Tom Tancredo

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, in 1996, the House passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act, a provision of which I have restated in this amendment. It simply says that notwithstanding other provisions of Federal, State, or local law, that a Federal, State, or local government entity or official may not prohibit or in any way restrict any government entity or official from sending to or receiving from the Immigration and Naturalization Service information regarding the citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual. That is current law. We passed that in 1996. There was just one tiny problem with it. There are no sanctions, there are no provisions for a penalty if localities, in fact, violate the law. Unfortunately, there are cities in the United States that have disregarded the law. Recently, as a matter of fact, the City of New York rescinded an ordinance that for 20 years had prohibited police officers from not communicating----

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, the amendment goes on to further define it, and it is defined: through the money that is provided to the Bureau of Immigration and Customs.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I must admit I do not believe that the gentleman is really confused about the purpose of the amendment or the words that are printed here. It is, in fact, quite clear. We have run it around the horn here several times, including with the Parliamentarians. The issue that the gentleman brought up earlier dealing with an expansion of the original law has been dealt with by this new amendment. We are speaking specifically of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, there are several cities in the United States that have chosen to pass legislation, pass laws that, in fact, restrict the ability of their own police forces, in many cases, from sharing information with the now Bureau of Immigration and Customs. That is a violation of the law. It is a violation of the present law. Unfortunately, there are no sanctions for that violation. All this amendment does is to impose such sanctions by saying that no funds made available in this act and under the provisions of specifically the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which has now become the Bureau of Immigration and Customs, can be forwarded to such a city that has, in fact, violated the law. It is as simple as that. There is nothing else to it. It was the original amendment that I made during the discussion earlier. I have changed the language to reflect the concerns of the Parliamentarian and the reason it was ruled out of order. That is the entire scope of the amendment, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. TANCREDO. Well, there are several cities that have passed laws in the nature I have just described, including Los Angeles; Portland, Maine; Houston; Seattle; San Francisco; San Jose; Portland, Oregon; San Diego; and Chicago, to name a few. I think there are others.

Mr. TANCREDO. No. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield, the original law did not apply to the transfer of any funds. It was simply a law making it illegal for any city to restrict the flow of information to or from the Department of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, actually.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman would yield, no, that is not correct. That was the original concern the gentleman raised. The Parliamentarian at that time ruled that because the original amendment had the words ``Homeland Security,'' that the gentleman was correct in his point of order. I have changed it so that it does not refer to the Department of Homeland Security. It refers specifically to the Bureau of Immigration and Customs, which meets the Parliamentarian's concern; and I have reintroduced the amendment.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, once again, the law that I am amending, the provision of the law that I am addressing here is current law. The provision of the law that we are dealing with is the part of the 1996 act. All this amendment does is say that no funds can be provided through the Bureau of Immigration and Customs to cities that have violated this law. That is it. We are simply putting teeth into the original law. That is all there is to it. Nothing more. It is as simple as that. And it is through the Bureau of Immigration and Customs. It is not TSA in particular, by the way, the one that the gentleman keeps referring to.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, a great deal of discussion has been undertaken on this floor for the purpose of addressing the issue of unemployment and for talking about the needs of workers in the United States. We continually look at pieces of legislation that are designed to improve the economic conditions within the country, to establish an environment in which people will be able and businesses would be able to create more jobs, to provide more jobs for Americans; and I certainly support the effort. I certainly believe with all my heart that that is what we should be doing, and I believe in the stimulus package that we passed here. I wish it had been bigger. I think that that is the right direction for the country. But it is also interesting to me to listen to the various interpretations of the problems that we have that are in fact causing people to be laid off or people who are and have been laid off to be unable to find jobs. Some of that is undoubtedly as a result of a sluggish economy, and I say I hope it will be helped by the passage of the legislation that we put through here and went over to the Senate and was signed by the President. I hope for that. But there is another aspect of this jobs issue that I think needs our attention, no matter how unpleasant it is to talk about it. No matter how much we want to shy away from it, no matter what the political implications of discussing it might be, I think it is important to talk about the fact that in this country today we have somewhere around 13 million, some people say as high as 20 million, people who are living here illegally, employed here illegally. We all probably know of folks that we think may be working here illegally. We see them on the street corner, we see them working in various positions and jobs, and there is this feeling that I wonder if those folks are here legally. They probably cannot speak the language, and you just wonder whether or not they are. We all have seen that kind of thing, and we think it is anecdotal, we think it is unique to a particular area, a particular place, just to this restaurant or that particular construction site. But, of course, it is not unique to any locale in this country. It is a phenomenon that we have to address and have to understand, that these people are here. For the most part I am sure they are well intentioned. They came, as we always say, for the same reason that my grandparents came, and for the same reason people came to this country from its inception, and that is to better their lives. No one is suggesting that all of those people who are here are here for nefarious purposes. That is, of course, untrue. But it is also true that they are taking jobs that Americans could take. Now I hear the opposite often. I have been in various places where the mantra chanted is something like this: ``We have to have illegal immigration into the country because it helps us, it helps the economy, and we have people doing jobs that no one else would do, no American would do.'' Well, there is another part of that statement that could be said, but is seldom said, and that is they are doing jobs that maybe no American would do for the price that someone is willing to pay. That may be true. But I suggest to you that it is not an economic benefit to the United States. In the long run, it does not even help the people who are in the lowest economic category, who are low-income earners, who are low- skilled people. It does not help them to have millions of people coming into the country, themselves with very few skills, taking those jobs that may be available, and, of course, therefore depressing the wage rate for everybody who works in that particular area. Now, there is also the issue, of course, as to whether or not it is productive for the country because it adds to the economy and they pay taxes and we, therefore, are benefited by having so many illegal aliens in the country. I would suggest that if you think that is true, if anybody believes that to be true, they should look at the research that has been done recently. Certainly Virginia Abernathy comes to mind. She is a professor at Vanderbilt University and has done a lot of work on this issue, trying to determine whether or not in fact the country does benefit from having millions of people coming across this border illegally, taking jobs that other Americans could take. And she sums it up in a statement that I would paraphrase in this way. She says that it is indeed true that there are profits to be made by the importation of millions of low-skilled, low-wage workers into the country, but the profits are for a few. They are for the employer. But the costs that we incur for providing the infrastructure necessary to support those folks in terms of schooling, health care, housing, all of those costs are far greater, far greater, than we gain from the taxes paid by the people working in those particular jobs. For the most part, again, it is low-skilled, low-wage jobs. Therefore, of course, they do not pay very much in income tax, if anything. They do not pay very much even in sales tax. They buy relatively little in comparison again to the costs of the infrastructure; and, therefore, it becomes essentially a burden to the taxpayers of this country to support. The infrastructure is very costly. We are watching hospitals go out of business. We are watching costs increase dramatically for those people who are able to pay in order to take care of all those who cannot pay that come to the hospital for service, come into the health care system at any point for service. There is a Federal law that says to hospitals they must treat anyone in emergency care, regardless of their status in the country; and that is a humane action on our part. It would be acceptable, it would be understandable, it would be defensible to have policies like that if in fact the Federal Government cared one bit about trying to defend its own borders, if in fact the Federal Government actually attempted to restrict entry into this country to those people who have permission to come, to those people who apply through a consular office or embassy, get a visa, come into the country, obtain a green card eventually. There is a legal process to come into the country; and if we would simply restrict entrance into the country to those people, then you could understand why we could say to hospitals, you must in fact treat them. Then you could understand why the Federal Government tells all schools in the United States, every State, that they must educate the children of people who are here illegally. It is a humane thing to do. But under the circumstances, when we choose not to defend our own borders, when we choose to essentially ignore any sort of immigration policy enforcement, then it is the height of arrogance to tell States they must take on this task. Billions of dollars are being spent by States all over the Nation trying to pay for health care, education, housing and all of the other infrastructure costs that they incur as a result of our open borders policy. And that is what we have; and that is exactly what we should call it. It is an open borders policy. Again, I know we do not like to think it, do not want to say it, do not want to suggest it, because there are a lot of people out there, that maybe John Q. Citizen cringes at that and says what do you mean, open borders policy, man? I am trying to keep my job, and I do not want to necessarily have to compete against someone coming across the border willing to work for a lot less than I am making. Maybe that is heartless and cruel for them to think. We may want to tell these people that they should just simply accept the fact that they have to give up their job, or work for a lot less, be what we call underemployed, because, after all, there are millions of people seeking to come into this country who are also poor and looking for a better life. So there is this dilemma then, how do we treat it? Well, Mr. Speaker, the whole world, the Third World, is waiting to come in. There are literally billions of people who would like to improve their status in life, and I would like their lives to be improved. No one wants to see people living in poverty. No one wants to see small children dying from diseases that could be cured. No one wants to see that. I also know that we cannot, there are not enough resources in this country, to simply open the boarders and say everyone can come. What we have to do is try our best to create economic conditions in countries that are today laboring under such problems so that people will not be forced to leave and seek a life in another country. That is an acceptable and understandable way to do it. It is not understandable or acceptable to ignore the problem, to say that John Q. Citizen, who is losing his job, that he is just simply being hard and xenophobic. I do not think he is being xenophobic when his job is taken away, or her job. I think he is doing exactly, or she is doing exactly, what any of us would do under the circumstances. We would ask our government, why is this happening? Why are you allowing so many people to come into the country at a time when we have so few jobs available, when the unemployment rate has now reached historic highs? I cannot answer the question, Mr. Speaker. There is no way that I can tell someone in a rational sense what our policy is and why we are in fact still accepting the concept of open borders. I do not know. If someone can explain it, please let me know, because I have a lot of letters to write to people who constantly write me and tell me of their plight and how they lost their job, and they have lost it to people who have just come across the border illegally; and they are asking what I am going to do about that. I have to explain to them, you know, there really does not seem to be any support in this body or in this government for implementing the kind of measures necessary to protect them. We are actually taking in a million-and-a-half people approximately a year legally, and probably about that many illegally. This is historic. The United States of America, if we just settled on the legal side of that, is still the most open-hearted country in the world. It accepts more illegal immigration than any other country in the world; more legal immigration, and certainly more illegal immigration, than any other country in the world, and this is to our detriment. This is not a beneficial thing. It is not helping our economy. That is an old saw. It is not true. It is helping a few people. It is helping a few corporations. That is true. But it is not helping the man and the woman who have been here all of their lives, or who have become citizens of this country through a legal process and who are unemployed today because of our policy of open borders. There are several programs that the Federal Government runs, visa programs, that are designed to bring more people in, to do jobs that again we are told cannot be done by Americans, by American citizens. Would my colleagues believe that we are told that there are millions of jobs going begging in the high-tech industry? Who would believe that, Mr. Speaker? I ask my colleagues, who knows of a job available in the high-tech industry that is going begging? Because again, if my colleagues know about jobs that are available, let me know. I have a lot of people in my district who are unemployed and have been unemployed for over a year, and they ended up being a victim of that bubble that burst in the high-tech industry, and they are looking for jobs, and they would love to get reemployed into that industry. But most of them are doing something else now entirely, if they are working at all. My friend and neighbor, it has been almost 2 years for him. He is doing some data entry for us and he is driving a limousine at night. And that is what is happening all over, of course, because people are trying to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. And they would love to get a job back in that industry. But, Mr. Speaker, we are encouraging people to come from other countries to the United States for the purpose of taking jobs in the high-tech industry. These are called H-1b visa recipients. Now, these are folks who are not coming over here to take a job that ``no one else would take,'' although we are told that, and that is supposed to be the scheme; that is supposed to be the idea behind H-1b and something else called L-1 visa programs, but it is not true. It is not true. These people are taking jobs, they are displacing American workers, by the hundreds of thousands. There are literally millions of folks in this country today holding these kinds of visas. Now, we asked the INS, how many are here? No one knows how many people in this country have even come here through the H-1b visa program. The new Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Service does not know. The Department of Labor does not know. No one in government anywhere can give me an accurate number, and the reason they cannot is because they do not keep those numbers. All they know is how many they hand out, about 195,000 a year we have handed out for several years now, and that is just the H-1b, and these folks do not go home when they lose their job, although they are supposed to. They stay. So I am saying that it is now approaching a million people, if not more, that are here under an H-1b program that are taking jobs in ``that high-tech industry that no other American would take.'' Does anybody really buy that? What we know is that they are being given these visas because they will work for less. It is a cheap labor program. Now, let us just say it. If that is the program we want to run, let us tell Americans that is the program. Let us not even hide it under visa titles like H-1b and things nobody has the slightest idea what H- 1b means or L-1 visas. I will tell my colleagues what it means, anybody who is listening: it is a cheap labor program. People want to pay less for labor. They know there are people outside the country who are willing to work for less, so let us get them in here. The Organization for the Rights of American Workers, the acronym TORAW, states that in the year 2000, there were 355,000 H-1b visas issued, just in the year 2000. The cap for H-1b visas in that year was 115,000. That means that 240,000 received H-1b visas through loopholes and extensions. In 2001, 384,191 H-1b visas were issued. The cap was 107,500. That means that 276,691 people received H-1b visas through loopholes and extensions. Thus, the total amount of people who came here using H-1b visas in 2000 and 2001 totaled 739,796. This is a program they told us would be short-lived, that it only was going to be there in order to take up the slack because we had this booming economy, we had so many jobs going begging. Has anybody heard that lately, something about a booming economy, something about jobs going begging? But 739,000 people were brought in here on H-1b visas in 2000 and 2001. There is plenty of evidence that major American companies like Bank of America, Texas Instruments, Intel, General Electric, and Microsoft are actively recruiting today H-1b visa holders instead of American high-tech workers. Does anybody believe there are people who are not capable of these jobs; that Americans, the highest skilled, the greatest educational system in the world, touted constantly for our ability to produce the best engineers; the best people in this high- tech environment, that we are not capable, Americans cannot do the job, we have to go to India or someplace else to get the folks over here to take those jobs from us. The San Francisco Business Times reported in November of 2002 that the Bank of America was eliminating 900 jobs by year end in its information technology operation. To add insult to injury, some of the laid-off workers were reportedly required to train their Indian counterparts in order to receive their severance packages. This is a common practice throughout the country. According to a survey by the Denver Business Journal, 66.5 percent of American high-tech workers who responded said they took salary reductions in 2002, and more than 71.5 percent of them expect pay cuts in 2003. According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, a company can replace an American engineer who gets paid $70,000 annually with a Hungarian who would earn $25,690 in Hungary or a Russian who gets paid $14,000 for that job in Russia. This puts companies in the position to orchestrate and control salaries. The overall effect is to decrease the salaries of all high- tech positions. Now, we say, well, is that not appropriate? Should they not do that? Well, again, that is a policy decision that this government needs to make and needs to tell the American citizens what we are doing. Again, all I am asking is for truth in advertising. These are not special visa programs; these are not designed just to bring people in here who are in great need because the jobs are jobs our people will not do. These are cheap labor, cheap labor policies. That is what they are, and that is what we should call them. Now, these people are succeeding, these companies, according to the Alumni Consulting Group, because in the last 3 years, the average high- tech professional salary has dropped radically, in some cases, up to 50 percent. An online search today of the three most popular high-tech job search sites, hotjobs.com, monster.com, and dice.com, showed that they were full of jobs being offered to H-1b holders. Now there is a new problem that is emerging, the L-1 visa. The L-1 visa program allows intracompany transfers of foreign nationals who are company executives or managers or employees with specialized knowledge of the company's products or services. It was never intended to allow companies to replace American professional employees with lower-wage foreign nationals, but guess what? That is, of course, exactly what is happening, and on a massive scale. NBC news reported on May 8 of this year that white collar computer consultants are losing out to cheaper foreign competition. These companies are outsourcing much of their technology and customer service work to foreign companies with the goal of reducing costs and increasing profits. I would suspect that these foreign companies are using L-1 visas to bring their manpower here to the United States. As I said before, the L-1 visa program was intended to permit multinational companies to transfer foreign nationals who were company executives and managers or employees with specialized knowledge in the company's products and operations. Instead, it is being used to allow U.S. companies with offshore subsidiaries to bring in lower-wage IT workers. These companies are circumventing the congressionally-mandated safeguards and rules imposed under the H-1b program. And our government knows it. This is not news to anybody inside the Department of Labor or inside the administration. They just do not care. In 2001, 328,480 L-1 visas were issued, which is an increase of 11 percent. Thus, the total amount of people who came here under L-1 visas in 2000 and 2001 was 623,138. Business Week reported on March 10 of this year that L-1 visas were being used instead of H-1b visas by India's top two IT consulting firms. Half of Tata Consultancy Services' American-based workforce are here on L-1 visas, some 5,000 foreign IT professionals. Infosys has 3,000 IT professionals here on L-1 visas, 3,000. Now, remember, these are supposed to be people with specialized skills, so specialized, and they are overseas, they are in the company headquarters in Bombay, but there is something so special about their ability that they have to bring them over here to work in their subsidiary. That is an L-1 visa. But of course, it is not that. It is anybody and everybody who they can get into the country, get over here to replace Americans who are now driving limousines at night. Siemens in Florida contracted to have 20 of its American IT professionals replaced by foreign nationals brought in by Tata Consultancy Services. Tata used L-1 visas to import Indians at one- third of the salary of Americans laid off. A member of my staff is a trained IT professional. Before he started working for me, he was a victim of the very problem I was talking about. When he asked his former company why he and the rest of his IT team had been laid off, they stated they were moving their project to India. They are doing this because the average Indian software engineer makes 88 percent less than the U.S. software engineer. Companies are not the only ones guilty of this transgression. The State of New Mexico paid a firm in India $6 million to develop an online unemployment claim system. The State of New Jersey called a call center in India to handle calls from their welfare recipients. In New Jersey, calls go to India. The State of Pennsylvania Department of Corrections utilized an offshore company to develop its mission critical systems. All of this shifting of jobs offshore has significantly slowed the recovery of our own economy, and it is something that we should tell our people about. This is something we should be truthful about. And these are all high-tech jobs I have been talking about recently. But remember, go back to the original discussion here about the people coming in here with low-skill, low-wage backgrounds and how much we need them. Mr. Speaker, I remember distinctly, this may be now 6 or 8 months ago, but I remember an article that I read in the Rocky Mountain Newspaper in Denver, and there was an article, it was not an ad, it was an article about a job that had been posted by a restaurant by the name of, it was called Luna Restaurant. I know it, I have been there many times; a great Mexican restaurant in north Denver. The reason why the posting of a job became a story rather than just an ad in the paper is because it was a job for a $3-an-hour waiter; and that one job posting, that one ad produced 600 applicants the first day. That is why it turned into a story, a news story, 600 applicants for a $3-an-hour job. Mr. Speaker, it is possible, I suppose, that every one of the 600 applicants that day were illegal aliens, but I do not think so. Maybe a large number were, but I think a lot of the people who applied for that job were American citizens who needed the work. So this old canard about they only come into the jobs no American will take is just that, it is a falsehood. We employ these falsehoods in order to maintain open borders. Both parties support the concept. The Democrats support it because it adds to their potential pool of voters for the Democratic Party. The Republicans support it because it supports cheap labor. I will tell my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, if that is the policy that our government is undertaking, then it is simply the policy we should tell our constituents about. We should explain it to them. When my colleagues get a letter like this, handwritten, three pages long, talking about what happened to them, how they were displaced by foreign workers, we should write back and say it is the policy of this government to displace you, to move you into a lower economic income category because we believe in cheap labor and we believe that the politics of open borders helps our party, in this case the Democrats, as I say. The Republicans, it is the cheap labor side of things. That is what we tell people. That is what we should do. That is how we should respond because that is the truth of the matter; and I hope that when we have people bring bills to the floor designed to do something about jobs, which we hear over and over again, do something about jobs, I just hope that they will think about one thing they could do. There is something that we could do tomorrow to improve the quality of life for millions and millions of American citizens. There is something that we could do tomorrow that could actually add maybe 10 million jobs for American citizens, and that is to enforce our immigration laws. Stop people from coming in here illegally, deport the people who are here illegally today, and we would automatically create 10 million jobs for American citizens. So I want that discussed every single time there is a ``jobs'' bill brought in front of this Congress, because there is an easy way to do it. There is a moral way to do it. It is immoral for us to, in fact, displace American workers with cheap labor from outside our country. It is immoral for us to tell Americans that we do not have an open borders policy because we do, and there are ramifications to it, deep, serious ramifications to open borders. If that is what the country wants, if 50 percent plus one of this body and the other body and the President of the United States signs it, that is what we will get; but that is what we are going to get. Even that does not happen that way. We are going to get it in a de facto way. We are going to get it without ever bringing it to the attention of the American public. We are all just going to look around one day and say, gosh, what happened to our economy? What happened to the country with the highest standard of living in the world? What happened to my job? At that point, it is, of course, too late. Mr. Speaker, I hope that we will be more truthful in the discussion of this issue, and I hope that for all of our constituents' sake that we will begin to uphold our law, begin to defend our borders and begin to, in fact, enforce immigration law.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, it is not bad enough that foreign governments are brazenly distributing identification documents to their nationals in order to make it easier for them to violate our immigration laws, it now appears that our government is aiding in the effort. Perhaps I am a bit inaccurate in referring to the State Department as ``our government.'' Anyone who has been around here any length of time knows that the State Department operates as a separate entity with its own agenda and set of rules and are often unconnected to the wishes of the administration and are often disdainful of any congressional input except when they are up here asking for money. Recently a memo came into our possession, which emanated from our Embassy in Managua and was sent to Secretary Powell. It was asking for directions in the task of helping the government of Nicaragua create these ID cards to distribute to Nicaraguan nationals living illegally in the United States. They want to do this so that these illegal aliens can more easily obtain benefits, get breeder documents, and generally live here undisturbed while they violate our laws. You got it. That is our government in league with a foreign government as they aid and abet their illegal aliens living in the United States. Beam me up, as our friend used to say, Mr. Speaker, beam me up.