Tom Tancredo

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, every year or so for the last several years there has been an attempt to bring something before the body and, in fact, it has come before the body and it is referred to as amnesty, sometimes an extension of 245(i), or that is the technical way of explaining it. But nonetheless, it is always a process, a desire on the part of people here and maybe even in the administration to grant amnesty to people who are living here illegally, that is, to reward people who have broken our laws by coming into the United States without our permission. It is a bad idea, and so far the Congress of the United States has failed to go along with it, thank goodness. So what has happened in the last several months really is that a new tactic has been applied here, a new strategy has been developed. Unfortunately, I think even with the agreement of the administration, something else is happening in order to accomplish exactly the same thing. Instead of now passing a bill through the House of Representatives simply granting amnesty to everyone who is living here illegally and rewarding them for that behavior, there is another thing that is going on, and what is happening is this: foreign nations hand out to their nationals something called the Matricula Consular. That is what it is referred to by the State Department and by our government. It is a card. It is an I.D. card. Foreign governments now have every right to give their nationals any kind of identification that they want to. But what is odd and what has happened in the last several months is that the government of Mexico has charged its consular officials here in the United States with the responsibility of going out and actually lobbying State and local governments to get them to accept this matricula consular card from their nationals who are living here illegally, because, of course, that card has only one purpose. If you are in the United States of America, if you are a national from a foreign country who is here and if you are here legally, you have some documentation to that effect. We have given you a green card. We have given you a passport. Whatever it is, you have documentation from the United States that you are here legally. If you are here illegally, you need some sort of identification, and that is what this card provides. Recognizing that, and recognizing that they cannot get amnesty through the Congress, they have begun to go to State and local governments all over the United States, lobbying them to get them to accept this card. They have done it to the banking industry, and the banks have been all too happy to go along with it, looking at their bottom line, looking at profits, even over the security of the Nation, because there is nothing secure about these cards. There is no way to guarantee that the person holding the card is who in fact that card says he is. In fact, we have already arrested people in this country carrying three or four of these identification cards. Their picture is on them, but different names on each card. They are easily fraudulently developed. So the idea that they have some sort of advantage because they have a secure card is ridiculous. Beyond that, it is again attempting to do exactly the same thing we did not do in the Congress, and that is to give everybody amnesty. Because if you can use this matricula consular card to obtain bank accounts, to get your kids in school, to get housing from the housing authority in their area, get your driver's license, get your library card, everything that a citizen of this country can use their own identification for, if you can do that using this matricula consular card given to you by a foreign government, then of course there is no reason to actually push for amnesty. You will have achieved it. Everyone living in the United States of America illegally, up to 20 million people, will have this card given to them by their government. By the way, it is now just Mexico and Honduras and I think there are five other countries in South and Central America providing this card now. What is to say that other countries would not demand exactly the same thing from the United States? Why would the government of Syria not say that they are going to give people living here in the United States illegally this card? How would we tell them that they cannot do that or we will not accept it? Not only that, we have found the administration, just a little bit ago, we found the regs that have been promulgated by the Department of Treasury now allow the banks to accept these cards. So our own administration, our own government is in league with the governments of these foreign countries who have given these cards to their nationals living illegally in the United States. Our own government is helping these people violate our own laws. That is the truth of the matter. That is an abomination, and that is something we should not allow to go forward.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Madam Speaker, I rise tonight to bring to the attention of the body an addition to the list of homeland heroes that we periodically bring forward to focus a little attention on because these folks face an incredible task. They have been waging a battle on their own property and their open land for quite a number of years now. I simply believe that it is deserving of our attention. Tonight I want to talk about Larry and Toni Vance. These are homeland heroes residing near Douglas, Arizona. Larry Vance lives only one mile from the Arizona border and three miles west of the border town and port of entry of Douglas. Larry is the son of a legal Mexican immigrant. He and his wife Toni have lived in the area for 29 years. The Vance family has seen many changes in that nearly 30 years that they have lived a mile from the border. Among the changes they have witnessed is the character of the illegal aliens crossing their land. In the 1970s and 1980s, they told us when we were visiting down there not too long ago, there were very few drug smugglers, that most groups coming across their land were small, three or four or five people; that they were polite and often asked to stop for directions or ask for water. The Vances were friendly and accommodating. There were periods during the late 1970s and early 80s when bandits posed a real danger to the residents along the border and burglaries were common. The Vance home was burglarized twice. There was a crackdown on the border crossings, the border patrol was beefed up; and the crime problem was brought under control. But in the mid-1990s they noticed that groups of illegal trespassers were getting larger and that there were many more of them. By 1997, the Vance family was seeing a daily pattern of 20 groups of 20 or more people passing through at all hours of the day and night. I want to say here that this is something that we heard over and over again while we were visiting around the Douglas, Arizona, area, that is, that something is changing, something is happening in the character of the immigrants coming through, illegal immigration into this country. It is certainly not a pleasant thing for the people who live in the area. The groups were not only men. Now they were women and children and also sometimes pregnant women and elderly people. Groups were coming through their property so close to the house that they could not sleep at night because the dogs would bark so much. In fact, the dogs literally would lose their voice, become hoarse, I suppose, is one way to say it, from barking night after night. In September of 1999, his two dogs were poisoned, the Vances' two dogs were poisoned. One of them eventually died. Bandits from across the border preyed on helpless illegal aliens that were crossing. They robbed them, they beat them, they raped them. The screams of the victims were often heard across the desert at night. The Vances had to install a high chain link fence around their house and wrought iron window guards. Such measures were unheard of in rural Arizona until the mid-1990s, and it is traceable to the rising crime from illegal aliens crossing their land. The illegal aliens often asked for rides to Tucson or Phoenix, and on several occasions Larry Vance was offered $300 to $500 to transport people to Phoenix. The Vances' horses often escaped and had to be chased the next day because their fences were knocked down or cut. Three years ago, he quit trying to keep horses; it became so difficult and expensive to keep the fences repaired. Larry Vance used to keep water troughs filled for the wildlife, but he cannot do that anymore because the illegal aliens constantly break the water lines. They do not merely drink the water. That would be okay. In fact, oftentimes I have seen where these ranchers along the border would actually put out cups, hang a cup along the water trough and along the water well for people to use themselves. But unfortunately they do not just take the cup and drink, now they destroy the water lines. The environmental damage to their land is tremendous. Trash is left in huge heaps and left everywhere. Both cattle and wildlife are killed because they eat the plastic bags and other trash. Traffic accidents caused by illegal aliens chasing other vehicles or just careening into a ditch have become regular occurrences. Many local residents have been killed by crashing with rampaging cars and trucks driven by illegal aliens fleeing across the border. A young father of two children was killed in such an accident just a short time ago. In the weeks and months immediately following the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, there was a dramatic decrease in the flow of illegal aliens across the land. The ports of entry at Nogales, Naco, and Douglas had been strengthened and more border patrol agents added to the ranks. But by mid-2002, the flow had resumed. The groups merely went around the ports of entry and came across the miles of unguarded fence that opened onto private lands. I often talk about the very peculiar and ironic view that we had from a helicopter when we were flying over this area, this area he is talking about here, Nogales, where there is a port of entry and there are large numbers of cars all lined up trying to come into the United States at that port of entry. We have got all these guards stationed where the cars come through, at these ports of entry; but you can, of course, see for many miles there, because it is just flat desert land, you can fly for a couple of miles either side of that port of entry and see people coming across at their will, driving cars right through the desert, walking across; but, of course, right there at the port of entry, they are checking IDs and all that sort of thing. It is ironic to say the least. It is a microcosmic look, if you ask me, of the entire system, of the entire problem. The groups merely went around the ports of entry, as I say. By late 2002, the drug smuggling had risen dramatically and marijuana-laden trucks crossed the border regularly in the area far away from the ports of entry but right near Larry and Toni Vance's home. During December of 2002 alone, there were 41 reported incidents of drug seizures. We can only imagine how many trucks got through the border patrol and made it to Phoenix and Los Angeles and elsewhere. The lives of ranchers like Larry Vance and his wife, Toni, have been radically altered in the last 10 years because their government, their own government, has failed to protect them and their property from the invasion across their land. Invasion is exactly what this is. That is the proper term to use to describe what is happening on the border and what these people along the border are facing. As I say, the Vances are just one of many couples, one of many families that we visited, that we became acquainted with just a month or two ago down on that border. I determined at that point in time that it would be important to bring their story to this body and to the Nation, because frankly, Madam Speaker, not many people know about them. Not many people beyond their immediate family and the immediate area around Douglas know of the Vances. But they should know, because these people are truly in a war zone. They are fighting a war and they feel like they have been abandoned, abandoned by their own government. And, in fact, they have. I could not bring them good news when I was down there. I could not say to them, not to worry, the government is going to come to your rescue. The Federal Government is going to do what it promises it should do and what it promises to do for every American citizen, and, that is, to protect their lives and property. I wish I could tell them that. I cannot do that in all candor. I cannot say that. Because this government has chosen to ignore the Vances, ignore all of the families, all of the homeland heroes that I have brought to the attention of the body over the last several weeks. They have chosen to ignore the millions of people in this country who plead with us, plead with Members of Congress, to do something about illegal immigration, to try to stem the flow of illegal immigration into the country, to try to get a hold of this problem. Not to slam the door to people, not because anyone is doing this or is concerned about the issue from racial lines or any of the ugly aspects of the immigration debate. Certainly there are people like that on both sides out there. You can go to the Web sites on both sides of this issue and find people who are racially motivated. I guarantee you it is on both sides of this debate. Racism can be a factor. It is not what motivates people like the Vances, I say, Mr. Vance himself, the son of a legal Mexican immigrant. He is devoted to his land. He is devoted to the country. He is devoted to the United States of America. He believes in the United States. He believes in the rule of law. All he asks is that the law be enforced, especially in his area, that his property be protected from this invading force. Is that too much to ask, I wonder. I do not think so. I only wish the public officials of this Nation had as much courage as the Vance family. We need to follow their example and take our responsibilities seriously. We need to gain control of our borders so citizens like the Vances can live their lives free of this constant threat. Madam Speaker, I am going to go on to another aspect of this discussion, beyond the Vances and the homeland heroes; and I want to talk a little bit about one other aspect of this whole immigration dilemma that we face. We have tried to break down the discussion of the immigration debate into several component parts. Over the weeks I have come to the floor of the House with a discussion of one particular part of the immigration dilemma or debate. I have talked about the national security implications of open borders, of the porous borders that we now have, the fact that people can and do come into this country at their will, some of them to do great harm to the United States. It is to the credit of many of our agencies, many of the law enforcement agencies that are devoted to the task of protecting America that some events have not already occurred with people who have come into this country illegally for the purpose, as I say, of doing us great harm. But we have a significant national security problem because of open borders and because of our unwillingness as a Nation to actually secure our own borders. That was the first night that I focused on that. And then we talked about the cost to the Nation, the infrastructural costs to the Nation of massive immigration. I talked about the fact that there are hospitals all over the Southwest that are going broke. I talked about the fact that hundreds of billions of dollars are being expended by citizens of this country through the health care process in order to provide health care for illegal immigrants into the country. Sometimes situations occur where we actually see ambulances coming up to the ports of entry carrying people who need help and they are waved into the United States, go to a hospital, obtain the help they need, and then they go back to Mexico and, of course, pay no bills. I talked about the infrastructural costs of housing, of schools, of highways, of imprisonment. Upwards of 25 percent of the population in Federal prisons are noncitizens. There is an enormous cost to massive immigration into the country, both legal and illegal. People suggest that it is of benefit to the country to have massive immigration and that it is economically beneficial, that these people pay a lot of taxes and that they do jobs no one else would do and so our economy prospers. In reality, the costs of immigration are far greater than the contributions in terms of either the labor or certainly the taxes that are paid. Another thing that I talked about was the damage to the environment. I mentioned a little bit in my discussion here tonight about the Vances, the amount of trash that despoils the land in this area, where people are coming through by the hundreds of thousands, in fact, over time millions of people crossing the border on foot, sometimes, of course, in an automobile simply driving off the road. We could see it time and time again where people drove off the road right into the middle of the desert, right off the desert floor. Those tracks will not go away for generations. Not in my lifetime, anyway. We can see from the air where the footpaths go on and on and on, and they spread out like cobwebs over the land where people come walking across that land, thousands of feet, hundreds of thousands of feet, millions of feet, plodding the ground in areas that are quite pristine, and they destroy the environment. They affect the migration pattern of animals in the area, of endangered species. They deposit trash in huge amounts. They congest in these areas called pickup sites where people dispose of the trash they have been carrying to get ready to be picked up by the next form of transportation, usually a car or a truck, moving them into the interior of the United States, into a city in the United States away from the rural areas where they are congregated. But where they congregate in these pickup sites, the trash problem is enormous. I am going to talk about a little bit later and show something that we found in one of these trash sites, but there is that aspect, the environmental damage to the land. I talked last week about the culture, about the danger immigration, massive immigration, poses to the culture and especially because it is connected, massive immigration is connected unfortunately with something happening in the United States. The sort of cult of multiculturalism is the best way to describe what is going on here, where we teach our children that there is nothing unique about the United States or Western civilization and if there is anything unique, it is uniquely bad, that there are no aspects of Western civilization worth mimicking. We tell our children they should not say the Pledge of Allegiance in schools. We ban it. We attempt to erase any sort of semblance of patriotism, any commitment to the idea of America, and I talked about the implications of such a phenomenon, the very serious implications of this combination of massive immigration into the country, both legal and illegal, combined with the cult of multiculturalism. Tonight I want to talk about another aspect, and that aspect is the attack on citizenship that is represented by massive immigration into this country, especially illegal immigration into the country. It is an attack on the concept of citizenship. That is, I suppose, the best way for me to describe my concern. There have been several very good books written about this and a lot of articles. I will quote liberally from one book in particular by Georgie Anne Geyer. It is called ``Americans No More,'' and, Mr. Speaker, I certainly suggest it to anyone who wants an interesting read on this particular subject. We start out talking about the importance of citizenship. Does it matter? Does the idea of citizenship matter? Is it an important element of our society, of any society? Citizenship is more than just banding together for protection against enemies. Citizenship particularly as it has evolved throughout the Western world, as Georgie Anne said, is the unique and ennobling story of the post-feudal modern relationship of the individual human to the state, of the state to the individual, and of the human being to his fellow man. It is a dignified component of respect, responsibility, even friendship and love. Citizenship I think is important. We are seeing everywhere, however, that the whole concept of citizenship is being attacked, as I say. It is being eroded by a variety of actions, by a variety of different kinds of laws that are being adopted, by States and localities and certainly even by this body. It is being eroded by the aggressive actions of other nations. I want to talk about one specific aspect of this. There is today a card that is being used by several governments distributed to their nationals, to their citizens and their nationals, and it is the Matricular Consular. It is a card given out by foreign governments to their people. It is an identification card that is provided by a foreign government to their nationals. Interestingly, this is not a new phenomenon. It has been available for a long time, but only recently have governments realized that it can be used, this process, this idea of the Matricular Consular, can be used as a way of avoiding and getting around the roadblock that the Congress of the United States has presented in the form of an opposition to amnesty, to amnesty for all people living here who came in illegally, which is an assault on citizenship as far as I am concerned. The desire of many people, Mr. Speaker, the desire of many people even in this Congress, is to eventually eliminate anything that would distinguish a citizen of the country from someone who is not a citizen of the country. How do we do that? We do that by providing all of the benefits of citizenship to people who are simply here, to people who are residents, and pretty soon it simply becomes impossible to tell the difference. We just do not know, and that is the desired goal of many people, foreign governments, and the Government of Mexico is heavily involved in this process, certainly Members of the Congress of the United States. Even others I think in the administration want to push this concept that there is nothing that really should distinguish an American citizen from someone who is here ``illegally'' or someone who is here legally but not a citizen. Eventually they want to reach a point where there is nothing that distinguishes any of those people from each other, and so one of the things that has happened is that they begin to push this Matricular Consular. Here is how it works. It is interesting. I have to give them credit. This was a smart move on the part of the Government of Mexico now being followed by four or five others, most recently Honduras. As I say, every government is allowed to do whatever they want, to provide their citizens with whatever kind of I.D., identification, that they want; but only recently have they found out that this can be used to advance the whole concept of amnesty or of the elimination of a distinguishment of citizenship. By giving the Matricular Consular, this I.D. card, to all of their nationals now living in the United States illegally, and frankly that is the only type of person that would actually need the Matricular Consular or this card from the Government of Mexico and four or five other South American/Central American countries. The only people in this country, I repeat, the only people in this country who need a form of identification provided by some other country is someone living here illegally because if they are here legally they have a document that the United States gave them, a visa, green card, or a passport given to one by the Nation that they came from. But they have something. They have an I.D. given to them, and that is a legitimate form of identification. They do not need the Matricular Consular, but they are now handing them out in the thousands. One can go to almost every Mexican consulate in America, the 40 some Mexican consulates in America, and one will usually see a line of people sometimes around the block. This is just recently happening because they are now handing out the cards to people who are here illegally; then the Mexican consulate goes out and lobbies States, cities, police departments, school districts, lobbies them to get them to accept the Matricular Consular for the provision of services as identification, and they have been quite successful. Scores of cities have done this. Many, maybe in the hundreds, police departments have agreed to accept the Matricular Consular as an identification. We have already, by the way, arrested people carrying multiple Matricular Consulars with their picture on it but with a whole bunch of different names, easily forged of course, but the desire is to establish a different immigration policy from the one that the United States Federal Government runs and to get a local government, a city or a State, to accept these cards. It is happening all over. In my own State of Colorado, four cities, Denver, Colorado Springs, Glendale, and Boulder all agreed to accept the Matricular Consular for the provision of services and for identification purposes. Police departments all said yes, sure, we will do it. Some of them, not knowing exactly what the implications of this were, looking at it in a very short-sighted way, saying we need something to identify these people, not realizing that once they use that, once they say that we have accepted this form of I.D. that is provided by a foreign government, they have immediately conferred status upon the person who has it, a status that that person does not deserve because that person is here illegally. Colorado, to its credit, was the first State in the Nation, I think just a couple of days ago, I think no longer ago than last week, passed legislation to stop this thing, to say no entity of the State of Colorado, no city, no department in the State of Colorado could accept