. I entered on duty with the INS at New York City in October, 1971, as an Immigration Inspector at JFKIA. I ultimately spent 4 years in that assignment conducting inspections of passengers arriving at that port and seeking entry into the United States. During the course of that assignment I was detailed for approximately one year to an examinations unit known as the I-130 Unit, so-named because the applications which we were adjudicating were known as I-130 Petitions. These are the petitions that are filed by spouses and other relatives who are seeking to obtain Lawful Permanent Resident Alien status for their respective spouses, children or other immediate relatives. My assignment dealt with the I-130 petitions which were filed by either United States citizens or LPRs on behalf of their alien spouses. My goal in this assignment was to seek to uncover marriage fraud in which the marital relationship exists only for the purpose of providing the alien beneficiary with LPR status. In 1975 I became a Criminal Investigator or, as it is now known, a Special Agent. I have remained a Special Agent with the INS since August of 1975. I have rotated through just about every squad within the Investigations Branch of the INS at NYC during my tenure as a Special Agent. I spent several years, in the aggregate assigned to the Frauds Unit in which I was responsible to uncover a variety of fraud crimes involving INS issues, from fraud schemes carried out with the ultimate goal of obtaining LPR status and/or U.S. citizenship, to the use of fraudulent identity documents to otherwise circumvent the laws enforced by the INS. In 1988 I was assigned to the Unified Intelligence Division of the New York office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. In this assignment I was responsible to work cooperatively with members of the DEA and other law enforcement personnel and analysts from a wide variety of other agencies including members of the NYPD, New York State Police, U.S. Customs Service, Internal Revenue Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and British Customs. My assignment here lasted for approximately 3 and a half years. During this assignment I decided to conduct a study on the individuals who were arrested by the DEA by reviewing DEA arrest records. We determined that approximately 60 percent of the individuals arrested by DEA and the DEA Task Force were identified as being ``foreign born.'' Nation-wide approximately 30 percent were identified as ``foreign born.'' For the 3 years that I tracked these statistics, there were only slight variations on the percentages. Although these numbers are now over 10 years old, I imagine that the percentages are probably not much different. In 1991 I was promoted to my current position of Senior Special Agent and assigned to the OCDETF Unit (Organized Crime, Drug Enforcement Task Force). This assignment requires that I work with other agencies to investigate, apprehend and prosecute aliens who are involved in narcotics trafficking and related crimes. The INS is charged with the responsibility of enforcing laws that govern the entry of aliens into the United States as well as those laws that are involved in the granting of Lawful Permanent Resident Alien status to aliens and to the bestowing of U.S. citizenship on aliens. It is often said that you only get one opportunity to make a first impression. Generally speaking, the first laws that aliens entering the United States encounter are those laws that the INS is supposed to enforce. When the INS fails to effectively, consistently and fairly enforce these laws, we are sending a very dangerous message to aliens seeking to enter the United States. In effect we are telling them that not only can they expect to get away with violating our laws, they can anticipate being rewarded for violating our laws! I have come to think of the INS law enforcement program as a tripod. The Border Patrol is responsible for enforcing the laws between ports of entry, the Immigration Inspectors are charged with the responsibility of enforcing the laws at ports of entry and the Special Agents are supposed to back up both of the other two divisions. Each of these components of the enforcement program, in my opinion, need to be emphasized equally. Just as a camera's tripod needs to have three legs of equal length, the enforcement tripod needs to rest equally on each of its three legs. If you shorten one of the legs on your camera's tripod, it falls over. This is the reality of the INS enforcement program. It seems that each time the call goes out to tighten up on the enforcement of the immigration laws, the typical response is to hire more border patrol agents. I am a great fan of the Border Patrol, they do dangerous and difficult work, however, if we do not also boost resources allocated to the interior enforcement mission, the entire enforcement program becomes ineffective. Aliens who are illegally in the United States don't only come to this country by running the border. Often, they obtain visas under assumed identities or violate the terms under which they were admitted after they enter the United States. As we have seen with the terrorists, most of them, from what I have read, appear to have entered the United States with visas that were issued by the State Department and then engaged in their treacherous missions. The task of tracking down such aliens is purely the domain of the Special Agents. We also need to exploit technology to help us to track aliens entering and departing the United States. We need to also use this technology to help prevent aliens and other criminals from creating multiple identities for themselves, further complicating the law enforcement efforts of the INS as well as other law enforcement organizations. We have heard calls recently for the implementation of a student tracking system. We have similarly heard calls for the INS to keep gabs on non-immigrants who violate their terms of admission (or immigration status). I couldn't agree more with these goals, however, I would like to know who is supposed to do this work? If we simply enter this information in a computerized database, we certainly will become aware of violations of the Immigration laws, but then what? I presume that the goal of establishing a tracking system would be done to enable the INS to remove those aliens who violate their Immigration status, however, without a cadre of dedicated Special Agents, who will do the job? Currently, according