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, it has been very elucidating listening to the folks who have such concerns about the possibility of a tax cut going to people that think they deserve it, and although it is not the topic of my discussion tonight or my presentation, I still feel it is worthy of some sort of rhetoric, and that is what we are really seeing, interestingly, is a discussion of what should be the tax cut policy of this country as proposed by the Democrats. That is great. It is great to hear. It is a wonderful thing actually to hear Democrats say things like we need a tax cut. I am sure they almost have to gag when they say it, but the reality is we need a tax cut. It is just not the one that you guys proposed. You guys proposed a tax cut for the rich and all this and other stuff, but what is even more fascinating about this, Mr. Speaker, is that we all know, there is not a single person in this body who thinks, and perhaps I hope very few people in the listening audience in America who think, that there would be any tax cut proposal from the other side tonight or any other time had not we proposed one first. Does anybody really believe that if the other party were in charge of the Congress of the United States or the White House that there would be any sort of tax cut proposal we would be debating? Does anybody really think for a second that there would have been something that the Democrats would have said we need a tax cut, because those words do not emanate freely and easily from our friends on the other side. They are prompted, they are urged and they come with great difficulty; and so they say, well, okay, we have a tax cut, we want a tax cut, but in reality, it is not the one that you guys have proposed. We will take a tax cut anytime, anyplace, anywhere. A tax cut is essentially and generally a good thing. Having people pay less of their hard-earned money for the task of expanded government is a good thing, I think, and so the fact that we would have even gotten the Democrats into the position of debating what their tax cut policy would be is a great, great boon for America. It is a great thing for all of us to have them try to stand up and defend a tax cut policy that they would never have put in place in a million years. No one thinks it, no one believes it, no one has the slightest idea that that would have come out of the Democratic Party had they been in charge of the Congress of the United States. That is part of who we are and what we are all about is reducing the cost of government to the people of this country; and so they think, well, we have to figure out a way to attack that. We have to attack the President. We have to attack the Party, the Republican Party, for doing this. How do we do it? I know. Let us drag up all of those things that we have used, time after time after time, somewhat successfully. Let us always say that it is the rich guys that the Republicans are giving a break to and it is the poor that are not getting their due rewards, and maybe they will buy it this time, or I should say maybe they will still buy it. Maybe we can still get the people who believe that, in fact, people should not be, that people do not, in fact, earn what they attain through the labor and the sweat of their brow, and that somehow or other everyone in this race of life should end up at the finish line at the same time. I used to teach ninth grade social studies at Jefferson County Drake Junior High, and one time one of my students asked about the difference between conservatives and liberals and how I would describe that. I said, I am a conservative and I want you to take that into consideration when I tell you how I think about that. I said, this is the way I really do envision our division in our country between these two major philosophies of the Republicans generally and Democrats generally. Republicans are generally conservative. Democrats are generally liberal. Not all, of course; differences on both sides. But for the most part, you can say this: that if you look at life as a race, and start at birth, and the finish line is death, and a lot of things can happen to you in between time, and you are trying to accomplish certain goals as you move through life, that for the most part a liberal would say that everyone has to end up at the finish line at the same time. That is the important role of government, to make sure that everyone ends up at the finish line at the same time, that there are no winners and there are no losers; everybody gets there at the same time. That is an idealistic approach and idealistic thought and philosophy. And remember, I am trying to explain this to ninth graders. I said, then, on the other hand, you have conservatives I think are saying if the government has any role at all, it makes sure the gate opens up exactly at the same time and everybody has the same opportunity, and if government has any role at all, it is to make sure there are no obstacles in the way, but no one is going to make sure you end up at the finish line at the same time because if you do that, of course, it is not a race. Pretty soon, if you do that, everybody walks because why should you run? It does not matter; we will all be at the finish line at the same time. It is true, it can be portrayed as hard-hearted from a conservative standpoint to say that government's responsibility is to simply make sure that the gates open on time and that from that point on make sure that there are no obstacles in the race, and there will be losers, there will be winners, and people will say how dare you, how can you accept that? That is, the government should not be in the position of accepting the idea that there are winners and losers. That is the way of life. I wish I could be on an NBA team. I am not tall enough. I am not capable of it. There are a lot of things I cannot do as a result of some of the shortcomings, literally and figuratively, that I think I face. And so no matter how much I would like the government to make sure I could get on that team, and therefore participate, and want the government to make sure that I am able to make baskets the same way as any other member of that team, it does not work that way. So I think our position is right. I think that in fact in the race of life, the government has relatively few responsibilities, and that the most important one is to make sure that the gates open up exactly at the same time and there are no obstacles in the track and that whoever ends up at the finish line, some win and some do not, and there are a hundred different races. We all are better at some things than others. It is not just where you race. We all accomplish certain things that we can do better than other people, and that is, again, the way of life. We have to accept that. But our friends on the other side of the aisle keep suggesting that somehow or other we have to say that in fact all people will end up at the finish line at the same time, and that is a winning sort of political proposal. People will respond, especially those who know they cannot make it to the finish line will say, yes, we should have the government stop everybody else until I get there. But in the total scheme of things, I do not think that will be the best for the country. I hope America understands when we start talking about tax cuts and who should get them and who should not, the reality is that if the Democrats were in charge of this place, there would be no tax cuts, there would be tax increases because that is the way they run government. That is the way they ran it for 40 years. That is why we are in power, and they are not. Now I want to get on to the issue that I wanted to address tonight, and that of course revolves around the issue of immigration and immigration reform. Tonight I want to talk about a couple of things. First of all, I want to talk about the impact of legal and illegal immigration on American society in one particular area, the area of jobs. A lot of the rhetoric we have heard on the floor and we will certainly hear over and over again revolves around whether or not the tax cut package we have just passed in this Congress and signed by the President, whether or not that will create jobs because we all know that is an important thing for the country and that is what we all want. The creation of jobs, I do not know of a single person in the Congress who would be opposed to it. Members recognize it is an important thing for us all, and it will be the stimulus for America in terms of us getting on the road to economic recovery. Well, there are various ways to do that; and I believe firmly that tax cuts do in fact create a stimulus that will improve the opportunity for many Americans and improve the job opportunities, especially for millions of Americans. I believe that. But there is something else, Mr. Speaker, that could be done and that no one, not our side, not their side, no one wants to talk about, and that is the number of jobs that would be created if we enforced our immigration laws. That is all. Just that. Not even impose new immigration laws or try to deal with the fact that we have got crossing our borders every day literally thousands and thousands of people coming, low-skilled people who are seeking jobs in America and getting them by employers who are using these folks and, in fact, abusing them in many ways. But if we just enforced the laws on the books, and surprising as it may be, it is against the law to hire someone who is here illegally. Now, who does not know somebody who may be or probably is hiring somebody or is in fact working for somebody in violation of that law. We all do. We all have anecdotal references we make to instances where somebody may be here working and they may be here illegally. We all know that. Now the first thing we usually hear when we raise the question is the question of real-world impact on American jobs and employment, and that these millions of illegal immigrants take only the jobs that Americans do not want to do. That is a mantra. We have to have people here from all over the world taking jobs because in fact there are a few jobs that Americans will not do, and we need all these folks to do the hard stuff. I am sure Members have heard that refrain many, many times. If it were true, the other problems brought about by illegal immigration would still remain, but we would not be worried about the loss of jobs or an adverse impact on wage rates. But is it true that illegal immigrants are taking jobs that no one else would take, no American citizen? I believe that the weight of the evidence is that it is not true. I believe there is ample evidence to the contrary. I believe there is ample evidence that illegal immigrants are increasingly taking jobs that American citizens would do willingly if wage rates for these jobs were not artificially suppressed by the ready supply of cheap labor from so-called undocumented aliens. Mr. Speaker, about 6 months ago now, there was an article in the Denver paper, the Rocky Mountain News, and it was interesting because it was a news article rather than a want ad; but it was a news article about a want ad and the article was about an ad that had been placed in the paper by a restaurant in Denver, a restaurant I have visited many times and know well, it is called Luna Restaurant. It is in an area where I grew up in north Denver. The article was interesting because it said Luna Restaurant puts an ad in the paper for a $3-an-hour waiter. We all know that waiters and waitresses make less than minimum wage because tips are included. So this position was for a $3-an-hour waiter. The article was in the paper because it was a news story. And what was the news story? The news story was the day that the article appeared there were 600 applicants for the job. Mr. Speaker, maybe some of those people, maybe a majority of those people were here illegally and were willing to do jobs that no one else was willing to do, but I do not believe that all 600 applicants were illegal immigrants. I believe a lot of them were American citizens looking for a job. It is undoubtedly and undeniably true that illegal aliens will work for lower wage rates than legal immigrants or American citizens. They do so because the wage is higher than they would earn back in Mexico, Guatemala, or other poorer nations. We all understand this, and most Americans sympathize with their plight. We can admire people willing to travel thousands of miles and evade the U.S. Border Patrol to get to Chicago or Philadelphia or Seattle in order to better their lives economically. There is nothing wrong with that goal in and of itself, and we can respect it because it is the goal that was in front of all of our grandparents or great grandparents or however long ago our family heritage established roots here in the United States. But there are several things wrong with the consequences of that behavior; and they need to be discussed even though it is not popular to do so, even though people get very antsy when you bring this up. They sort of go, oh, gosh, he is going to start talking about immigration again. I do not like dealing with that because people might think I am a racist or a xenophobe, so let us not talk about. Well, it needs to be talked about. First of all, one of the consequences of the behavior is that people are entering our country illegally, and the habit of breaking one law for economic benefit often creates a disregard for law and a willingness to violate other laws for personal benefit. And the more we choose to ignore it, the more we pretend that it is a law that we can wink at, a law that, gee, I know it is a law, but, and I have heard that 100 times. If it is a law, but, if it is a law that does not have importance, if it is a law that is not meaningful, then I urge this body to do what it should do. Mr. Speaker, if there are laws in the books in America that are no longer valid and meaningful, repeal them. I urge this body to actually address this issue head on and bring a bill forward in this body that says we will repeal all laws regarding immigration. We will essentially erase our borders. We will eliminate the Border Patrol, close the stations, the ports of entry because after all, we cannot control it. And if people want to come to the United States, for the most benign or most wonderful reasons, the reasons that we can all applaud, let them come. Why should we call someone here illegal? Why should we draw any sort of conclusions about someone who came into this country without our permission? Let us just let them all come from wherever they want to come and as many as wish to come. Now, I want that debated in this House. I want Members to vote yea or nay to this concept. If you vote ``yea,'' you are for erasing the borders. You can make that case to your constituents. Try and make that case. Some of us will be able to do so. Some of us will not be at all excited about that possibility and will vote ``no.'' I will not vote for such a bill, of course. I am a ``no'' vote because I do not believe it is good for America. I will tell Members I am a ``no'' vote on the issue of eliminating borders. I believe it goes to the very basic, to the heart of what we call our country, to the heart of national sovereignty. I will make the case as strongly as I can against any sort of bill that would in fact invalidate the borders. But that is exactly what we are doing, Mr. Speaker, every single day. That is the problem. It is happening, our opponents, the people who want the elimination of borders, know they can accomplish their goal by pretending that they support national sovereignty and national security. They can stand up and suggest that all day long. They do not want to vote on this idea of whether or not we should erase our borders because in their heart of hearts many people want to, and many times they want to for political reasons. They know that people coming into this country as immigrants tend to vote for one party over the other. They tend to vote for the Democrats. The other side of the aisle knows that. Again, this is not brain surgery we are dealing with here. It is politics 101. How do they gain supporters, especially when their side is losing? Where do they look? If the majority of Americans are now turning to the Republican Party or becoming more conservative and expressing that, where do the Democrats look for people who will support their efforts? Where do they look for people who support their efforts, for greater welfare and expanded government? They go to the immigrant class coming into the United States. So it is not unusual, it is not illogical, it is not crazy for us to deal with it in that way, for political parties to look at it that way. So our friends on the other side of the aisle see massive immigration and say, I do not care whether they are coming here legally or not. They eventually become my voters, so I am for it. So I am going to on the one side of my mouth I am going to suggest that we need national security, everybody should come in legally, wink, wink. On the other side I am going to say we need your help, we need your labor, and vote for me when you get here, whether you do so legally or not. On our side of the aisle, on the Republican side of the aisle, we have many Members who look at this whole thing and say there is an awful lot of cheap labor that is coming into this country, and that is good for business. That keeps wage rates low, prices low, and what is good for business, as Calvin Coolidge said, is good for America. Mr. Speaker, in this case it is not good for America. I would challenge my opponents on the other side of the aisle and I would challenge my opponents on this side of the aisle that massive immigration today both legally and illegally is not good for America. Now, as I mentioned, the first consequence of ignoring the fact that people come in illegally and break our laws is that is the wrong way to start off your citizenship in the United States. Of course it is not citizenship, your residency in the United States. The second consequence of this law-breaking behavior, the consequence of entering our country illegally, is that they also enter our labor market illegally. It is this consequence that I wish to talk about this evening. I want to ask you to consider, Mr. Speaker, some aspects of this underground labor market that is not getting much attention or discussion in the press and not much attention by this body or policymakers in general. In the first place, with the possible exception of a few agricultural jobs, it is simply not true that Americans will not do certain jobs because of their low status or because they involve hard labor. We have done these jobs throughout our history and well into the second half of the 20th century. Mechanization of agriculture over the past 100 years has led to a diminishing need for farm labor and our food is the least expensive in the world because of this. This trend was well established long before agricultural interests started relying on migrant labor and becoming more and more dependent on illegal migrant labor. Fewer and fewer Americans were needed to harvest our crops and there was an adequate supply of indigenous labor in the vast majority of cases. Harvesting peaches and tomatoes and strawberries is indeed very hard work. Mechanization has taken over in many crops but there is still a need for some amount of seasonal physical labor in some sectors of agriculture. Does this require 8 or 10 or 13 million illegal immigrants? I do not think so. There is another aspect of this that is very important to understand, Mr. Speaker, and, that is, when we allow massive immigration of low- skilled, low-wage workers, we have a tendency, therefore, to screw around with the market in a way. What we do is actually delay the implementation of the use of technology to accomplish certain goals. Specifically I remember when we used to have a bracero program in the United States. That was a program that allowed migrant workers, mostly from Mexico, to come in and do agricultural labor. And they had to return to Mexico and they could not bring families. When that program was ended, there was an outcry from the tomato growers in the United States. There was a massive sort of rush to legislative remedies. They wanted us to do something because they kept saying, it is impossible for us to actually do our job. We cannot possibly grow tomatoes, we cannot harvest tomatoes, without the help of this kind of labor. So we ended up in a situation where we went ahead and eliminated this bracero program. And what happened? Did tomato growers go out of business as they said they would? No. They were forced to actually invest in technology, to invest in different kinds of technology and actually develop some sort of mechanized approach to doing the labor that had been done heretofore by individuals. So today tomato growers in the United States are far more productive than they ever were before when they relied solely on individuals picking tomatoes. Now they can do it with machines, now they can do it more cost effectively, and they are more productive in the process. So when we import massive numbers of illegal workers into this country, or even legal workers who are low-skilled, low-wage workers, we need to actually again get involved and kind of skew the marketplace. We mess up the process that should lead to a development of greater use of technology and productivity. To the extent that American workers cannot be found for some seasonal agricultural jobs, that need can be met by a new guest worker program. I intend to introduce legislation to accomplish that goal very soon. A well- designed and properly managed guest worker program would allow migrant workers to come into this country legally, work as long as they are needed in jobs that are certified as requiring foreign nationals and then return to their homes. That is the important part we ought to remember about guest worker. Guest worker is a program that allows people to come into the country for a period of time, do a specific job, and return to their country of origin. That is a guest worker program. On the other side, you can have people come into the country and begin the process of becoming a citizen of the United States; that is called immigration. Two different things. We are right now by far the most liberal Nation on the planet in terms of who we let come into the country legally, 1 million, 1.5 million every year. We are also, of course, the most liberal Nation in the world in terms of who we let come into the country illegally, 1 million, 1.5 million people every year, that we turn a blind eye to. We do so for the reasons I mentioned earlier, political advantage for the Democrats, a business interest for the Republicans. And so we ignore the law. Once again I go back and say to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, if you want to accomplish your goals and let people into the country at their desire, not in any way, shape, or form connected to our needs in this country, if you want to do that to the Democratic Party, fine. To Republicans, if you want to just have a massive influx of low-skilled, low-wage workers in order to reduce the cost of labor, fine, let us tell America that is where we stand. Let us have a bill that actually eliminates the borders, allows people to come at their desire, not in response to our need. Let us do that. Let us let Americans know how you feel about this. Unfortunately, I do not think we are going to get that bill in this session or the next session, because I have never seen it introduced by anybody on either side of the aisle. And so when the other side of the aisle, the Democrats, talk about job creation and the need to protect workers in America, I find it always fascinating that they never ever want to talk about the thing that would protect American workers to a very large extent, and that is to actually control our own borders and to allow people into this country based upon our needs and to determine what those are. If they are, in fact, needs that can only be filled by low-skilled, low-wage workers, fine. If that is it, fine. If in reality, quote, no American wants to do these jobs, then, yeah, they are open to anybody who wants to come in and work hard and accomplish their life's goals. What about the jobs in other areas, the so-called low-status jobs that now employ illegal aliens? What about restaurants and car washes and leaf blowers and gardeners and carpet installers and hotel and motel housekeeping staff? These are a few of the typical jobs we are told that cannot be filled except by illegal aliens who will work for less money than legal workers or citizens. But should we stop and think about the statement they will work for less money, because that is really what we should add to the first part of the statement. There are jobs Americans will not do, at least for the money someone is willing to pay them to do it. It is true, but it is half a truth and hides a deeper reality. The illegal aliens will indeed work for less money because they can, because they come from a culture where $6 an hour is more than a living wage, and that family members often pool their incomes and share living quarters. This is to their credit. I do not mean to demean their efforts. They are doing exactly what my grandparents did and our great grandparents or however long ago our individual families ended up in this country. Most of them came for the same reason. I do not for a moment mean to demean that particular goal. But it is only half the story and the half that everyone sees and understands. The other half is that American workers used to do these jobs before the supply of cheap foreign labor drove down wage rates relative to the rest of the economy. In other words, the conventional wisdom has the story exactly backwards. We do not have 8 to 13 million illegal aliens in this country because we need them to fill jobs. We have 8 to 13 million illegal aliens in this country because there is a ready supply of cheap labor to keep wage rates low. We have that ready supply of cheap labor because we have an open border policy. Once again, maybe you can make this case, Mr. Speaker. Maybe it is something that all Americans will agree with. Maybe our friends on the other side of the aisle and my colleagues on this side will in their heart of hearts say, yes, it is true that we have to keep people in very low-wage situations because it is good for the economy. I just want them to make that case to their constituents, that is all. That is all that I ask. I want them to tell the people who are struggling in those low-wage jobs that they are there and they are going to be there for a long time, and there is no real opportunity for advancement because open borders will keep wage rates low and, therefore, the economy moving. Do we need an open borders policy? Not to help our economy, which would adjust and prosper without the supply of cheap labor, just as I mentioned earlier in what I described about what happened in the tomato growing industry. It is interesting how business does adjust and how the economy does in fact relate to these things called labor shortages. We would adjust and we would prosper without the supply of cheap labor. But because it benefits Mexico and maintains good relations with the Mexican Government and because it benefits the cheap labor advocates in the Congress of the United States and the political advantage that our friends in the Democratic Party get because of massive immigration, we will continue the program. If these workers were not available, if we did not maintain an open border policy, our economy would adjust and we would continue to be the most prosperous Nation in the world. The few companies that must have such low-wage workers in order to compete in the marketplace will move their plants to the source of the labor. But our history teaches that most employers will not do this. Denied a source of below-market cheap labor, employers will generally not move their operations. Instead, they do one of two things. They will either mechanize their operations, as agriculture has in fact done steadily over the past 150 years, or they will raise their wages to attract American workers or legal workers. Actually there is another part to this. We will increase productivity. That is what we have done. Because in reality, no matter how much we talk about the need for open borders, it is very difficult to compete in a world in which, today especially, you can move work to worker anyplace in the world. So how does American labor compete? It is not, frankly, with just the importation of cheap labor; it is with the development and the continual increase of productivity by the American worker. When this is done across the entire industry, it does not disadvantage any one employer because all employers are in the same boat. Costs to the consumer will rise as the cost of labor rises, but the product will be produced and will be available on the market. To cite one of the most obvious examples, if restaurants in New York City and San Francisco and Dallas could not employ these illegal immigrants as their dishwashers and busboys and valet parking attendants, they would be forced to pay slightly higher wages to legal workers. Would they all go out of business? No, they would not. I respectfully submit that it would not be a calamity for our economy to have to pay a price for a prime rib dinner that would move from like $16 to $16.50, and the price of delivery of pizza to go up 50 percent, if the car wash goes up from $12 to $13, if the price of a Motel 6 room increases from $34.95 in Lubbock to $36.95. I recognize that this might be a difficult adjustment for some people, but we have been through hardships that we endured and we can endure this one. To offset these temporary adjustments in our life- style, there would be many favorable things that would happen in our economy if the supply of cheap labor and illegal labor was cut off. The first thing we would notice is that our college students could in fact find summer jobs and part-time jobs year around. Some of the 8 million unemployed Americans would find jobs in the service industries at a higher wage than is now offered. As the job magnet disappears, the flow of illegal aliens across our borders, now estimated at 1.5 million a year, would stop. This would have some very positive effects on our economy. Hospitals, law enforcement agencies, and public schools all across the border States and in many of our bigger cities would notice a diminished burden on their budgets. As a result, State and local governments all across the West and South would discover they have revenues available that had previously been devoted to the needs of a growing immigrant community. Legal immigrants seeking jobs would not be competing with people willing to work for below-market wages. The U.S. Border Patrol and the Customs Service could concentrate all of their energies on stopping the flow of illegal drugs into our Nation instead of worrying about the flow of illegal people; people like several members of my own community in Denver, Colorado; people in my own neighborhood. One gentleman in particular comes to mind. He is employed in the high-tech industry, and we will talk about that in a few minutes, about exactly what is happening there because we have spent most of the time talking about low-skilled, low-wage workers, but there is just as big a problem, if not more so, in the area of white collar workers, high-skilled workers in the United States and the various programs that we operate to bring people into this country to displace American workers in this area. My friend is one of those. He is an individual that has been out of work for a year or year and a half in the high-tech industry. He now works a little bit for us, and at nighttime drives a limousine to keep a roof over his head and food on the table. If you ask him, you know, when you were a high-tech worker and in this very high position in this industry that you were involved in, would you believe that you would be driving a limousine at night picking people up and taking them to the airport, he would said no; but it does not matter, because that is what I need to do. That is what I have to do today. That is the case for millions of Americans. They are looking for ways to keep the roof over their heads and food on the table. They will take jobs. They will take jobs, if available. As I said, Mr. Speaker, the 600 people that applied for that $3-an- hour job at the Luna Restaurant as a waiter were not all illegal immigrants. I do not know how many, but I would guess 50 percent were people who have lived here all their lives. They were American citizens, and they were looking for a job; and their chances of getting it were diminished by the fact that so many people are here and working here and living here illegally. I want to reiterate, it is not a slam against those people. They are doing what they need to do, what they want to do, what they have to do to try to improve theirs lives. I totally understand and relate to that. I empathize with them in every single way. I know what my grandparents went through, and I hear this a thousand times, that we are a Nation of immigrants and everybody came here and worked hard. Mr. Speaker, this is a time when in America we have to determine what our needs are, what our needs are, and to what extent we want to disenfranchise and do things that do not benefit the American citizens of this country, so as to improve the lot of those people who are not citizens. How much of what we have in America do we wish to diminish? How much has to sink in order to allow this other part to rise? This is something we have to think about. It is harsh. I know that to many people, they feel that to be something that they would just as soon not think about, not deal with; but it is important for us to understand and deal with. Is it right? Is it okay? If it is, if you believe so, if you come down on the side that says that we need to in fact allow for markets to work and simply have as many people who want a job in the United States to come across the border and get it, if that is true, if that is what we want, then eliminate the border. Erase the border. Forget about a border. Allow people to come to this country at their whim, at their desire. Allow them to come from every country in the world. Now, what would happen, I ask? Would all of our lives be benefited? Would everybody in the United States be better off, the people living here, would they be better off as a result? Would the quality of our life go up, or would it be diminished? If it would increase, let us do it. Let us pass the bill. Let us put it on the floor; let us debate it. To the extent you can make the case to the American public that the United States should be open to every single person in every single country who wants to come here, then let us do it. The thing I just hate, the thing that I rail against, is the idea that we are going to actually accomplish that goal, but we are going to sneak it through. We are not going to tell Americans that is what we want, that is the goal we are trying to accomplish, to reduce everyone's