the Matricular Consular, or what I think the legislation was that they could not accept any card that was not issued by the Federal Government or by the State for purposes of identification. I hope other States do this. I understand that there are at least two other States that are looking at this, and I certainly hope that that legislation will progress. I believe Iowa and Arizona are the other two States that are looking at this. Banks are using these cards to allow people to open up bank accounts. Remember, if one is here illegally they do not have a true Social Security number. I always wonder, when the bank allows someone to open up an account using these Matricular Consular cards for identification purposes, whether or not they are actually listing the Social Security numbers because of course they cannot because they are here illegally. So what happens to the interest on that account? How does that get identified come income tax time? This Matricular Consular is a tool that is being used, as I say, to acquire what they could not get through this Congress, and that is amnesty, and that is a an attack on citizenship. It is part of the movement to eliminate the whole concept of citizenship. Mexico and the Mexican government, as I say, has tasked these consular officials, and we have tons of documentation to show where Mexican consular officials have gone out to lobby. Let me ask the Members, Mr. Speaker, what do they think would happen if an American consular official would go to an official in the State of Chihuahua in Mexico and say, ``Look, we need your help in allowing people from the United States to come down here and violate the law?'' We would like you to help us out. Would you please accept an ID given by our government? Even though people are here illegally in Mexico, we would like you, nonetheless, to accept our ID for all the services that might be rendered to an illegal American citizen living in Mexico.'' What do you think would happen? First of all, the Mexican Government would throw you out on your ear. The Governor of Chihuahua is, by the way, now visiting, as I understand it, the Governor of Colorado to get him to be a little more lenient with regard to the immigration issues. That is another interesting aspect of this. We see all this communication now between the Government of Mexico and State governments, this ongoing lobbying activity with States and localities, on immigration issues. Immigration is supposed to be uniquely a Federal responsibility; yet because of the fact that they cannot achieve their goals through this body, they are taking and doing the next best thing. And they admit this. They have stated on many occasions, Mexican officials have stated quite publicly that their desire is to obtain amnesty for, obtain all of the benefits of citizenship, for the people who are living here illegally. Even though they cannot do it through this body, they will do it through things like the advancement of the Matricula Consular being accepted all over the place. But as I say, what do you think would happen? First of all, the Mexican Government would demand an apology from the State Department for having an American consular official go down to Mexico, or any other country on the planet, and try to lobby them, lobby their local government leaders, to get them to help people violate the national law. That is exactly what is happening here. Yet we have said nothing to the Government of Mexico. We have filed no protest. I brought this up to the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, in a hearing on the Committee on International Relations on which I sit, and he said he was concerned. He was concerned. He did say that. That is as far as it has gone. I want the American people to know, Mr. Speaker, that apparently the policy of this government is to allow the law of the land to be eroded; and in order to erode the law of this land, they conspire, our own government conspires with foreign governments to help them lobby State and local communities to obtain what they cannot obtain through the Congress of the United States. The California Assembly last Monday approved legislation that would allow legal and illegal immigrants from Mexico to obtain city and county services by displaying the identification card issued by the Mexican consulate. Under the terms of the legislation, these cards would enable illegal aliens to do everything from acquiring a marriage or business license, borrowing books from the public library, securing senior citizen or student discounts or public transportation, and on and on and on and on. According to a recent news article, few of the 5 million undocumented Hispanic immigrants had bank accounts because they lacked sufficient identification. In late 2001 that changed for Mexicans when banks began accepting an ID issued by Mexican consulates, the Matricula Consular. Almost 2 million Mexicans have already obtained the card, largely because it is a key into the banking system. Some immigrants arrive with $20,000 in cash, according to this article. Bank of America often sends staff out to ply those waiting for the Matricula Consular with brochures and coffee. The banks of the country are aiding and abetting people who are here violating the law in order to get them to be customers. Interestingly, however, is that banks in Mexico do not recognize the Matricula as legal identification. It is far too easy to forge, for one thing. The Dominican consulate is planning a move that it says they hope will ease some of the lives of some of the Dominican immigrants, because they are going to start issuing the card. They are going to start issuing Matricula Consular. With this ID, illegal immigrants would find it easier to open bank accounts, they say, and identify themselves to the police. There are tens of thousands of illegal Dominicans in New York City and Chicago alone, for example. The longer the government waits to develop a coherent policy on immigration, the longer we postpone efforts to improve border security, the more frequently we will see thinly disguised attempts at policy- making like the Matricula Consular cards emerge. That is certainly what is going to happen, because we do have a tendency to try to ignore this issue. In a way, I can understand why there is a desire to ignore it, because they are accomplishing their goals by ignoring it. By not dealing with it here, by this body refusing to deal with it, then I assure you, the people who support the concept of amnesty and the people who oppose the concept of citizenship will achieve their goals. What else are we doing in this country to attack the whole concept of citizenship? Well, recently both the State legislatures in Virginia and Maryland passed legislation that would give in-state tuition to illegal immigrants; but they were met with vetoes, at least in Maryland. I do not know for sure about Virginia. Perhaps they have also vetoed the legislation. In fact, what happened in Virginia is this, that they passed a bill to stop anyone from providing illegal immigrants with in-state tuition, and that bill was vetoed, it is true. Unfortunately, I should say, it is true. The issue has come to the State of Colorado also. A few States, California, Texas, New York and Utah, have already granted in-state tuition to children of illegal immigrants, this in violation, by the way, of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act. It says specifically that States cannot offer in-state tuition to illegal residents, unless they also offer it to all legal residents, regardless of what State they come from. So, Mr. Speaker, a parent today paying out-of-state tuition prices for his or her daughter or son to go to school in California, Texas, New York or Utah, could, I believe, file a lawsuit on the basis of our 1996 Immigration Reform Act if California, Texas, New York, and Utah do not extend that same privilege to everybody. I am an American citizen, a citizen of the State of Colorado, a legal resident; but I cannot send my child to those four States and get in-state tuition. Unless they approve it for everyone, then they should not approve it for anyone. That is the law of the land. That is the 1996 act that we passed. But these States are doing it. I would suggest, Mr. Speaker, that anyone out there who is in fact paying out-of-state tuition for their kids in these places should think about this very seriously and consider the possibility that they may have some legal action against these States to regain the tuition that they have spent. But this is another attack on the whole concept of citizenship. If in fact you can provide all of the services, all of the benefits, all of the things that the California legislation provides, cards that would enable illegal aliens to do everything, from acquiring marriage licenses, business licenses, borrowing books, securing senior citizen discounts, getting all kinds of social services, if you can do that, if you can send your child to school in any State in the Nation, or at least these four, and several others are proposing it, and get in-state tuition, if you can get driver's licenses, which are now being proposed for illegal immigrants, do you not see, there is little if anything left that distinguishes you from a person who is here legally. If you can obtain all that by coming into the country illegally, then why in the world would you go through the brain damage and the expense of doing it the right way? Why would you spend the money or the time or the energy? You can get everything else, because, after a while, citizenship will not matter. It will be of no consequence. And that is the desired goal of the people who support this kind of State legislation and who refuse to take it up in this body. Luckily, there are some Members of this body who have been steadfast in their opposition to this kind of malarky. They have been steadfast supporters of immigration reform. They were laboring in this vineyard before I ever came to this body. One of them has joined me here this evening, my friend, the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher). I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I am flattered, and I am humbled by my colleague's kind words. I sincerely appreciate it. I have said this over and over again, because I know the gentleman feels this way, I know there are many other Members of the Congress who feel this way, and that is that massive immigration, combined with this sort of radical multiculturalism that permeates our society, this is so dangerous. It will not only determine what kind of a Nation we are in the future, that is to say divided, Balkanized, or united, it will determine whether we will be a Nation at all. Those are the stakes that I think are on the table. Therefore, I feel compelled to come here night after night, to stand up in any venue I am allowed to, and talk about this issue. I cannot think of anything that has more of a potential detrimental impact on the Nation than this massive uncontrolled immigration, combined, as I say, with this cult of multiculturalism. Because it does conspire to make, for instance, a severe and very, very dangerous attack on citizenship itself, on the Nation itself. We talked about the various things that people are allowed to do now and that governments, State and local governments, are allowing to do who are living here illegally who are breaking our laws. And I mentioned that if you can come to the United States illegally, get your children educated for free, which you certainly can, K through 12, if you can now get your children educated at the state institution of higher education for in-state tuition, if you can obtain all the social services, all of benefits, if you can go to the hospital, get treatment for your ailments, get treatment for your children, get health care paid for, if you can use public housing get subsidized housing, if you can get all of those benefits, then there are very few things left that distinguish you as the citizen. One of those things is the ability and the right to vote. But guess what, this right to vote, this right to vote which we for a couple of centuries anyway held so dear, this right to vote is also being now threatened. And it is added, I should say, that right to vote is being added to the list of things that people can obtain here in the United States even if they are not citizens. In 1991, Tacoma Park, Maryland, not far from here, voted to give non- U.S. citizens the right to vote in city elections. Several others by the way, several other cities around here have followed suit. Every time I say this people say no, that is impossible. That is not true. No, it is quite true. There are cities throughout the country, especially on the East Coast here, not too surprisingly I guess, that say if you are a resident of the city, simply a resident of the city, show us your utility bill, show us your driver's license, you can vote. Your citizenship will not be a question. Now, there was a former state delegate in Maryland by the name of Thomas Mooney. He wrote an article in the Prince George's Journal. He was on the opposite side of this vote. He said, ``Never have I heard of anything so ridiculous, so devoid of merit and so blatantly anti- American as the recent proposal to allow illegal aliens the opportunity to vote in city elections. If I went to Mexico or El Salvador I would not expect to be involved in their electoral process. I am an American citizen. My allegiance is to the United States. Voting is much more than supporting one candidate over another. It is a positive affirmation of our system of government. It is an act of involvement, a rite of passage for defining American citizenship. It is a vital piece of our common culture. It is under intense, strident attack by the Hate America First crowd. By allowing aliens to vote we demean that act which legitimizes our government and is one of the essential unifiers of our society.'' Absolutely true. Now, Tacoma Park, as I say, was not the only one, has not been the only one who has ever done this. Even in the late 1960s a radical move occurred in New York City where the decentralization of the New York City schools, all parents, legal or illegal residents, were given the right to vote in 32 community school board elections. In New York City citizens were voting not only in elections for school boards, but, interestingly, on policy boards that were in charge of distributing anti-poverty funds to community groups. In Chicago not too long ago a television station there, WLS-TV, did a comprehensive investigation of illegal aliens and the vote. It was a 5- part series in the early 1980s. They found that illegal voting was rampant. People were questioned on air and asked about it and they all said, yeah, sure, I vote. Robert Baskin states, ``Carlos is a citizen of Mexico, but he had no trouble registering to vote in Chicago.'' In California there have been bills up before the state legislature to allow anyone to vote. Time and again we have seen where people have actually set up stalls and set up tables in parking areas in California especially that are frequented by people who are here illegally, day centers where people come to get jobs and things of that sort. They set up these tables to register illegal aliens in parking lots and then tell them how to vote. They complete absentee ballots by hundreds and thousands and give them to illegal aliens to sign them and send them in. They transport van loads of illegal aliens to multiple voting locations in various names. This has gone on for quite some time. Again, when you add it to all of the factors, when you add it to all of the things that I have said people can obtain by simply being here and not necessarily being a citizen, you can see why there is concern, why there is great concern for what is happening to the United States of America. Theodore Roosevelt said in his speech on true Americanism in 1894, ``We have no room for any people who do not act and vote simply as Americans and as nothing else. We demand that all citizens shall have fair treatment in every way. They all alike shall have the rights guaranteed them. The mighty tide of immigration to our shores has brought in its train much of good and much of evil. And whether the good or evil shall predominate depends mainly on whether these newcomers do or do not throw themselves heartily into our national life, cease to be aliens and become Americans like the rest of us. But where immigrants or sons of immigrants do not heartily and in good faith throw in their lot with us, but cling to the speech, the customs, the ways of life, and the habits of thought of the nation which they have left, they hereby harm both themselves and us. If they remain alien elements, unassimilated, and with national interests separate from ours, they are mere obstructions to the current of our national life and get no good from it themselves, and they are who really suffer the most.'' ``It is an immense benefit to the immigrant to change him into an American citizen. To bear the name of American is to bear the most honorable title. From his own standpoint it is beyond question that the wise thing for the immigrant is to become thoroughly Americanized. Moreover, from our standpoint we have the right to demand it. We freely extend the hand of welcome and of good fellowship to every man no matter what his creed or birthplace who comes here honestly, intent on becoming a good United States citizen like the rest of us. But we have the right and it is our duty to demand that he indeed shall become so. Above all, the immigrant must learn to talk and think and be the United States.'' Not too long ago I had an opportunity to have a breakfast meeting with a Bishop Gomez, Bishop of the Catholic Church in the Denver archdiocese. And he did not agree with my concerns about immigration and about what is happening in the country with the lack of interest in citizenship and the attack on citizenship. And he said to me, Congressman, I do not know why you are so concerned about this, he said. He said, Most of the people coming here from Mexico today do not want to be Americans. And I said, Well, of course, Bishop, that is exactly the problem, is that they do not want to be and, by and large, they are not coming to be, we are witnessing, by the way, something else. Even people who are here legally are choosing not to become citizens at a far higher rate than ever before. Two-thirds of the people living here legally but who are not citizens of the United States have chosen not to pursue the citizenship route. That is another new phenomenon. And, again, I guess I could say, why should they? What is the benefit of citizenship? Why should anybody go through it? Everything obtainable under citizenship can be obtained if you simply walk across these borders. It is a dangerous thing. There is a celebration for the Hispanic community in the United States referred to as Cinco de Mayo. It was over the weekend. It is an enjoyable celebration many people attend and certainly a large number of Hispanics in Colorado attend and enjoy it. I was listening to a radio talk show and they were talking to several of the vendors on the street. I thought it was interesting the vendor who was doing the biggest interest at Cinco de Mayo in Denver, according to this radio program on National Public Radio so it certainly had to be accurate, right, but the stall that was doing the most business was the stall selling Mexican flags. And later on that evening I saw a short clip on television show Cinco de Mayo and they were, of course, waving thousands and thousands of flags. All Mexican flags. I did not see a single American flag there. Now, there is every reason to be prideful in the country that you are from. I certainly am proud of my Italian heritage. I do not wave the Italian flag on any particular holiday of Italy, and I certainly never would have thought of doing so. And if I did ever put out an Italian flag for some reason, I think I would put out an American flag next to it or above it to show my commitment and loyalty is to the United States. It is just a little thing. It is not a huge thing. You cannot draw a lot of conclusions from it. I thought it was an interesting thing that that was the one stall doing the most business and it was the prominently displayed flag during this celebration. Why should anyone care? We encourage them not to in many ways, not to care about being an American, not to care about the fact that citizenship is a privilege, conferred upon people who have strived to come to the United States, overcome tremendous obstacles, devoted their lives in many cases to attaining that wonderful goal, being so excited when they were able to do so, when they were able to raise their hands and take that oath of allegiance to the United States of America. Interestingly enough, now that oath, even the citizenship ceremony, the INS is letting individual groups, some religious groups, actually determining who will pass the test. They put out little brochures talking about how easy it is to pass the test, so that you do not have to worry anymore. They are not going to ask you any really tough questions. We will give you the tests in your own language. Doing everything possible to simply eliminate anything that is sort of a hardship to becoming an American citizen. Well, I think anything that is given away is not valued. And I think that we should begin to be concerned about where we are going as a Nation, and how massive immigration combined with this multiculturist phenomenon in the United States has the tendency to tear us apart and to do great damage to this country. My friend, the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher), when he stood up he talked about courage and that sort of thing to say these things, but really it is imperative that all of us address these issues. I came across this, and I will just end with this. This is a speech given by Enoch Powell in England, 1968, on the issue of immigration. He said, ]The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred. At each stage in their outset there is room for doubt, for dispute, whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles which are both indisputable and pressing. Once the besetting temptation of all politics is to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future. Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing trouble, and even for desiring trouble. ``If only,'' they love to think, ``if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen.'' Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object are identical. At all events, the discussion of future grave, with effort now avoidable, evils is probably the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it, deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after. I choose to avoid that particular environment. I do not want to have to look back and think, I wonder how this all happened? I wonder what happened to the Nation that I knew? And I do not want to have to try to explain to my children and to my grandchildren that it happened on my watch and that I did nothing, I did absolutely nothing to prevent it. I want to convince them that I tried my best and so I will come back to this well of the House and as long as I am able, on as many occasions as I possibly can, to discuss this topic and to try and get our colleagues and the American people, to get our colleagues to reflect the attitudes and the opinions of the American people, 70 percent of whom agree with everything we are saying here tonight who are asking our own government for help, like this family that I brought to my colleagues' attention earlier and like the millions of others who are seeking to deal with the massive immigration and the negative effects it has had on their lives. The people of this country know there is something wrong. I do not think there is a bigger divide between what the people of this country want and what the government is willing to give them than it is on this immigration issue. So we will do everything we can; and as I say, I certainly appreciate the efforts of those who have labored in this particular environment long before I came here, like my friend, the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher), the gentleman from California (Mr. Gallegly), and others who I know have been sounding this alarm for a long time. I join them in that chorus, and I ask for my colleagues' support.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. The dictionary definition of physiological psychology, a branch, by the way, of physiology, is that it is concerned with the relationship between the physical functioning of an organism and behavior. So I am quite sure that this definition will cover the kinds of folks, the kinds of problems that my colleague from the other side of the aisle has brought to our attention. It is certainly not my intention to discriminate against them. It is simply my intention to make sure that only the children who need help, be it physical or mental, get that help, and they are now being refused that help. We cannot get them into the program. We cannot give them the help they need because of the many kids who are there who should not be there. I sat through many processes that were designed. As a teacher, I sat through the process designed to determine which kids should go into special ed and which kids should not, and I will tell my colleagues everything in that process is designed to push the kid in. Everybody around that table is usually there to say yes, including the parent, who does want an excuse. More often than not, they do want an excuse for the problems they are having, and a lot of problems are behavioral. There are all kinds of kids in our classrooms today who are there in IDEA classrooms and handicapped education because their IQ does not fit their achievement level. But that is not necessarily a handicap and should not be a definition of a handicapping condition. We have title I for this kind of thing. That is the problem, too many put there subjectively. It is not an attempt to discriminate between mental or physical handicap one iota. I assure my colleagues I have a personal concern about those issues. I assure them. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murphy). (Mr. MURPHY asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Norwood).