to published statistics there are fewer that 2000 Special Agents of the INS nation-wide. At the present time, there are approximately 100 Special Agents to cover the southern half of the state of New York, including New York City. Clearly this situation is untenable. We need to have many more Special Agents. We also need to have an agency that functions effectively. At present, each district office operates more as a franchise than as a component of a paramilitary organization. While I agree that each office needs to have some autonomy to take regional variations into account, the over-all functioning of the agency should stress a direct chain of command from Headquarters to each and every field agent throughout the United States. Each employee needs to feel that he or she is within the chain of command to headquarters and the level of accountability should be directly proportionate with the level that the employ works at. That is to say, the higher up the chain of command, the more accountable the employee needs to be. Issues of morale and attrition rates which have been, in my experience, virtually ignored, can no longer be ignored. A considerable sum of money is spent on recruiting and training each law enforcement officer of the INS. Special Agents require several years from the time they are hired to the time when they are truly ``up to speed'' and possess the skills and abilities that they need to do their difficult and complex jobs. However, for many reasons, highly qualified agents often leave the INS shortly after they complete their training at the Academy. This revolving door is not cost effective and helps to erode morale and efficiency in those offices which suffer from high attrition rates. It would seem that when Special Agents resign they should be given formal exit interviews to identify the issues which caused them to leave. To my knowledge, this is not being done. Often the agents who leave go on to other agencies where many of them develop successful careers. The role of the Special Agents is vital. When our nation was attacked on September 11, 2001, the danger posed by terrorists became all too clear, however, various criminal organizations over the years have also exacted their toll from our nation and our people. Go back to that statistic I quoted earlier. Sixty percent of all people arrested in New York City by the DEA and the DEA Task Force were identified as being foreign born. Over the years, how many people may have lost their lives or suffered terribly at the hands of narcotics traffickers? What of the impact of other criminal aliens? We have seen the rise of ethic organized crime throughout or nation. How many more people have fallen victim to these criminals? The most effective way of dealing with these criminals is to beef up the interior enforcement program of the INS. Any law enforcement agency has two primary goals. Goal one is the detection of crime and the successful investigation, apprehension and prosecution of the criminal who commits the crime. The second goal is to be a credible deterrent to those who would violate the laws which fall under the jurisdiction of that law enforcement agency. This goal is directly dependent on how effectively the agency carries out its first goal. Without an effective interior enforcement program, criminal aliens are emboldened to attempt to enter our nation to commit their crimes. They are not deterred by a program that lacks man-power and leadership. We need to change the reality and consequently, the perception. Not only to prevent future terrorist attacks, but to also deter criminal activities of a wide spectrum of criminals who still find America to be a ``Land of Opportunity''. Please understand, I am not opposed to the lawful entry of aliens who come to the United States to share the ``American Dream'', I only take issue with those who come here in violation of law and who end up creating America's nightmares. Indeed, my own mother was welcomed by this country shortly before the Second World War, enabling her to survive, while her mother, for whom I am named, perished in the Holocaust. We simply need to know who we are admitting and having an agency that possesses the resources to not only tracks aliens who end up violating their Immigration status, but also has the resources to track them down and ultimately, when appropriate, remove them from the United States. This capability is a matter of nothing less than national security.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 3248 and wish to fully express my gratitude to the crew of United Flight 93, and especially its captain, Jason M. Dahl. It was with immense sadness that I learned that the Dahl family and indeed all of Colorado had been robbed on September 11th of a good man and a good father. Mr. Dahl's family, to paraphrase President Lincoln, must feel enormous pride for having laid such a costly sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. According to a friend, Dahl learned to fly before he learned to drive. A neighbor remembered Dahl's football and baseball games in the street with neighborhood children and his commitment to his family and his community. Having read the statements of those who eulogized him, I cannot help but conclude that the gentleman flying that plane was one of America's best--a great father and husband alike. Since September 11th, America has rediscovered the importance of family, and turned to family members for comfort and understanding. It is no small tragedy that the Dahl family does not have this luxury, having been left incomplete on September 11th. Most of us saw evil on that day watching the pictures of the two planes collide with the World Trade Towers in New York City. Jason Dahl almost surely saw evil in a different form. He must have seen it in the faces of the hijackers and known that it was in their hearts. The loss of Mr. Dahl and all of the passengers aboard Flight 93 will not be forgotten--certainly not by this body. This morning, we passed a resolution calling for a plaque to be placed on the grounds of the Capitol memorializing their deaths. I would suggest that their memory will go much farther. The fact that this great building and its dome-- two irreplaceable symbols of American democracy--still stand today will always be a living memorial to their sacrifice. My prayers, Mr. Speaker, are with all of the innocent civilians who died aboard that plane, and especially Jason Dahl and his family.