standard of living in order to accomplish this sort of idealistic libertarian goal of having markets actually determine all aspects of our society. Let us just say it. That is what I want from this Congress. That is what I expect from my colleagues and the President of the United States. I expect him to tell the truth about where we are going, about what they want to accomplish, because it is one or the other. We cannot have it both ways. Either you have unlimited massive immigration into the country, the elimination of the borders, or you do not. There is another very important dimension to this whole debate over illegal workers, and it is a good news story when you really look into it and understand it. I am thinking of the role that millions of American workers play in our Social Security trust fund and the actuaries for payout to tomorrow's retirees. One of the arguments frequently heard in this Capitol is that the Nation benefits from all these illegal workers because many of them do in fact pay into the Social Security system, but they never gain any of the benefits. The argument runs that if they are a net-plus for the system, they will help fund the future payouts for retirees. A recent research report by economist John Attarian called ``Immigration: Wrong Answer For Social Security'' examines the numbers and the projects and comes to a different conclusion entirely. Dr. Attarian's analysis of all the most pertinent research by many organizations and many pro-immigration advocates shows that in order to make any significant dent in the long-term deficit projected for the Social Security system, we would have to quadruple the number of high- wage immigrants in the technology field, not the low-wage workers who come from across our borders illegally. Moreover, the actual fiscal effects of massive illegal immigration are probably negative, because the low-wage workers contribute less in Social Security payroll taxes than the workers they displace. If you depress the wage rates paid to workers in order to hire illegal aliens instead of higher-wage citizens, you decrease the net income of the Social Security trust fund. You do not increase it. Yet there is another aspect of this labor market that needs greater attention and some serious scrutiny. We have talked only about the myth of low-wage jobs that supposedly no one wants to do. There is a growing problem with higher-level jobs that are now being taken by illegal aliens and that no one wants to talk about. This is a strange thing, this public silence about the loss of jobs in the construction industry, jobs that pay $12, $14 and $15 an hour, that are being filled by illegal workers. Please, someone explain to me how it is that contractors cannot find legal workers to do these jobs? Do you really believe, does anyone in this body, anyone even in Washington, where the air here is so rarified that it has sometimes affected all of our thinking and we have a hard time relating to the people we represent, the working Americans, does it really occur to anyone that there are in fact many Americans who will not take $12 to $14 or $15 hour jobs in the construction industry, and therefore they go begging and we have to import illegal aliens? The explanation, however, is simple. The jobs that a contractor is willing to pay an illegal worker $14 an hour to do, he would have to pay $16 to $18 to carpenters, union workers, brick masons and union workers. More importantly, when hiring the illegal worker instead of the American worker, the employer does not have to pay withholding tax or workman's comp or health benefits. Thus, he reduces his labor costs by as much as 50 percent by breaking the law. You may be surprised to learn that this practice is very widespread in our Nation, especially in the West and Midwest. The Denver Post recently ran a front page investigative report on this phenomenon. The investigative reporter revealed that there is a large underground network of labor brokers who specialize in providing illegal workers for the construction industry. They provide buses and transport illegal workers from one site to another when a project is completed. There are thousands of workers involved in this scheme all across the West and Midwest. Two very interesting questions arise when looking at this matter. The first one is obvious: Why does the U.S. Labor Department let employers get away with this violation of our labor laws? Why are arrests and prosecutions so rare? The second question is not so obvious, but it is equally curious: Why are the labor unions not objecting to this loss of jobs to their members? Thousands of jobs, and probably tens of thousands on a national scale, are going to illegal workers who are not union members. Where is the voice? Where is the process of the AFL-CIO when union workers lose their jobs and are displaced by illegal aliens? Where is the protest from our deficit hawks when the IRS loses millions of dollars in withholding because these illegal workers are paid off the books or as independent contractors who do not have to pay withholding? Where is the protest by the proponents of workers' safety rules and standards when it is revealed that hundreds of thousands of workers are not being covered by workman's comp laws because employers are skirting the law in wholesale fashion, and neither the U.S. Labor Department nor State authorities are willing to do anything about it? Where are the Nation's frontline newspapers and news networks? Is this story not told because it is not politically correct to talk about it? I will soon introduce a new guest worker program that will offer a real and equitable solution to the so-called labor shortage. We will authorize unlimited guest workers into this country to fill legitimate jobs that cannot ``be filled by citizens and legal residents.'' If the employer can demonstrate a real need, if he can offer a job to a foreign national, then that worker can enter the job market and work at it for up to 2 years. There will be penalties for fraud, and a part of the worker's wages will be withheld until he or she returns to the home country. This is another issue. We will see other Members introduce legislation for guest worker programs; and for the most part, they will be disguised as a guest worker program with the purpose of creating amnesty for people who are here illegally. This cannot be. This is absolutely inappropriate. We should never, ever, ever reward people for breaking the law, whether it is the employer who benefits or the illegal alien. We should not do that as a Congress; we should not do that as a Nation. So if you need to come into this country and if we need the labor, we should have a legal process for that to occur, a process that guarantees the rights of the people coming into the country so they are not abused by the people who are hired by them to sneak them into the country, the coyotes, the people that packed them into the back of semis, like in Texas, where they died, 19 of them just recently, or where they bring them into the country or bring them near the border and the women are raped and the men in the family are robbed and they are shoved into the border. We have testimony from people who have ranches near the southern border, and at nighttime they can hear the screams of women being raped by the coyotes who have taken them to this point where the promised land is just on the other side, but at that point they take advantage of them in every single way imaginable and shove them into the desert and they die there by the hundreds. We can protect them. We can stop them from doing that. We can stop the coyotes from doing this. We can protect workers coming into the United States and make sure they are paid at least the minimum wage. We can be sure they are in fact given the kind of protection that American workers deserve, that all workers deserve. On the other hand, we can protect our own interests in this country and protect the interests of Americans who need jobs. If there are truly ``jobs that Americans will not do,'' fine, let somebody prove that; and when they prove it, let them import labor for that purpose. It is okay with me. But I will assure you that if that test were really that difficult, if we truly put it out there in that way, prove that no American wants this job for what you are willing to pay, for what the going rate is, by the way, not just what you are willing to pay, what the going rate for this job is, okay, you can bring in a guest worker. But I guarantee, Mr. Speaker, that most of these jobs that we are being told would only be taken by people we have to bring in here illegally would in fact be taken by American citizens. To the extent that is not true, fine, import workers. Bring them in legally so that they are protected in their rights and so that our rights are also protected. There would be penalties for fraud, and part of the workers wage would be withheld, as I say. The penalties for fraud are important, because we have to stop the demand side of this equation just as much as the supply side. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of American corporations that are taking advantage of our laws, that are importing workers, that are actually involved in the process, not just of hiring illegal aliens, but bringing them into the country. Tysons Foods, Tysons Foods in Arkansas is being prosecuted by the U.S. Government, and it is a showcase. I really and truly applaud the Immigration and Naturalization Service for bringing this case, because I hope people in Tysons Foods, if they are found guilty, actually go to jail for what they have done, because they are part of, according to the government's case anyway, Tysons Foods and the executives at Tysons Foods were actually involved in the importation of illegal workers. Well, that even goes one step beyond just hiring someone who is here illegally, and the people who did that should go to jail. American corporations who knowingly hire people who are here illegally should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, and we should not wink at it and we should not just pretend that it is the problem of the illegal worker coming into this country. He is coming or she is coming for a job. That job is being offered by an American corporation or an American company or just an American citizen, and we have to stop that. Each are culpable. When those people died in Victorville, California, the people who are responsible for their death, beyond those individuals who put themselves in harm's way, who decided to actually take the risk of coming into this country illegally, beyond those people, there is still more culpability. Part of it goes to those American employers who enticed these people into the United States. Part of it goes to our own government and every Member of this Congress who refuses to deal with the issue of illegal immigration. Yes, it is our responsibility. Yes, their blood is on our hands. Mr. Speaker, I state that categorically, that we have, over the course of the last couple of decades, made it enticing for them to come to the country illegally; made it illegal to do so, of course, to come without our permission; but, on the other hand said well, if you can do it, if you can make it, we will look the other way. So, of course, millions do, and some of them get caught in this trap, and some of them die. It is our fault. We share the blame. So does the Mexican Government for encouraging this flow, for doing everything possible to move unemployed young Mexican workers into the United States to reduce their own problems in Mexico and to increase remittances from people who come to the United States and send money back to Mexico, which becomes a significant part of their own GDP. They also encourage the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States from Mexico in order to have them, as I was told by Juan Hernandez, who was at that time the head of the ministry in Mexico called the Ministry for Mexicans Living in the United States. He said that it helps them influence our government's policy, the massive number of Mexican nationals living in the United States helps them, he said, influence our government's policy vis-a-vis Mexico. So Mexico has a role to play and is equally culpable for the deaths of the people that have come across this border and found themselves in horrible circumstances and died as a result or were harmed in the process. Mr. Speaker, all of these people have some role to play and some degree of culpability, and I say to every single one of them, I challenge you to actually deal with this forthrightly. Stand up in front of the American public and state unequivocally that what you want is, in fact, a Nation where there are no barriers to immigration, where people can come at their will. Say that. It may win. It may win a majority of the votes in the Congress of the United States and the President may sign that kind of a bill. I, as I say, am a ``no'' vote, but it may happen. I just want the debate. I want it to happen in this body. I want it to be done in a de jure fashion, not in a de facto way. I know that what we are doing in America today is in fact moving in exactly that direction. We are eliminating our borders, but we are not doing it through a legal process; we are doing it in a de facto way, by looking the other way. And there are many, many bad things that happen as a result of that desire on our part to look the other way. Well, I want to force this Congress, I want to force this Nation, I want to force the President of the United States to look at this straight in the eye, and say we are going to deal with it one way or the other. Open our borders or secure them. Those are the only two options open to us as a Nation. Take your pick. Vote on one side or the other. Let us get this job done. Let us tell the people where we really stand. Let us get this problem solved one way or the other.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, several foreign governments have undertaken to distribute identification cards to their nationals living illegally in the United States. Some of these governments, specifically one of them, Mexico, has taken this one step further and decided to begin to use their consular offices here to lobby State and local governments in the United States to get them to accept these cards, thereby aiding and abetting people living in this country illegally. Mr. Speaker, if the United States had asked its consular offices in Mexico or any other country to undertake such a practice, there would be a storm of protest, and rightly so. Consular offices would be closed; officials would be recalled. It would be appropriate for governments to respond that way. Our government has not said a word about this. It is time, however, that the Government of the United States issue a formal protest to the Government of Mexico for this egregious, outrageous behavior, and it is time for this government to take control of its own immigration policy.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, it is an interesting use of words that are employed to describe this event, this process, this phenomenon we call a tax cut, and those who are helped and those who are hurt. And we sit here tonight and we listen to people describe the perils of those who do not receive a ``tax cut.'' Tax cut. Now, let us analyze those two words. A tax. Something people pay. A cut. A reduction in that amount. In the case that was just brought to us and the case that, in fact, has been characterized over and over and over again as the people who do not, who will not be getting this tax cut, who are purposefully left out of this tax cut because we are so hardhearted on our side, we are so mean and hateful to people who make a little bit of money, very poor people, so that we decided, I know what. Let us make their life even more miserable. We will not give them their tax cut. Mr. Speaker, it has nothing to do with this process of a tax cut. Because, of course, the people that we are talking about here, the people that are suggested are not participating in this, do not pay taxes; therefore, we cannot cut the taxes they pay. And they do not get a refund of those taxes because, in fact, they do not come to the government in the first place. So now if you want to simply move money from one source to another, if you want to redistribute the wealth, which is, of course, part of our great tax scheme and something the Democrats have been so cozy with for so long, something they feel strongly about, something they can endorse wholeheartedly, moving money from people who pay taxes to those who do not, that is a different plan. That is okay. We do it all the time. It is called welfare. And that is, of course, an acceptable thing in this Nation. It is just not part of a tax cut plan. The reality is that this is a problem we face with more than just this issue. The whole concept of what we are doing for working Americans, what we are doing with a tax cut proposal that is designed to increase the number of jobs out there. I certainly support this concept. I certainly supported the job stimulus package that was passed here in the House, and I hope that it works. It is designed to do just that. If we leave more money in the hands of the people out there to invest, to, in fact, create jobs, that is good, I am happy. Then people like the ones that we were talking about here earlier and that had been brought to our attention who are in the lower income levels of society, those people will benefit also and that is the whole purpose of a stimulus package. It is to increase the economic benefit to all Americans, to all working Americans. That is the whole idea. Now, let us look at another aspect of this that I never ever see in terms of this being discussed, in terms of what really could help American jobholders or those people who are job seekers, the millions of Americans who are today unemployed or underemployed, the people who are making minimum wage, the people who are desperately looking to better their lives and are wondering about, in fact, what the government can do to help. Well, I agree that one of the things we can do to help is, in fact, propose and, in fact, pass a tax cut like we have done. But there is something else that we can do and then I would encourage all of my friends on the other side of the aisle to help us do. And that is to do something about the massive number of people who are in this country illegally and working illegally, people who are here, low-wage, low- skilled workers who have come into the United States. There are something like 13 million, maybe more than that, who are here today employed and they are actually illegally employed. They are employed by people who know that they are here illegally but it does not matter. They take their jobs, the jobs that could be going to other Americans, and, in fact, we allow that to occur. We encourage that. We have all kinds of loopholes in our immigration, not just in the borders that exist, not just in the fact that we have porous borders through which these people come, take the jobs that American citizens would take if they had the opportunity, and in fact, even those jobs, American citizens who are working, many of them are working for very low wages. As has been talked about tonight over and over again, that is true, but the reality is that those wages are kept low by the massive number of people who are coming into this country illegally, with low skills and, therefore, get paid low wages, and just the numbers here depress the wage base. I would like to have people support our efforts to try and secure the borders and stop all the loopholes in our immigration law. That would help working Americans.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I want to address the House tonight on an issue that I try often to bring to the attention of my colleagues and the Nation, and that is immigration and immigration reform, and I want tonight to induct another member into the famous ``hall of homeland heroes.'' This is an exercise that I have gone through several times, and we have identified quite a number of people who have experienced things that should come to the attention of this body and the Nation, because these folks and what has happened to them really and truly are extraordinary events and they are extraordinary activities with which they have been involved in trying essentially to keep their own land, raise their family, and do what every American has a right to do, but they do so under very severe circumstances. They do so in an area of the country that is very harsh, very challenging, and very unforgiving. The geography of the land, the climate of the land is in every way, shape and form severe. It is the southern deserts of the United States. It is the area in and around Cochise County, Arizona, and it is the area adjacent to our border with Mexico. All of these things make living in the area very, very difficult. Of course the land has always been unforgiving. The environment has always been harsh, but only in the recent 5 or 10 years has the proximity to Mexico become also very problematic in terms of trying to run a business, trying to actually just live your life. Because they have had so many problems in this regard, and because so few people have paid attention to these problems, I have decided that one way to bring their plight to the attention of the Nation is to create this thing we call the ``homeland heroes'' and every once in awhile to come up here with another person that we are trying to induct into that ``hall of heroes.'' Tonight it is Ruth Evelyn Cowan. Ruth Cowan is a fourth generation rancher who has been forced to move off of her land because of the dangers posed by hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who cross her land every month and every year. Ruth Cowan and her husband own 16,000 acres of ranchland located 45 miles from the Arizona-Mexico border north of Douglas, Arizona. They have about 400 head of cattle. Like many ranchers in the area, Ruth Cowan and her husband must work two jobs to make ends meet because the cost of operating a ranch often exceeds the income. Her husband works 130 miles away in Phoenix during the week. It is not safe for Ruth to live on her own ranch in her own home. She is very isolated. She has to live in Tombstone and drive to the ranch daily to supervise the operations. Each day she drives to the ranch, she must carry not only her cell phone, a two-way radio, a camera, marking tape and a flashlight, she always carries a pistol for self-protection. To some liberal church groups in the Tucson area, this makes her a vigilante. It also would make her a vigilante to some of the more liberal publications that emanate out of the East Coast, publications that employ writers to talk about this issue, writers who have never set foot in the desert, do not have the slightest idea what it is like to live in this area and yet take great pleasure in characterizing people like Ms. Cowan and others who do have to face the trauma of life in this area, and characterize them as vigilantes. She carries a gun for self-protection on her own land. This does not make her a vigilante, it makes her a victim of failed immigration policy and open borders. Three years ago she had to take a leave of absence from her job as a flight attendant because the ranch requires her round-the-clock attention. This additional demand on her time is due almost entirely to the costs and other problems imposed by the flow of illegal aliens across the land. Among the additional costs thereby imposed on her family has been the purchase of COBRA insurance at over $400 a month. Her ranch business has been hurt financially by the flow of illegal aliens across the land, a flow of people and illegal drugs that have increased dramatically since she and her husband first purchased the family business in 1996. Her ranch has three different south-to-north routes used by illegal aliens. Her trucks have been stolen and vandalized leading to both direct losses and increased insurance costs. She has lost many animals to the illegal aliens, including a $2,400 registered bull that died from eating a plastic bag. Another bull was hit by a hit-and-run driver and had his leg broken and had to be destroyed. You say, eating a plastic bag? The fact is that the area around there has been so inundated by illegal aliens carrying their supplies and then depositing their trash throughout the land that in many areas it looks similar to a huge trash dump. It looks like a municipal trash dump. This is the middle of, as I say, a very pristine area; but you will come across these areas, 50, 100 acres at a time. They are called pickup sites where these folks will meet, they walk into the country illegally, they meet at these sites, prearranged where they are going to be picked up by trucks that bring them into the interior of the United States, trucks similar to those that were identified recently in Victorville, Texas, in which several illegal aliens died tragically. But from these pickup sites, then, trash is distributed throughout the area. The wind, of course, takes it; and we have a definite problem with the kind of pollution that that causes, and then not only that, of course, cattle eat the plastic, the trash bags and whatever, and they eventually die because it will not digest and it will kill them. This happens time and time again. This was certainly not unique. But again, explain this kind of thing to someone living in Washington, D.C., writing for The Washington Post or some of these other e-mail magazines, online magazines. They have not the foggiest idea of what we are talking about and what these people have to deal with all of the time. Because of the broken fences, cows wander onto highways and cause accidents. A nurse hit a cow recently and threatened to sue the Cowan family for negligence. Unfortunately, the illegal trespassers who cut the fence were not available to answer the court summons or to pay damages. Cut and downed fences make it very difficult to maintain a special breeding program for the cattle. Herds mix and become mongrelized and are more susceptible to diseases from neighboring herds. This means that the market value of their cattle diminishes. Thus the Cowan family suffers real economic loss as a result of these cut fences. Repair costs for gates and fences and broken waterlines have skyrocketed. The real estate market for ranches south of Interstate 10 has plummeted because no one wants to purchase a place imperiled by all of these problems. Ruth Cowan has been forced off the local roads many times by overloaded trucks running at high speeds. Unfortunately, when these speeders cause real accidents and hurt innocent people, they do not have insurance and flee into Mexico before they can be prosecuted. We are going to talk a lot more about that kind of a phenomenon later on this evening. It is often alleged that critics of the open border policy are simply bigots, that they do not want Mexican workers in the country or as new citizens. This is hogwash, and the experience of the Cowan family shows why it is hogwash. Ruth Cowan has two employees who are Mexican nationals and work on the ranch with legal work papers. They live in Agua Prieta, Sonora and drive to her ranch about 50 miles every single day. Ruth Cowan has been trying for 5 years to get immigration approval for the wife of one of the employees to come and join her husband. The employee could then live on the ranch and not have to commute 50 miles in each direction daily. These legal Mexican workers are equally indignant about the problems affecting the Cowan ranch because they see the problems firsthand and know that it affects their own lives as well. One of the employees had his own truck stolen by illegal trespassers. This is something else that really deserves the attention of the body and, again, the attention of the people back here who either write or opine about the problems that we face in the United States and in the western United States with illegal immigration. What they do not understand is that it is not Anglo-Americans that are imperiled by this. It is not a race issue whatsoever. Every time I do this, that I come to the floor and I talk about this issue, I will go back and there will be a lot of e-mails, a lot of calls on our line. Most of them are quite supportive, and many of them, a high percentage of them are from people who suffer these kinds of problems, people of Hispanic descent who say to me, what you are doing is right, what you are saying is right, we have come here legally, we are trying to work through the process, we are trying to live a life in the United States, build a life here. We live by the rules and by the laws. And they resent it that other people get to sort of jump in front of the line, in front of them, that other people take advantage of our lax immigration law, lax immigration enforcement, in fact nonimmigration law enforcement. They resent it. And they have every right to resent it. And they are Hispanic Americans and they are black Americans and they are white Americans and they are brown Americans and pink and blue and every color Americans, but they are just as angry about this as anyone else; and they have every right to be angry about it. Another thing we will talk about this evening later on is the impact of massive immigration on low-wage, low-skilled workers, how many of them are negatively impacted by the flow of illegal aliens into this country. But we will save that for a later time this evening. Ruth Evelyn Cowan is a law-abiding citizen and a fourth-generation rancher who only wants to live on her own land, manage a business for the benefit of American consumers, and enjoy life with her husband in a safe community. She would like to be able to spend a weekend with her husband and not have to stand watch over the trails used by illegal trespassers. She would like to have the first activity of each new day not be the repair of broken or trampled fences and other damage caused by uninvited intruders. She would like to sleep through the night without someone calling on the phone to tell her to come and get her cattle off of the highway. She would like to be able to invite friends to her ranch without worrying about the piles of trash visible all across the rangeland. She would like to be able to ride her horse on her own land without a bodyguard. She would like to be able to host groups of students who want to learn about the ranching business without having to apologize for the dangers and the rash of diseases and crimes afflicting the region. In short, Ruth Evelyn Cowan wants to be able to live the kind of life that she would be able to live if we had a secure border and adequate enforcement of our immigration laws. I speak of Ruth Cowan's problems and fears not only out of sympathy for her and her family and not only as an example of what is happening to thousands of ranchers across the Southwest. I speak of these problems because they are problems that are growing all across our Nation and problems we cope with very inadequately and unsuccessfully with the impact of massive illegal immigration. If we do not address these issues now, these problems will continue to grow and multiply not only in the States on our southern border. The problems will multiply in Omaha; Portland; Fort Collins, Colorado; Chicago; and Spartanburg. I commend to you this life, this individual, Ruth Cowan and her family; and I suggest that we owe them a great deal. We owe them at least the protection that every citizen in this Nation has the right to expect from their government. The Constitution of this United States gives the Federal Government relatively few true responsibilities. We usurp many. We take many responsibilities here that have absolutely nothing to do with the Federal role in our constitutional government. We can have debates over whether or not we should have a U.S. Department of Education even though the word ``education'' does not even appear in the Constitution anywhere. We can argue about whether the role of the Department of Health and Human Services is relevant and important and a Federal issue. We can argue all of these things, and I think there is logic to the argument that we have usurped many of these responsibilities from the States. But one thing about which there is no argument is the fact that the Federal Government owes the people of this country the right to think, anyway, and believe that it will try its best to protect and defend their lives and their property. That is a Federal role. That is something the States cannot handle. They cannot raise armies and they cannot develop immigration policies. At least they should not. That is another issue again for perhaps a little bit later time. There are, of course, States and localities throughout the United States that are succumbing to the siren song being played to them by the Mexican consul in their area. The Mexican consul and consulates throughout the United States, all 47 of them, have been charged with the responsibility by the government of Mexico to go out and lobby State and local governments to get them to accept anyone who is here, to accept the matricula consular. This is a Mexican ID card given to Mexican nationals living in the