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Graves).

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. Much of the debate over this particular amendment, I think, we have actually heard over the previous amendment. It goes to the same issue, although this is not a sense of Congress, this is an amendment to the bill. It is designed specifically for the purpose of trying to identify those children who are truly in need of the services that we appropriate money for here, and distinguish them from those children who are not, but who are placed into these programs in ever-greater numbers, thereby diluting the pool of resources available to serve children who are truly in need. This is a problem which has been with us since the beginning of this program. It was hoped it would be addressed in the reauthorization. That did not happen. The reauthorization does, in fact, what the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Kennedy) was asking for a minute ago, and that is emphasize early identification, and I am all for that. I do not believe that will change the problem. If children are being misidentified today, they will be misidentified earlier. That is the real problem, misidentification, not the time at which it happens. The problem is with it intrinsically. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me this time. Currently, 7 percent of all students enrolled in Catholic schools are identified as disabled. Less than 1 percent of them get services. They generate $10 million in revenue for the schools in IDEA. The schools actually get about $78,000 out of that $10 million generated. So when we talk about equity issues and we come to this floor to talk about the needs of all children, please consider the fact that these are children also. They happen to be in a different setting. They happen to be in a school that is not a government school. But that should not determine whether or not they are served. We have time and time again stood on this floor arguing about whether or not we are really talking about children in these bills that we pass for education or whether or not we are just simply trying to support a particular system, a particular way of educating children. Should our concern not simply be about the children? We hear that word bandied about, so often used to describe our motives here, but when it is a child other than the one the government runs, we say they do not deserve it. This is a great amendment. I hope we support it.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to point to a couple of issues that I think deserve our attention. As I do on many occasions, I come here to address the issue of immigration and the reform thereof. I would like to start tonight with a discussion of a couple of people that I met not too long ago when I was on a trip to Arizona, and specifically, to the border area around Douglas, Arizona, and I want to add them to the list of people that we have identified over the last several weeks and months as belonging to who we have described as homeland heroes. They are George and Linda Morin. They own and manage a cattle ranch of 12,000 acres, located only 4 miles from the Arizona/ Mexico border. Their ranch house is only 5.5 miles from the border. They have one son, 26, who lives on the ranch and helps run the business. George Morin's grandfather came to America in 1908 and bought a dairy farm in southern Arizona. He speaks Spanish and has a half brother living in Mexico. After living 54 years in this border region, he knows both sides of the border very well. Beginning in the late 1980's, things began to change along the border, and we heard this refrain often. We heard this same thing from almost everybody we talked to there, and most of the people who live in this area have been living there for generations, and they have witnessed the phenomenon of immigration over that period of time. They have witnessed people coming across the border looking for jobs, people that they have befriended, people they have aided economically, and this has never really been a huge issue for them except in the last 10 or 15 years. George and Linda noticed a steady increase in the number of illegal aliens crossing the border and coming across their land. Over the past 5 or 6 years, this flow has become, as they put it, a flood. They run a large cattle ranch as a family business, and it is a lot of very hard work. Drought, cattle diseases, volatile market prices for beef cattle, all of these make cattle ranching a tough business in the best of circumstances. The massive flood of illegal immigration across the border has brought many more hardships. Among the recent experiences, consider the following: The waterlines that carry water to their cattle have been cut and broken so many times that they have lost count, and again, by the way, this is a complaint that we heard over and over again. Water in this part of the world of course, in this part of the country, is very valuable, and it is something that ranchers depend upon for their existence, frankly, and the people coming across the border, for reasons that are sometimes difficult to explain, oftentimes vandalize these waterlines, vandalize the wells, even though many of the ranchers will leave out cups for these people so they can drink from the well and not do anything to harm it, but they do anyway. The same thing goes for cattle fences. Repairing cut fences is now a routine task, and we saw hundreds of miles of broken-down fences along the border. Electric switches for water pumps are often jammed or vandalized. The Morin ranch has lost 8 cattle in the last year to death by eating plastic trash bags that trespassers drop as they pass through the land. This is also a site that is all too common throughout this particular area. There are occasions throughout the Southwest, and especially in southern Arizona that are referred to as pickup sites. These are places where large numbers of illegal immigrants will gather for the purpose of getting a ride eventually, because these places are often near roads, sometimes highways, but they are often on private land, sometimes on public land, but they are places, as I say, in which large numbers of these folks will gather. When they gather there and they start to undertake the next part of the journey, they discard everything that they have been carrying because the coyotes, the people who bring these people across, tell them that there has to be a lot more room in the trucks so they have to discard everything they have, and they throw everything in these pickup sites. We walk through them now, and they really are similar to large refuse piles, dumps essentially. I have, sometimes not so facetiously, referred to many of our parks in the area, the Cactus Pipe National Park as the Cactus Pipe National Dump because of the way it appears, and the trash is everywhere and these plastic bags are everywhere, and the cattle eat them and die. Trash left behind by the thousands of trespassers are not only dangerous to the cattle that eat it; it is despoiling the land and environment in numerous ways. In one day, Mr. Morin collected 42 syringes left by one group along with discarded drug containers. All of this goes on, by the way, in plain sight. It is something that if the media would pay attention to, certainly there would be an outcry. We wonder why there is not an outcry from groups like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth and various other environmental organizations that often raise Cain about the despoiling of the land, but seldom say a word about this particular problem because of course it is connected with illegal immigration, and therefore a topic not willing to be discussed by these left-wing observations. We wonder how many people are coming across. Do they see these people? Do George and Linda, his wife, see them coming across? How many do they see? Can they actually identify people who are coming across illegally? And of course, that is very possible. Two years ago George Morin woke up to some noise at about 5:30 in the morning. He discovered a virtual army of 600 trespassers walking through his ranch within eyesight of his ranch house. He called the border patrol. They did come this time and loaded 297 people onto buses and took them back to the border patrol station for processing. About half of the 600 got away, scattered to the hills, trails before the border patrol could load them onto buses. Sometimes these folks coming across the land get lost or they are abandoned by the coyotes. Again, these are the people who are paid to bring them into the United States. It is common for ranchers and border patrol agents to hear from a group that their coyote pointed them to the lights in the distance and told them there is Phoenix. Maybe it is Tucson or maybe it is some small town only about 40 miles from the border. One Thanksgiving morning 4 years ago, George and Linda Morin woke up to find about 80 Iranians walking across their property right in front of their house. The border patrol agents who took them into custody said that they had been told by their coyote that they were only 10 miles from San Diego. Only last Thursday, April 24, 90 illegal aliens were caught walking through the grassy expanse of the U.S. Army's Fort Huachuca near Sierra Vista, Arizona. The military police caught them and marched them to the fence where the border patrol loaded them onto vans. One thing that is important to understand is this, as I mentioned earlier, is a new type of phenomenon. We have always had illegal immigrants coming across the line, but we have seldom had this happen in the numbers that we are witnessing today and/or in ways that are so organized. It is no longer just a few people coming across looking for jobs. It is now a very well-organized effort, a very well-organized activity conducted largely by people who have heretofore been involved with drug smuggling into the United States. Because it has become very lucrative, that is why the drug cartels have become interested in this business. They are paid between $1,000 and $1,500 for a Mexican national to come into the United States illegally, but costs for a Middle Easterner or an Asian will get to about $30,000. So there is so much money now in people smuggling that it rivals drug smuggling into the United States in terms of just the sheer volume in both human beings and in dollars. If they are poor and they want to get smuggled into the United States, they do not need to come up with the ongoing price of $1,000 to $1,500 to get the help of professional people, smugglers. One can now be smuggled into the United States on the installment plan. It is happening this moment on a very large scale. It is widely understood by the border patrol and law enforcement agencies in the west. What happens if one gets to Phoenix or Los Angeles or Omaha and do not make their promised payments? Some very bad things happen. Only last week, two illegal aliens who had made it to Phoenix were killed by members of the Mexican gangs that had smuggled them into the country. They were killed because they did not make their mordita payments. This is now a ``travel now, pay later'' business. But if you cannot pay, it is ``travel now, die later.'' Not only have the numbers of nationalities of people coming across the land changed over the last 10 years, but the character of the people and their attitude has also changed. Twenty years ago it was not uncommon to encounter illegal aliens on the ranch who would ask politely for a drink of water or ask for directions. Ranchers were normally cordial and often did not report the trespassers if they were in small groups or posed no immediate threat. In the past decade, this has changed because the groups are larger, more aggressive. Part of this change is due to the increase in drug smuggling. The people who are transporting drugs across the open rangelands are usually armed and dangerous. They do not want any interference, and they will usually take what they want and not ask for it politely. One recent trespasser George Morin encountered was angry because he had been caught and was being turned over to the Border Patrol. He told Mr. Morin, You don't belong here. You are in Mexico, and you don't know it. We are going to take it back and you will be gone. This man is not delusional. He was deadly serious. He was voicing a goal of a small and radical movement within Mexico and the Southwest that looks forward to what it calls ``Reconquista.'' This is the reconquest of the lands Mexico lost to Texas in 1836 and to the United States in the Mexican war of 1846. There is a larger and more persuasive movement that is more powerful and very influential. The changes this movement seeks, in my opinion, pose a threat to our civic and legal institutions that provide the foundation for our freedom. I am talking about the multiculturist movement. This movement is very political and politically correct. It becomes very influential in our universities, our public schools, our foundations and our mass media. The problems raised in this movement go far beyond the immediate concerns presented by illegal immigration; yet the two sets of problems tend to reinforce each other. Many of these problems created by large numbers of illegal immigrants are exacerbated by the diversity movement because of the many proponents welcoming illegal immigration and opposing measures to controlling it. So I want to speak to that issue tonight. Over the past several weeks, I have tried to deal with the issue of immigration reform in a variety of contexts. We started off talking about the problems with porous borders and what that means to the United States, especially in terms of our own national security. We talk about the economic impact of massive immigration of low-skilled, low-wage people. That was another segment. We talked about the environmental damage. We spent 1 hour here talking about just this one aspect of it, the environmental damage that is being done by the literally millions of people coming across our southern borders, both walking and driving through pristine land, destroying some of the most beautiful and important national monuments. All of this, as I say, is happening without the attention that would normally be focused on that kind of activity by the environmental groups in the United States. If it were done any other place, any other way, any other time, you would have hell to pay. The environmental groups would be just going crazy about the fact that we are destroying so much of our natural environment. Yet nothing is said about it here because we are talking about illegal immigration, and nobody wants to touch that subject. This is a chart that describes what is happening in the United States in terms of population growth. By the year 2100, if we do absolutely nothing, if things continue as they are today, if the numbers increase as they are from the sources that they are occurring today, here is what happens. We reach a little over half a billion people in the United States. The fact that we get there via immigration and descendants of immigrants is the important point here. It may be a very good thing. It may be very positive for the United States to have population growth of this nature, so dramatic and so important in terms of many things, including the economy. People talk about the need for growth in the economy, so maybe it is a good thing. Maybe this kind of growth is good. It is important to understand that this growth is not coming as a result of the natural birth rate in the United States; it is coming as a result of immigration. So we have to make a decision as to whether or not this is where we want to be in 2100. Again, this is if it just stays at the same level. This is all U.S. census data here. This is not something we are interpreting. This is where the U.S. Census Bureau tells us we are and where we are going and how we are going to get there. Mr. Speaker, we can go back to the one part we talked about in terms of immigration reform and what this really means in terms of the environment, the impact on the environment. I come from Colorado, and I will tell you that things have changed pretty dramatically in my State over the last several years. The increase in the State's population has been dramatic. All of the infrastructure costs that go along with massive increases in people are, of course, prevalent, and they are to be paid for by the taxpayers of the State of Colorado. This is happening not just in Colorado, but in States all over the Nation. But where is this growth coming from? Again, I want to emphasize, it is not the natural growth rate of the country. It is a growth rate made up of immigration and the descendants of immigrants. Again, this could be what we want. It could be absolutely where we want to be, so that pretty soon it is much more difficult to get through on congested highways, to visit the national parks, to experience that pristine wilderness that we have all enjoyed. But maybe that is all worth it. Maybe giving all of that up, maybe, is worth it, because the economy demands this kind of population growth rate. But what we do not talk about and what I want to focus on tonight is the effect of immigration, of two things, and this is very important to discuss tonight or at least pay some attention to. It is not just immigration that poses a cultural threat to the United States. Heaven knows that this is a Nation of immigrants. We have talked about this over and over again. We are all here because somebody in our past, some grandparents, great grandparents or however far back, decided to leave wherever they were and come here. I do not care if you call yourself a Native American. The reality is somebody many, many, many generations ago came across a land bridge from Asia to what we now call America. So all of us came here as a result of somebody making a decision to leave someplace and come here. This has been a source of great strength for the United States. It is something to be enjoyed. Diversity is a good thing. I am not arguing that point. By the way, this level of immigration, this rate of immigration, is something far greater than anything we have ever experienced in this Nation. It is far greater than what we experienced in the 1900s when in fact my grandparents came here. The numbers are huge. Now, this does not even account for illegal immigration into this country. We talk about the fact that there are, we do not know for sure, maybe between 13 million and 20 million people in the country illegally. That, combined with all the people who have come into the country legally because we have now expanded our immigration and opened our immigration doors wider than ever in the past, all of these things can be positive. I am not saying that we should slam the door to all immigration. Certainly not. But what I am suggesting is it is important for us to review as a Nation the connection between massive immigration into the country and something else we call multi-culturalism, this sort of rabid multi-culturalism. What do I mean by that? Multi-culturalism is a philosophy that permeates our schools and society in so many ways, and it says essentially this: there is nothing unique about American culture. In fact, if there is anything noteworthy about American culture, or Western Civilization, it is that it is bad. It is that it has been a culture developed on the backs of slaves, and that all the people who created the American dream were slave owners, people who came to pillage and rape the land. That is what we teach children about America and that there is nothing unique about America; there is nothing special, there is nothing that we should sort of glom on to and maybe disconnect from in terms of where we came from. This is the problem. This is a very serious problem in this regard. The combination of these two things, massive immigration and this rabid multi-culturalism that tells people there is nothing unique about America, and that if you come here you should probably not only not integrate into our society, but you should in fact keep separate, keep a separate culture and keep a separate language. We go to the extent of spending billions of dollars every year to teach children in our public schools in languages other than English. I think that this is a dangerous phenomenon. I think that we can handle immigration into this country, and always have; and we can do so because people coming into the United States, people coming here were, for the most part, coming from something else and to connect to a new idea. At least that is what my grandparents always said. My grandparents came here around the turn of the 20th century, and I can remember very distinctly my grandmother telling my grandfather all the time, Speak American. Speak American. There was this implied and sometimes not so subtly implied desire on their part to really Americanize themselves. I think of that when I think about a lunch I had not too long ago with a gentleman in Colorado, his name is Gomez, and he happens to be a Catholic bishop. Bishop Gomez asked to have lunch and discuss this issue of immigration, because he knows I am quite concerned about it. He knows I talk about this issue an awful lot here in the Congress of the United States, and he does not agree with me. So I certainly agreed to have lunch with him. He said something that I found very illuminating in the course of our luncheon. He said, Congressman, I don't know why you are so worried about all of this immigration from Mexico, let's say. He said, You know, they don't want to be Americans anyway. I thought that was just an amazing statement. He said, Don't be worried. He thought for some reason or other I was worried that these people were coming into the United States to become Americans, and I did not want them to. Of course, it is exactly the opposite. I explained to him that was exactly why I was worried about massive immigration today. It is a different thing. Mr. Speaker, we have argued about this issue since our Nation's inception. People have come to this floor over the past 200 years to talk about concerns about the newest wave of immigrants from someplace else and how that might affect America or whatever, and I do not mean to suggest that these old arguments hold water. I am not talking about the simple fact of immigration, although it has, as I say, implications. Regardless of whether or not it was connected to the multi-culture issue, it has implications for many things just because of the numbers, which are far different than it ever was before. But regardless of that, there is something new that is happening, and that is what I keep harping on, that is what I keep trying to bring to the attention of anyone who will listen, that there is a different immigration pattern today, and it is, as Bishop Gomez accurately described. He said, They don't want to be Americans. That was his comment, an exact quote: ``They don't want to be Americans,'' so I should not worry. They are only coming here for economic reasons, to escape poverty, the same reason my grandparents came, for the large part, and many others, to escape poverty and the blight of their history and the past. But I am telling you that there was this other aspect to that immigration of past years, this one thing that said, I want to disconnect from that old way, from those old ideas, from that bankrupt history. I want to connect to something brand new in the United States. I wanted to become part of it. This is showing itself in a number of ways. When my grandparents came to this country, they no more would have thought about the possibility of having a dual citizenship status than they would fly. They really wanted, as I say, to disconnect from the old country. They came to the United States, and they took an oath of allegiance, and they swore to end any allegiance to any foreign power or potentate. That is the same oath that people take today, but something else is happening. In about 1947 or 1948, the United States decided to allow people to have dual citizenship. Now, we did that primarily because of what was happening in Israel at the time; Palestine, later to become Israel. And there were maybe at any given point in the last 50 years, up to the last, let us say 10 years, there were maybe 100,000 people in the United States, according to our research, maybe 100,000 at any given time holding dual citizenship. Now, something has happened. Something brand new is occurring that reflects, I think, the problem that I have just described with this concept of multiculturalism, the lack of any desire to attach themselves to any American experience, if you will, and to retain political and cultural ties to the country of origin. About 2\1/2\ years ago, Mexico allowed their citizens to actually have dual citizenship, something they had never done in the past. And they also began to encourage, this is over maybe 5 or 6 years, they began to encourage a large flow of Mexican nationals into the United States, which created the kind of problems that we talked about here with the Morins on their ranch because they had never seen this kind of thing before. As I said, they had lived here for generations, but they had never seen the kinds of problems that they are seeing today, the numbers that are coming across, in this case from Mexico. And the fact is that this kind of combination of events where Mexico is encouraging the movement of people into the United States, allowing people to take dual citizenship; this is having an interesting effect here in this country. For instance, we now think that there are between 6 million and 10 million people living in this country who claim dual citizenship. This is an interesting new phenomenon. Is it worthy of our discussion here? Is it something that anybody thinks is interesting, relevant, important? What does this mean? What is the effect of having this many people in this country with divided loyalties? And that is really the only way that one can describe it. I think Teddy Roosevelt said, we can have no 50-50 Americans. Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all. Teddy Roosevelt. The idea that we have so many people clinging to other citizenship, clinging to other countries politically is, I think, a little bit problematic. At least it is worthy of our interest, our debate. Yet it is something we hardly talk about. Certainly it does not come up in this body very often. Nobody wants to really push this issue for fear that we will make someone else a little bit upset with us, that we will insult somebody else, some ethnic minority in this country, some dual citizen, some ``something'' hyphenated American or something that will offend them. Well, I would suggest that we should not worry about that kind of offense; we should talk about it because it is meaningful in this country. It is important to understand what is happening here. I want to go back for a moment to what I was talking about in terms of the difference that is occurring and the whole concept of what it means to be an American, how that is fading away, how difficult it is now to actually define this idea, this ``concept America.'' When I was a child, when I was growing up in Denver, Colorado, and attending St. Catherine's Elementary School and, later on, Holy Family High School, I was taught about my heritage, who I was, and what my history was; and if someone would have asked me then, if someone asked me now, what is my heritage, I would say it is American. Who are my heroes? Who do I look to in my history and the history of who I consider myself to be from a heritage standpoint? I would say Jefferson and Lincoln and Washington and Adams, because I connected directly to that, even though I am a relative newcomer to this land. My ancestors did not come here on the Mayflower. But I connected to America, because that is what I was taught. I was taught by my parents, I was taught by my school that that was my heritage; that I was here now, and that this was the American ideal to which I was to aspire. And I did. I would challenge people today to go out and ask a child, ask a student, almost any school in America what it means to be an American. Define that term: American. And I think many people would have, many students would have a very difficult time in doing that today. They have been told, frankly, that it is not a very good term, that it really does not, and it should not be used to signify something select and different and unique, distinct. Not long after 9-11, the National Education Association put out a list of suggestions for teachers and for parents as to how they should address the issue of the attack on the United States on September 11. In not one word of about a 3- or 4-page little program that they distributed did they talk about the uniqueness of America, the importance of defending this Nation. The entire little descriptor was to tell people, tell parents and tell children that they should not think about these people who attacked our country in negative ways; I should say, they should not use the attack to cast aspersions on any group or any organization, and that there are many bad things in America that we have done, and that maybe we even actually sort of brought this on ourselves. Well, an ex-President of this country, and I am feeling a great deal of comfort in actually saying ex-President, for me anyway, Bill Clinton, was speaking at a university, I think it was Georgetown, and he said essentially the same thing. He said that the reason why we were attacked is because of slavery and the way we treated the Indians. I mean, this is the most incredible stuff. But this is what we are teaching our children about America. Now, this is, I think, dangerous stuff. It is reflected in other ways. It is reflected in other ways. I look at the way in which the media has portrayed, for the most part, I guess, I should say the media, a large part of the media has portrayed the conflict in Iraq. I could not help noticing, I was in Europe last week, or the week before last, and I was watching, I think it was CNN International, and it was fascinating because they could not report a single story without some sort of twist they could add to it that they could characterize as anti-American. Every single event in Iraq, no matter how difficult it was to describe in this context, they managed to do it. They are not unique in that. I think many, many aspects of the American media one could describe as being overly sensitive to the other side's attitudes, opinions, and ideas, overly critical to American interests. And this is what I am talking about. We cannot even report stories factually anymore. We have to couch everything in this sort of multiculturalist light so that no one might come to the conclusion that there is anything better about, let us say, the United States and Western Civilization than any other civilization or country. And that is why it was so hard for many members of the media to really analyze this issue objectively and report it objectively. They are stuck in this multicultural miasma. And they are, of course, helping to expand and to incorporate that kind of thinking into American schools and American thought. I realize I am walking into somewhat uncharted waters here, and I want to make some very important distinctions. When I talk about multiculturalism and the problems I see in it, I am not talking about cultural diversity that brings into our society the music, the poetry, the art, dance from different cultures of all continents of the globe. Certainly our Nation has been enriched and continues to be enriched by these contributions. I am not talking about people of other nations bringing their language, religion, continuing to practice their religion in our free society. The freedom of religion is, of course, one of the most cherished liberties we have and must remain so. I am not talking about new immigrants who continue to speak their native language in their homes and want to pass it on to their children as part of their biethnic heritage. What I am talking about is the current politically motivated drive to enshrine, enshrine diversity as a goal that requires and demands a change in our fundamental values governing our civic institutions. What the advocates of this new diversity seek is a kind of reverse assimilation who want American society to assimilate and adapt to the values of other cultures. An example of this political drive is to establish bilingualism as a national standard for official business in government operations and commercial life. Previous generations of immigrants expected that their children would learn English. As I mentioned, my grandparents demanded of my parents and of us, demanded that we learn it as quickly as possible. Only in the recent past have we seen a political movement that seeks to perpetuate a parallel culture that does not speak English and thus cannot participate fully in the mainstream of American life. There are schools in States throughout this Nation, in cities throughout the country, where children can actually spend years and, for a while, one could actually go 12 years to a Denver public school and never be taught in English. I believe that the demand and push for manufactured diversity in every facet of our lives has a political motivation. Its purpose has nothing to do with toleration of other cultures. Our Nation has historically been the most accepting, most tolerant people on Earth; and this has not changed, nor should it. But Americans could and did accept millions of immigrants from diverse cultures precisely because we had a set of institutions and a set of civic values that all of the new immigrants were expected to adopt. In doing so, immigrants did not give up their language, their music, their religion. They became Americans in certain essential ways that allowed them to assimilate into American life and enjoy the benefits of liberty. I am gravely concerned that our recent and current immigration is not of the same character as our historic immigration and that the impact and effect will be to weaken our civic culture and our political institutions that guarantee life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I will give a concrete example of this changed character of our recent immigration and especially the impact that can be expected from granting amnesty and citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants. I speak now of the matter of a divided loyalty and a growing acceptance, as I mentioned earlier, of this dual citizenship. Do Members think it is a mere accident or happenstance that the oath of allegiance taken by every one of the tens of millions of naturalized American citizens who had passed through Ellis Island over the last 150 years contains the words ``I hereby renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, State, or sovereignty of which I have heretofore been the subject or citizen''? These words explicitly and unabashedly require new citizens to give up any loyalty to the foreign country. I have oftentimes, perhaps not so often, but I have certainly spoken to immigrant groups coming into this country. I have gone to citizenship ceremonies where people take the oath of office, new immigrants to the United States. I have gone there and said to them, first of all, I want to tell you welcome to the United States. Secondly, I want to tell you, thank you for doing it the right way. Thank you for coming here, working through the process and doing it legally. I also want to tell you how important it is to now adopt a new life around a set of ideals that we can share, that we have in common. I want to encourage that. I do try my best to encourage that. I say this because I want to reemphasize the fact that I am not opposed to immigration, but I certainly believe that it is in desperate need of reform. I think another way to describe what is happening, besides using the word ``multiculturalism'' is to talk about the people who have developed what is called a cult of ethnicity. It challenges the idea of what it means to be an American. There are major implications to this phenomenon. I have talked about, to a certain extent, the problems we have when we do not encourage people, Americans, especially our children, to understand and to believe that there is something unique about America worthy of their allegiance; not to be chauvinistic, necessarily, but to simply understand the basic reality of the situation. That is this, that western civilization has provided the world, certainly America, with the infrastructure that has enabled us to actually grow the greatest, I think, civilization on Earth. Now, that is a personal observation; but I think it is empirically provable, also, that there is something better about what we have. I am proud of what we have. I am proud of being a product of western civilization. I am proud of the infrastructure. I am proud of the principles that we embody in this organization we call the Congress of the United States. I am proud that we have an adherence to the rule of law. I am proud that we believe in and strongly defend the right to pursue our own religion, to speak openly about our feelings about government. All of these things really are an aspect of and a product of western civilization, and they are worthy of our allegiance and worthy of things we should tell our children about, and that we should encourage them. If we do not, we will find ourselves lacking in a number of ways. We especially will find ourselves in a dangerous situation when this civilization is, in fact, threatened, as I believe it is today. Now, this gets me into an even more, I guess, controversial arena than what I have spoken of up to this point, if that is even possible. I believe that what we are witnessing throughout the world is, indeed, a clash of civilizations, and I believe western civilization is threatened. I think the major threat today comes from something that we can refer to as radical Islam; not the religion of Islam, but it is the religion married to a political philosophy that says that all other people on the Earth have to be annihilated, abolished, eliminated. Now, this is a clash that we have seen actually for centuries. It is not new, this confrontation. This conflict has been going on, as I say, for centuries. It peaks; it goes down. There are times of a great deal of activity, and times when there is not a lot of activity around this thing. But it has been going on for a long time, and it goes on even today. It is important to understand this, because what it means is this: that it must be fought. If we are going to defend western civilization, it has to be fought with force of arms, as we have witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also has to be fought in the world of ideas. It has to be fought with ideas. Western civilization rests upon certain ideas and ideals. They, in fact, need to be taught to children and to adults. I was a teacher. I taught for 8 years in the Jefferson County public schools. I taught civics. I will tell the Members that very, very few children ever come to school with an innate appreciation of certain things like art, music. They need to be taught. They do not just wander in the door thinking, you know, I just feel something really good about Mozart or about Picasso. We have to teach children. We have to teach people about the value of these things to get them to appreciate them, more often than not. Some people may have that gift, but most of us do not. Likewise, children do not come to school with an innate appreciation for western civilization or what it means to be an American. They have to be taught. When we abandon that and we offer it up on the altar of multiculturalism, we risk a great deal; especially when, as I say, there is the threat to the system. Now, anybody can feel sort of a visceral response to somebody driving a plane into a building and killing 3,000 of our citizens; driving a plane into the Pentagon and killing a couple hundred of our fellow citizens there; crashing a plane into Pennsylvania that was destined for this spot. Anybody can get a visceral reaction to that and say, yes, I want to confront that and punish whoever did that. That is fine. It is fine if, in fact, that conflict only lasts a short time, and that we identify the culprit and we take care of business. But unless Americans understand that this is a long-term prospect, that this is a long-term conflict; and that it is not just with a segmented chunk of society. It is not just with a group we call al Qaeda or a group we call the Taliban or an individual we call Osama bin Laden, or another individual that we call Saddam Hussein. Unless we realize that it is something broader than that, something bigger than that with which we are in conflict, Americans will lose heart for this conflict because they do not connect it to anything bigger than an attack on the Pentagon, an attack on the World Trade Towers. This is why I say that this is an important issue for us to discuss as Americans, and understand that there are cultural ramifications to massive immigration when it connects with this rabid, bizarre multiculturalist philosophy which permeates America. There was a book written not too long ago by Arthur Schlessinger, Jr., certainly someone that I would not have thought before I would have found myself having a common ground with, but he wrote a book called ``The Disuniting of America.'' I have liberally excerpted from it for tonight's discussion. He says, ``The historic idea of a unifying American identity is now in peril in many arenas: in our politics, our voluntary organizations, our churches, our language.'' What this esteemed historian saw as peril in 1991 is even more evident today in confronting the question we are, in fact, confronting, the most fundamental question a nation can consider as a matter of national choice and deliberation: what is America? What is America? This question is not one that has been created by illegal immigration. We would confront this question sooner or later, even without massive illegal immigration into the country. Nor is the question now more urgent because the levels of legal immigration has far surpassed historic levels. The additional numbers of immigrants brought to America by our immigrant policies no doubt exacerbate the problem of national identity, but they have not created the problem. What has created the problem is the influential ideology of multiculturalism discussed so eloquently by Arthur Schlessinger and accurately described by him as deeply hostile to our historic ideas of assimilation. Now, remember, Mr. Schlessinger is not a conservative. He is not or he cannot by anybody, I think, be called names like ethnocentric or any of the other epithets that are thrown at people who suggest that there is a problem with multiculturalism. He has lifelong liberal credentials and is a liberal scholar. On July 4, 1915, President Woodrow Wilson spoke in Philadelphia at a mass naturalization ceremony. On that day, at the President's behest, all members of the cabinet and other prominent members of our society spoke at naturalization ceremonies across the Nation. As we all know, President Wilson was an idealist in matters of world politics and a liberal reformer in domestic policy. But on that day in 1915, he spoke for all Americans when he told the new citizens assembled to take their oath of citizenship: ``I certainly would not be the one even to suggest that a man cease to love the home of his birth and the Nation of his origin. These things are very sacred and ought not to be put out of our hearts. But it is one thing to love the place where you were born, and it is another to dedicate yourself to the place to which you go. You cannot dedicate yourself to America unless you become in every respect and with every purpose of your will thoroughly Americans. You cannot become thoroughly Americans if you think of yourself in groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American, and a man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is not worthy to live under the Stars and Stripes.'' I firmly believe that we desperately need to reaffirm the principles of citizenship and of American identity if we are to survive as a free people in the 21st century. I believe this is not just a fear of immigration. As a son of immigrants, I welcome and support immigration. What worries me is that the nation our new immigrants seek to find at the end of their journey may not be the nation of their dreams and grand ambitions. If we are to remain true to our history, we must also remain true to our destiny. It is not that of a vague and confusing collection of ethnic groups or religious sects; our destiny is to continue as the land of freedom and opportunity, a beacon of hope for all the world's oppressed. To succeed and find that destiny, we must renew the bonds of citizenship and the values and institutions that nourish and sustain those bonds. This ideology of multiculturalism does not understand this. In fact, that movement is at war with the very idea of America as it was understood for 200 years. But most Americans do understand it and do want to strengthen it; at least I hope that is true. With the help of the good people of this Nation, we will prevail. But we will not prevail unless we are willing to at least confront this issue, no matter how uncomfortable it is for us to talk about, no matter how challenging it is. It is undeniable that massive immigration combined with a multiculturalism philosophy in this country has ramifications. Some here, some throughout the country, may believe those ramifications are positive; I believe that, for the most part, they are negative. I believe that the leadership of this Nation must begin a discussion with America. When I say leadership, I mean it in the way of renewing a commitment to the idea of America on the part of all the people who come here and on the part of all the people who are here. Is Western Civilization, as epitomized by the American experience, is it worth saving? This is the question we must pose. And in order for anybody to answer it accurately, they have to have all information available to them. We have to teach children about its value along with its warts. It is important that we do not gloss over the inequity, that we do not discard as part of our text any discussion of slavery or any of the issues that we know to be negative in our history. They have to be discussed and understood in order to be overcome. But why is it not equally as important to discuss the factual positive elements of Western Civilization and what it has brought to the world? Why is that so scary to the academic community, to the media, and to the pop culture? Why is it so comfortable for members of the pop culture, the people in television and in movies to stand up and criticize, only to criticize, what it is to be American when they reap so many of the benefits of Western Civilization themselves? How hypocritical it is for them to do so. But how comfortable it is for them to do so. How easy it is for them to do so. Is it not intriguing that if anyone were to stand up, especially in the world of Hollywood and such, how difficult it is for anybody to stand up and be patriotic Americans, say things that reflect a true love of the country? I mean, this was not always the way. In the 1940s and the Second World War, Hollywood was looked at as a bastion of patriotism. The movies they put out were patriotic in nature, and it was not looked down upon to express those feelings. Something has changed dramatically, and now people who do, people who exist in that medium are afraid to actually express those sentiments for fear they will be shunned by their peers. What has happened that has allowed this to occur? Well, I suggest to you that it is time to regenerate a discussion of American principles and ideas; to make everybody, our children and adults, understand the importance of those ideas and ideals; to expect from immigrants coming to this country that they want to be Americans, and to come here for any other reason is not acceptable. To come here simply to achieve economic goals, but to hold allegiance to other countries both politically, ethnically, and linguistically is not acceptable. It is not acceptable because it will sap the strength of America. It will sap our ability to be successful in the clash of civilizations. It will lead to our demise. And that is why I take to the floor as often as I do to talk about this issue, immigration. It is far, far more significant than just the issue of jobs or low- skilled, low-wage people who have to come to the country and we have to build highways and we have to build schools. And all of those things are true and all of the problems we have with population increases that are as a result of massive immigration, those things are real and they have to be dealt with. But it is even more important than that; it is far more important than that. It is far more important than that. It goes to our very existence. Massive immigration in this country will determine not just what kind of a Nation we will be, but whether we will be a Nation at all.