United States and, of course, given to Mexican nationals living here illegally. In fact, the only purpose these cards serve is to provide some sort of identification to someone who is living here illegally or to a felon who is trying to change his identification. So for in the last several months, 1.5 million of these cards have been distributed in the United States and the Mexican consulates are handing them out every day. They send out vans, as a matter of fact, to pass out these cards. Then they go to the cities and States and get them to accept the cards that are given out to these illegal aliens. And many States, many localities are doing it. California is in the midst of a discussion in the State legislature that would actually have the State accept the matricula consular from illegal aliens for the provision of services. That is running a different immigration system. How many immigration systems are we supposed to have in the United States? The one the Federal Government runs and the one that the State of California or the city of Denver and the city of Tucson run along with the Mexican consul? These are all different immigration policies. But it is a uniquely Federal role. To a certain extent, the Federal Government has abdicated that role, so States and localities, in a way, they are saying, okay, if you don't want to handle it, I guess we will. But they are not protecting the Cowans. They are protecting illegal aliens. All these cities and States that are anticipating this acceptance of the matricula consular, this Mexican ID card and ID cards that are now being handed out by at least five other governments, foreign governments to their illegal nationals living in the United States, people who are doing that, these cities and States and police departments that are doing that are aiding and abetting criminal activity in the United States. Yes, I said aiding and abetting criminal activity. That is what even police departments are doing when they accept these cards. If a police officer is shown a card, a matricula consular, they should immediately arrest that individual, because that is prima facie evidence that that person is here illegally. Because you do not need the card if you are here legally. If you come into this country legally, you have something called a green card, or a visa, or a stamp on your passport, or something the United States Government has given you. You do not rely on another country's identification card, especially in a time like this, especially when we recognize that porous borders mean a danger to the actual existence of the United States. But here we are allowing cities to do this, allowing States to do this, and even having the Federal Government actually anticipate doing this, with the Department of Treasury issuing regulations not too long ago saying that banks could do this, could accept a card from people so they could open bank accounts. I understand the motivation of the bank. I know what they are wanting to do this for. It is called money. It is called the dollar sign. It is called the bottom line, right? They are a business and you can excuse it, you can rationalize their behavior. They are simply being greedy and doing exactly what they should be doing, I guess, as greedy huge corporations trying to improve their bottom line. They see this group of what they call the unbanked, 13 million people living here illegally and not being able to get fees from them, that makes these bankers, the Wells Fargo board of directors salivate thinking, my goodness, think of all those people from whom we could collect fees and how we could get all that money they make, what little it is does not matter. Multiplied by 13 million, that could be a lot of money. The unbanked, that is what they call them. There is another word, it is illegal aliens; and you are aiding and abetting a criminal activity. It is against the law to aid and abet someone who is here illegally. That is against the law. It is against Federal law. Yet all of the things I am describing are things that government agencies are doing. That is how bizarre this whole immigration policy has become. So the Cowans and others look to the Federal Government for help. They get none. They look to their State for help. They get none. Recently, because of the pressure that has been applied as a result of these weekly stories that we bring to the attention of the body, it is suggested that because of the pressure that has developed as a result of this noise that we are making about this, little things seem to be changing. I want to say how happy I am about the fact that some different people are in place in the Border Patrol in that area, in the administration of the Border Patrol. I understand that some new folks are on hand down there and may be looking at this whole issue differently and be willing perhaps to help the Cowans and all the other ranchers in Cochise County begin to control this problem. I hope that is true. I understand that the sheriff in Cochise County has become a little more amenable to the concerns of the people down there. I am very happy to hear that. I am encouraged by the fact that little things may be happening for the people in Cochise County because we have made a lot of noise about it. But it is not enough. It is not enough, because the plight of the people in Cochise County, Arizona, is the plight of literally millions of Americans, and will be the plight of the entire Nation if this phenomenon of massive immigration into the country, unchecked, unrecognized immigration, illegal immigration into this country, goes without our attention. During the break, during the last week when we were off, the Memorial Day break, I got a call from someone who was telling me about a situation that had occurred in a little town in Colorado, so I can bring this a lot closer to home. I am, of course, a Representative from the Sixth Congressional District of Colorado, which is the southern suburbs of Denver really. There is a town in northeastern Colorado called Yuma. I got a call from someone who was saying, Do you know what is happening in this little tiny town of Yuma, Colorado, a town I know well and have been through many times. They said in the last, really just year-and-a-half, 2 years, the whole town is suffering through a really significant and traumatic time. They went on to explain that because of something that occurred, again, just not more than a couple or 2 or 3 years ago, when a couple of families of illegal immigrants moved into the area, moved into the town from a particular village in Chihuahua, Mexico, and found employment there. They then called their family and relatives in this small town where the unemployment rate was like 80 percent and said, Look, we found a job in Yuma, Colorado, and we can get you on here. There is a big dairy farm, there are several various cattle feeding operations there, several pig farms, and there was work. They could get paid under the table. Everybody was pretty accommodating. They could get paid. It was probably less than would be the going rate otherwise, but after all, they were here illegally, so they were willing to accept a lower wage and more difficult conditions. So, other people came from this village in Chihuahua, Mexico, to Yuma, Colorado. Over time, more came, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100, and now this group of illegal aliens makes up a significant chunk of the town. About one-third of the school district, the population of the school district, are children of illegal aliens living in Yuma, Colorado. Well, what does that mean? For them it may be a better life. It may be better than that small village in Chihuahua. Nobody can argue that. But what does it mean for the people in Yuma? Well, let us see. It means higher costs for infrastructure activities, highways and police activities and schools. There is a bond issue that is being considered for Yuma, Colorado, and they are concerned about whether this bond issue will pass, because they recognize that a lot of people in Yuma think that the reason why the bond issue is being put forward is because they are going to have to pay for the additional costs incurred by the school district because of all of these children of illegal aliens in the schools, over 280 children. I went up there. I drove up to Yuma to see this myself and to talk with the school superintendent, who agreed to meet with me, a very interesting and pleasant fellow who had been around the business for a long time. He was telling me, among other things, that the highest single budget item that they have is English as a second language now, $280,000, which is higher, he said, than what they spend for English language education, history, science, any other program in the school district. This is, again, this little tiny school district. He said, sure there are problems. You go into the cafeteria at any given time, you are going to see the Hispanic kids sitting over here and the Anglo kids sitting over here. Because of the language problems, he said, we have had a significant decline in our test scores. They have plummeted. Naturally, they are going to suffer in that way. The rest of the community and the town are calling up and saying, What is happening here? Our town, our kids and this school district have always done so well, our scores have been so good. How come our district is not doing as well anymore? And a lot of kids are moving to a little school district called Lone Star, Colorado. Fights, they are having all these problems in the school and having problems in the town. And yet, as I talked to him, I said, you know, does anybody not talk about this? Does anybody not bring this to light? He said, No one wants to talk about this problem. He said, Everyone in this town knows it is a problem, but nobody wants to talk about it. He said, You might go over to the coffee shop and sit down, and you can really get to know somebody, and they might begin to discuss it. But generally speaking, they do not want to talk about it. They are fearful of talking about it. But everybody knows it is happening, and it is a huge problem for this little tiny town. Now, here is the other part of the story. It is not unique. This situation in Yuma, Colorado, is not unique. In fact, Yuma is a microcosm of this phenomenon. It is happening in small towns all over the United States of America. But do you know what? Nobody wants to talk about it. You did not hear this. I have certainly not seen any reference to this in the local media. Our two major dailies did big stories, or one at least did a big series of stories supposedly about the problems of illegal immigration or immigration into Colorado. I do not remember any discussion of Yuma, Colorado, or the problems that exist in that small town, or any of the other small towns in Colorado where this is happening. The picture that is portrayed by most of the media of illegal immigration, certainly the media out here and the media in my area, that picture is one of this idealistic sort of situation where you have got a family come in, they are hard-working, the kids are in school, kids are going to school in the United States. They are saying what they want, they simply want to go to college for in-State tuition, and how bad we are, how selfish we are, that maybe a State does not want to provide subsidized education, the taxpayers of a State, higher education for people who are here illegally. How incredible. That is the portrait that is painted by the media of the typical family. Well, that is a true picture of many people who are here illegally, but it is not the only picture. And what about the lives that are affected negatively by that family? What about the costs to the society, financial, and in terms of tearing communities apart; what about those costs? When are they calculated? How are they calculated? I have seldom seen anybody want to publish a study. The many studies that have been done, Professor Huddle, there have been many, many studies that have been done that identify the negative aspects of massive immigration of low-skilled, low-wage people. A professor by the name of Virginia Abernathy comes to mind at Vanderbilt University. Her portrayal of this can be characterized in a way that is illustrative of the problem. She says massive immigration of low-skilled, low-wage people into the United States does create profits for some, it is true, profits for the employers of those people, but it creates costs for the many. It creates costs for schools, for highways, for housing, for social services and for health care; costs that are far higher than any of the tax revenues that are gleaned from the people who are working here. First of all, they are working for very low wages. Many of them are working, like many of the folks out in the Yuma area, they are working and being paid under the table, in cash, no taxes being collected. Even when taxes are collected, when illegal aliens obtain Social Security numbers, file income tax statements, because their wages are so low they usually are able to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit. I will never forget, we came through one of these pick-up sites I was telling you about earlier in the desert in Arizona, and there on the ground there was a tax form. Among all this trash strewn all over the desert floor, there was a tax form, a claim for the Earned Income Tax Credit for a gentleman who had been in this area, dropped it or had thrown away this form, and claimed he had made about $8,000 or $9,000. He had paid, I think it was less than $100 in taxes, because he had several children, and claimed $3,700 in Earned Income Tax Credit. So even when people ``pay taxes,'' people who are here illegally, the fact is they can and do oftentimes get money back. In 1994, right before we passed the 1996 act, in 1994 a Democratic Treasury Secretary, Lloyd Bentsen, was talking about this, and he said he believed there were hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens taking advantage of the Earned Income Tax Credit. I do not know what the numbers are today, but I believe they are still very, very high. These are costs to our society. There is another cost that no one wants to talk about. It is the cost to other low-skilled, low-wage workers in the United States who are here legally, who are citizens of the country, or who are here as legal aliens, have legal alien status. Their wages are significantly depressed by the numbers of people coming in here, into the United States, and taking these other jobs, these low-skilled, low-wage jobs. To employers, this is great. There are employers at Tysons Food, some of the executives at Tysons Food, a huge corporation, of course, a huge food corporation in Arkansas, some of these guys may be going to jail soon. Charges have been brought against them by the Federal Government, RICO charges have been brought against them, because not only did they hire illegal aliens in their food factories, but they imported them. According to the charges that have been brought, they are actually helping the importation of people into the plant, importation of people to come in here illegally. Again, not just aiding and abetting, but in this case actually participating in the act of bringing in illegal immigrants into the United States. So there are many people in this country who are harmed by the presence of so many illegal immigrants in this country. Their plight is hardly ever discussed by the media. We hardly ever see that. We would never have heard of Ms. Cowan had I not brought her to your attention tonight. There are millions of people in this country who have been harmed because of our lax border policies. I am going to host, I and a number of other organizations will be hosting the week of September 11, that week we will be hosting an event here in Washington. It is called the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Open Borders and Illegal Immigration. We are encouraging, Mr. Speaker, everyone who has had a problem, everyone who has been in fact victimized because of our open border policies and by illegal immigrants to come here and tell their story, identify themselves to their congressional representatives, to their House Members and to the Senate Members that represent their State. Tell them what has happened to them; tell them about their loved ones who have been killed, killed by people who came into this country illegally and were later able to escape back into Mexico and therefore, because they refuse to extradite people to the United States who may face the death penalty, they are still in Mexico living life down there. There are literally thousands, actually hundreds of thousands of people who fall into this category. It is not just people who have been harmed physically or have had members of their family harmed physically, of which there are many; and we can go through some of them a little bit later. But it is also, you know, when one has been displaced, when one has been displaced by a foreign worker who comes into this country, takes the job that you had because someone is going to pay them a little less money for it, pay the illegal worker less money, and you are displaced. That is a distinct disadvantage at which you are placed. It is a harm to you and to your family that has been done because of our policies. There can be a legal process in which people can come into this country and work if we truly need workers. I hear this all the time, that the reason why we have people come into this country and do this work illegally is because there are all these jobs American workers will not do. If there are these jobs, and there may very well be, and there are certain industries where I recognize there is a need, then a legal process has to be developed in order to bring people in to get work and so that their rights can be protected, so they can be protected against the abuses of unscrupulous employers, so people coming in here do not have to sell their souls to the coyotes, do not have to be locked into the back of tractor-trailers. They can actually come into the United States in a legal process, but they must return home. That is a guest worker, a person who works here a while, returns to the country of origin, cannot bring family into this country, cannot establish residence, permanent residence, and cannot eventually become a citizen through that process, because that is called immigration; and that is over here. We still have the most liberal immigration policies in the world. If we cut it in half or if we cut it to one-third of what we are presently doing in immigration, legal immigration, we would still have the most liberal immigration policy of almost any country in the world. So they can come into this country one of two ways legally, if we have a guest worker program or through immigration; but they cannot be the same thing. People cannot come in here and expect to become a citizen through this guest worker program. Also, we cannot possibly have a guest worker program, which is being proposed by other Members of this body, we cannot have a guest worker program unless we have secure borders. Because no matter what we say or no matter how we define a guest worker, someone will choose not to come that way and come through the porous borders, so we have accomplished absolutely nothing. So the borders have to be secure before any guest worker program can be initiated, secure borders. Yes, we can have it. Yes, it can happen. It is the only way to have a guest worker program. We can have one if all of these jobs that, as I say, Americans will not take are really out there. That is the other thing, you have to prove that you have tried to give that job to an American citizen and that you cannot find anybody, and you cannot pay somebody less because they are coming in here through a guest worker program. So their rights can be protected and American citizens' rights can be protected, but only if the border is secure. That is the only way a program like that will work. When we suggest this to many of my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, who are in fact pushing these ideas, they do not want to talk about secure borders, or they want to use it as a platitude. They say, yes, we have it. We will increase the number of Border Patrol. Of course, that is not securing the border. We have to militarize the border on both the northern and southern borders, as my friend and colleague who has joined me here tonight has told this body on more than one occasion. We need to be able to use the military to augment the Border Patrol, the Customs Service, Forest Service personnel, until we can actually gain control of our own borders. For that discussion or whatever point he would like to make, I will yield to my friend, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode), and ask him to join us and give us his comments.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the gentleman coming down and discussing that tonight. He brings up an interesting point that is the kind of activity that is going on throughout the country, some of it being sponsored by the Federal Government and other by Federal agencies in order to encourage people to come here illegally, in order to get benefits of every kind, variety and shape. In Colorado I just got a flier from an organization. It is actually a group of people that are sponsoring this group of organizations; and they have gone to a couple of counties in Colorado. One is Jefferson County, which I live in; one is Adams County just north of me. And the flier talks about this and they have the county treasurers to join them in this effort, and what is the effort? It says, building communities one taxpayer at a time. You think, what are they talking about here? And the big title of their conference that they are going to have on July 12 in Colorado is to teach people how to get taxpayer identification numbers. It says, who needs one of these? Anyone who cannot get a Social Security number needs a taxpayer identification number. Now, you have to ask yourself a question, How many people in this country have to have a taxpayer identification number as opposed to a Social Security number? Because when you call the IRS, they tell you it is one in the same. If you have a Social Security number, that is the same as your tax ID number. If you do not have a Social Security number, you fill out this form and you get one. Who would do that? People who are here legally like the gentleman referenced so he could pay his taxes. How about people who are here illegally? We do not know. We are not going to try to stop them. If somebody comes in and applies, they are going to get it. What do they need it for? What does somebody who is here illegally need a taxpayer identification number for? I will tell you one thing they need it for is that every time we start talking about amnesty for everybody who is living here legally, one of the things that comes up is someone is going to prove that they have been here and working for some time and they will turn to this taxpayer identification number so they can prove that and they get amnesty. It comes through this particular body. It is to do just exactly what the gentleman has suggested. It is to obtain benefits from the Federal Government in terms of tax credits for your children, tax exemptions, tax deductions and all of it, so if you are working here, even if you are working here illegally, people do get fake Social Security numbers, it happens, strange as that may seem, I know it is hard to believe, but it occurs. And this identity fraud is becoming even another huge problem. But here we are teaching people the classes, my friend from Virginia uses the word ``schooling'' for them, and that is exactly what they are doing. They advertise. This is not clandestine. It is not like, oh, my goodness, do not tell anybody. Come over here on the 12th of July; we will explain how to actually scam the system. They make a big picture, a big brochure about it and send it out. They send it to the county treasurers. They say, look, this is one of things they said to the county treasurer, if we get all these people in to claim these deductions and claim these tax credits, do you know how much that means to come to the county? Dollars coming to the county, people who are living here illegally but they will be able to get these tax deductions for their kids so that means money to the county. That is how they get the county commissioner and county treasurer sucked into it. It is as if this money is coming from Venus. It is a scam. It is another example of the attempts that are so much a part of everything I see around here, and that is to eventually come to the position where there is absolutely nothing that distinguishes you as being here illegally from someone who is here legally. Everything that that person who is here legally can do, all of the benefits they can achieve as a result of citizenship in this country, legal status in this country, every single benefit would be accorded and afforded to you, someone who is here illegally. Therefore, the distinction is gone. And the whole concept of citizenship is gone. It is an attack on citizenship. It is an attack on the concept of citizenship. It is an attack on the sovereignty of the country. It will be the place where a lot of people reside. There are cities not too far from where we stand tonight that allow people to vote just based on their residence. All you have to do is bring in a copy of your utility bill. You can vote. They do not ask you whether or not you are here legally. They call themselves refugee cities. They are in Maryland. They are all over the place along the east coast here. The Mayor of this city, Washington, D.C., proposed that not too long ago to the city of Washington, I mean the District of Columbia, that it, in fact, should allow people to vote simply because they are residents, nothing else. Residents of the country. Not citizens. The concept is under attack. Whether these cities and counties that are accepting the matricula understand this or not, I do not know. Whether all of these city officials and county officials who are aiding and abetting illegal immigrants in this country, aiding and abetting people in the violation of our laws, whether they recognize it, and people do not think it is more than a little transgression, that it is like jay walking, no, this has major implications. It is meaningful stuff. It is a transition our country is going through here that I do not know if everybody understands that we are simply moving and we are directly moving to a system that will not have, as I say, a way of distinguishing a citizen from a noncitizen. It is just a place where they are residents. Borders will be erased de facto. Borders will be erased. Maybe that is okay. Maybe that is exactly where everybody in this place wants us to go. I would like to put it to a vote. I would like to see somebody actually have to vote on whether or not we have to erase the borders because that is where we are heading. We are doing it a little bit at a time. It is the old frog in the hot water syndrome where the heat is turned up one notch at a time and you look back and say, what happened here? What happened? Is there a time when citizenship meant something? We are going to debate, and I think the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) is on the committee that is debating the bill to give citizenship status to the families of people who have fought in the service, were in the armed services for a year; and we will now give status to them if they were here legally. I think it is coming to the floor soon, tomorrow or the next day. And the bill is lengthy, about exactly what you have to do in order to get this thing called citizenship and what you have to go through. We pretend like we prize it. If you get a dishonorable discharge, you cannot have it. We pretend like it is this wonderful thing. Well, it is a wonderful thing. I think it is a wonderful thing. I think citizenship in this country is a marvelous thing. But it is a strange phenomenon that on one hand here we are coming with a bill that pretends that citizenship is meaningful and that everything else we are doing here aids in the destruction of the concept of citizenship and the fact that the Federal Government, through its Department of the Treasury, promulgates regulations that allows banks to accept the foreign government ID card from a person who wants to open an account. This is an example. It is one step in this process and it is a pretty good step. Actually, it is not a little thing, the unbanked, the millions and millions of people who are here illegally, that the banks want to get a hold of their money. That is a big step in this direction that I am pointing to, a step to a place where there is no such thing as citizenship and whether or not we can have the debate whether or not someone is here legally or not, it does not matter if you are here legally or not. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) for joining me this evening and for letting me bring this to the attention of the body.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to discuss a topic not unfamiliar to those who know that I have a passion for and an interest in the issue of immigration and immigration reform. Tonight, I wanted to specifically refer to a proposal that has made its way forward and that has a number of interesting aspects. As you know, Mr. Speaker, over the last couple of years anyway, there have been attempts on the floor of the House here where many people have tried to advance the cause and idea of amnesty for people who are living here in the United States illegally. It is something we have done before, something we did in the mid-1980s, and it has proven to be disastrous from a variety of standpoints. You may recall that as a result of amnesty for millions of people living here illegally, millions more people came illegally. Of course, this is only logical. It is not surprising whatsoever that if you tell someone that they can enter the United States without going through the legal process, without going through the expense and waiting in line, and that if they do that they will be rewarded for that activity; that we will provide you with all of the benefits of those people who did wait in line, well, then, of course, people will not wait in line. It is pretty logical. Nobody really, I think, is too surprised by the fact that when I do travel to the border and I talk to the border patrol, they always say, I hope you guys up there will stop using the word ``amnesty.'' Because every time you even utter the word, the flood I am trying to stop down here, with the sieve that you have given me, turns into a tidal wave. And, of course, it would always do so. Now, we have been successful, those of us who have been opposed to the continuation, or an expansion, of this concept of amnesty, expansion of what is bureaucratically and legalistically referred to as 245(i), those opposed to 245(i) expansion have been successful in stopping it from actually occurring. It came through the House here, and it did pass the House by one vote but failed in the Senate. Actually, it failed because Senator Byrd put a hold on the bill and it did not come up. There is little sentiment in the Congress of the United States for this concept. The President has pushed it, but there is little sentiment for it here. And, frankly, I doubt that there is going to be a major effort to push it again through this Congress. There may be, but I think that we would be able to stop it. So what has happened as a result of the fact that those people who want open borders, those people who want to reward people for having come into the United States illegally? I mean, what do they do next, I guess is the question. Well, what they do next is to try to attain the same goal only in a different venue. Instead of coming through the Congress with a bill to create an amnesty for people who are living here illegally and rewarding people for violating our law, a new strategy has been hit upon. Now, this strategy is a strategy that has been employed by other governments, but in this case specifically, the government of Mexico, and maybe I should say other coconspirators in the United States, people who are in league with them, who believe that we should abandon our borders and provide no barrier whatsoever to the movement of people, ideas, goods and services. But the Mexican Government has decided to use something to achieve the same goal that they could not achieve by coming through the Congress, and that is the use of a card, an ID. It is referred to as the matricula consular. The matricula consular is an identification card that is given to nationals of any country by their own government. It is not unique to Mexico, and Mexico has actually been using them for a long, long, long time. What has changed in the last year and a half or so is that Mexico has decided to go big time into this particular kind of endeavor, that is to say, to distribute as many of these Mexican identification cards as possible to Mexican nationals living in the United States. Now, again, my colleagues might say, well, so what? What has that got to do with amnesty? Well, here is the deal. Everyone realizes, everyone realizes, that there is only one purpose for this card. There is really only one reason why someone would need this card in the United States, and that is if you are here illegally. It is a passport for illegal aliens. We know there are between 13 and 20 million people living in this country illegally, the vast majority being Mexican nationals. So the Mexican Government has already distributed, by their own count, about 1.4 million of these ID cards in the United States. Now, as I say, they have the right to do that. No one is suggesting that Mexico cannot give an ID card to their nationals living anywhere. But what is peculiar about this whole thing is that they then went to their consular offices throughout the United States and they said, your job, if you are a Mexican consular official, is to go out into the States for which you have some responsibility and begin to lobby those States and begin to lobby the cities, the counties, the police departments to get those entities to accept this card from anyone who presents it for a valid form of identification. And this has been enormously successful. They have been successful in getting police departments all over the country to say yes to this idea, to accept the matricula card. They have been successful in getting States to go along with it. California is in the process of actually passing legislation to force their cities and counties to accept this ID, an ID that is given by a foreign government to a foreign national living here illegally. It immediately sets up a lot of questions, of course. The first one that would come to mind is how many immigration systems are we running in the United States? There is one that supposedly we have some responsibility for here and we say who can come and who can go. Now, we know that people ignore it quite routinely; but, nonetheless, we have a whole system of immigration law that we are supposed to be enforcing. Then there is another system of immigration law that is developing out there, in this case the States are employing it, and counties and police departments. They are doing it on their own. These States and local agencies are saying, well, we do not care if you are here illegally, we are going to give you our passport. We are going to accept this card from you and say that that is your passport for anything you want to obtain in the United States, for anything that a legal resident may be able to obtain: a driver's license, certain other benefits. And, in fact, beyond that, they are asking for cities and counties to extend social service benefits to people who carry this card, and police departments are to adhere to this card. Now, let me just tell you what that sets up. We arrested someone in Colorado not too long ago that had seven matricula consular cards with their face on it, but with seven different names. There is absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing, that we can rely on to suggest that these cards are in fact valid forms of ID. For $28 and a photocopy of your Mexican birth certificate, which of course can be created quite easily on a computer, you can go to the Mexican consulate, and it does not matter what you say your name is, it does not matter what you look like, it could be a person that looks completely anglo, it just does not matter, and you go in and say who you are, you present this birth certificate, and for $28 you will get yourself a new identity. So it is not just people who are living in the United States illegally who are benefited by this; but it is also, of course, people who are felons. They may be legal United States residents, but they have a desire to change their identity. This is a great way to do it, and people are doing it in great numbers. Now, this has started another set of discussions going, and specifically there are parts of the Federal Government that are interested in trying to address this issue, namely Homeland Defense. Because not too long ago, in California, a Federal office building in San Francisco began to accept the matricula consular as a valid form of ID for someone wanting to gain entrance to the Federal building. This was done as a result of the insistence of the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), and there were a number of repercussions to this, I should say. In fact, there was such an outcry and enough people concerned that a Federal building in the United States was allowing entrance into that building by someone who presented an identification card that our government did not give them, a foreign government did. So GSA, which is the government landlord, decided to put this whole thing on hold while they did a study of the whole concept of using the matricula for ID purposes, and a working group started. It was really housed originally in the Department of Homeland Security, and they were charged with the development of a draft proposal. They completed that not too long ago. I happen to have been able to see a copy of that proposal. It was interesting in that it talked about the very dangerous repercussions to allowing Federal government agencies to accept the matricula consular as a form of identification because, of course, you cannot just regulate this to one country. You cannot just say you will only accept the matricula consular from Mexico. Right now, there are five other countries that are using this form of identification for their illegals living in the United States, one of them Poland. This is something many countries are looking at. If a country is not looking at it, a lot of terrorists are looking at it, a lot of people who are figuring out a way to become part of the American mainstream, to get into American society. They are looking for a passport into American society, something that allows them to open bank accounts, get a driver's license, your library card, and anything else that a regular citizen of this country would be able to do. So terrorists have a strong incentive to see how this thing unfolds. So at certain points in time we could certainly see governments of a lot of foreign countries providing these matricula consular to their nationals who in turn would use them in the United States because the law says the government accepts them, and the law in your particular city or State says you can do so. Banks became very involved with this whole thing and started encouraging people to open accounts in their bank. Wells Fargo Bank and Citibank, Bank America, all of these banks saw a huge potential there, a niche market. They call them the unbanked. What they mean is the illegal alien living in the United States and looking to open an account. I do not blame the banks for seeing this as a true profit center. They are completely able to do that. But what is interesting is not too long ago we passed something called the PATRIOT Act here, and we made it difficult, supposedly, for people to do things and supposedly difficult for banks to do things that would allow people to use bogus accounts to transfer money because we recognize that is something that terrorist organizations do. So the banks, even without any sort of legal imprimatur, if you will, to allow them to do this, went ahead and started accepting the matricula consular to open accounts. Well, the Treasury Department last week promulgated rules in response to the PATRIOT Act. Now this is the great irony here. The PATRIOT Act demanded that the banks do something to make it more secure, to make the whole process more secure when people open an account so we really know who these people are and we can track the money flow if we have to. That is the part of the PATRIOT Act that banks were responding to. So what did they do? The Treasury Department, recognizing that this was happening in the banking industry and that banks were making millions of dollars off of the ``unbanked'' community, the Treasury of the United States, in response to the PATRIOT Act, promulgated rules saying, in fact, that banks could accept the matricula consular. This is amazing, and it is I think something that we should all be concerned about. I think that certainly we are going to try to bring this to the attention of the House in a short time by filing a request for a resolution, a joint resolution to stop the implementation of these regulations. Remember, Mr. Speaker, what we are talking about here is something that is being used to avoid the law. We passed a law in this Congress saying that the only way that you can come into this country is through a certain process and that if you do not do that you are in violation of the law. But how hypocritical is it to then say, however, if you get here, we are going to ignore the fact that you chose this particular route and we are going to give you access to every single amenity that this country has to offer, including the right to vote which is being pressed. There are cities not too far from where we are tonight in Maryland and in Connecticut, along the East Coast especially, that call themselves sanctuary cities, and they allow people to vote in elections even if these people are not citizens of the United States. Even if they are not even legal aliens, they allow them to vote if they can show residency. If they can show them a utility bill, they can vote. What the end result of all of this is, if we give people the ability to obtain all of the benefits of citizenship without ever being a citizen, then of course the whole concept of citizenship is meaningless. That is the end result of things like this matricula consular activity or movement. We have to deal with it. We may not think that is important, and it becomes esoteric for some. You say matricula consular, and they do not care. It is a strange concept. We are just going to let somebody else deal with. Luckily, some States are dealing with it: Colorado, Iowa, Tennessee, and Arizona have all introduced laws to abolish or to stop their State and/or any entity in their State from accepting the matricula consular. That is, of course, what I believe this government should do. I hope that we will follow carefully this issue, and I hope that we will support either my bill or the bill of the gentleman from California (Mr. Gallegly). Either one of these two bills are designed to put a stop to this movement, at least at the Federal level, and I hope we can do that. We endanger homeland security by allowing these cards to be accepted. We establish a precedent that says, even if you violate our laws, we will not do anything to you. You can come here and have all of the benefits. What a slap in the face that is to every other citizen who has done it the right way, everyone who has waited in line, paid the price both emotionally and monetarily, to get to the United States. What a slap in the face it is to them to say it does not matter. All you have to do is jump the line, come in and you will be rewarded the exact same way that someone who did it the right way is rewarded. So this is an attack on our sovereignty. This is an attack on citizenship itself, and it certainly sets up a very dangerous situation in these very trying days. We went recently to Code Orange, and that means that we are even more fearful of an attack by a terrorist organization. We are taking more steps to try to prevent it. What is fascinating to me is everything we do is designed to stop someone from committing an act, committing a terrorist act once they get here, but very little is designed to stop them from getting here to begin with. Hence, our open border policy invites terrorists into the country, and then we scurry around trying to stop them. We say we are not going to defend our own borders. We suggest that in doing something like making a secure border that there would be repercussions, that there would be political and cultural repercussions to it. Other countries, Mexico in particular, would not like it if we put military on our border to defend against people coming in here illegally, so we do not do it. What a bizarre concept that we will let other countries and vocal minorities inside our own country stop us from defending our own people. The one responsibility we have in this Nation, the one responsibility we have in this House is to protect the people and the property of the United States of America, and we shirk that responsibility because we are afraid of those political ramifications. Well, there will be other ramifications to open borders: successful terrorist attacks. Those are ramifications of open borders. People will die in this country as a result of that kind of behavior on our part. Our almost guilt-driven sort of compulsion to move this concept called multi-culturalism to where it permeates every aspect of our culture and society, we must make sure that we do nothing, say nothing that would make anyone else upset with us, any other country or culture. We have to be so careful about that that we disregard our own security measures. That is what we are really trying to deal with here, is what it means to be an American and what it means to defend the concept of being an American. There are so many aspects of this particular problem and issue. There are political and economic and social ramifications of open border policies, and I touched a little bit on what I consider to be the national security implications of open borders, but there are many others. One that I wanted to talk about a little tonight is the economic impact of massive immigration of low-skilled, low-wage people, both legal and illegal immigration. For many years, the old adage dealt with the fact that massive immigration translated into economic opportunity and economic power and growth. It turns out, study after study is now showing us, like so many other things that we believed to be true at one time or another, that is a myth. Massive immigration of low-skilled, low-wage people does not in fact create wealth, except for a few. Specifically, those people who actually hire low-skilled, low-wage people and pay them low wages, it does provide for them a certain degree of profit. But for the rest of us, for the taxpayers of the country, massive immigration of low-wage, low-skilled workers creates a cost, a cost for housing, a cost for roads, hospitals, infrastructure costs which come about as a result of population growth. There is absolutely no way that the number of people coming here and taking those jobs, a lot of which of course are paid for sort of under the table in cash and we do not see any sort of cash revenues, but even those who come here and file fake Social Security numbers or get a tax identification number from the Internal Revenue Service and pay some taxes end up being a significant cost to the United States. First of all, they pay little or no income taxes. Secondly, they consume a great deal in terms of infrastructure costs. Now there is another aspect. You have to admit, it is kind of a clever strategy. There is a provision of our law called Earned Income Tax Credit that says if you do not make enough money during the course of a year, we will in turn give you extra dollars back to sort of make up for that low-wage kind of poverty cycle in which you may be stuck. This has already been identified by GAO and other studies as being one of the most fraud-ridden government programs. Billions of dollars every year are sent out to people who falsify documents in order to obtain their Earned Income Tax Credit. It is not just American citizens who have figured this out and figured out a way to scam the taxpayers of the United States. It has become a big business for people who are here illegally. Not too long ago, I had the opportunity to be observing the situation on the border in Arizona. We went through an area where there were a number of these things called pickup sites. Pickup sites are places in which illegal immigrants gather for the purpose of being picked up like these folks, the unfortunate folks in Victoria, Texas. They were picked up at a certain location by a big truck, in this case a semi, and driven into the interior of the United States. These pickup sites, these places where all these folks gather, are all around the American Southwest. They become trash heaps after a while because, after a while, literally thousands of people will actually gather there. They throw everything around. They throw their trash and their water bottles and everything else out there. We were walking through one of these pickup sites not too far from Douglas, Arizona. I looked down, and I saw this, actually this copy of an IRS tax return document enclosed, it says. I picked it up, because this was an odd thing to be there in the trash pile in a place where only illegal aliens gather. This particular form is an Earned Income Tax Credit form that was filed by Mr. and Mrs. Delgado, Mr. Delgado who is here apparently illegally. As I say, this is a place, a site for people who are here illegally. Mr. Delgado claimed that he paid $64.12 in total Federal income tax, and he claimed $3,581 in Earned Income Tax Credit. We know this is happening. We also know, as a matter of fact, that the IRS is so interested in making sure that even if you are here illegally that you benefit by your status that if you have used a fake Social Security number to get the job you have because you are here illegally and file an income tax form with a request for an Earned Income Tax Credit, the IRS will actually send you back a letter that says, your Social Security number is inaccurate. So, therefore, we have assigned you a tax identification number, and here is your check. Here is your Earned Income Tax Credit. It is a great scam. As I say, millions of American citizens take advantage of the lax enforcement procedures attendant to Earned Income Tax Credit, and so do illegal aliens by the thousands, maybe by the hundreds of thousands. We are really not sure, but it is certainly something that we know happens and happens a lot. So when we talk about the costs of illegal immigration into the United States, we have to really and truly consider the fact that these costs are more than just the jobs that are taken. Let us talk about the jobs issue for just a moment. We passed a bill in the House. It has gone to the Senate. It is going to come back to us in the form of a conference report, perhaps. There is a great deal of attention being paid to this particular piece of legislation. It started out and it was referred to as a tax cut bill. I still think of it as that, but we now talk about it as a jobs creation package, because the purpose of it is to stimulate the economy, to provide more dollars for employers to hire more people, to invest in their own plant and equipment. And I believe it will. I certainly supported the legislation. It is interesting to me to note that various economists come in and tell us how many jobs will be created by the different levels of tax cuts that we propose. It is several hundred thousand for this one, 100 and some thousand jobs for this one. I always think to myself, there are between 13 and 20 million jobs we could create instantaneously for American citizens, and that is, of course, we could deport people who are living here illegally, which is exactly what we should do. That is what should happen to someone who is here illegally. They should be deported. Anyone who hires someone who is here illegally should be fined. There is a law that says you cannot hire people who are here illegally. We all know that it goes on constantly, and we all know for the most part everybody sort of turns a blind eye to it. It is fascinating that we spend an enormous amount of time, energy and resources in the discussion of exactly how many jobs we need to create by tax cuts, and again I am all for it, but we ignore the fact that there are millions of Americans who are looking for work and they are looking for work in places where the jobs have been taken by people who are here illegally. I hear all the time about people who are here taking jobs that only they would take, that no other American would take, that no citizen would take. Maybe those jobs really exist. Maybe all of the American citizens out of work from whom I hear, by the way, are people who really would not go do the hard labor that is done by illegal immigrants. I suggest that it is not true. I suggest, and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to lead me to the conclusion that, in fact, Americans are ready, willing and quite able to take the jobs that are being held, low-skilled, low-wage worker jobs that are being held by illegals. As evidence of that, I can remember an article that appeared in the Rocky Mountain News, oh, several months ago now. It was about a restaurant in Denver called the Luna Restaurant. It is a Mexican restaurant. I have had occasion to visit and had a great meal there a couple of times. The article in the paper, interestingly, was about an ad that had been placed by the restaurant in the paper, an ad for a waiter, a $3-an-hour waiter, the type of job that we are always told no American would do. The reason that that ad turned into a story in the paper is because the Luna Restaurant received 600 applicants in one day for that job. Maybe, it is possible, of course, that all 600 people who applied were illegal aliens and that every American citizen who looked at that ad said, no, that is below me. I'm not going to apply for that job. It is really not within the realm of possibility. I really do not think it happened, Mr. Speaker. I really believe that a lot of the people who applied for that job were American citizens, lived here all their lives or came here legally and I think should have had the first shot at that job, frankly. But let us say that there is that need out there for low-skilled, low-wage workers and that need cannot be supplied by American citizens, that we have all become too spoiled. Let us go to the next level of unemployment that we face in this country. It is called the high-tech industry. We all know, especially Members from California recognize fully well the enormous change that has occurred in that industry, the shake-out in the industry, if you will, the number of firms that have gone under and the many, many thousands and thousands, in fact, millions of people who have been thrown out of work in that industry. Several live in my neighborhood. Thousands live in my district. We run a program in this country, an immigration program referred to as H1B. H1B immigrants are different in many respects than other people we let into the country legally in that we say that these folks have skills that are so unique that we will give a certain amount, in this case 150,000 a year, of these particular H1B visas because these are given to people with certain skills, high-tech skills that we again, quote, can't find Americans that would qualify. We have had this program operating for, oh, 5 or 6 years, I think, longer than that; and every year we have been bringing in 100-, 150,000 of these folks. They do not go home. They are supposed to go home when their job ends or after a certain period of time, but they do not go home. The INS tells us that they have absolutely no idea how many are still here but probably close to 90 percent of everybody who ever came. So we have well over 1 million people in the United States today who have come here with an H1B visa. That is a visa that allows them to displace an American worker. Because even though the law is supposed to prevent someone from coming in here and replacing an American worker and paying this newcomer less money than the American would be paid, it happens all the time. Everybody knows it. Everybody knows that the employer will look for that individual, and these people have skills. They are competent for the most part. I am not saying they are not. So the employer gets somebody that they can get to work for less, and the American worker gets the unemployment line. What is happening to the H1B visa? Are we going to abolish it? Not on your life. I certainly have a bill that would significantly reduce the numbers. I have no great hope that that bill will be heard or ever come to the floor. Why not, I guess I would ask? I do ask that question. Why not? What is there about our economy today, how many people are out there looking for a job who have all the skills necessary to be placed in that high-tech industry but, of course, their job has been taken by someone who is not an American citizen with an H1B visa? They are, some of them, here legally. Many of them have, of course, overstayed their visa and are now here illegally but they are still employed and still taking jobs away from American workers. Yet no one discusses that issue when we talk about jobs creation. I just wonder why. I really know why. I just rhetorically wonder why we do not talk about it. There is an economic price to pay for massive immigration into the country. I hope in the near future that we will get the courage in this body to actually engage in a debate, a full-blown debate on this concept of open borders. I would love to have a bill before us that says you have two choices, America. You either abolish the borders, take down the ports of entry, take back the Border Patrol and abandon it, let people do what libertarians in both this House and even in the administration want, and that is to have the free flow of goods and services and people without being impeded by borders. That is one picture that people have. It is bizarre to me, but it is a picture that people have about what the world should look like in this century, a world without borders. I would very much like to have a debate as to whether or not that is the world we wish to live in, that is the future of this country, or a country that secures its borders by every means possible. Those are the two choices we really have. Because anything in between that leads us to where we are today. It leads us to a situation where you call something illegal, people can actually be arrested for violating the law, they seldom are, but they could be, but we all know that we do not really enforce the law that much, so we entice a lot of people to come into the United States illegally. It is partially our fault. It is this government's fault that things like the incident in Victoria, Texas, occurred. Nineteen people die in the back of a trailer, one small child. Of course, hundreds of people are dead in the deserts of America, in the Southwest. Hundreds of people die every year coming into this country. They do not do so quite as dramatically. We do not find them all in one place. We find bodies scattered throughout the Southwest and deserts, but this is what happens. Also, on our side, people, of course, die in the defense of those borders. Park rangers die. Border patrolmen die. This is a dangerous place to be. And yet we entice this movement of people by making it very or relatively easy to come into the country, yet still illegal. So people pay coyotes, people who bring them into the country; and they will pay them $1,000 or $1,500 to coming into the United States, and the coyotes will then oftentimes take advantage of the people. They are oftentimes robbed of their life's savings, the people coming across. The women are raped. They are thrown into the desert and they die. It is a horrible situation on the border, and today we passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 that allowed the President of the United States, in fact, encouraged the President of the United States to place troops on the border. We passed that bill here before and it has always failed over on the Senate side. We will see what happens this year. But I suggest that that is exactly what we have to have in order to prevent the kinds of things that we see on the border, both to protect our own people, border patrol, the Forest Service personnel, park rangers, to protect them and also to protect and stop people from coming into this country illegally and, in fact, protecting them from some very bad things that could happen to them. So it is a lax border policy that encourages people to come and events like Victoria, Texas, to occur. The other thing is that the Nation itself has to make a decision as to exactly what it wants to do, what kind of a policy it wants to have, whether or not we truly, as I say, want borders or we do not. Because if we make the decision that we want borders, then there are a whole bunch of other decisions that follow after that. How are we going to defend them? Are we going to make them secure? What are we going to do to people who violate our borders by coming in illegally? These are all very difficult questions, but they are questions this Nation has to begin to deal with because there are major implications to massive immigration combined with this cult of multiculturalism that permeates our society. It is a very dangerous combination. Massive immigration and the cult of multiculturalism. The country needs to make that kind of decision. It has to engage in that kind of debate. It would be great, I think, if a Presidential candidate would enter into that debate, would bring it to the focus and the attention of the Nation and make people, all people running for office at every level, talk about how they feel about this issue, whether or not secure borders mean anything, whether or not massive immigration is an acceptable activity today, and whether or not we are going to have porous borders especially in light of the terrorist threat that exists in this country. Let them explain to their constituency why open borders is a good idea. Let them explain why massive immigration even just in terms of the numbers anymore is justified. Let us talk about what is the need of this country. Is it for millions of low-skilled, low-wage workers every year? Is that what we need? If it is, okay, that is the kind of immigration policy we establish. We say, here is how many people can come into the country. Here are the skills that we need, that our country needs to make us a better country, to make the people living here have a better quality of life. That is what a rational immigration policy is. Or, as I say, abandon the border. Forget the whole charade that we call immigration and immigration law because when we operate the kind of system that we are operating now, all we do is put people in harm's way. All we do is put our border patrol people and the people trying to come across that border illegally into very dangerous situations; but in fact we do not accomplish any of the goals that should be established for immigration. So if we do not believe in it, if we think that this is not a legitimate goal for the United States, if it is not a legitimate function of the government to say who comes and who goes, then just abandon the border. Defend that to the population. Go out to their constituents and explain to them this is their concept of America, an America where borders are no longer relevant, they are anachronisms and new maps should be drawn up that erase the borders. Go ahead and explain that because that is exactly where we are headed. We are heading there in a de facto way, not in a legal sense; but that is exactly where we are heading. And as I say, Mr. Speaker, I believe there are major implications to that, and they deserve to be debated. And maybe I am 180 degrees off center here. Maybe I am completely wrong about my concerns with regard to open borders. But at least does it not deserve an honest debate in a very public forum and at the highest levels? Is it not an appropriate thing for Presidential candidates to discuss? I would love to see, really, a very thorough discussion among the candidates running for both the Democratic primary and I wish the President of the United States would discuss it to a greater extent than he does. I would like to know exactly where all of these candidates stand, and so would people of this country, so would Americans like to know where their representatives stand on this issue. Today it is not all that clear because we can sort of take a powder on this by saying we have got this immigration policy and we will let them do their job but knowing full well that it is a total abject failure and that it is the worst of all possible worlds. It is a place into which we have put people who are, as I say, in great danger, and yet they actually are defending something we do not believe to be of great value, and, that is, the border. I went down to Ajo, Arizona, not too long ago to attend a funeral, a funeral for a gentleman by the name of Kris Eggle. Kris Eggle was 28 years old. He was a park ranger. He was killed not too far from Ajo. He was killed by two illegal aliens who had come into the United States as part of a drug deal that went bad in Mexico. They had killed four people there. They came across the border. They confronted Mr. Eggle and killed him. And I went there with Mr. Eggle's father, and we stood at the very spot where Kris was killed, and this had been the fourth time that the father had visited that particular location. And that was hard even for me, and I cannot imagine how difficult it was for Mr. Eggle. But he does it, he said, and he will continue to go there to draw attention to the plight of the border, to draw attention to the fact that we have people like his son down there in great jeopardy but truly without the intent of having them defend our borders or else we would do what is necessary to protect them and the border. But we are fearful of it because there are political obstacles, political and cultural as Governor Ridge told us. When we asked him why we did not put troops on the border, he said there are political and cultural problems there. That is true. There are no two ways about it. It is an honest statement, an honest reflection. But I would suggest that it is not a good enough reason for not defending our own borders. There are other very significant implications to massive immigration combined with the cult of multiculturalism, and I can save them for another evening. But I do want to encourage all of us, Mr. Speaker, to become acquainted with this matricula consular, this card that is being handed out. I want us to become acquainted with it because it is something that could be used to achieve the goal that we were able to block here sometime ago, and that is creating amnesty for everybody in this country illegally. It could be used eventually essentially to destroy the whole concept of citizenship. That is what it is designed to do, and it will do if we allow it to. So although I know the issue is somewhat esoteric and people become a little glazed over when we talk about things like matricula consular, it is nonetheless important, important for us to understand, important for our constituents to understand. So, therefore, I will continue to raise that issue as long as it is necessary.