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor tonight to discuss the issue of immigration and immigration reform. It is a topic that I often take this floor in order to advance, and I have over the last several weeks chosen to separate the topic up into various component parts. And we talked about immigration reform and how much it was needed because of the dangerous situations that exist on our borders. That was the first week. We talked about, the next week, I tried to address the issue of immigration and open borders and what that meant to the importation of drugs into the country and the impact that that is having on our land. Today I am going to talk about another aspect of this subject that is seldom discussed. It is one that a lot of people do not want to really focus on because they are not sure how to deal with it. I think specifically of the people in, say, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and a variety of other environmental organizations that are out there and that focus in on matters that harm the environment; and they have constantly come to us, come to this body in the form of lobbying activity to tell us that we have to do more to protect the land and the environment, the water, the air, because of what man is doing to it. And yet there is almost a deafening silence, if you will, from the same people, the same organizations, when it comes to the degradation of the land that is as a result of the massive numbers of people coming across our borders illegally, the millions of people that are crossing these borders. There is a great quote from a gentleman who is the program manager of something called the National Parks Conservation Association. His name is Randall Rasmussen. Mr. Rasmussen said, ``Organ Pipe National Monument is becoming Organ Pipe National Catastrophe.'' I call it the Organ Pipe Cactus National Dump. I have been down there several times in Arizona. Of course, that part of the country is beautiful. Arizona has a 372-mile border with Mexico and it ranges from very sandy deserts and lava flows in the West, where you get about 3 or 4 inches of rainfall in a wet year, to oak-dotted grasslands and mountain-top forests in the East, where snowfall may be measured in feet. Really, few areas of the North American continent boast such natural beauty and such a great amount of diversity. Yet, cutting across that landscape is one huge problem. The entire region is getting hammered by wave after wave after wave of illegal border crossers, by horse, by foot, by bicycle, motorcycle, all-terrain vehicles, cars, trucks, even utralight gliders. They stream across the border every day and every night. They dump tons of trash and human feces in places that are set aside for their scenic beauty. They blaze hundreds of new roads and trails through fragile desert soils. They ruin habitats for endangered species and they start forest fires that consume hundreds of thousands of acres of forest and brush. When I was visiting the Coronado National Forest not too long ago, I left there on a Sunday morning and a fire started by an illegal alien campsite had been left unattended after starting a warming fire in the evening, and then they walk on, and they leave the fire often times burning, it caught the rest of the brush on fire, and before I got back to Denver on the plane, before I got back to Denver, it had consumed 35,000 acres in the Coronado National Forest. We did not hear much about that. Even if we did, we probably only heard about the fire, but no one wanted to talk about how it started because this is a delicate subject. This is because people get very antsy, even here in this body, when we start talking about immigration and the impact of illegal immigration especially on the Nation. The reason why I have divided this subject up into various component parts is because it is an enormous subject. It has enormous, massive implications, immigration, that is, for our Nation. I have often said that it will determine not just what kind of a Nation we will be in the future, that is divided and balkanized, it will determine whether or not we will be a Nation at all. And there are, as I say, implications of massive immigration into this country which are absolutely incredible and need to be talked about, need to be debated, even if it makes people uncomfortable. And certainly this is one part of it. This is just one part. That is the environment. Mr. Speaker, I have been down to the border several times. I have been both to the northern and southern borders of the country. And the sites that I see are sites I wish many of my colleagues here on the floor would also see. Sites like this on Department of Interior wildland where new trails, abandoned vehicles, trash, and human waste are strewn. These are trails that you see all over that particular part of country. Trails like this. When you look on a trail map, by the way, there is no trail there on the map, because these are not official trails. These are all made by people walking through by the hundreds, by the thousands; in fact, by the millions. Once they start these trails, they will use them for a couple of weeks, and then they think that we put sensors on them, and sometimes we do, the Border Patrol puts a sensor on there, so therefore what will happen is they will move over a little bit. When you fly over this area, you look down and it looks like cobwebs that spread out from a particular area coming across the border, but it is really just the number of people that have come across by foot, by horse, even, as I say, bicycles sometimes, and often times by cars. Vehicles will be driving along a highway that is adjacent to a national park or some sort of protected site, we will say a national forest, and at some point in time they just decide this is it, and they will peel right off of the highway and start right through the forest. And so as you drive along that road, it may be a blacktop road, as you drive along you can see on both sides where people have simply driven off the road into the desert and, of course, are trying to take people into this country and drugs into this country illegally, and they have caused enormous damage to that environment. They leave cars. Again, once they abandon the vehicle, once they take the drugs that they were carrying in or the people that they are carrying in and move them to a driven form of transportation, they usually abandon the vehicle. So if you fly over this area you will see literally hundreds and hundreds of abandoned vehicles in the desert rotting away. They leave clothes. They leave trash, water bottles like this in areas sometimes that encompass 50 or 60 acres and are knee-deep in trash. These are called pick-up sites. These sites are areas where people will come to on foot. They will come across the border on foot into the United States, and then they have been told where they should gather. And it is often on private land. It is often, however, in the middle of a national park or a national forest area. They gather and they wait to be picked up to be taken into the interior of the United States. Sometimes these groups will be as large as several hundred. And over the course of about a month, many thousands will have gathered in one place, waiting for their transportation into the United States. And they are told by the people who bring them here, and often times we refer to these people as ``coyotes,'' these are people paid by Mexican immigrants, primarily Mexicans, but certainly not entirely by Mexicans, paid by the immigrant coming into the country, the illegal, sometimes $1,500, sometimes if the case is more difficult it gets more expensive, where in fact we have cases today where we are looking very carefully at people coming into the country from places like Iraq and Iran and all over the Middle East. These folks have to pay upwards of $30,000 to have to be smuggled into the United States. So it has become a very big business. Once they get them into these pick-up sites they tell them you have to discard everything you have got, everything you have been carrying, all the water bottles, all the trash, the food, the clothes, discard everything because we have to pack you into, well, they do not tell them why, they just tell them that they have to discard everything. Then they pack them so tight into the backs of cars and trucks and trailers and vans that many suffocate on the way up. But what they do, of course, is to make room for more people. That is why they tell them everything has to be abandoned here. When you walk through these pick-up sites you will see literally tons and tons and tons of trash. You will be overcome sometimes by the smell because, of course, this is also a place where people deposit their own human waste. And so the feces by thousands of people in this area, this is certainly not a pleasant topic, I assure you, but it also is not just unpleasant from an olfactory sense, it does not just smell bad; when it does get a little bit of rain into this area, that is washed into some of the water supplies. We have had ranches down there where farm animals and ranch animals have stopped drinking in the wells. They have essentially been ruined by this kind of activity. It does seep, of course, into the ground, then, after it has been washed down into this arroyos. This is not the kind of area, this is not the kind of land where that kind of waste can be disposed of easily. The rest of this stays in place. The Border Patrol is not going to pick it up. The ranchers try to pick it up because it becomes very dangerous, but they can spend their entire day, week, month, year, picking up trash on their land. Their cattle eat this trash, especially that black plastic that most of us have seen and we certainly use ourselves. It is strewn all over the desert and the cattle will eat that and die. We have had thousands of head of cattle here that eat this trash and that die as a result of it. These are just, as I say, some of the environmental problems that you have when you have got literally hundreds of thousands, in fact, millions of people coming across this land. We have had archeological areas, areas of great archeological value destroyed. In Pinacate, which is also a national park, the Mexican soldiers destroyed some of the archeological areas, including one with a 100,000-year-old drawing on the wall. This was according to the Pinacate Park Director, Carlos Castillo. In addition, the Mexican Army has dug deep trenches to destroy 19 clandestine airstrips which mar hundreds of acres of volcanic desert that took 4 million years to form. These soldiers' markings could last for another 100 years. Few parks really have taken a greater toll than the U.N.-designated biosphere reserve El Pinacate and Arizona's adjoining Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Last year, officials caught 200,000 migrants coming through Organ Pipe. Remember, we get one in five. That is a conservative estimate. I think it is closer to one in 10 we actually will try to interdict; 200,000 were caught in Organ Pipe last year; 700,000 pounds of drugs were confiscated in Organ Pipe last year. The drug runners use every imaginable form of transportation: cars, trucks, ATVs. When they are chased, they throw these spikes out behind them, so that the border patrol, whoever may be chasing them, have their own tires blown out. This is something, of course, that our border police and law enforcement agencies use themselves, the spikes to stop people who are chasing. In this case, the trespassers, the people carrying either individuals or drugs, throw out these spikes to stop the people from chasing them. Again, cars that are abandoned all over the forest, these kinds of roads that have been cut into the forest. Ruts that have been created by so many cars coming across this area; this will not go away for hundreds of years. They cut down some of the cactus that actually grows in this area, I mean, actually Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, that is why they call it that, that is why the park is there because it does not grow anywhere else. This is a unique form of cactus. They are cut down and saguaro cactus are cut down and laid across the roads as obstacles so people when they will be driving along the road they stop, their cars are carjacked. They are taken and used to transport drugs and/or illegals and then abandoned all over the area. Meth labs, this is another interesting one. This is mostly on the northern border, but not exclusive to the northern border. In Canada, there is a group in Calgary, about 25,000 actually; about 25,000 Muslims reside in the Calgary, Canada area. Strange as that may sound to some, that is the case. There are really several hundred thousand Muslims in Canada. They have been immigrating to Canada for the last several years. This one group in Calgary, according to the folks I talked to that work security for the national parks and the national forests, are telling me that this group is the one that is primarily responsible for the importation into the United States of millions and millions and millions of tabs that are the component parts for methamphetamine. They are shipped from Calgary into the United States. They are cooked at these meth labs that are out there in the national parks and then the proceeds from the sale of these methamphetamine go back up to the organization in Canada, the Muslim group in Canada; and they use that money to support the terrorist activities all over the world. This particular site, this is a meth lab that is being cleaned up in a national park. People have to come in there with hazmat suits. It is a very, very dangerous area; and for every pound of methamphetamine, there are 6 or 7 pounds of this material that is left, and it is a very dangerous substance. It has to be treated like this, as I say, hazmat suits and very, very carefully. The drug smugglers will use natural caverns and/or tunnels, caves to deposit this stuff. So we have got kids, we have got hikers, bikers, we have got people coming in walking through the national parks, legitimately walking through, legitimately trying to enjoy the scenery and will go down into these caverns and into these various caves and come in contact with this material and become quite ill. The fact is that the animal life in most of our national parks have been damaged by so many people coming through. This is a pristine environment with a lot of people coming across the deserts. We find that some of the migration patterns for some of these animals are disrupted. They are kept oftentimes away from water because that is where these pick-up sites are. So some, like the Sonoran pronged horn, which is an endangered species, is becoming even more endangered as a result of this kind of activity in their environment. Take this cactus. As I said earlier, these are unique in the world, this kind of cactus, organ pipes. We can see here the graffiti that they have carved into it. This goes on and on, and yet nothing is really said about this. Nothing is done about this part of it. It is fascinating to me, we actually send billions of dollars around the world to Third World countries, Mr. Speaker. We hear the discussion on the floor of the House. I hear it in the Committee on Resources. We spend billions of taxpayers dollars in Third World countries because we say in these countries we have to do something to help them create an economic environment where they will stop degrading their own environment, where they will stop destroying the forests, where they will stop cutting down old-growth forests, where they will stop polluting because they are doing it because they are a Third World country, they are very poor; and so we have to come in there and try to help them. We go to Africa. We spend billions of dollars in Africa and in Latin America trying to get them to change their economy, trying to do something to get them to stop doing what they are doing to their land, and we do this with great relish, and we do it in this way that makes us think and feel good that we have taken care of our land. We know how to deal with our problems. We know how to deal with the environment in the United States. We have passed law after law after law. We have slapped people into chains and sent them off to jail. We have fined companies billions of dollars. We will pick a person up in certain States and arrest them for littering. I mean, we have got signs along the highway that says no littering. We do a lot of stuff in the United States, but we completely ignore these particular phenomena in our own country. We have National Geographic specials, we see them all the time on television. They are documentaries talking about how we need to do things in countries around the world to address the problem of the degradation of our environment on a worldwide basis, but no one will talk about this. No one will talk about the smugglers that have left 95 percent of their garbage and junk vehicles in our borders. At Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, smugglers have made a 26-mile road into the Growler Valley that slices into protected wilderness. I saw that road. I have been down to Cabeza Prieta. Along the refuges is famed Camino del Diablo where crosses mark places where 19th century travelers paid for their ignorance of the area with their lives. The dirt is now a dirt road. It features big pits of nearly impassable moon dust. Smugglers just drive around these areas, widening these pits a quarter mile into the wilderness. It is estimated to fix the dirt road up to $30 million. That is if we can get down there to fix it, but they are probably not going to get appropriations for that purpose because why? Because that particular part of our environment, that particular problem was caused by illegal immigration, and we do not want to talk about that so we are going to ignore it. As I mentioned earlier, there are cars all over. Officials estimate smugglers drove 5,000 cars through protected wilderness last year alone. Once that road is there, it will be there for 60 to 70 years, says Vergial Harper, the refuge's outdoor recreation planner. Seventeen abandoned vehicles now sit in the Growler Valley area. They probably have to be removed by helicopters to minimize further damage to the soil that serves as the skin of the desert, as they put it. Do my colleagues know how much it costs to try and get one vehicle out of there by helicopter? It is a very expensive undertaking. There are thousands of vehicles all over the desert. On a recent afternoon in Organ Pipe, discarded water bottles, backpacks, hot sauce containers, and Spanish-language comic books littered the ground around a sprawling ironwood tree estimated to be 1,000 years old. Another endangered species' affected growth in Tucson, the Pima pineapple cactus, is also in the way of crossborder traffic. Just northeast of Nogales, fences meant to protect a patch of these cacti from being knocked down and allowing cattle to enter and possibly trample them, well, anyway, the fence is being destroyed. The crossers, the horses and their vehicles, have also gone right through that same plot. The tiny cacti ``don't have any legs. They can't get up and move,'' Coronado national forest spokesman Gail Aschenbrenner said. At Leslie Canyon Wildlife Refuge near Douglas, areas thick with a particular kind of water umbel, an endangered plant, had been trampled to death by illegal immigrants waiting to be picked up, according to a congressional study. The plant has adapted to flood, draught and water fluctuation, said refuge manager Bill Radke, but not adapted to people squashing it. So much of this has been documented by the kind of information that even the Congress has had at its disposal by hearings, by the CRS, the Congressional Research Service, and again, nothing, absolutely nothing, done. Let us talk about fires for a moment. Illegal border crossers are suspected of causing eight major wild fires in southern Arizona in 2002 sticking taxpayers with $5.1 million in fire fighting costs. These eight fires that charred 68,000 acres are nearly 108 square miles near the border according to the Arizona Daily Star. Only the fires bigger than 100 acres were included in that analysis, but officials say border crossers cause many smaller blazes that were quickly controlled. Food containers, juice cans, water bottles from Mexico were found at many of the fires' starting points. The Ryan fire, a 38,000 acre fire that raced across grasslands toward Fort Huachuca in late April and early May. The Oversight fire burned 2,189 acres in the Huachuca Mountains. The Walker Community fire burned 17,000 acres west of Nogales in June. These were all started by illegal aliens. When we were down there, it was fascinating to talk to the people, the forest service. They will tell you, they now have changed the way that they actually try to fight the fires because it has gotten so dangerous to go in there. There are so many people coming through those forests with guns protecting drug trafficking activities that they do not go into the forests at night even to fight the fire. So the fires are allowed to burn because we are afraid to send people in there. We are also afraid to dump the retardant on there because we are dumping it on a lot of people who are out there. These are illegal aliens, but there are so many in the forests that we cannot fight fires appropriately. The whole area is susceptible to this kind of thing, and yet again, where are the environmental groups? I hear from them. I am sure every Member of this body hears from people in the Sierra Club and everybody else that are demanding that we do more to protect the environment. Where are the groups demanding that we do something to stop illegal immigration and the degradation to the land that occurs as a result of this policy of open borders? Just considering the environmental damage alone, we can wonder why those dedicated to the protection of the land and its resources have never intervened forcefully in any way. For example, the County of Santa Barbara, California, where lawyers representing environmental groups are ever ready to go to court on behalf of possible damage to oaks, endangered species, habitat or wetlands, if they are disturbed in any way by the action of California ranchers or farmers on their own property. If there are similar organizations in Arizona, the vast environmental damage being done by hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants does not seem to disturb them. Evidently, political correctness demands that one first consider who is destroying the environment, not the extent of the destruction itself or whether it should be stopped. With environmental groups these days, social justice is in the form of immigrant rights; and it trumps concerns about overpopulation, damage to plants, land and wildlife; and those are the quality of life issues in the United States. These priorities mirror those of the Ford and associated major charitable foundations from both the National Council of La Raza and the Sierra Club where they give their financial support. Interestingly, the Sierra Club does have one part of its organization, maybe 30 or 40 percent of their membership, that have decided to start sort of a splinter group, I guess I would say, in the Sierra Club. And they in fact have actually done a pretty good job of trying to bring to the attention of the rest of the members of the Sierra Club the problems that are endemic with our national grasslands, our national parks, and our national forests as a result of our completely and totally abandoned borders. This is from a report to the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations on impacts caused by undocumented aliens crossing Federal lands in southeastern Arizona. It was a joint project by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency. It was completed on April 29, 2002. It has only recently been released. It constitutes an extensive and official documentation of the harm that migrant smuggling has done to the fragile ecosystems and natural resources in southeastern Arizona, and, one might reasonably conclude, other frequently traveled areas along the southern border. Sometimes our environmentally based arguments fall on deaf ears because environmental effects are indirect or long term. I am reading from a report that was issued by FAIR, an organization devoted to immigration reform. Here are some of the quotes from the report to the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations on impacts caused by undocumented aliens. Here are some of the quotes. Page 2: Undocumented aliens crossing Federal lands in southeast Arizona not only cause damage to natural and cultural resources, they impact Federal land visitors, public services, Federal employees working in the area, and residents and businesses located on Federal and reservation lands. Impact visitors: Let me tell my colleagues what happens. Here is mom and dad out there in their Winnebago, camped out in any one of these different types of campgrounds in our national parks, and all of a sudden, and this has happened, all of a sudden they look out the window of the camper and there, coming across the camping ground, is a group being led by a guy with an M-16, a bunch of people carrying 60-pound backpacks carrying drugs, and a guy following them with another M-16. And I am sure they thought to themselves, this is a national park? This is a campground? Am I in the right place? Well, yes, they are in the right place. They have been confronted, their vehicles have been vandalized and stolen by these people, and they have been threatened by folks smuggling drugs across that border and through our national parks. Yet nobody really seems to care. Another quote: Certain Federal lands in southeast Arizona can no longer be used safely by the public. These are our public lands. This is where we want to go when we want to take the kids out hiking, camping, and fishing. Certainly Federal lands in southeast Arizona can no longer be used safely by the public or Federal employees due to the significance of smuggling of undocumented aliens and controlled substances into the United States. The mere number of undocumented aliens traveling in the border area intimidates legitimate visitors and creates a reluctance by some in the public to use the public lands. I guarantee that is true. There are people who are afraid to actually go into our own public lands. Another quote: Ranchers, farmers, miners, and other legitimate users of Federal lands are heavily impacted financially by smuggling operations that cut fences, break down or leave gates open, damage water supplies, steal or damage equipment, and disrupt grazing and irrigation schedules. Every week I come on the floor with a picture of another person we are inducting into the Homeland Heroes Hall of Fame. These are primarily ranchers down along the Arizona border that are having their entire lives turned upside down. Their ranches are being destroyed, and their government does not seem to care one iota. They are not coming to help them, but they are facing the brunt of the invasion. And it is just that. It is an invasion. That is the appropriate word. Michelle Malkin, author, uses that word to describe her book. In fact, it is title of her book, and it is about this phenomena. And it is absolutely accurate. It is an invasion, but we do not intend to address it. We are fearful of actually trying to stop it for fear that there will be a political backlash here; for fear that some of the business interests that support our side of the aisle will say we need the cheap labor; for fear some of the immigrant and lawyer groups that support the other side of the aisle will say, look, these are all going to be voters sometime and they comprise a big chunk of our voter base, so let us not talk about illegal immigration. These are the reasons why we do not face the issue of invasion. Going back to the report: Breaking and entering and burglaries along the border are common and include historic and government structures, employees, and private residences and businesses. Another quote: Federal law enforcement officers assigned to land management agencies and tribal police often face situations where they are at personal risk and must deal with overwhelming odds. In Arizona, on the reservation land that we refer to as the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation, they have about 1,500 people a day coming in to their land, 1,500 a day coming in to that tribe's lands, coming across it and destroying the land and the life-style of the people who live there. Go down and talk to the Tohono O'odham Indians yourself. Talk to the people who try their best to maintain some degree of order on that reservation and they will tell you it is a madhouse. Life there is a nightmare for them. I have seen little children, 5 years old, walking around stoned. The drug smugglers have turned several small villages there into their encampments essentially, because they have been able to, both with drugs and money, entice people into participating in this activity. Going back to the report: The character of congressionally designated wilderness areas have been reduced by the creation of unwanted trails and roads, damage to existing trails, and large amounts of trash. Encounters with large groups of undocumented aliens