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. Every nation on the face of the Earth uses their military for the purpose of defense and uses their military on their borders for that very purpose. We are unique in that we have chosen over the years to avoid that use of the military, but the time has come for us to rethink this. The time has come for us to use our military in a way that every other country uses their military, to protect and defend their own borders. It is true, I have heard so often from Members of the other side, that we have our military spread all over the world. Undeniably true. And intriguingly and almost ironically in many of the places where we have our military stationed, they are stationed for the purposes of defending borders. We are defending borders in Korea. We are defending borders in Kosovo. We are defending borders in Afghanistan with our troops. Yet we refuse to use our troops to defend our borders. Is that not peculiar, to say the least? Is it not ironic at least? The issue of the training, let me relate a story that happened to me. I had the opportunity to visit the northern border about a year and a half ago, not too far from Bonner's Ferry, Idaho. There was an exercise at the time underway. One hundred Marines were on the border working in conjunction with the border patrol and the Forest Service. This was a 2-week exercise, just to see what we could do, what actually we could do to help improve border security by using the military. It was a fascinating experiment, and I hope the gentlemen who have raised the issue of training so often would pay close attention here because it was an experience that I think they should all observe. One hundred Marines on the border trying to control in this case about 100 miles of border. And they brought with them three UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, and two radar facilities. And in the use of these radar facilities and the UAVs, they were able to actually stop, while I was there, four people who were attempting to come across on all-terrain vehicles carrying 400 pounds of drugs; and a light plane was intercepted using those two radar stations. The interesting thing is that when I was talking to the commander of the Marine detachment who was there subsequent to this experience, he said, This was the best training we have ever had. This was the best training we have ever had. He said we were operating in a realtime environment. There were real bad guys we were trying to stop coming across this border, and this is the roughest terrain we have ever operated in. So when we are talking about the use of the military, when we are talking about training exercises and how if we were actually to employ the military on the border that this would somehow or other detract from their own training activities, I would say it is just the opposite. Talk to the Marines. Ask them about whether or not this was not what I have just described, the ``best training activity'' they have ever had. I completely support those folks who have indicated a desire to put more resources into the border patrol. Absolutely, no problem at all as far as I am concerned. I would vote for it in a heartbeat. I would encourage all of my colleagues to do exactly the same thing. The reality is this, that even if tomorrow we doubled or tripled the amount of people and resources that we would devote to the border patrol, just the process of getting them trained online and ready to work would be so long and so cumbersome that frankly it seems to me that this alternative, the use of the military when necessary to augment, no one is suggesting and certainly my friend from Virginia is not suggesting that this be the place for the military forever, but they could augment the services of the border patrol. They could provide the technical capabilities, the unmanned vehicles, the radar stations and all the rest, as I say, that the military can bring with them and be benefited by in the process. It seems like a very symbiotic relationship that we can actually use the military and the border patrol in conjunction with each other to accomplish the goal of a safe, secure border, a border that would in fact in reality, a secure border, have helped prevent the kind of horrible events that we have been witnessing recently.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, we have had some discussion on the floor already about a variety of different fuels reduction plans and whose is best. Let me just show you what a fuel reduction plan is from the environmental community. This is a fuel reduction plan from the environmental wackos. They want to leave forests in a state where that is the only outcome when a fire starts. You have a conflagration. It is not just a fire; it is a fire that consumes everything in its path for miles around. Such a fire was in my district in this last year, the 139,000-acre Hayman Fire, just one of several record-breaking fires that touched the West last year in the worst wildfire in Colorado history. The fire destroyed 133 homes and filled reservoirs with soot and sediment. Another example of that: the Colorado Hayman Fire dumped colossal loads of mud and soot into Denver's largest supply of drinking water. The air was filled with toxic gas. The State Department of Public Health and Environment advised people living as far from Denver as Wyoming to stay in their homes, shut their windows, and use fans and air filtration devices until the fire was extinguished. This is a picture of Denver on June 8, the day before the fire. This is a picture of Denver on June 9, the day of the fire. By the way, another good example of the bizarre rules in which we operate is that fire, the smoke from that fire, is not counted against Denver for clean air; but any kind of pollution that is prior to that is counted against our clean air days. But a smoke that completely almost blurs the city, that is not counted by EPA. The Hayman Fire cost more than $39 million to extinguish and millions more in cleanup and restoration costs that continue to grow. The fire incinerated large areas of habitat for threatened or endangered species. One of those species may even disappear as a result of the fire. This is not a partisan problem. In fact, the Democratic leader in the U.S. Senate last year became so fed up with the delays and procedural requirements blocking the implementation of thinning work in South Dakota that he inserted a sweeping rider in the 2002 supplemental appropriations bill suspending all legal and administrative requirements in an effort to get the work done. The fact that such drastic action has to be taken to facilitate the completion is a striking commentary on how broken this process is. Congress should not have to legislate individual thinning projects. Support the rule and support the bill.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, tonight I want to bring to the attention of the body another member of a group that we are referring to as homeland heroes. This is a group that has not had the attention that it deserves. It is a group of people who have suffered mightily as a result of the fact that the Federal Government has chosen to abandon them. And yet they fight on, sometimes facing overwhelming odds, sometimes facing the scorn of many of the people in their own community, some of the members of the press. But, nonetheless, they fight on for their own lives, for their life-style, and for the generations behind them that have paved the way for their existence in the area around Douglas, Arizona, and on our southern border even beyond that. Tonight I want to pay a tribute to a lady I had the opportunity, the great opportunity to meet when I visited the Douglas, Arizona, area a couple of months ago. She came at that time to tell her story, and I found it quite compelling. Her name is Olga Robles. She is a second- generation Mexican American. She lives in Douglas, Arizona. Olga Robles describes herself as an American citizen with Mexican roots. That is where she got into trouble with her Mexican neighbors about a half mile south of her home in Douglas, Arizona. Olga Robles is criticized and attacked because she does not want to be called a Mexican American. She says she is not a hyphenated American. She is 100 percent American. She was born, raised, and educated in Douglas, Arizona. For the first 18 years of her life, she lived two blocks from the Arizona-Mexico border. Her mother still lives in that house, and Olga is a full-time caretaker for her mother, who is now 89 years old. Her own home is eight blocks from the border. She is married to Frank Robles, a retired Phelps Dodge worker, and has two sons. She is a registered nurse and has worked at Douglas Hospital as a health professional and as a health professional for EPA and Vision Quest. From 1979 to 1984, she was an elected local official, a councilwoman in the city of Douglas. She served her community with dignity and great energy. All her life she had been a hardworking citizen, and she is widely known and respected in her community. Why do I call Olga Robles a homeland hero? I do so because she has suffered, and she is suffering today, for standing up for her rights as a citizen and speaking out against the permissive policies that this government employs toward illegal aliens. She has been personally vilified and shunned by the advocates of unrestricted immigration and proponents of open borders. When she speaks openly and candidly about the problems caused by illegal aliens, she is attacked and told to shut up and ``be a good Mexican.'' In December, 1999, she was attacked and vilified by name in the Mexican newspaper El Clarion in the town of Agua Prieta, a town right on the border. She was called a traitor and a racist for opposing illegal immigration. She was called these things for saying that the laws of this land should be upheld, the laws that she has obeyed, the laws her family has obeyed, the laws that she has every single right to expect her neighbors and her countrymen to obey. One illegal alien who was caught on her property told her angrily, ``We have a right to be here. Santa Ana sold it too cheap, and we want it back.'' Now, Olga Robles grew up two blocks from the border and had Mexican parents and grandparents. She said she never had a personal problem with illegal aliens until about 10 years ago, when the situation changed. And, Mr. Speaker, it is amazing to me that time after time, as I have come to this floor and introduced this topic and sort of inducted someone into the Hall of Homeland Heroes, that there is a similarity in their stories. They have all been living through very difficult times. They have all been challenged by what is happening on the border, by the flow of illegal immigration into this country, and they all say it is a relatively recent or relatively new phenomenon. Beginning in the early 1990s, the illegal aliens started coming across the border in larger numbers, she says. About 5 years ago, the flow of illegal aliens through Douglas became really heavy and created a big increase in local crime. The illegal aliens have torn down the fences on her property seven times as they hurry to get through her yard and further away from the border. She would call police and the police would say, we cannot do anything; they are illegals. Call the border patrol. Now, every single resident of Douglas, Arizona, and in every city in this Nation has a right to expect their local police department to come and help them if their rights are being violated, if their land is being despoiled, if their property is being destroyed. But along the border, this has become commonplace, and police departments, for one reason or another, have decided to shirk their own responsibility and duties. And I will tell you there are sheriff departments and police departments along that border that have become corrupted by the phenomenon of illegal immigration and the drug money that is attendant to it. Mr. Speaker, they told a resident of the city to forget about it. They are illegal aliens. It is somebody else's problem. No, it is the problem of any law enforcement official in the United States of America. When she did call the Border Patrol, they would come too late and never capture anyone. Because there has been a lot of attention paid to the problems in Douglas, Arizona, and because there has been a lot of attention paid to the problems with the administration in Douglas, Arizona, with the mayor and other members of the city administration, because people are becoming concerned that their city government may not be in fact as responsive as it should be on these issues and there may be reasons for that, allegations of corruption certainly abound, and because of that, things are beginning to change in Douglas. Police now come quicker and will apprehend illegal aliens if they are breaking the law, and they will turn them over to the Border Patrol. Illegal aliens often showed up in her yard in broad daylight. If she called the Border Patrol, the aliens would threaten her and call her names. There are people who bring people into this country illegally and get paid for that. There is a story about this kind of thing happening in the papers here recently. It is a horrible, horrible story about the death of 19 people, including a small child, as a result of the actions taken by people who were smuggling these folks into the United States illegally. They are called coyotes, who are Mexican tour guides, in quotes, who will help a group of illegal aliens get across the border for a hefty price of between $1,000 and $1,500. These coyotes scout out vacant houses in Douglas and the surrounding area and tell the illegal aliens how to find them. They become safe houses. These vacant homes and homes for sale are fair game for these criminal gangs. The drug cartels on the Mexican side of the border are very well organized and sometimes very ingenious. Drug smugglers equip trucks and vans with corporate logos from local companies like Quest and have also used trucks disguised as City of Douglas vehicles. Not long ago, it was an interesting event down there on the border where they had actually stolen a vehicle, drug smugglers had stolen a vehicle that looked like a vehicle that would be used by the Border Patrol. They took it into Mexico. They carefully and with great precision painted the vehicle so it looked exactly like a Border Patrol vehicle. They put the wire mesh inside and even got U.S. Government license plates put on the vehicle, and they used it to smuggle drugs into the United States. Now, these things are all happening right in sight of Olga and her family and her friends. These things happen every day. She observes them and calls the police. She does what a good citizen of this country should do. She expects her government to help her. It has been very late in responding and very hesitant to do so, and it only responds to her demands, to her concerns, when the pressure gets so great that they cannot look the other way. So one of the things I hope to do by creating this Hall of Homeland Heroes is to keep the pressure on. I want the people in Douglas, Arizona, I want that mayor in Douglas, Arizona, to know that people are watching him; and I want the police force to know that there are folks who are interested in how well they are enforcing the law. I want people to know throughout this land that there is great concern about what is happening to the cities and towns, police departments, even Border Patrol agents, customs officials. I want them to wonder what is happening around that border, because there is a great deal of corruption spilling over from the Mexican side, all brought about as a result of the drug trade and the trade in human beings. You can not only smuggle a Mexican national into the United States for between $1,000 to $1,500, and when we consider how many come across that border every day, tens of thousands a day, it becomes big money. But you can get an even bigger price, demand a lot more money, up to $30,000 to smuggle someone into the United States who is coming from a Middle East country, coming from a country on the Terrorist Watch List. In fact, there is a road not too far from Douglas, Arizona, that the locals refer to as the Arab highway, the Arab road, because so many people from the Middle East come across that road being smuggled in by these coyotes. For $30,000, maybe you get better transportation, you get business class transportation into the United States. It is a very lucrative endeavor. You combine that with the drug trade on the border, and we can see why there is a corrupting influence on the border. We have evidence of high school students along the border driving big brand new cars and SUVs and trucks, and when you try to find out how they could possibly get the money, they have been working for the people or drug smugglers. You can make a lot of money in a very short period of time doing something illegal along that border. As I mentioned before, Olga Robles is a registered nurse. She has personally witnessed the decline in health care services in her community because of the financial impact of the flood of illegal aliens who must by law be treated, but they do not pay the bills. The Southeast Medical Center in Douglas, Arizona, is almost closed now. It offers only emergency room services, and if this particular facility closes we were told when we were down there, and, as I say, the threat of the closure of this facility is very real, and it is coming about because they have had to provide services to illegal aliens coming across the border by the thousands, and they get no reimbursement for it, and if that place closes, there is no facility like it around for a hundred miles in any direction. A citizen who needs to see a specialist must now go to Wilcox or Tucson, whereas specialists used to come to Douglas and see patients at the Southeast Medical Center. There is no longer an OB/GYN service in Douglas. Women must go to Bisby to see their specialist or have a baby. Olga Robles has seen this problem grow and grow over the past decade. She has had personal encounters on her own property and suffered vilification for speaking out against our lax Border Patrol and law enforcement. But Mrs. Robles' primary concern, her main worry is not for her personal safety or her property, she is mostly worried about what is happening to her country, her country. She worries about what is happening to her city's schools where overcrowding is directly traced to the hundreds of children coming in from across the border illegally. They falsify their residency, and no one from the school district checks up on them. She worries about the impact on local hospitals and medical services. She worries about the rising crime rate. She worries about the influence of drug cartels on the American side of the border. The corruption of Mexican police and military is now taken for granted by her and most residents of Cochise County, but it is now seeping into the Arizona side of local government and law enforcement. People in the Douglas area in Cochise County wonder about their own sheriff. His reluctance to become involved with the issues of drug smuggling and people smuggling make people wonder why. Ms. Robles worries about the growth of drug abuse among schoolchildren throughout the county because marijuana and cocaine are so widely available. I think we should honor citizens like Olga, and there are thousands and thousands more like her, but they do not have the courage to speak out. We should all recognize the fact that they exist, their stories deserve to be told just like Olga's, but they do not have the courage to come forward for fear of what their own community might do to them. Olga is a woman of great courage. She is an American with Mexican roots. She welcomes new Mexican immigrants who come here legally and want to become American citizens, as we all do and should welcome anyone who wants to come to this country legally and become American citizens. What we should not welcome is the massive flow of illegal aliens. I salute Olga Robles for her courage and integrity, and I hope that some day the political leaders of this country will follow her example. There are many other stories. I will be bringing more to the floor of the House in the weeks to come of the people whom we are inducting into the Homeland Hall of Heroes. This is one way that we want to try and get the story across to the American people. This is a challenging experience to try and get this story across to the American people. Because what you find, what amazingly you find is, for the most part, the American people are pretty much aware of it. They get it. Poll after poll tells us that large, vast majorities, 70 percent of the American people when polled say there is something wrong, there is something desperately wrong with our immigration policy. We should review it. We should secure our borders. We should make it more difficult for people to come into this country illegally. We should find people who are here illegally and deport them and operate a system like every other nation on the face of the earth where we try to actually control the flow of people into this country so it benefits this country and the people coming in. Most people get it. Most Americans understand it. Why then is it so hard for my colleagues to get it? Why is it so hard for the administration to get the point? People want their borders secure. How much more clearly can we present this issue? How much more of an outcry can there be from American citizens like Mrs. Robles? How many more people have to die coming into this country illegally, as the 19 people who died in the back of that truck, in the back of that semi, including one small child, while they were tearing away the panels on the truck exterior to try to get air? Imagine the horror inside of that truck. Imagine the screaming. Imagine the prayers. And now imagine some of the causes for that kind of thing to happen. Certainly, if you are looking around for blame, you say, well, they came here illegally. They took a risk. That is true. And some of the blame rests with them, with the 80 or more people who paid the coyote to help them break the laws of this country to come in here and get a job, seek a better life as most people coming into the country do. So some of the blame rests with them, that is true; but there is a lot of blame to go around. I hope that the lesson, if any lesson is learned by an event of this nature, by a tragedy of this dimension, and my heart breaks for the people who died in that and for the family members who now grieve, but I must tell you that there are many people in this country that share the blame and there are many people in the other country on the other side of the border that share the blame. Let us start with employers over here in this country who knowingly hire people illegally, who are here illegally and, therefore, are hiring illegally. It is against the law to hire someone who is here illegally. Yet we all know, there is not a person here who does not know that this happens quite consistently. Everywhere we look it is a wink and a nod, well, maybe they are, maybe they are not but I am not going to pay any attention because I need this service or that service. We have companies, Tyson Foods, major, huge U.S. corporations that become involved, at least are accused, I should say, RICO statutes have been used to try and convict some of the executives at Tyson Foods because they say not only did these people, or the allegation is that not only did Tyson executives knowingly hire thousands of people who were here illegally but they actually helped in the business of importing them. They became part of the coyote network. They went and sent people down apparently to scout and learn and get these people smuggled into the country, so they all became part of a smuggling network, not just a chicken-producing company but a smuggling company. These people have a responsibility for the deaths of these 19 individuals, for the pain of their families today. Everybody who does this and, therefore, entices people to come to this country illegally to seek a job, they are responsible, they are partially responsible for the death of these people and for the hundreds of others who die in the deserts who we do not know. We do not hear their screams. We do not witness their demise. We witness only the remains. We find them from time to time, what is left of them, in the desert. Many times they have been abused by the coyotes who bring them in. They get them to the line, they will rape the women, they steal all the money from the family, and they shove them into the desert. Those cries go unheard most of the time except I have actually had a homeland hero, I think it was last week, who said that on a clear night in the desert, you can hear the screams of these people being abused, of the women being raped, of the families being robbed and beaten. There are others who I suggest share some responsibility for the deaths of these people, the people trying to come into this country illegally. Again I do not absolve anyone. They have a responsibility themselves. They took a risk. There are warning signs all over. In the desert we have signs up in the desert about how dangerous it is to come through that area. People put up water. There are groups that go down there and put up water for them along the border. I blame them. I blame some of them. Those groups have a responsibility in the deaths because they entice people forward. I blame our own government for refusing to secure our own borders. When you make it illegal to enter the country but then make it possible to do so, you are in a way encouraging people to break the law and in fact put themselves in peril. The charade of immigration law that we operate with, where we have laws on the books, we have big organizations, border patrol, Customs, Forest Service people, these people are charged with the responsibility of, quote, border security, especially the border patrol and Customs; yet we all know you can go down and talk to anybody on that border in any of those services and they will tell you what a joke it is. And to pretend to have Members come on this floor as they did just a little bit ago in the different hour and talk about how important homeland security is and how the fact that maybe somebody tried to manipulate homeland security to go find some Texas legislator and oh, my goodness, what a travesty because they could be out, what? Defending the border? When was the last time that happened? And when was the last time they demanded it? I would love to have seen anytime in the past when any Member who was here protesting the use of homeland security for other than border security, or homeland security, I would love to have seen when they were demanding that our borders become secure and that we use the people for that purpose. And internal security in this country meaning we identify people who are here illegally and deport them. That is what homeland security is all about. If on the one hand you have demanded that from this agency, then you have every right to complain about the fact that they may be misused in some partisan political venture. But believe me, believe me when I say that for years the INS and the border patrol were misused for partisan political purposes, and the most blatant partisan political purpose was when we used them to tell people, to tell Americans that we had border security, that everything was okay because, after all, we have X number of thousands of people on the border; but we sent laws down to them telling them to ignore illegal aliens crossing. We sent regulations telling them that they should wink and look the other way while we continued to tell the American people we have a border policy. And what happens when you do things like that? People die. People die. Because they are trying to come across and do something that is still illegal, but they know that their chances of making it are pretty good, so they roll the dice. Well, these people lost. And who is responsible? I am telling you, it lies in this body, in this government, because we do not secure the border. It lies in Mexico and with the Mexican Government, the Mexican Government that actually encourages people to move northward into the United States. They encourage it because they are trying to do something about the huge number of unemployed they have. When you have got the population of Mexico, the population under 25, Mexicans under 25 have doubled in the last 10 years or so. It is enormous. Most of them are unemployed. It is a very dangerous, very difficult situation. And so Mexico says, gee, how do we do it? Do we actually try to improve our economy by privatizing a lot of the businesses that years ago were made government, specifically Pemex? And what an uproar that caused not too long ago when a committee on which I sit passed an amendment to the State Department reauthorization bill and it said that we should encourage Mexico to actually privatize their state-owned oil companies because if you want to have a better economy, that is one place to start. But does Mexico try to change their own structure to try and actually address the problems, the economic problems that Mexico faces? On the contrary. No, they told us, mind our own business. And they were absolutely right. It is really not our business. It only becomes our business when they continue to shove their unemployed into the United States. Then it is my business. And I have every right to tell Mexico, shape up, fix your economy. Stop the corruption that goes from the cop on the beat to the highest levels of government. Who does not know about it? You talk about another charade. The whole government of Mexico in a way is a charade. It is a charade that pretends to be a true government and in fact it is like a huge mob. It is like the Mexican Mafia, only in this case it is in many ways the government. Corruption from the cop on the beat to the highest levels of government. Everybody knows it exists. When you combine that level of corruption with a tendency toward a socialistic economy, believe me, you are going to have some big economic problems. You are going to have horrendous unemployment. You are going to have an under-class that cannot seem to find a way out and that will take any opportunity, take anything available to escape the grinding poverty that your own failed system places on them. So it is my business. It is the business of every American and especially every Congressman to tell Mexico to fix their own economy when they continue to send us their problems, and they do so for various purposes. Mexico sends us their unemployed because naturally it helps reduce the pressure, the political pressure that they would otherwise apply in Mexico. It also helps them because when they get here, Mexicans dutifully send home large portions of their own salaries. $10 billion is the very conservative estimate of exactly how much money is sent to Mexico; $10 billion a year, that is. That is a huge sum. It is 30 percent of the GDP in Mexico. This is a problem, therefore, for the United States. There is a challenge to us all, I think, to expect more and to challenge Mexico to do more and expect more because Mexico, by the way, not only receives this economic opportunity and economic benefit by moving their people into the United States that are unemployed but they also achieve a political benefit as was told to me in the most blatant and candid terms by the director of the bureau in Mexico that is a newly created division of the Mexican Government called the Ministry for Mexicans Living in the United States. A fascinating title, if nothing else. Newly created. According to its director, Mr. Juan Hernandez, its purpose was to move Mexicans