reduces the quality of the wilderness experience for many visitors. I assure my colleagues that that is true. When someone comes across a bunch of people carrying drugs in and guns on their backs, it does have a tendency to, as they put it here, to decrease the quality of the wilderness experience. Gates are rammed, security locks are cut, signs are driven over and heavy damage or destruction of water developments and other improvements by undocumented aliens traveling through the Federal lands and seeking drinking water in remote locations occur regularly. Some ranchers actually put out cups for these folks and say, look, do not destroy the well, do not break the pipeline, here is a cup, here is water. But they have disregarded it. There is some animosity there. They break the pipeline, they pollute the well, and move on. Recreational, cultural, and administrative sites are repeatedly vandalized and damaged, 1,000-year-old carvings destroyed. Would that not have made the front page in most papers around the country if that had happened by a bunch of vandals destroying some pristine area, some prehistoric site, for instance, like that? That certainly would have made the news somewhere. But you did not see a word here. Why? Because it was done by illegals. In one case it was done by the Mexican Army coming across the border. Why were they in the United States? They were protecting a drug load; protecting drug traffickers coming into the United States. Believe me, the Mexican Army, which is on the border to a large extent, is not there to protect the border. They are there essentially to provide cover for illegal drug activity on that border. Going back to the report: Tons of trash and concentrations of human waste are left behind by undocumented aliens. This impacts wildlife, vegetation, and water quality in the uplands, in washes and along the rivers and streams. It also detracts from scenic qualities and can affect human and animal health from the spread of bacteria and disease. We have not even gotten into the issue of disease tonight. We will talk about that more at a later time. State, county, and local governments and private property owners experience most of the same problems caused by undocumented aliens crossing their lands as mentioned herein. Additionally, there is a significant increased workload on Federal and local court systems and increased costs to medical providers caring for the sick and injured. Health care providers especially are heavily impacted. Twenty-six percent of all the people in Federal prisons are illegal aliens, 26 percent in Federal prisons. We do not know how much it is in State and local prisons all over the Nation. Hospitals, especially their neonatal care units, are closing up all over. Douglas Hospital is going through bankruptcy. If it goes under, it is going under because of the care they provide to illegal immigrants, without of course reimbursement. If it goes under, there will not be a hospital around for 100 miles. Back to the report: Literally hundreds, if not a thousand or more, of new trails have been created on Federal lands in southeastern Arizona by undocumented alien crossings. And more and more trails are being created by the hundreds of thousands that cross Federal lands in southeastern Arizona each year. This proliferation of trails damages and destroys cactus and other sensitive vegetation, disrupts and prohibits revegetation, disturbs wildlife and their cover and travel routes, causes soil compaction and erosion, impacts stream bank stability, and oftentimes confuses legitimate uses of trails on Federal lands. There are so many trails on lands that people that are out there legitimately are looking for a way to get around the land, and they take these trails that the drug users have created and, of course, go off into never-never land. The impacts of such fragmentation are perhaps most severe to breeding birds, many of which nest directly on the ground in short shrubs and trees on or adjacent to the network of undocumented alien routes. The continual disturbance to nesting birds during day and night typically leads to direct nest failure or abandonment of breeding birds. That leads to increased predation on active nests and keeps birds from maintaining egg temperatures and adequately feeding any young that do hatch. Again, let me suggest that if this were happening anywhere else in the world, especially anywhere else in our country, there would be an outcry on this floor. There would be an outcry heard by every news outlet in the Nation. They would interrupt the report about the war to talk about the fact that some bird has been removed from its nest, or its nesting area has been destroyed by some sort of action taken by man. In this case, however, because it is an illegal immigrant, we will not hear a word about it. There are high concentrations of human fecal material in heavily used undocumented alien pickup points in and adjacent to washes, rivers, and streams and in other heavily traveled routes. This also impacts wildlife, vegetation, and water quality in the uplands, in washes, and along rivers and streams. The human waste presents a health risk to all people. Now, this is in a report that is provided to this body and to the United States of America, to the people in this Nation. We provide this particular information. And what happens as a result of it? I wonder if any of my colleagues have ever read it. I wonder if any of the news media that so quickly uses this kind of thing to pick up on when they say a report delivered today to Congress talks about environmental damage, talks about global warming, talks about how the world is changing as a result of man's interference with nature. Usually, that just gets snapped up like that if there is one sentence in any Federal report, scientifically supported, that draws attention to some problem with the environment, especially some problem that we can attribute to mankind. Well, we certainly cannot attribute this to anything else. There is no way to say that what I have talked about here tonight is not a problem created by human beings. What we can say, however, is that this problem is not being solved. It is not being solved because there is not some technical solution, or maybe we just do not have the right kind of pollution control device and/or we have not come up with the correct mix for gasoline to remove some of the pollutants. We cannot say that is why this pollution is occurring in our national forests. We can say it is occurring because we do not have the will to stop it. We are destroying this land. It will be gone. Our children will never be able to enjoy it. Certainly their grandchildren will not be able to, and how will we explain this to them. Will we say it was because we just did not have the technology, but there was an argument about whether or not it was really caused by man's interference or whether it is natural. No, that is not an argument that we can use in this situation. We know what has created this. It is millions and millions and millions of feet across this land every year. It is hundreds of thousands of vehicles coming across this land every year. And for what purpose? To enter this country, to do so illegally, to bring human beings or drugs into the Nation. That is the purpose. Because we find that so sensitive, so off the charts when we are talking about issues, we refuse to deal with it. It is amazing. We cannot get an argument about what the cause is. Not a single soul will stand up and argue about the cause here for this pollution. We know exactly what creates it; but we categorically refuse to deal with it because the subject is difficult to deal with because it is not politically correct to talk about it as a result of human traffic, illegal traffic into this country. There are huge, huge economic benefits that accrue to certain groups, to certain businesses, to certain individuals to have lots and lots of cheap labor. There are political advantages that accrue to others to have lots and lots of immigration into the country. These two things, the political advantage, the economic benefit of cheap labor and illegal immigration, stop this from being addressed. It is a shame at least. It needs to be addressed. It needs at least to be debated. Maybe I am wrong, maybe I am 100 percent wrong about what is happening. Maybe this report is just fabricated, just a bunch of lies that somebody wrote down because they have it in for immigrants. Go there yourself if you think I am exaggerating this problem. I encourage Members to go there themselves and observe it, observe the Organ Pipe National dump and see whether Mr. Eggle, Mr. Robert Eggle whose son was killed at Organ Pipe a year ago August, his son was killed there by two people who had come through after killing four other people in Mexico, part of a drug deal. They came into the United States and they came up against Kris Eggle. He was a park ranger, and he was not trained and he did not have the equipment to deal with terrorists. That is who they were. And they cut him down with an AK-47. We went to where he was killed, and Bob said the following: ``If they do not get the crime situation under control, they are not going to have any resources left to protect.'' That was quoted in Outside Magazine February 2003. His son lies dead. The environment is being destroyed. Hundreds of illegals are dead in the desert, all because we do not have the guts in this body to take this issue on. Americans do, I assure Members of that. Poll after poll after poll will tell us that Americans believe we have to do something to control our borders, something to reduce immigration to a manageable level. I have a bill that would reduce immigration, annual legal immigration into the United States to 300,000 a year. That is far more than came into the United States during the heyday of immigration of the early 1900s. I am accused of trying to build a Berlin Wall. And how can we create a bill for guest workers to come into this country legally, how can we say we have some sort of legal immigration number by say 300,000 or 3 million, how can we say that if the borders are porous? It does not matter how many the government says we will allow in or how many workers we will take in as a temporary basis. As long as the borders are porous, they will come at their will, not according to what our needs are. And they will pollute. The only way to defend this Nation against the danger that exists as a result of terrorist activity, the only way to defend this Nation in terms of the drugs that are imported across this border every single day, the only way to defend the environment in this Nation is to put the military on the border to augment our border patrol and our Forest Service personnel and stop this degradation of the land and stop the invasion. That is the only solution to the problem. The only one. Nothing else will work. We must use the military to defend our borders against the invasion until the Department of Homeland Security can effectively control this problem. Until then, the invasion goes on. Our homes are threatened, our lives are threatened, our environment is being destroyed. Let us not shy away from that on the House floor. It is our duty, it is our sworn duty to take on these kinds of issues, and I urge Members to do just that.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Madam Speaker, it was a little over a year ago that I had the opportunity to visit with a gentleman who was, at that time, the head of a ministry in the Vicente Fox government in Mexico. His name was Juan Hernandez. Mr. Hernandez was head of a new agency that was called the Ministry for Mexicans Living in the United States. It was interesting that that would be the name of any new governmental entity that had just been created, but that was it, a new agency, the Ministry for Mexicans Living in the United States. In the discussion we had, I found it interesting in that when I asked him specifically what was the purpose of such an agency, he said, well, it was to, first of all, increase the flow of Mexican nationals into the United States. I asked him for what purpose. He said essentially that in doing that the hope was, of the Mexican Government, that it would influence United States policy towards Mexico, because he wanted to have a large number of Mexican nationals living in the United States, but with political, economic, and cultural ties remaining to Mexico. So his job was split between encouraging the flow, on one hand, and then encouraging this connection on the other, a connection that would remain. We talked a little longer. There were two other Members of the Congress there with me that evening. He said something that I thought we were all kind of amazed at. He said, Congressman, it is not two countries, it is just a region. I know that he believed that, and many other people do. I think perhaps even people in this body may think of it that way: It is not really two countries, it is just a region where the border does not matter; it is inconsequential, and it is sometimes even problematic because it does restrict the free flow of people across that particular part of the country. There are folks who look at it in that way. Borders, they think, are anachronisms, not necessary, anymore; and after all, it was really just a region. What has happened as a result of this shift in philosophy, this shift in government philosophy in Mexico in particular, the push for people to come north? In the past, Mexico had treated people coming across the border with some disdain, and there was actually a derogatory term applied to people who left Mexico. But in the last 5 to 6 years, because of the importance of what Mr. Hernandez was described as trying to influence American foreign policy vis-a-vis Mexico, and also because of the importance that remittances play. Remittances is the amount of money made in the United States, or countries outside of Mexico, but sent back into Mexico to family members that now accounts for something over 30 percent of their gross domestic product. Therefore, of course, they are very interested in using America as a way of expanding that particular phenomenon. That is fine. On our side, we have, of course, abandoned the borders. We have made sort of an unwritten agreement with Mexico that we would not really do anything to significantly impede the flow of those people into the United States for our own reasons, some of it dealing with cheap labor and our demand for it; others because of the political consequences that arise as a result of a massive flow of people across the border into the United States who will sometimes themselves vote, even illegally, but eventually become voters after a period of time, or their children will after they have been born here and are citizens of the United States. But this has had an impact on certain folks. We do not hear anything about them. That is why I come just about every week with another individual, another person. Tonight I am going to talk a little bit about Frank Adams. Frank and his wife Barbara operate a small ranch of about 500 acres. It is about 3\1/2\ miles north of Douglas, Arizona. Here is a picture of Frank. They have lived on this ranch for about a half a century. They are only 3\1/2\ miles north of the border. Their daughter lives on that ranch with them, and they have two grown sons living in Texas. Their experience is not an awful lot different from many of the other ranchers on that border area who I have brought to the attention of the body in the past. Their lives have been completely turned upside down by this phenomenon, this elimination of the border, the fact that there is no longer a border, the ``It is not really two countries, it is just a region'' philosophy. Their lives have been turned upside down. Their ranches are being destroyed. They are being essentially driven out of their homes. I just wanted to bring Mr. Adams to the attention of the body as a homeland hero.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to talk about the issue of immigration and immigration reform and a specific aspect of that particular problem that we face here in the United States. I have, over the course of the last couple of weeks anyway, tried to enter into a dialogue here; perhaps it is more of a monologue, I suppose, at this time of night and in this particular setting, and the discussion that I have tried to focus on is one that I believe is of paramount, or should be at least, of paramount importance to the Members of this body. It is true that I am concerned about that particular issue and I intend to spend at least most of the evening tonight discussing this particular point, and I should say more particularly, more specifically, the issue of the drug importation into this country which is allowed by the porous nature of our border and the various hazards that that poses, because there are a wide range of problems that confront us because our borders are porous. We are going to explore these one at a time; we are going to take them in sections, I guess, if you will, and we are going to talk about, as I did last week, we are going to talk about the issue of national security and how that is affected by porous borders. We are going to talk this evening about the importation of illegal narcotics into the United States and how that threatens the country and how that phenomenon is made more, I guess prevalent, and it is, of course, much easier to import illegal narcotics into the United States because our borders are porous, and we are going to focus on that. And then we are going to talk about maybe in the next week or so, environmental degradation that comes as a result of millions of people crossing this border illegally and what they do to the land as they trespass upon it. But let me just for a moment or two reflect upon some of the things that have been said in the prior hour by members of the Black Caucus. Time and again we heard reference to the ``cuts'' that were part of the budget we passed, the Republicans introduced and passed in the House. And I am certainly not going to spend a lot of time talking about each of the issues, each of the different kinds of budget issues that were identified here, but I am going to talk for just a moment about one aspect of this, and that is, I think 13 or 14 times I heard the phrase ``cuts in funding for veterans.'' I am going to only focus on that to show my colleagues the difficulty of debating this kind of an issue and actually getting the facts out to the general public. Now, if anybody did in fact hear the last hour, Mr. Speaker, they would think certainly that there has been a cut in funding to veterans, and actually proposed, that is to say, by the Republican budget. A cut not just to veterans, but to a whole host of groups, the elderly, children, schools, you name it. So let me just focus on this one point, just on veterans, in order to put this thing in some sort of perspective for anyone who was actually listening to that discussion. Cuts in the budget to veterans. Cuts. Now, I am not sure exactly how Webster defines the word ``cut,'' but it has to do, I am sure, with a reduction from one level to another. I am just going to assume that. So if someone stands up in front of us and says there has been a cut proposed in the Republican budget for veterans, one assumes that the money that is being proposed to be spent for veterans benefits next year, 2004, is less than what is or what has been spent or will be spent in the 2003 fiscal year. So that we again can actually understand what is going on here, let me tell my colleagues what the figures are. These are undeniable, undebatable; they are in black and white; they are produced for the public consumption by the printing office when it prepares these budgets. So anyone can determine whether or not I am being truthful here when I tell my colleagues that the budget for veterans for the fiscal year 2003 was about $57 billion. I believe $57.6 billion, to be a little more specific. Now let me tell my colleagues what the budget is for veterans for the year, in our budget, in the Republican budget for the fiscal year 2004. It is $61.6 billion. Now, let me think. Let me think. Mr. Speaker, $57.6 is this year; $61.6 is next year proposed; somehow or other, only in this place, only in this kind of debate can we say things like the Republican budget is proposing a cut. I do not know how they come to that conclusion. It may be because they established for themselves some mythical number that should be in the budget of $100 billion, and then say, do you realize the Republicans have cut the budget for seniors by $40 billion? Because I think they should get $100 billion, therefore the proposed budget of $61 billion is a cut from my figure. Now, maybe that is what they meant. It is, of course, irrelevant because nobody does math like that; or perhaps, I should say, nobody does anything but fuzzy math in that way. Or maybe it is a product of a school system. Maybe it is the fact that the schools are so bad, as was discussed in the last hour, that people simply cannot figure out, they cannot do the math and figure 57 minus 61; let me think, that is about, oh, yes, that is $4 billion. That is an increase proposed for the next fiscal year. So I am going to go out and say that because I wanted $70 billion or $100 billion, there is less money available, or that the Republicans had cut the budget. Now, I am just pointing at that particular thing because it is really and truly an example of this entire debate. The president's budget, by the way, was a 4 percent increase, higher than inflation. It proposes a 4 percent overall increase for all Federal spending. An increase, I-N- C-R-E-A-S-E. No matter how many ways we try to construct this debate, it is impossible if we do the math to figure out or to come to the conclusion, I should say, that there is a ``cut.'' Yet people can say things like that over and over and over and hope that somebody actually believes it. It is amazing. What a country, as the comedian says, what a country. There is another aspect of that last debate that I wanted to bring up. It is a very, very controversial aspect. I certainly understand that what I am about to discuss here for a moment or two has that dimension, or that characteristic. It is controversial. I am concerned about the fact that in this body, and certainly throughout the country, we do things that are designed, maybe not purposely, but certainly have the effect of pulling America apart, pulling us apart and putting us into camps as individuals. This is one of the issues that we deal with when we talk about immigration reform, and the problems with massive immigration into this Nation that occur simultaneously with the development of this philosophy of multiculturalism. It is not just massive immigration into the United States that is problematic. We have, as a Nation, dealt with it over the last couple of hundred years. As a percentage of the population, it has risen; it has fallen. We have been able to deal with it. We would be able to deal with it even today, even though the numbers are far greater today. The massive immigration into this country exceeds, in just the numbers, anything we have ever witnessed before. But I am sure that we could handle it if we did not have to also deal with, internally, this issue of, I would call it, a pernicious multiculturalist philosophy. What that philosophy boils down to is something like this: that, you know, the United States as a whole, as a Nation, cannot really be defined. America cannot really be defined easily if we are talking about a group of people that are coming together in support of and in a complete understanding of and an allegiance to a certain set of ideals and goals, because of course we are not a country of people that can easily be identified any other way. We are not a people that you can look at and say, yes, he or she is an American. We do not know that, because we are people of different color and different religious perspective and cultural habits; and all the things other countries maybe have to hold them together we do not have in America. People say diversity is our strength. Of course, there are certain positive aspects of diversity; but there are certain times when diversity, driven to the extreme, becomes something other than a positive aspect of our society. It is when we become pulled apart as a Nation and divided up along ethnic lines, as opposed to along the lines that would divide any other sort of republic; that is to say, along the lines of ideas: ideas about how we should be governed, ideas about what it is to be an American, some communal thing. There can certainly be differences. Absolutely there are differences, as evidenced by the division in this House, right and left, conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat. Those are good. They are healthy differences to be discussed, to be debated, and for the Nation to work through. Those are healthy differences, and I applaud them. I wonder sometimes about those things that are designed, however, to divide us on other lines; not into camps based on ideas about how government should be formulated and how government should actually react to the citizens of this country and reflect their opinions. But we should in fact be divided on other lines: on racial lines, such as the Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus. I respect every single person in this body. I respect people; and I certainly have great, great respect and love for my colleagues who serve here. I do believe that they are capable, competent individuals who have gained this seat in this body because of their individual abilities. They are, for the most part, I think, enormously competent people, and people who come to serve here for all the right reasons, because they want to do what they can to improve the quality of life for people who live in this country; but I hope it is for all the people who live in this country. I am concerned to a certain extent about the division even in this body into groups that are based on things other than ideas, and that are based on things like race. Certainly, I would be opposed to a white or Anglo caucus, and certainly the media would go crazy. Everybody would say, what kind of a thing is that? That is a racist concept. I would have to agree that such a caucus would be, I think by its very nature, racist, because I do not think that the problems that confront the United States are problems that are uniquely black, white, or Hispanic. I believe they are problems that confront us as human beings. I want to reiterate that I respect every single Member of this body, and certainly every member of the Black Caucus, every member of the Hispanic Caucus. But I do wonder about the kind of message that even the creation and existence of those caucuses, those two caucuses, what is the message that it sends, that we are as a Nation dividing up into these camps, and that it is appropriate to do so: white, black, Hispanic. Mr. Speaker, I think that is a dangerous thing. It is one of the reasons why I do, in fact, take the floor often to talk about the implications of massive immigration that are combined with this multiculturalist philosophy that permeates our society, a multiculturalist philosophy that says there is nothing unique about America, or if there is anything unique, it is maybe about how bad it is compared to other cultures and civilizations; that there is nothing special about America. It is the philosophy that we see in the textbooks of the children in our classrooms throughout this country that downplays American history, that downplays the role of Western Civilization in the development of world history, the positive aspects of Western Civilization, all of Western Civilization and the participants therein, be they black or brown or white or yellow. Western Civilization offers much to the world and has provided enormous opportunities. Certainly there are warts. Certainly there are aspects of Western Civilization that we can condemn or criticize. But overall, overall, I think it can be said and empirically proved that Western Civilization has contributed far more than it has taken away from human liberty. We should extol that virtue, especially, especially when Western Civilization is in fact under attack, which I believe it to be. Western Civilization is confronted by many rivals, and we are seeing some of those battles being played out, I must tell the Members, right now, I think, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in other places in the world. Because, yes, I think part of what we are facing is a clash of civilizations. I believe Western Civilization and the values thereof are being confronted by other values. Perhaps we can, for our purpose here for just a moment, describe those other values or those other concepts as fundamentalist, or radical Islam. I believe that Islamists, radical Islamists, are in fact threatening Western Civilization, confronting Western Civilization. I believe that what is happening even today in Iraq is a reflection of that conflict. I know that what I am saying here tonight is controversial. It is certainly not politically correct. It will tend to make people respond with the usual epithets of ``ethnocentrism'' and ``racism.'' Those are the words that are usually used to describe a person who feels as though Western Civilization does have a significant role to play in the development of mankind, and intrinsically has a great positive benefit; but I believe it does. I believe it can be proven. I believe there is nothing to be ashamed of in this, as being a sort of representative of Western Civilization; or a participant in, a member of, however we want to put it. There is nothing to be ashamed of, and I think there are many things to be proud of. I am proud, but I do worry about all of those things that are part of this multiculturalist philosophy that tend to tear us apart and make us, therefore, less able to actually confront an opponent; in this case, fundamentalist Islam. Islam, I should say, is not a monolithic entity. It is made up of over 1 billion people who have different opinions and attitudes and ideas, so I do not want to suggest that everyone who is of the Muslim faith is a foe of Western Civilization. But I will tell the Members that the fight we fight in Iraq and that we will be fighting after the war in Iraq ends and after Saddam Hussein is deposed, that war, it will go on; and it is a war that I think can be characterized accurately as a clash of civilizations. So we have to know who we are, Mr. Speaker. We have to know exactly what it is that we as Americans and that we as representatives and leaders of Western Civilization are all about, whether the ideas and ideals of Western Civilization matter, whether or not they are worthy of the battle and of our defense. I think they are. I do not mean for a second to suggest that people who come to the floor and who argue for their particular point of view, certainly because it differs from mine, are not as committed to this Nation and to its future as I am. I just would want to bring to the attention of the body this fear, this problem, this one aspect of that debate. When it strays from a debate over ideas and into a debate that divides us up on racial or ethnic lines, this is, I think, problematic, to say the least. It is something that we need to talk about, to discuss in candor and without vitriol. It is something that we must not be afraid to talk about, even though, I admit, it is controversial. Certainly there are a lot of people who will be on edge when we begin to discuss this thing, but perhaps that is not a bad thing. Putting Americans on edge when confronting these kinds of questions is perhaps not the worst thing in the world; and it is, perhaps, absolutely necessary. We have to think about this: What does, in fact, tie us together? What makes us come together as Americans? Can we actually define what that means, American? Can we leave out any reference to the color of our skin or to our ethnicity in that definition? Can we, to paraphrase someone else, can we forget about the color of our skin and concentrate on the nature of our character? That would be the ultimate goal, and that would be the most positive development and the most positive aspect of any debate over what is America, what is the definition of America, or Americanism. It is worthy, I think, of our allegiance, but we have to tell our children about it. I hope that the President of the United States and leaders of this country, elected leaders and cultural leaders and people in the pulpits of the country, I hope all of them will think about the importance of advancing this concept of America as one Nation, as an ideal, an ideal that has many components and one of the wonderful aspects thereof is the ability to debate those ideas in a forum like this. So I hope that I will be given some leeway by those who are listening in terms as they get very on edge, I guess I should say, about what I am saying here tonight. Let me suggest that it is important for us to discuss these topics in a way that I think would make us all better people and better Americans. So with that let me go to the point or to the discussion now of the issue of immigration specifically, and even narrow it down to a greater extent to the problem we face as a Nation of porous borders and the amount of very dangerous things that come across those borders. And so tonight for the rest of the evening I am going to talk about just one aspect of porous borders and the problem with lax immigration laws, and that is what happens to the United States and in the United States as a result of those porous borders, and specifically as a result of the drugs that come across those borders. First, I am going to take a look at the Canadian border. Now, it is an interesting thing that although marijuana is by far the drug that is trafficked across that border more than anything else, there is one little thing that is happening up there that is worthy of our attention. That is the amount of a different kind of narcotic, in this case methamphetamines, that are coming across the border. This is a series of pictures of meth labs that we have uncovered on our border, on our northern border, and what we are finding is that there is an enormous amount of methamphetamine traffic from Canada to the United States. Due to the lack of legal control measures in Canada, both Canadian- and American-based drug traffickers are able to purchase chemical products used in making methamphetamines openly from legitimate distributors. So they buy the component parts of methamphetamine in Canada. They ship them into the United States. They are cooked. They are brought together in meth labs like this that we see all over the northern border States and some, as a matter of fact, down in the Southwest, but primarily again up in Canada. The drugs are put together in these meth labs and then transported farther inland in the United States, sold, and the money goes back to the drug cartels in Canada. Now, here is one little interesting aspect of this whole thing that I think relatively few people may be aware of; that in Calgary, Canada, we now see a relatively large community of Muslims, about 25,000 in Calgary. There are about maybe 100,000 in Vancouver, and I am not sure, estimates are about a quarter of a million or so in Canada generally. But the 25,000 Muslims that are in Canada can be identified as the primary source of that drug trafficking activity into the United States. I was on the northern border not too long ago. I was a guest of the Forest Service and the Border Patrol. They were telling me about this particular phenomenon. They were telling me about the group in Calgary, Canada, about how they transport the methamphetamine components into the United States, about how those components are put together in these meth labs, and how then the money goes back to the Muslim group inside Canada, and then that money is used to support terrorist activities and terrorist organizations all over the world. I confirmed this, when I got back, with Asa Hutchinson who is, I guess we can call him our drug czar, but a Member whom I served with some time ago and a Member for whom I have the greatest respect. And it is true. What I just told you is true. There is this group in Canada, primarily Muslims, who are the source of this methamphetamine trade into the United States. Now, not only, of course, do we know the damage that this particular drug does in the United States to our children and to adults, there is also an environmental component of this, and we will talk about that more at a different time, the environmental degradation of the land as a result of illegal immigration and of porous borders, but specifically with regard to this particular problem, the methamphetamine and the labs that are operating all over the northern part of the United States, that environmental degradation is caused by dumping of toxic by- products resulting from this methamphetamine production, and it is a very scary thing. It is a very costly thing. On average, 5 or 6 pounds of toxic waste are produced for every pound of methamphetamine produced. It costs us about 3- or $4,000 every time we go into these areas and clean up these meth labs that are left around. They will dispose of much of these chemicals, by the way, in caves, in abandoned mines and that sort of thing. And the problem is, of course, people come across it, kids, hikers, whatever, will go in there, animals; the danger is great. These toxic chemicals are very, very dangerous, and very lethal. In addition to the chemical and other kinds of threats to health and safety of officers in dismantling these laboratories, these sites often contain additional dangers such as blasting caps, dynamite, explosive booby traps, grenades, pipe bombs, and plastic explosives of a variety of kinds. The Canadian border sometimes, well, we just are sometimes astounded by it. We cannot believe this is happening up there. We do not pay a lot of attention to it. The media does not pay a lot of attention to the porous nature of that particular border. But while I mentioned earlier that I was up there along the Canadian border, this was not too far from Bonners Ferry, Idaho, an incredibly beautiful part of the North American continent. And I went to the border to observe an exercise being conducted by 100 marines who had been sent up there to see what kind of technology we could employ along with the military to try to control just one section of the border there, just one little tiny, maybe 100 miles of border. And while we were there, we were using by the way, I say ``we,'' I was really just an observer. But the marines were using three drones, unmanned aerial vehicles to patrol the skies over that border to identify people coming across that border. And by the way, this is the most rugged territory you have ever seen in your life. And there are no roads, and people coming across that border are usually coming because they would not be welcomed at the port of entry. And sure enough, while we were there, one evening a drone that was being operated, it was about 2 o'clock in the morning, it was being operated by this young marine, and it pops up on the monitor, on the screen there, some sort of activity on that border. And they closed in on it and found, I think it was four people coming across on ATVs, All Terrain Vehicles, carrying 4- or 500 pounds of narcotics on the back of these ATVs. And they were able to be interdict because we were using the military in conjunction with the Border Patrol and in conjunction with the Forest Service to apply technology and human resources to try to see whether or not we could actually control the border. Actually it worked. We also, I was not there at the time, that same exercise was responsible for interdicting, as I understand it, a light plane that was carrying a lot of drugs. And planes are often used, of course, for the transportation of narcotics across that border. Oftentimes drugs are smuggled across the Canadian border commingled with legitimate cargo in commercial vehicles. For example, in February of 2001 a bus driver from British Columbia was arrested for transporting 135 kilos of Canadian-produced marijuana into Washington State aboard a tour bus. Marijuana was secreted inside garbage bags located in the spare tire compartment of the bus. The Coast Guard seized 240 pounds of marijuana from a Canadian military vehicle that crossed the border from British Columbia in the Blaine port of entry. Canadian Customs in Montreal discovered 350 kilos of cocaine concealed in pallets loaded with a shipment of coffee. The shipment which originated in Brazil was transported by vessel to the United States through the port of Philadelphia, then transported by tractor- trailer to Canada through the St-Bernard-de-Locolle port of entry on the northern end of Interstate 87. The Office of National Drug Control Policy reports that drug smugglers along the northwestern corridor of the United States have been increasingly exploiting the open skies policy between the United States and Canada. Due to this agreement, law enforcement reports contain several examples of drug smuggling by aircraft from Canada to the United States. It occurs in a number of locations, including from British Columbia to Washington State, from the Vancouver area across the Idaho and Montana borders, across Lake Erie into Pennsylvania, and from Quebec to Maine. In January 2001, law enforcement authorities in the Western United States arrested 13 members of a smuggling group that regularly transported and air-dropped a potent type of Canadian marijuana into Washington State via fixed-wing aircraft and helicopter. There is even intelligence that suggests four trafficking groups transporting Canadian-produced marijuana into Pennsylvania using small aircraft and a corporate jet. As with the southern border, we are seeing a higher degree of technology being employed and of sophistication being employed by the people smuggling drugs across that northern border. Intelligence reports indicate that drug smugglers are increasingly using night vision optics, global positioning systems in order to navigate in remote areas. Furthermore, again, not unique to just the northern border, but what we see is smugglers increasingly are carrying weapons to protect their cargo. This is of course a threat to any law enforcement officer that may approach them. You have to remember that most often they are being approached by Forest Service personnel, Park Rangers and other, who are really not being trained for this kind of thing. They are not really able to be the first line of defense against drug traffickers, narcotics smugglers into the United States. Their job has been mostly dealing with people who are violating some camping regulation or whatever. But they are not really all that prepared to deal with this enormous amount now of smuggling that is going on on our borders. Now, the northern border, as I say, it has unique problems that we have to confront. Incredibly difficult terrain, a government in Canada that takes sort of a blind eye towards the issue of smuggling and narcotics in general. We have actually had, we have actually had Royal Canadian Police call our folks on our side of the border, both Forest Service personnel and Border Patrol people and say, look, we are chasing a load of drug smugglers into the United States. But we are going to let them go. We are not going to actually interdict them. We are just going to keep chasing them because we know if we stop them, they are going to be let loose by our government because our government does not care about drugs, especially when they are going into the United States. So they actually warn us so that we can interdict them as they get across the border and hopefully they will be charged, sent to prison, and pay for the crime. But the Canadian police know that their government will not do it, so they call us and ask us to help them. Those are some of the unique problems on the Canadian border. Those are some of the problems we incur because our friends, the Canadians, are not so friendly when it comes to these border-related issues. Canadian borders are themselves porous. People can come in and do often come into Canada, claiming refugee status. That is all they have to do, and at that point, they are admitted into Canada, and they are allowed, of course, to actually traverse Canada. I have often joked, but it is not really much of a joke that Osama bin Laden could land. I am surprised in a way that one of the countries that are not offering some sort of refuge to Saddam Hussein, I am surprised it is not Canada or Mexico because frankly their immigration policies would indicate that they would be wide open to it. I said that it was not really a joke, but I have suggested that Osama bin Laden could shave off his beard, come into Canada, call himself Omar the Tent Maker or anybody else, not have to produce any document of identification, just claim refugee status. He would be allowed to go into Canada, and of course, because our borders are porous and because we refuse to actually do anything to control those borders, he could come into the United States; and of course, people do by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, yes, by the millions. We are focusing tonight on just the drug importation problem. It is a serious one, but it is certainly not the only problem that results from porous borders. Now we are going to move to the southern border. Magnify everything I just told about that northern border by 50 times, and this is the problem we have on the southern border. The problem there is we not only have a government that looks the other way when it comes to drug smuggling activities, we have a government, a large portion of which is involved with the drug smuggling activity. Mexican drug lords, backed by corrupt Mexican military officials and police officers, will move tons of marijuana, cocaine and heroin this year over rugged desert trails to accomplices in Phoenix and Tucson for shipment to willing buyers throughout the United States as per an article printed not too long ago in the Washington Times by Jerry Seper. He goes on, ``Most of the smuggling routes pass through the Tohono O'odham Nation, a sprawling Indian reservation, where undermanned and outgunned tribal police will confiscate more than 100,000 pounds of illicit drugs this year, about 300 pounds a day.'' I am going to talk more about the Tohono O'odham Indian reservation in just a moment or two, but believe me, the problem is not just there, that 71-mile chunk of the border. The people coming across that border, according to Detective Sergeant Kray says, again, they have become very, very sophisticated. They have two way radios, night vision gear, body armor, and carry automatic weapons. They put people on the hills to act as lookouts and use portable solar panels to power their communications equipment. They have powerful four wheel drive vehicles that are under orders not to stop, to shoot their way through if they have to. This is an example of that sophistication, of that level of danger, I should say, that is developing on those borders. Oftentimes we have seen probably on television when the police are in a chase, the police in the United States are chasing someone, they will put out spikes and try to stop the car and blow up the tires. The drug traffickers are doing exactly the same thing, but only to us. When they are being chased, they throw out these spikes here behind them so as to puncture and disable the tires of the border patrol or law enforcement agents that are coming after them. They will also put across the road these barriers. They will cut down trees. They will place rocks across the border to stop people, carjack them, take their vehicles, use them for drug transportation and then abandon them; and we can go across the Southwest, we can fly over the desert areas in Arizona and Mexico, and we will see cars, literally hundreds and hundreds of abandoned cars all over the desert. These cars are oftentimes stolen from Americans, stolen from people who are just traveling in the area. As I say, they are carjacked. People are sometimes hurt in the process, sometimes killed. Their cars are taken, used in the drug transportation and then abandoned. This article goes on to say that the smugglers, according to U.S. law enforcement authorities, often are protected by heavily armed Mexican military troops and police, who have paid handsomely for the privilege of escorting the drug traffickers and their illicit shipments across the border and into the United States. The drug lords are expected to spend more than $500 million this year in bribes and payoffs to a cadre of Mexican military generals and police officers to ensure that the illicit drugs reach their destination. Mexican smugglers will account for 80 percent, 80 percent of the cocaine and nearly half the heroin that reaches the streets of America this year. Law enforcement authorities all along the U.S.