into the United States in as many numbers, as big a number as possible, as great a number as possible, to achieve all the benefits I just described: to reduce the political pressure by a large number of unemployed on the one hand; secondly, to gain what they call remittances, the dollars coming back into Mexico making up the 30 percent of their GDP. And another thing that he mentioned that was really amazing and very interesting and something that we should pay attention to. He said, you know, they will influence your government. Millions of Mexicans living in the United States who retain a political allegiance to Mexico, and that was part of his job, to make sure that they did so. He would speak up here for 3 days a week, speak in Mexico for 4 days a week, but his job was to get as many Mexicans, he said, into the United States and then have them retain a political allegiance to Mexico so that they could then bring pressure on our government to change our policies vis-a-vis Mexico. This is a great plan. You have to admit, it works really well. It is a logical thing for the Mexican Government to do. It is also, however, logical, it seems to me, for us to say, wait a minute. Wait a minute. This is not the relationship we expect with a friendly country. We expect you to help us control our borders, especially after 9/11, especially after we know that people are coming into this country, and we have now gone to code orange again, a heightened level of security. It is heightened here. You will notice it as you come to the Capitol, there will be different things that you see when we get to different levels of security. But I will tell you what you do not see is you do not see any real attempt to make our borders more secure. You do not really see anything where somebody says it is time at this level, we now have to place the military on our borders, we have to employ our military assets to help our border patrol, help our Forest Service and help our Customs officials defend the border. You do not hear it. You do not see it. That is not part of the plan. There is no level, there is no color level of danger that says at this point we actually defend our borders. It could be. It could be the color red, the color of blood, because it is American blood that moves us into action sometimes. It is 3,000 dead. That is why we sometimes get into a discussion of the problems that confront us on our borders. Mr. Speaker, this is a very, very dangerous situation we face, and it is made more complicated every single day by the inaction of our own government and by the activities of those who demand that we have open borders, demand that we reduce our vigilance to the extent it exists anyway, demand amnesty for people who are living here illegally. All of these people are really and truly making it more difficult for us to protect American citizens, and they are making it easier for people to come into this country illegally and, in fact, walk into harm as the folks in this truck did, and as I say, it happens throughout the American Southwest that people die in the process. There is a great deal of blame to go around. We should accept it. We should do something to stop it. And we really have only two choices Mr. Speaker, only two choices. We can either abandon the border entirely and completely, repeal all the laws that presently are on the books about immigration control, declare ourselves to be an open state, declare the borders to be erased, take away the ports of entry, remove the Customs officials, remove the Border Patrol, disband those services and let people come and go as they want to. That is one way that we can stop this kind of thing from happening. People will not die trying to cross into the United States if there if it is not illegal for them to do so without our permission. That is one way. I am a no vote, believe me. I am a no vote. I happen to believe that borders matter. I happen to believe that national identity has meaning, that national sovereignty is an important aspect of who we are as Americans. So there are a hundred reasons I can give tonight for being a no vote. But I am saying I would like for this to be put for a vote. I would love for this to be put to a vote. And the only two options I think we should have are either the one I just described, where we erase the border so we no longer put these people in harm's way and we no longer put our own people in harm's way. We no longer have to go to funerals in Ajo, Arizona, for people who were killed in defense of the border, young men like Kris Eggle and hundreds of others who have died or been harmed along those borders trying to protect a system that really and truly says to them do not try too hard, let them go by. But if one is going to do their job, if one is a person of principle as these folks were and certainly Kris Eggle, one is going to do their job to the utmost, one is going to give 100 percent, and he gave his life. I do not want to see that anymore. I do not want to go to any more funerals for people who died on the border in defense of the border, if we are not going to truly defend the border. I would rather give it up, give it all up than to put all these people in harm's way and to tell the American people that there is this thing called the Border Patrol and do not worry, everything is going to be okay. I would rather just play it straight with the American people than I would continue this charade. But the other alternative, one to which I subscribe, by the way, is one in which we secure our borders. And believe me, Mr. Speaker, even though there are all kinds of people who keep saying this is not possible, that the borders are far too long, far too difficult, the terrain is far too difficult, we cannot do it, I assure my colleagues that is inaccurate. I assure my colleagues that this country has the ability to defend its own borders by the use of technology and the use of human resources. We can do it. The only thing we do not have, what is missing in the equation, what is missing in the concoction to actually try to defend our border, the theory, the agenda, what is missing is the will to defend our border. It is the will to use the military for fear of the political consequences of doing so. There is something else that I want to pay just some attention to here briefly. The other issue that needs our attention this evening, because this is rising to a boiling point, is something I hope that we are all going to pay close attention to. There is something going on here that needs our attention. Mr. Speaker, not too long ago the Mexican Government embarked upon a program to use its consular offices in the United States for the distribution of a card. We call it the matricula consular. This is a card that any government can give to their nationals for the purposes of identification. Nothing wrong with that. Other countries have done it in the past, not to any great extent. A few hundred people may have needed it for some purpose or other. But Mexico decided not too long ago that if they could not achieve the goal of open borders through this process, if they could not get the United States to abandon the borders and give amnesty to everybody who is here illegally, they would accomplish the goal another way. They knew that there are between 13- and 20 million people who living here illegally. A huge number of those are from Mexico. So they decided to begin handing out these cards to their nationals living in the United States. What is interesting about this, of course, is that the card is only, it is only important to someone who is here illegally. If one is here as a legal guest of this country, if one is a legal alien in the United States, they have something that identifies them that the United States Government gave them. It is a stamp on their passport. It is a visa or it is a green card. It is an I-94. There is something we have given them to show that they are here legally. They do not need any other form of identification for our purposes. So the only real purpose is to give illegal aliens a form of identification that they can then use to obtain services. How does one get the services? Well, they send their consular officers out all over the United States, they go to State legislators, they go to city councils, they go to police departments, and they ask them, and they get the banks to help them with this. They ask them to accept the matricula consular for purposes of opening bank accounts, opening charge accounts, getting social services, doing all of the things that a ``citizen'' would do and be able to do just because they are a citizen of the United States, a legal resident. They have been extremely successful. The Mexican consuls and the Mexican Government have been extremely successful in getting cities and counties to do this. In fact, the State of California has, if I am not mistaken, already passed a law saying they have to or at least the law is in process saying that the State has to take the matricula consular. This is akin to establishing another immigration system in the United States. How many immigration systems are we going to run? One by the INS, supposedly, we give them that responsibility for homeland security, and one by every bank, one by every city and county in the United States. But that is what is happening. The banks started this. Wells Fargo was the beginning. Wells Fargo Bank looked out there and said wow, I have got this what they call ``unbanked population.'' This is a euphemism for illegal alien, and I want to get them into my bank, and I want to charge them fees. So what do I do? How do they open an account? They are not here legally. I know. Let us work with the Mexican Government. Let us use this matricula consular. We can get them all accounts that are open. Now of course banks all over America, Citibank, Citibank is doing this. Most federally chartered banks have now begun to do this or accept the matricula consular. And what happened here just a couple of weeks ago but the United States Department of Treasury promulgated regulations. Get this, if there is not some incredible irony. In reaction to the PATRIOT Act, which was designed, of course, to increase security measures in the United States and so the Department of Treasury had promulgated regulations to implement certain parts of the PATRIOT Act, and so the other week the Department of Treasury in really cooperation with the banks said it is okay to use the matricula consular to open an account. If this is not just an incredible irony. A bill to enhance our security was used to open a loophole a mile wide for somebody to actually use to violate our security. Because we do not know, no way, no how can anyone possibly tell me that that Mexican matricula consular is in fact a valid document when I have already seen somebody get arrested with that in Colorado who had seven of them. His picture, seven different names. I have seen vans in Chicago that hand these cards out on the street corner. There is no way that they are ``valid'' or ``verifiable.'' But now the banks can use them. They can use them for identification purposes when somebody comes in to open an account. And I understand that today Treasury was over at the White House lobbying the President of the United States to get him to issue an executive order to say that the whole Federal Government will accept the matricula consular. This is bizarre beyond imagination. I happen to know, Mr. Speaker, that there are a lot of people in the government, especially in Homeland Security, who are absolutely opposed to this; and they do not want this Government to accept a foreign government ID for our purposes, for purposes of identification, especially in the banks, so they can launder money, so they can move money around from various accounts. Because I guarantee the Members that there is absolutely nothing that says that if we can accept the matricula consular from Mexico, what says we cannot possibly accept it from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, or anywhere else? Their nationals will come here, and already five other countries are now involved with this because they see this as a great way to avoid our immigration law, a way to avoid immigration law. And here the Treasury is aiding and abetting it in reaction to the PATRIOT Act, the PATRIOT Act which tells us that we cannot go rent a library book and not have to worry about the Feds coming to see what we are reading. That is the level of security that we are supposed to employ, and yet they use the PATRIOT Act to write regs to allow people to violate the law. This is incredible. Banks all over this country are doing it. I am searching for a bank in Colorado that I can withdraw my funds, both my private funds and my campaign funds, because the banks I am presently with accept the matricula consular. I am looking for a bank that does it because I want to move my money, and I certainly would encourage anyone to do exactly the same thing. The task is trying to find a bank that will not accept the matricula consular now. Because they say to me, hey, the Treasury just said it was okay; and it is now a competitive issue. As the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) was saying, I guess they cannot blame the pharmaceutical companies. Blame us for allowing them to do what they do. That is true. A bank is a profit-making center. They care about one thing, the bottom line. They could not care less whether or not they are aiding and abetting people who are living here illegally, which they are doing. They could not care less. Their issue is, what is the profit here? And these are multinational banks for the most part. I say multinational because they have absolutely no concern about this country's welfare. They have one concern, and that is the concern of the bottom line. And, okay, that is the system we live in. That is capitalism. So be it. But what else is capitalism? Capitalism is when we say to Americans we have a right to voice our concern, boycott, do something to show we do not like what they are doing. That is also the right of an American consumer, and I certainly encourage people to do exactly like that. Like I say, the problem is trying to find somebody that is not already in bed with the traffickers and a bank that is willing to say, no, this is wrong; we will not accept it. I am told, Mr. Speaker, that World Savings is a bank that will not accept it, and that is great except it is not a commercial bank, and we have to have a commercial account especially for our campaign, for one's business. So we need a national bank, a federally chartered bank, a commercial bank that would agree to live up to a responsibility that we should place on them as good citizens. And it is amazing. ``Citigroup Announces Precedent-Setting Partnership with the National Council of La Raza and Commits $105 Million to Revitalize Hispanic Communities.'' You read this thing, and what you find is they can revitalize it. What they are doing is paying off La Raza, just exactly the same way other businesses have been forced into, coerced into, blackmailed into, funding Jessie Jackson's group. It is the same exact thing going on here. I wish people would go to their banks and would ask them what their policy is about the matricula consular, and the States, because Colorado just passed a law, the first State in the Nation, passed a law making it illegal for any State agency to accept the matricula consular. This is an important thing. It goes to exactly what we are talking about here in terms of what does it mean to be a citizen. Does it matter that we make laws against people coming in illegally? Does it matter if we are stopping people from getting amnesty if they have come illegally? What if the entire decision is made at the local level by banks, by city councils, who are themselves so fearful of the electorate in their area, so they say I have to make friends with this constituency, so let us accept this matricula consular. Let us tell our police to accept it, tell our cities, our urban authorities, our housing authorities to accept it. Let us go ahead and give amnesty. The Congress will not do it, so we will do it. Well, I hope, Mr. Speaker, that people all over this country will look at this issue, will ask their banks, will ask their city council, will ask their police, why are you accepting this bogus form of identity that is not given to you by the Government of the United States or by the State of whatever, but by a foreign government, at a time when we are suspicious and fearful of exactly what kind of thing can happen when people come in and steal identities in the United States, open up accounts under bogus names, transfer money into terrorist organizations? There are all kinds of things that can happen. It becomes a breeder document. This is a very dangerous thing, and I wonder what our government is going to do. I wonder what happened today at the White House, after the Treasury Department was over there trying to get them, Treasury and State were trying to get the Federal Government, the President, to agree to accept this matricula. I know the Homeland Defense Agency is opposed to it. I know. I saw a draft that was produced by Homeland Defense that said this should not be, that no Federal agency should accept this, and that draft was making its way up to the White House, up to the highest level. That is why all of a sudden all of the activity is over there, because they are getting ready to announce the policy of the Federal Government on the matricula consular. And I urge everyone, Mr. Speaker, everyone to understand that, to recognize it, and to pay close attention to what happens here. This is important for us all as Americans. Pay close attention to this issue. Mr. Speaker, this issue of the matricula consular is just one of many that we have to deal with in terms of immigration and immigration reform, but it is a great example of the threat we face and the many facets of immigration and the need for immigration reform. I will, for as long as I can anyway, continue to bring these issues to the attention of this body and to the American people.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, as I do on several occasions, I attempt to bring to the attention of the body and the people of this country a group of people who I have referred to as homeland heroes. These are people whose efforts in defense of the homeland go unheralded, unfortunately, but who, in every way imaginable, are living in situations that we can only describe as war-like. They are living on a war front, and I refer specifically to our borders where an invasion is occurring. And these folks, the folks that I refer to as homeland heroes, represent to me, anyway, the sort of first line of defense, and they look to their government to help them defend their country, their lives, their homes. Unfortunately, the Government of the United States looks the other way. Tonight I wanted to bring to the attention of the body the newest member of this group of homeland heroes. His name is Gary McBride. He is a 59-year-old rancher in Cochise County. He has lived in Arizona all of his life. He manages a ranch of over 22,000 acres in Rucker's Canyon, which is 30 miles off the U.S.-Mexico border just northeast of Douglas. I met Gary McBride on one of my most recent visits to Arizona, and I visited the Rucker Canyon area on a beautiful Sunday morning. Mr. McBride is a frustrated man, I should tell my colleagues. He cannot understand why his own government cannot curtail the flow of illegal aliens across the rangeland he manages. This is a good question. It was one I could not give him a good answer to. Mr. McBride is the manager of a ranch with 30 bulls, 300 cows and their offspring. His job is to see to it that the care and feeding of these cattle goes on. Anything that affects the cattle or increases the cost of raising cattle has a direct impact on his life. A few things are basic to raising cattle and bringing them to market. These things include water, feed, and fences. Let us concentrate on just water for a little bit. Water is, of course, an enormously valuable commodity, as it is in Arizona and throughout the West. I am sure one can understand how wasted water and damaged water lines can be a big headache for ranchers. All of the ranchers I spoke to along the border region have experienced continual problems with their water lines because of illegal alien trespassers. The illegals stream across their land in very large numbers. Anyone walking many miles across open range will need water. If the trespasser only drank the water and did not damage the water lines, the water troughs, water pumps and other equipment, that would be one thing. It would not impact the ranch so much, and it would not add that much to the cost of raising cattle. Unfortunately, the illegal aliens coming across the land in large numbers do not merely drink water from spigots or troughs. They break a float or fix it so it will not shut off, or they turn a valve so the tank is drained completely dry and the water wasted. A typical storage tank holds 10,000 gallons of water. In the last year alone these tanks have been drained three times, the tanks owned by Mr. McBride. This is a lot of water to waste in time of drought. Not only are the cattle affected, but local wildlife is also affected. Often the generator for the water pump is damaged or vandalized. The cost of replacing a generator, anywhere between $3,000 and $5,000. I will stress that these are new situations for people living on the border, for Mr. McBride who has lived there all his life. It is not new to have illegal trespassers coming across their land. It is completely new to have them come across in numbers of hundreds, even thousands. It is also new to have this phenomenon where they are so intent on vandalizing the property. They confront property owners in very aggressive ways. There is a difference today, they will tell you. Anyone on the border will tell you there is a big difference today in the people coming across the border and the people that used to come across three or four at a time looking for a job, that oftentimes the ranchers would provide, give them some food, send them on their way. But today it is different. Fences. Let us go into that part of what it takes to be a rancher in this area. A central part of ranch management is having good fences. Keeping fences repaired is a big problem for all of the ranchers on the border region. One or two people crossing the land might easily crawl under or over a cattle fence, but groups of 20 or 50 or 1,000, usually headed by what is called a coyote, and the coyote cares nothing for the fences. This is not the four-legged animal we are talking about. Coyote is the term used for the individual who is leading the group of illegal immigrants across the country. So as I say, he does not care a thing about your fences. And in order to facilitate the movement of the people quickly, which is what he is trying to accomplish, they will cut the fences or trample them down. On one recent evening, trespassers destroyed five gates and six fences in one 15-mile stretch involving four different property owners. Think about the cost in supplies and time to repair those gates and fences. On another night the trespassers destroyed two gates and two fences that took Mr. McBride $170 to fix. When a fence is down, cattle move across and wander into adjacent ranch property. It typically takes over 100 manhours each month to sort the cattle out and move them back where they belong. Sometimes the coyotes create a new problem that never existed before. Mr. McBride told me about this fence that serves no purpose but to stop illegal traffic. Mr. McBride had to build a strong fence on a quarter-mile stretch of road to prevent vehicles from using a back road to transport drugs across his land. It was the only way to stop the almost nightly flow of trucks across his land. It cost him $1,033.25. How about the trash, another aspect of this that goes undiscussed and to which very few people pay attention. But if you live in this area and on the land down there, you pay attention to it. It is the pristine environment; pristine except for those areas where illegals have made it a national dump. Cows are not very smart, but they are curious creatures, and they will eat almost anything when hungry. They eat trash bags and plastic. The illegal aliens coming across the rangeland in groups, as I say, in groups of 100 or more, will leave behind lots of trash. They leave milk jugs, plastic bags, baby diapers and other things. When a cow eats the plastic bag, she will die, but she will not die right away. It will eventually block her digestive system and cause infection. She will either starve to death or die of gangrene from the infection because of the blockage. The cost of each dead cow, lost income, $750. If a cow is carrying an unborn calf, it is about another $400. In the last year alone Mr. McBride lost three cows with baby calves. The total cost is $3,450. Now we listen to this kind of thing, and you may be thinking to yourself that this is just the cost of doing business, and, after all, we all have these problems. But it mounts up, and the cost of doing business on the border, it is a little more difficult to do business down there because of the environment. It is a very harsh environment, and these are things that are happening that could be prevented. That is the other thing. These are not just part of the natural environment. These are things that are happening to people living on that border every single day, destroying their livelihood, destroying their lives, and forcing them off of their land, and this is what I believe to be intolerable. Let us talk about another aspect of massive immigration of illegals across their land. Over the past year Mr. McBride put out several small grass fires started by illegal trespassers that left campfires unattended. Luckily, the fires were discovered and put out before they could do much major damage, but last summer only 40 miles west of McBride's ranch, a major fire was caused by illegal aliens in the Coronado National Forest. I happened to have been there at that time, by the way. It was called the Ryan fire. It burned over 38,000 acres. It came right up to the border of the town of Sierra Vista and the U.S. Army facility at Fort Wachuka. Only 2 days ago there was another fire in the same vicinity of Santa Cruz County, this time in a wildlife preserve. It burned over 450 acres until it was brought under control. Front page story from Tuesday's Tucson newspaper, the Arizona Daily Star, quotes a Forest Service employee as saying the source of the fire was a cooking stove used and abandoned by illegal aliens. Perhaps the Tucson churches that want to provide plentiful water to the aliens crossing the border could also provide them with a manual for camping safety. Mr. McBride kept a journal of his encounters with illegal aliens over a 3-month period last year. He spent a lot of time calling the Border Patrol and waiting for them to arrive. McBride encountered illegal aliens on 46 separate occasions over a 90-day period, sometimes as many as 3 encounters in a day. Over the 9-month period, January 1 and September 1, 2002, Mr. McBride made 101 calls to the Border Patrol to come and apprehend illegal aliens. This does not include the numerous times when he did not bother to call the Border Patrol because there was no chance of catching the trespassers, or there were too few involved, and he knew the Border Patrol would not come out anyway. Some of the encounters are not friendly, and they make daily life hazardous to local residents. Mr. McBride found trespassers in his barn where they leave garbage, feces, and lighted cigarettes. He has been run off his road by illegal drug smugglers traveling at high speeds. In his daily experience drugs are now smuggled across his ranchlands every single day; not occasionally, not weekly, but daily. Equipment has been stolen from his garage. Groups of illegal aliens stand in front of his yard and yell at him, demanding to use his telephone. Real estate values in the area have fallen dramatically as few people want to purchase a ranch and cope with the daily stresses and additional costs imposed by the constant flow of illegal trespassers. Mr. McBride is a frustrated man because he sees nothing happening about his problem. He has every right to be frustrated. Nothing happening. People apparently here do not care. At least not enough of us care. Many of us, however, on this floor and in this body share the frustration because we see much more that can be done and could be done to secure our borders and curtail, if not stop, this invasion. For example, we could adopt a policy that the Armed Forces of the United States could conduct routine training exercises along the northern and southern borders. As a Nation, by action of this Congress, we could adopt a policy that one-third of all our military training take place within 50 miles of our borders. That would send a message that we are serious about the borders. Not long ago, Mr. Speaker, I had an opportunity to actually visit a site north of a little town called Bonners Ferry, Utah. It was a site where a group of 100 marines along with the Border Patrol in the area and the Forest Service and the Customs Service were trying to see whether or not they could actually use the military to help control, let us say, 100 miles of border up in that most rugged area of the Northern United States and our border with Canada. It was an enormously successful 2-week exercise. While I was there, we actually saw and the authorities were able to apprehend four people coming across, as I say, the most rugged area you could imagine, no roads, coming across on ATVs, all-terrain vehicles, carrying 400 pounds of drugs. Another time a small plane was coming through, and the radar facilities used by the marines, employed by the marines picked it up. It was intercepted. It was also full of narcotics. These would have certainly gone through easily as they had done many times in the past had it not been for the fact that the military was there using military assets, including three drones. These were old, old 1991 model drones, the kind we used in the Gulf War, and they are noisy, but they did the job. At 2 o'clock in the morning, they picked up those four guys coming across the border, and then they called to the Border Patrol, helicoptered out, intercepted them, and we had them. The really interesting thing is when I talked to the Commandant of that Marine group that was there, he told me that it was the best experience they had ever had. It was the best training experience they had ever had, because it was real time in really rough terrain dealing with real bad guys. We could be training our military on the border, if nothing else, even if you did not want to put them there all the time because everybody is so sensitive about, oh, my God, what would the Mexicans say, what would the Canadians say about using our troops on our border? Well, I do not really give a fig what they would say. I could not care less about what Mexico thinks about us trying to protect our own borders, especially when Mexico does everything it possibly can to help people invade the United States. Mexico has departments of government that are designed to help people come into this country, even come in illegally. Mexican Government provides buses, bringing busloads of people to the border of the United States where they dislodge these passengers and let them start walking across into the country, into the desert. This is the Government of Mexico. This is our friend. This is the country that is represented by President Fox, who came here and said over and over again that he wanted to be our friend. And this is the same country, of course, Mr. Speaker, that refused to be our friend when we asked them for support in the Gulf War, the most recent war in Iraq, in Operation Enduring Freedom. They were not to be found. They were AWOL. They said we should not do it. They would not give us any help. They would not help us defend our country, but they have no qualms about helping their illegals into the United States, because for one thing, of course, those illegals who are here send money back to Mexico and now accounts for a third of the Mexican GDP. It is a huge amount of money. And so Mexico encourages invasion of our country. And so I am supposed to care about what they think about us putting military on our border? Give me a break. But let us say we are still sensitive to that, what they might say, what they might do. So do not station them there. Just use them there for training purposes. They get good training. They also help defend the Nation's borders. At a minimum we could say that all military facilities located in the 14 States along our northern and southern borders must conduct at least half of their training exercises within 50 miles of the border. Utilizing military resources does not mean putting a soldier every 100 feet on the border. That image is conjured up by the opponents of border control. Using our military on the border will not mean a new expenditure of tens of billions of dollars, another myth. But we must be willing to employ our military intelligently, appropriately. And I think we owe it to the citizens of this Nation to do so. We send our military to borders all around the world. Our military is presently employed defending the borders of Iraq, defending the borders of Afghanistan, defending the borders of South Korea, defending the borders of Kosovo and in the old Yugoslavia. We send them all over the world. We can find the money to send them all over the world to have them defend the borders of other countries. We cannot do it in our own country. Why? Because we are fearful of the reaction not just of the Governments of Mexico and/or Canada, we are fearful of the reaction of people in the United States who have an allegiance greater to other countries than they do to this country. We are fearful that there will be people in this country who are still politically connected to Mexico, for instance, and would raise Cain with us politically for putting troops on the border. We are fearful that we will lose the votes of this Hispanic, I would say, very small minority, but nonetheless, that is really one of the reasons why we refuse to do it. So let us say what the truth is here. That is why we do not put troops on the border. We are afraid of both foreign and domestic reaction. I asked Secretary Ridge, I will never forget. It was on this floor. Actually my recollection, it was another Member who asked him during a briefing on this floor. He was then head of the homeland defense, and now, of course, running that new agency; but he was asked why he was opposed to putting troops on the border to defend the country, he is the head of homeland defense after all, and his response was incredibly elucidating. It was very candid, and what he said was the reason why we will not do it is because there are political and cultural obstacles, political and cultural obstacles to putting troops on the border. I applaud Mr. Ridge for being truthful. He could have given us some mealy-mouth typical Department of State response to a question like that, but he said it just the way it is. There are political and cultural problems with putting troops on our border. I will say this, that if we have another event like 9/11 and it happens as a result of somebody coming across these borders illegally, then I want him or any other member of the administration employing this particular philosophy to go to the families of the people who are killed in an event like that and explain that we could not protect them because of the political and cultural obstacles to stop them from doing so. You explain that to them. I certainly will not. I will tell them that we shirked our duty as a government. We shirked our primary duty. It is to protect and defend the people of this country and their property. We are not doing it for Mr. McBride or any of the people who live along the border in Arizona and Texas, New Mexico, California, any of the other States that are impacted by the invasion to which I have referred. We are not doing it there. We are not helping them, and we are not helping the rest of Americans who are going to be affected by this policy. To those of my colleagues who think it is just Mr. McBride's problem and just the homeland heroes that I have brought to my colleagues' attention, Mr. Speaker, if they think that is who it is, let me say that it is a much broader category of Americans. It is a much broader spectrum of Americans than just those living on the border who are affected negatively by massive immigration, unchecked immigration, immigration uncontrolled so we do not know who the people are coming into this country. We have created an oceanful of immigrants, legal and illegal, in which now the most dastardly deeds can be done and people who have come into the country do us great harm, can swim, and they can swim in that ocean undetected simply because there are so many here; and we overwhelm all of our agencies designed to do something about illegal immigration. We overwhelm the INS, the border patrol, the Customs service, homeland defense. We overwhelm them with numbers so it becomes impossible. Let us look at just one aspect of this. There are, we do not know, but somewhere between 13 and 20 million people living here illegally; but my colleagues say, okay, well, they are not really doing anything, they are not harming the country, they are just providing labor for the jobs necessary to be done that ``no one else would do.'' I hear that all the time, that the only people we are hiring are people taking jobs no other Americans would do. I tell my colleagues that right there I would challenge that statement and tell them there are millions of Americans looking for work, and they will take jobs and they will take any jobs. I have a fellow working for me who is a past executive in a high-tech firm. We cannot get him more than a relatively low-level position. It is almost a part-time position. He has a daughter with leukemia. He is looking for insurance benefits. We are able to help provide him that at least. He does data input for us. He also works driving a limousine at night to try to put a roof over his family's head and keep food on the table, and you are telling me there are not American citizens looking for work and that all these illegals are coming in to do work that no American citizen will do? I am telling my colleagues that is blatantly untrue. There are millions of unemployed Americans looking for jobs that are being done by illegals in this country. Why? For one thing, they are being employed by employers because, of course, they will work for less and they will not make any waves because after all they cannot pay an illegal the same amount of money as they pay somebody else. They cannot give them the same benefits. What they are going to do about it? They are not going to squawk. They are going to be turned into the INS. They are fearful. If they only knew they could get turned into the INS every single day and they are not going to do anything about it. They are leery about it. So they can be manipulated. They can be mistreated, and they often are. There are plenty of American citizens who need and want jobs; but let us say, all right, out of the 20 million people who may be working here illegally, living in the United States illegally, let us say that 18 to 19 million of them are just regular folks trying to make a living doing the same thing our immigrant grandfathers and grandparents did. Let me tell my colleagues that because there are so many living here illegally and because all of our agencies are swamped by the numbers, we cannot deal with those maybe several hundred thousand, maybe a million people who are living here illegally and are doing very bad things to us. For instance, a few years ago, we brought pressure, I and other people in this body, against the INS to tell us exactly how many people were actually still living here in the United States, after they had been ordered to be deported. The only way one actually gets ordered to be deported in this country is usually they do something pretty bad and they get arrested and they get arrested for rape or robbery or murder or vandalism, one. All of the sudden they say, oh, by the way, you are also here illegally, you end up in immigration court and the judge orders you deported and you think, oh, good, the INS comes to get them and they take them back. No, wrong, does not happen that way. They are put out on bond usually, and they are given a letter and says come back, report in 6 months to be deported. Guess what. Just guess. Mr. Speaker, guess what happens. They do not come back, amazing as that is to contemplate, that someone would actually not come back for their deportation hearing. Well, they do not, of course. It is called a ``run letter.'' As a matter of fact, when you send them a letter telling them when they are supposed to come, the vernacular is it is a run letter because they run. Of the people who have been told that they are to be deported because they have committed some crime here, 2 years ago the INS admitted that they had a list of over 320,000 individuals. They would not even talk about it until we forced them to, and actually an immigration law judge called my office and told me about this and said do not use my name, we hear that 1,000 times, do not use my name, I have got to tell you what is happening because I know you get upset about these immigration issues; but he said every day I see in my court, I order somebody to be deported. They put up a bond. They are out the door. We never see them again. He said, I will bet you there are 100,000 or more like that. We kept pressing the INS. Guess what. There were over 300,000 that they admitted to. Last year, again because of the pressure, they decided to put these 300,000 people on the NCIC. They decided that we would put them on the databank that was available so that if anybody picked them up crossing the street illegally, running a red light, anything else, and you ran their number in the NCIC, you could get them. We could deport them. Come to find out, of the 320,000 people that were on that list, according to just statistics that came out the other day, a total of 2,000, little over 2,000, were actually identified over the last year. Of them, about 600 were actually deported, and guess what has happened to that total number. It has grown to about 400,000 people who have been arrested or ordered to be deported and walked out the door. Now the homeland defense agency is calling upon people to be a little more focused on this issue and calling on local law enforcement agencies to find these people. We have 400,000 people here that the INS admits most of them with felony convictions and who have just walked away. That is one of the problems of having massive numbers of illegal immigrants and even legal immigrants in the country because when it blends together, it becomes impossible for us to track; and, therefore, the resulting consequences to the United States are severe. There are consequences to massive illegal immigration into this country. We have over 5,000 miles of international border with Mexico and Canada, but Mexicans and Canadians are not the only ones who come across those borders. INS statistics for 2001 show that 70 percent of the illegal aliens crossing from Mexico are Mexican nationals. That means 30 percent are from other countries. The number of illegal aliens coming into the country by most estimates is three to four times the number that are caught by the border patrol. That means that 1.5 million illegal aliens came into the United States in 2002, and that means that 450,000 came into our country from countries other than Mexico. In fact, that is the way it is referred to on the border, OTM, other than Mexican. By definition we do not know who these people are or what they are doing here. I ask you to consider just one statistic. If only one percent of those 450,000 people are terrorists, that would mean that there are 4,500 possible terrorists entering our country each year. The INS said that there are nearly 400,000 absconders. I mentioned that one. The Haitians, just a little bit ago, big article in the paper about the fact that even the State Department is saying that we have to do something about the people coming in here claiming to be of one nationality but, in fact, they are not, because it detected an increase in third country nationals including Pakistanis and Palestinians attempting to sneak into the United States from Haiti; and because it feared that lax immigration enforcement would lead to a new boat lift from the country, the State Department urged the White House to adopt a policy of detaining illegal aliens arriving by boat from Haiti until they could be deported or granted asylum. Mr. Ashcroft acceded to the demand, the request of the State Department; and of course The Washington Post and all of the local media went crazy, and this was a racist philosophy and tried to get them to pull back on it. What they worry about, as I say, are so many people coming across claiming in this case to be Haitians, but in fact, they are other nationalities. This is not unique to Haiti. There is an area of South America, south Central America, South Americans in this case, called the tri-border area. It is Brazil and Argentina and Paraguay, and it is an area in which there is a great deal of activity where illegal aliens are brought in, smuggled in. There is a smuggling ring operating out of Brazil. It brings Middle Easterners into the country, gives them Brazilian documents, keeps them there for maybe up to 6 months, and then moves them forward through Mexico into the U.S.; and if they are stopped, if anything happens, they are identified as Brazilians so there is no big issue. Maybe they will just be deported back to Brazil. If they were brought here under their true identification as people coming from Middle Eastern countries, most of them on the terrorist watch list, then there would be a lot more attention paid to them. That is why they try to filter them through, try to mask them by coming into the United States as Brazilians. It is happening with countries all over the world. As we saw just a little bit ago, the Cuban boats are coming across in large numbers. We have a policy that says if you get to the United States, put one foot on dry land, you will be given asylum. I do not know how carefully we screen these people, but I will tell you that the whole enterprise that we call immigration and immigration control is a farce. If you get to the United States, you are probably going to remain in the United States. That is the reality of the situation. We deport very few people; that is, if you are sneaking in especially. But if you are trying to get here legally, it can be a very difficult task. I have people coming to my office all the time asking to come into the United States legally, trying to bring a spouse in legally. Very difficult. That is tough. Trying to get somebody here legally could take you years, often does take years. Takes a lot of money. You have to hire lawyers. I often think to myself that you want to go to these people and say, boy, I hate to tell you this, but it is probably just as easy to sneak in the country, because it is going to take you a long time to do it legally. And if you sneak into the country, you will get all the benefits that anybody gets living here legally. Now, we do not tell them that, of course, and I do not suggest that people do it, but it is hard not to recognize the logic they would employ if they were to look at those two options. Go through all the brain damage of trying to come here legally or simply sneak across the border. Either way you will probably end up in exactly the same sort of circumstance, to live in the United States for as long as you want. That is the problem with immigration policies today. In just the last week or two, look at all the things that have happened, of course we have seen the horrible tragic situation in Texas, in Victoria, Texas, where 18 migrants died packed into a truck. Oftentimes these trucks carry upwards of 100 people smashed into them. It gets very hot. This is unfortunately not a unique situation, but it is always a terrible, horrendous problem, a horrendous thing to happen, where you have 18 people dead which were being brought in to the country by these coyotes. I was asked on a television program last night about this, and I was debating someone on that program from an organization that is an open borders-type organization called MALDEV, that is the acronym, MALDEV, and the gentleman was saying that the only way to stop this, according to the open border people, is to allow for greater immigration. But of course it does not matter, as I pointed out to him last night. If we said we will accept another million people a year, or 2 million or 10 million people a year into the United States, as long as we put a cap on it, there will always be people coming in illegally. There will always be this kind of situation. We have two choices, only two choices. Either we walk away from the borders, close down the border stations, close down the Border Patrol, admit the failure, admit that it is our desire to maintain open borders and allow anybody to come into this country when they want to, go ahead and admit that; and stop the charade, or secure the border. Those are the only two options. There is nothing else. In between leaves us with things like this: 18 dead. It leaves us with hundreds dead in the deserts of the Southwest. People die of exposure. It leaves us with all of the problems that are attendant to having porous borders: The drug trafficking, the horrendous impact on the lives of the people in southern Arizona and all along the borders. These are the things that happen when you have porous borders and you pretend that you have some immigration policy. It is either one or the other. Make a decision, America. Mr. Speaker, I believe that we should try our best in this body to force a debate on whether or not this country wants open borders or whether it wants secure borders. I am a vote for secure borders, needless to say. But if I lose the debate, if I am in the minority, then so be it. We will no longer have people like Kris Eggle being killed in the line of duty. His parents were here when we passed a bill on this floor, a bill I introduced to name the visitor center at Organ Pipes Cactus National Park down in Arizona, to name the visitors center after Kris Eggle. His parents sat up there in the gallery when we passed the bill here on Wednesday, and his name was added to the list of names that were put on a memorial here in Washington, D.C., for all of the fallen law enforcement personnel of the Nation. Many of these people like Kris, they are people who were Border Patrol people, they were park rangers, they were Customs officials who were cut down in the line of duty by people coming into this country illegally, people transporting drugs, people protecting those people who were transporting drugs. Kris Eggle was 28 years old and had a full and rich life ahead of him. I went to his funeral, and I passed a bill to memorialize him. I do not want to have to do anything like that again. There are no parents of children who are employed in our Park Service or on our Border Patrol who want to go through what the Eggles have gone through. Nobody wants to do this again. But it will happen again unless we make that choice that I have just put in front of this Nation. That is it. Either secure our borders or walk away. This approach we presently employ of having the charade of a Border Patrol, where we put people out on the border, we put them into harm's way, but we really and truly do not mean to secure those borders, this is the worst of all possible worlds. Their blood is on our hands. Those people who make these decisions to keep our borders porous and to put these people in harm's way without supporting them, without a real commitment to defending the border, they have the blood of people like Kris Eggle on their hands. And so there will be no other way. We will not stop others from dying, not American citizens, not illegal aliens trying to come into the country. It will happen over and over again until we secure those borders. Allow for a legal way for people to come into this country and demand that is the only way they get into this country. Deport everyone who is here illegally. Now, I know people will go, oh, what are you saying, deport people here illegally? That is exactly what I am saying, Mr. Speaker. We must deport people who are here illegally, and we must prevent those who are trying to come into this country illegally from doing so. That is the only way we can call ourselves a Nation. It does not mean that people cannot immigrate to the United States, as my grandparents and probably yours and everybody else's did. Immigration can still occur. But it can occur on our basis, on how many we want in the country, on what grounds we believe they should be able to come into the country, for how long, what are they going to do here when they get here. But it has to be in a number that we can handle. It has to be a number that we can actually integrate into the country. There is another whole side of this that we have not even touched upon, and that is the threat to the very culture of the country, the threat to the idea of citizenship that occurs when we have massive immigration coming into the country, and we combine that with this rabid multiculturalism, the cult of multiculturalism that permeates our society and that tells us and tells our students and tells our citizens that there is nothing unique about America; that we have to worship at the altar of multiculturalism; that we cannot be proud of own culture; that Western civilization is of no value. It is that philosophy, combined with massive immigration, that could spell doom, and does spell doom for our own country and for our civilization. And, believe me, that is a 1-hour Special Order in and of itself. In fact, we have divided this issue of illegal immigration into different categories. We started off by talking about the danger it poses to our national security. Then we talked about, in another hour I did, simply the environment, the damage to the environment, the kind of things I talked about earlier, but even in more detail in terms of just exactly what is happening to the environment of this country, what is happening to our parks, to our grasslands, to our deserts when they are crossed by thousands and thousands of people on foot and in vehicles, coming across desert land that is pristine, ruining the lands, depositing all their trash, their feces, their leavings, and leaving it looking like a national dump. The fires. All of these environmental hazards and all of this environmental degradation that occurs even without the slightest peep from the Sierra Club or any of the other organizations that are supposed to be out there caring for our pristine lands, caring for our environment. They only care to a point. But they are, of course, also wrapped up in the cult of multiculturalism so that they cannot complain about the fact that there is such degradation on our borders and in our parks being committed by people who are coming into the country illegally. That would be seen as a racist comment. That would be seen as someone who is ethnocentric. Well, race has got nothing to do with this issue. Ethnocentrism has nothing to do with this issue. It is an issue of our national survival, and we are attacked on various fronts. Then we could spend an hour, and I did spend an hour, talking about just the health care costs, the damage that this massive immigration is doing to our infrastructure in the United States in terms of health care, in terms of tax, the cost to taxpayers to provide housing, to provide roads, to provide hospitals, to provide schools for the massive number of people coming across here into this country illegally. Twenty-five percent of all people presently incarcerated in Federal prisons are noncitizens. I do not know what it is for cities and localities, but it has to be almost as high, if not higher in some places; huge infrastructure costs to the United States that are not paid for by the ``taxes'' paid by people coming in here and working, even if they are illegal. I assure my colleagues that the meager amount of taxes paid by people who are employed in low-skill, low-wage jobs in no way pays for the infrastructure costs of their existence here. So there is another aspect of immigration that we do not talk about; that we are afraid to talk about. Then there is this issue of the culture and the issue of citizenship, the attack on the culture, the attack on citizenship. This is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the entire phenomenon. It is the desire on the part of a lot of people, maybe even in our own government, to eventually eliminate the distinction between someone who is here as a citizen, a legal citizen, and someone who is here illegally. And everything that is done that provides illegal immigrants with some benefit or other that would usually go to an American citizen is another step towards that elimination of the importance of the distinction of being a citizen. You can come into this country illegally and get an education for your children. You can come into the country illegally, starting out by breaking our laws just to begin with by placing your foot in this country illegally, and as a reward for that behavior, you can then get your children educated, your children and yourself medical attention, your family provided with all kinds of benefits in terms of housing, subsidized housing and the myriad of other social services that we provide in this country to the poor. You can even vote, which in fact they do in large numbers. Illegal aliens are voting in this country in every election. We have had, oh, I do not know how many exposes that have been run showing how many people have been in this country and have voted illegally. They do not have to even do that by lying, sometimes, by lying to the person at the voting booth, by the poll watcher. They can do it by walking into cities right here in Maryland, College Park and others, other cities, that allow people to vote if they are a resident. That is all they ask for, residency, proof of residency. Let me see your utility bill. You do not have to be a citizen. So if you can vote, if you can get Social Security benefits, if you can get social service benefits, if you can have your children educated, if you can have all of that, get your driver's license, send your kids to college and have it paid for by the taxpayers of this country, if you can do all of that, then you tell me, Mr. Speaker, what is the difference between a citizen of this country and a noncitizen? How do we distinguish it? It becomes impossible. That distinction is blurred. That is the desired goal of many people who are on what I call the open-borders part of this discussion. Some of them are organizations like Maldev, like La Raza. There are many others. You can go on the Web and see these sites. Barrio Warriors. You can see how they talk about taking back the United States, taking back part of the Southwest. You can see what they say about the fact that they have already done it. They will state clearly that they believe that in large measure they have already taken back parts of the United States and that they have not simply come to the United States and become part of our society, our culture and our political system; they have simply moved theirs with them. There are areas along the Texas border, inside Texas, where there are places called colonias. These are communities that have grown up of illegals, communities often not served by some of the infrastructural services available; they may not have water, but there are thousands and thousands of people living there. And there are places to which law enforcement officials will not go. They are afraid to enter one foot into these colonias because it is so dangerous. So they have a separate community, actually a separate country existing within the United States. They can then claim quite honestly that they have begun to reclaim this country from what they consider to be the outrageous tragedy of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ceded part of what is now the southwest part of the United States to the United States and took it from Mexico. These are claims that these people make. I am not making this up. You can go on their Web site and see it. There is a movement they call Aztlan, Return to Aztlan. Aztlan is a term they use to describe that part of the southwestern United States that they believe should be returned to Mexico or made a separate country in and of itself. This all sounds bizarre to most people, but there are many people out there who are committed to this concept. We see the way they talk about Anglos. If you want to use the word ``racist'' to describe somebody in this debate, it could certainly be used to describe the people who push this kind of separatist agenda. We are making it more difficult to integrate into society and on the other hand making it very easy for people who choose not to integrate into our society. This certainly can be, and I think will be, a major threat to our existence. A recent survey was sent out by the Republican National Congressional Committee. We all get these surveys; the Democratic National Committee does exactly the same thing. They send you out a questionnaire. They say, what do you think are the big issues or what do you think about these big issues? Send this back. They usually ask, send it back with a check. It was interesting because Phyllis Schlafly, the head of Eagle Forum, got one of these questionnaires. She writes in a column that was picked up by the Copley News Service. She says, ``Whoever produced the survey must have the same world view as inside-the-Beltway policy wonks whose sensitivity to public opinion is bounded by The Washington Post in the morning and Dan Rather in the evening. They are clueless about what grassroots America thinks. Out of the 54 detailed questions sorted into 13 different issues, there was only one about border security and immigration. The lone question appears at the bottom of the page titled Foreign Affairs. There is a section on homeland security but it contains no mention of border security or immigration. I'm going to help the Republican Congressional Committee by providing a list of 20 questions for which the answers would be helpful to party leaders.'' I would suggest to the party, both parties, if they are going to send out questionnaires, they should ask some of the questions Mrs. Schlafly puts forward here. Number one. Do you favor President Bush's plan to give amnesty to undocumented aliens, putting people who violate our laws in line ahead of those who lawfully apply for entry? What do you think the answer to that would be? Do you favor the repeal of Senator Kennedy's diversity visa lottery which admits 50,000 aliens per year, mostly from non-Western countries, including countries that sponsor terrorism? What do you think the answer to that would be? How do you think that would come back from most Americans? Should the U.S. State Department stop issuing visas in countries that sponsor terrorism? Oh, gee, let me think about that one for a while, Phyllis. How should I answer that one? Do you favor closing our borders to undocumented aliens, illegal drugs, and contagious diseases by whatever means necessary, including electronic fences and National Guard troops? Mr. Speaker, I will include this article in its entirety for the Record.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to urge passage of H.R. 1577, a bill that would name the visitors' center in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona for Kris Eggle, a park ranger who lost his life in the line of duty. I want to thank the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra), who has worked tirelessly with me on this legislation, and also Senator McCain, who is carrying the bill in the other body. I would also like to thank Chairman Radanovich and Chairman Pombo for their work on the bill and allowing it to be brought to the floor for consideration today. Mr. Speaker, Kris Eggle was a brilliant young park ranger in one of the most beautiful units of the National Park System when he was killed last summer by a drug smuggler who had crossed into the United States after committing two murders in Mexico. Last August, Kris and three U.S. Border Patrol officers responded after Mexican police reported that two armed fugitives had fled across the border into the U.S. A Border Patrol helicopter directed Eggle and the other officers to where the suspects had abandoned their vehicle. Kris pursued them on foot, apprehending one of the suspects before he was killed. Kris was 28 years old. I have personally visited Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on numerous occasions. I also had the opportunity is one way to put it, I guess, the duty, and I certainly accepted that, to go down to Arizona and go to Kris' funeral and speak briefly at his funeral. It was a very moving event, a very emotional event as one can imagine with all of his colleagues and friends there in attendance. The area is certainly one of the most beautiful units in the National Park System. It is, unfortunately, also one of the most dangerous. According to the Fraternal Order of Police, it is a magnet for illegal aliens and drug smugglers. Some 200,000 illegal border-crossers and 700,000 pounds of drugs were intercepted at the park last year, a fact that rangers like Kris who at this very moment are patrolling the vast and remote expanses of Organ Pipe know all too well. Kris, like many BLM, Park Service and Forest Service law enforcement officers, was on the frontlines of a battlefield we pay far too little attention to. He gave his life in service to this country. We should all be proud of his heroism. We should not forget. By passing this bill today, I hope we can both memorialize Kris' personal sacrifice to this Nation and remind the American people of the perils faced and sacrifices made by those who work each day to patrol the parks, refuges and forests, particularly those located along our increasingly dangerously porous international borders.