-Mexico border are concerned about the involvement of Mexican military troops and police in the alien and drug smuggling business. Another visual portrayal of that, 2001 Mexican military police incursions into the United States. Hear what I am saying. Mexican military and Mexican Federal police have come into the United States along these points. The blue arrows indicate the Mexican military, the red the Mexican police. The yellow are the ports of entry. ``Several officials said in interviews that Mexican police agencies along the border have been `totally corrupted' by drug smugglers and that the corruption included a number of key Mexican generals and other commanders. ``Violence along the border, fueled by the drug trade, has spiralled out of control.'' Corruption among Mexican police is so extensive that, they said, some U.S. law enforcement agencies refuse to work with their Mexican counterparts. Mexican police officials have been tied not only to alien and drug smuggling, but also to numerous incidents of extortion, bribery, assault, kidnapping and murder along the border. ``Border patrol agents in Douglas, Arizona, were pulled from their duty stations after police in Aqua Prieta, Mexico, tipped U.S. authorities of a pending drug shipment. Supervisors were fearful of putting their agents in the middle of a shootout between rival drug gangs, each supported by competing Aqua Prieta police.'' This is absolutely incredible in a way, if we think about it. Members of a foreign military, members of a foreign government's military establishment and police establishment routinely cross our border for the purpose of aiding and abetting a drug trafficking cartel, actually several cartels. We have had over 200 of these incursions since about 1997. I have written the President of Mexico. I have written the Secretary of State of the United States. I have asked our administration what do they intend to do about this. What they say periodically is we intend to bring it up at the highest levels of government. We know what that means. Let us define that down to regular speak, okay. Nothing, that is what we intend to do, nothing. Because, of course, these issues, if understood by the American public, Mr. Speaker, would certainly arouse some degree of ire, and they would probably result in people suggesting to their congressional representatives, let us say, that something should be done about the border, that, in fact, if the Mexican Government can put troops on the border for the purposes of helping the narcotics traffickers into the United States, that certainly the United States could put American troops on our border for the purpose of protecting our own sovereign Nation, if it is sovereign anymore. We have had instances where Mexican military and/or Mexican police have fired on and injured people in the United States, specifically our border patrol agents. A recent documented Mexican military incursion on May 17 of last year when a border patrol agent was fired on by three Mexican soldiers in a military HUMVEE near now what is known as the San Miguel Gate on the Tohono O'odham Indian reservation, I mentioned it earlier, about 30 miles northwest of Nogales. The gunfire, which erupted shortly after 8:30 p.m., shattered the rear window of the U.S. agents' four-wheel-drive vehicle. An unnamed agent, after spotting the soldiers, sought to avoid a confrontation, according to U.S. authorities, and had turned his clearly marked green and white border patrol vehicle away from the HUMVEE when it was hit by gunfire. Mexican soldiers were armed with assault rifles. One bullet was deflected by the vehicle's prisoner partition located directly behind the agent's seat, and knocked out the right rear window. The agent involved had been on the job for about a year, authorities said. I actually interviewed this fellow when I went down and visited the border some weeks later. Earlier that day, in the same area, border patrol agents had confiscated 2,200 pounds of drugs from a vehicle that had crossed into the United States, although a second vehicle escaped back into Mexico. I am sorry I am getting ahead of myself here because we get into some other very dangerous situations along that border. Let me move ahead here. Let me talk a little bit about those cartels that I mentioned, the cartels in Mexico that actually control most of the drug smuggling into the United States, five main cartels: the Arellano-Felix organization, the Vincente Carrillo-Fuentes organization, the Armando Valencia organization, the Miguel Caro-Quintero organization, and the Osiel Cardenas-Guillen organization. They are responsible for the majority of the cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana, and precursor chemicals entering the United States. In April 2000, an investigation revealed that Mexican marijuana organizations were working in conjunction with Jamaican traffickers in the United States. A large-scale Jamaican marijuana trafficking smuggling group had numerous distribution sales throughout the United States and a primary marijuana source supply Mexico-based traffickers with ties to Mexico and to these different organizations. We have uncovered tunnels. There is no two ways about it. These organizations are very creative and industrious. We have identified a whole series of tunnels that were dug across the border near Nogales and other cities along our border with Mexico through which both people and drugs were smuggled. Let me talk a moment or two about the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation in Arizona because this is a microcosm of the problem we are facing. I just want my colleagues to think about it. What I am going to tell my colleagues here is just one little part. It shares just a 71-mile-long border with Mexico; and of course, our border with Mexico is close to 4,000 miles, so extrapolate this any way you want to. ``They're being overrun by illegal aliens. They're being overrun by drug smugglers. And they're caught in a war zone,'' says Judge Pogo Overmeyer of the Tohono Indian Nation courts. Homes burglarized by illegals, deadly car wrecks caused by reckless smugglers, drug runners brandishing weapons as they demand help from the local people, this is daily fair on the reservation. Overmeyer said that she noted that Tohono O'odham police reported seizing 33,000 pounds of marijuana during the first 4 months of the year. During the same period, the police located 1,877 vehicles that smugglers had abandoned on the reservation. One of the busiest smuggling routes through the reservation begins about 25 miles to the West where taxis finish a 15-minute run from the Mexican town of Sonoyta by depositing passengers at a flimsy border fence. This is a little publication put out by the Tohono O'odham Indian Nation. Four separate land areas comprise 2.86 million acres, three counties, 75 miles, I said 71, 75 miles contiguous with Mexico, nine villages in Mexico. Narcotics seized in 2002, 65,000 pounds. Illegal immigrant traffic, over 1,500 a day, 1,500 a day coming through there. Towing vehicles out of there, 30 to 40 a day. Refuse, trash, every immigrant leaves behind over 8 pounds a day, equal to 6 tons per year. In just December of 2002, the Indian Nation, and this is a very small contingent of police on that reservation, they alone took in 5,400 illegals. They have spent millions and millions, $6.5 to $7 million, in treating illegals that are getting sick on the transportation, 85 cases of death, exposure, drug smuggling, other death investigations, homicides, vehicle towing, immigrant interaction cases and Sells Indian Hospital. Sells is the little community there that has a hospital. Treatment of illegal immigrants, over 50 cases a month, summertime over $500,000. And these are not just Mexican nationals, they say. In 2002, over 200 undocumented immigrants were apprehended in the Nation that were not Mexican nationals. On August 6, the Tohono O'odham Police Department drug enforcement officers found a plane ticket stub dated August 21, 2001, a plane ticket paid for Yousif Abdelkaber, paid for in cash. Mexican military incursions into the Indian reservation in March 1999, April 2000, January 6, May 17, February 7. All this on this little Indian nation. They are overrun. Their entire life has been destroyed. Their children are being taken into these cartels, sometimes forcibly, but oftentimes of course just led into it for the money. I saw 5-year-old children on this Indian reservation who were walking around stoned. These parents are going crazy. They do not know what to do. They cannot deal with the fact that they are being invaded essentially. But let me tell you, they are just one part of that border problem. It is just a microcosm. We can identify it, we can quantify it, because it happens to be an Indian nation and they have their own organization. They have their own police department and they keep numbers and track of it, so we can do that there. But let us talk about the Tucson area, where in the month of November of last year they accounted for 100,000 people. They stopped about 23,000, but 100,000 people came through there illegally. This is a picture of the plane flights coming out of Mexico. I do not know if this can be seen, but there are literally hundreds, thousands, of plane flights just in the last year. In the green, these are all over the area here; these are fades, where we catch them on radar then they duck under and we do not see it. The blue are low flyers. The red are called short landings. Now, what these red are, that means we catch them, they land in the United States, and we see them back on the radar going back out in 15 to 20 minutes. These are all drug related, coming into the United States. Okay? How about this? How about this? Talk about the creative and inventive nature of the drug cartels down there. They stole a vehicle, an SUV, and they painted it with Border Patrol logos. They found and were able to obtain government plates for this thing. They used it to transport drugs into the United States. They packed it full of marijuana, but we caught it. That was pretty smart, right, decking out a vehicle to look like a Border Patrol vehicle, and then using it to smuggle drugs in? But they are pretty stupid at the same time, because they are smuggling the drugs through at about 2 a.m. in the morning with their lights off, so we caught them. This is the kind of thing that goes on and on, on that border. And here is what it ends up. We have a Park Service that is also under siege. We have a situation where 40 percent of our border on the southern border and 10 percent of the northern border are national parks. They were being inundated. They are being trashed. The drug traffickers are coming through. Sometimes there are caravans of people walking through; a guy with an M-16 on the front end, a whole bunch of people carrying 60 pounds of drugs in backpacks on their backs, and a guy with an M-16 on the back. Meantime, here is mom and dad in a Winnebago down in the Coronado or the Cactus Pipes National Park, and they are camped out, and all of a sudden they look out their camper window and see a whole bunch of people coming through with guns and drugs. This is happening, and people are getting killed in these parks. The parks are being destroyed by these drug traffickers who could not care less about the land. They leave trash, they set the place on fire. When we were down there in the Coronado, a fire had been started by an illegal alien who had started the fire at night to keep warm, and then walked away from it. By the time I got back to Denver, 35,000 acres had been burned to the ground. This is what is happening on our southern border, yet we do not have much of an intention to do anything about it. And on the northern border, of course, this is what is happening to us. And let me say this. This is a face I wanted all of my colleagues to remember. I want all of America to remember this face, Mr. Speaker, because this is the face of a gentleman by the name of Kris Eggle, who at the young age of 28, last August, was killed by drug traffickers. A drug bust went down near the border. We got about 400 pounds of drugs that we confiscated. That drug load was not actually completed, because the guys that were responsible for it lost the load. We got it. The cartel sent somebody to take care of them. They killed four of them in Mexico, who were escaping across the border, and they ran into Kris Eggle, who was doing his job as a park ranger. He confronted them and they killed him. I visited the spot where he died. I visited it with his father, who had been there four times to commemorate his son's death and to relive that experience. It is a difficult thing to do for anybody, but he did it because he does not want this death to go in vain, and I do not either. These borders are porous. We refuse to protect them and we send people like Kris Eggle down there and we do it at their peril. This is a shame, Mr. Speaker; a shame that we do not defend these borders and defend the people we send into harm's way there. It is a war zone also.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Mexico. We have been standing here for some time listening to some of our friends on the other side of the aisle talk about what they saw as the doom and gloom of the tax package of a budget really that allows people to actually begin to operate, begin to do things that will bring this economy back. It is amazing. If we had listened for any length of time to our friends on the other side of the aisle, we would have heard time and time and time again that the following rhetoric; we would have heard something like this: Oh, my God, they are going to take money from the people who are veterans and children and old people and everybody we can think of to cast in a sympathetic light, and they are going to give it to the rich. Give it to the rich, this is a fascinating way of talking about letting people keep some of their money, but it is exactly what distinguishes the two sides in this debate. It really is a great way of explaining how one side of this debate looks at the whole issue of taxation and the whole issue of private development, the development of one's own resources and talents. To think that the Government of the United States or any government owns the money to begin with and that they, if they are nice, we are going to let them keep some. But if they are not very nice, and even if they are wealthy, if they made a few bucks in the process, all of a sudden they are the bad guy and we are going to either keep money from them, but if we are going to pass a tax break, we are ``going to give them money.'' It is not giving anybody money to say that they can keep some of the money they earn, but it is only that if we think of it as being all the government's money to begin with, and that is exactly what the other side does, that is how they think about government: It is all government money. We will let them keep some if they are good. That is what really separates these two sides in this debate, and I hope that the people that listen to this debate understand and really are able to see that. Mr. Speaker, there was a time when the leadership in the Democratic Party, not just a single governor like Governor Richardson today, but the leadership of that party could actually look beyond the whole concept of class warfare and did not try to incorporate that into the philosophy of the Democratic Party. And there was a time that the leader of the Democratic Party actually came to the Congress of the United States, came to the people of the United States and said, You know what we need? You know what we have to have? We have to have a tax cut. Even though we have got deficits, huge deficits, the way to get us out of those deficits and back into a surplus is to let the economy begin to move again, and we have to do that by giving people tax cuts. The Members know who that was, of course. It was John F. Kennedy, and he put through a huge tax cut in the face, by the way, of large deficits that were running at the time; and he did not talk about letting rich people keep some of their money. What he said is, we have to allow people to keep some of the money that they are laboring for because that is truly what makes an economy hum. And he was right. There is another thing that we should pay special attention to, Mr. Speaker and my colleagues, especially my colleague from New Mexico, who I know understands this issue far better than most of us, and that is the importance of energy production and the importance of getting an energy bill through this Congress, the importance of getting the President's energy package through. This will do more to ``stimulate'' this economy than almost anything else we can doing aside from letting people keep more of their own tax dollars. We have to allow for the development of the economy and the stimulation of the economy to occur as the result of the production of energy resources in this country. No one, no one, believes that we should continue to rely upon foreign sources for our energy needs. That is why it is incumbent upon every single one of us in this body to do everything we can to put an energy bill in front of the President, let him sign it, an energy bill that will begin to explore the resources that are available in the United States, the coal, the gas, the oil resources available to us here while simultaneously researching what is available to us in alternative resources and the use of alternative energy supplies. That is what is desperately needed, and I hope we will begin to focus here, even for the remainder of the time we have available to us, on this issue of energy, because it is an extremely important part of this whole discussion of how we get an economy going again.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Madam Speaker, I would urge my colleagues to consider and to just picture something with me, and that is, picture a life in rural Arizona, a life that is in the one of the most bucolic settings one can possibly imagine, the beautiful desert, a life where a family has been operating a ranch for generations, as a matter of fact, six generations. Imagine waking up every morning to that kind of an environment and going out to do what is necessary to keep that ranch going, as it has been going and has been running for someone's parents, grandparents, and generations on back. It is a beautiful life, as they say, and as the movie title goes. Then one day, picture this. One day a person gets up, but their whole life is completely turned around because of something that has happened, a change in the environment I guess one might say. Imagine finding that across the land people are coming, and people are coming in very large numbers. People are coming by the hundreds, by the thousands. People are cutting the fences in order to get on the land. People, once they get on to the land, are defecating in the water supply and/or breaking the water valves. This is, remember, the middle of the desert, and the water there is the most precious commodity imaginable. Imagine them strewing trash all over the ranch so that the cattle begin eating some of this trash and eventually die. Imagine being threatened by these people who are crossing the land. Land, remember again, land on which you have been for six generations, but your children all of a sudden are afraid to go to their grandmother's house because of the danger that exists in moving just a few miles across the land. This is the situation that Steven and Tammy Sue Smith are facing. The Smiths own and operate a cattle ranch located only 30 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. This is their family. There are, as I say, six generations of owners of this particular property. Like many other ranch families in Arizona, their family has been there longer than Arizona has been a State. The Smiths have three children: two sons, Chance, 17, and Will, 15, and one daughter, Shaye, Shaye Lynn, that is to say, 14. All three children live and work on the ranch while attending school. Over the past several years, the Smith family has had to deal with an invasion of thousands of illegal aliens trespassing over their ranchland. Not surprising when we consider that in one month alone the Tucson sector, which is the area in which this particular ranch exists, reported that they had, in fact, stopped or identified or collected 23,000 illegal aliens. That was in the month of November, last. Also, remember that they even admit that they get one in five. So, in the Tucson sector, where this ranch exists, 100,000 people came across that border from Mexico and into the United States illegally, and many of them came across this ranch. Since September 11, as security at ports of entry in and around cities has stepped up, the flow of illegal aliens has shifted to the public and private rangeland where countless miles of border are marked by barbed-wire fences and little else. There this open rangeland is rapidly becoming one of America's most dangerous doorsteps. Steven and Tammy Sue Smith have concern for their property and for their children and for the safety of their family. This concern is not misplaced nor is it exaggerated. I will cite a few examples of the very direct and dangerous encounters that the Smiths and their children have had on their own land. Remember, that this has only really happened to them in the last several years. The Smith ranch is a popular travel route for people smuggling and drug smuggling because of the very mountainous terrain. The hilly and rocky terrain makes it harder to track the trespassers and harder to see them and apprehend them. Thus, the Smith family finds itself a major thoroughfare for hundreds of illegal aliens and drug smugglers every month. Shaye Lynn, when she was 12 years old, was driving with her grandmother across their own ranch to feed some cattle. They were confronted on the road by a car with two illegal aliens who subjected them to threats of violence. Fortunately, they were able to essentially outrun the pursuers. Their vehicle made it to safety. Steven, the dad, almost died 2 years after he contracted a very serious illness after coming in contact with a cadaver on his land, and the doctors asked him if he had, in fact, done that, if he had come across something like that, because they told him that they were encountering many strange diseases for which they did not have any sort of treatment, and they did not know essentially what to do. Their son Will rolled his pickup truck in avoiding hitting two illegal aliens who tried to hijack him by placing large boulders in the middle of the road. I have seen this out there. They, in fact, will use either boulders on the road or sometimes they will cut down a tree, cut down a large saguaro cactus laid across the road, and then when people stopped, they are hijacked. This is on a little, tiny, dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Will and Shaye were able to identify a man on America's Most Wanted one night based on the appearance on their property a few weeks earlier. He had demanded food and then tried to steal two horses. America's Most Wanted described this man as one of Mexico's most dangerous coyotes, the thugs who smuggle people across the border for money. On another occasion, the Smith family observed a group of 32 aliens crossing their lands very near their house. They tracked them and were able to stop 27 of them and were able to detain them until the Border Patrol arrived. One, who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, was later found to have been from Guatemala. This is also very typical. These people are homeland heroes, and we should not forget them, and we should hold them up in high regard because they truly are on the front line of an invasion.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Madam Speaker, the Washington Times carried an interesting article on March 28. Headlines read: Bonner Says U.S. Borders Sealed Better Than Ever. ``America is better protected against terrorists and weapons of mass destruction today than it ever has been, says the head of the new Federal agency assigned to guard the Nation's 6,000 miles of international borders and 300 ports of entry.'' The borders, he says, are sealed better than ever. Well, maybe something has happened down there in the last several days that I am not aware of, but I can tell you what is the situation on our borders, at least our southern border, as recently as the last couple of weeks because I have just returned from there and observed how sealed these borders are. In fact, of course, they are anything but protected. They are completely and entirely porous. This is a picture of exactly what I am talking about. This is the border between the United States and Mexico here. This is a cattle guard that has been put up at this particular point because so many people have come across them. They have knocked down this fence so many times, they have just given up putting up any sort of protection, because all it is is a 3-strand barbed-wire fence to begin with, but it has been knocked over so many times they just put up a cattle guard to keep cattle from going across the border. But it certainly does not protect or seal the border. And this is the case for literally thousands of miles of the border. This is a sign. Maybe this is what the head of the agency is referring to when he says things are better now than ever before. This sign was put up there; actually it was put up a while back. Here is a sign near another little spot around the border where the ruts in the road, they will show you how many times they have come across here from Mexico into the United States where we were standing taking a picture of this sign. The sign says, ``All persons and vehicles must enter the United States at a designated port of entry only.'' This is not, underlined, this is not a designated port of entry. And, of course, we are out in the middle of nowhere. There is not anything for hundreds of miles except where everybody has been coming across and knocking down fences and coming into the United States. Maybe this is the security device that we are talking about. Maybe this is what we will see when people come across, terrorists and others, who come across this place which is not a port of entry, and look at the sign and say, oh, golly, this is not a port of entry. I guess I should go several hundred miles to where it is a port of entry and try to come across there, and then they will turn back and go back into Mexico. Surely that is what this, we are assuming, is going to make happen. Well, of course, it is not. The borders are not only not sealed better than ever, they are entirely porous. There is a report from the Tucson sector from the U.S. Border Patrol that said that as early as November of last year they apprehended in just one sector 23,000 illegal aliens, but they also said that at least for every one they get, five get by them. So in the month of November, according to the Border Patrol, 100,000 people came across just the Tucson sector into the United States. They got 23,000 of them, turned them back, and of course those people very soon just came across the border as soon as somebody was not looking; 100,000 in the month of November. There is a gentleman here that owns a ranch, not too far from where this picture is taken, as a matter of fact. His name is Roger Barnett. He has personally, he, his wife, and his brother have personally interdicted 2,000 people a month on their land, called the Border Patrol, had them come and get them and take them away; 2,000-some people a year, these folks stop themselves on their ranch and get the Border Patrol and come and get them. The Tohono O'odom Indian Reservation, also in Arizona, not too far from where this picture is taken, has 1,500 people come across their land, across their border every single day; 1,500 illegal immigrants come across a 71-mile section of the border called the Tohono O'odom Indian Reservation which has a coterminus border with Mexico; 1,500 a day and we are supposed to believe that our borders are sealed better than ever. They are not sealed; they are not even remotely secure. Now, maybe we are devising better methods of identification for people to show, so when people come through a port of entry they have to prove who they are. That is a good idea. But let me suggest that people do not come across the port of entry if they are coming to do us great harm. They are coming across right over here.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk tonight about another aspect of the immigration issue that I so often come to the floor to discuss, and what I have decided to do is over the course of the next several weeks is to break this issue down into several of its component parts. Because it really is a fascinating issue, immigration and immigration control, the impact of massive immigration into this country, uncontrolled immigration, the impact of having porous borders. It really does matter. It is not just something that we can observe and think about as being really not involved with and not important to our Nation's future. It will affect every single aspect of our lives. It will affect us socially and economically and politically. It really does have enormous implications, the whole idea of massive immigration into the United States, both legal and illegal. So as I say, tonight I want to go into one specific aspect of this and focus on it for a while, and that is the costs of illegal immigration and even to a large extent massive legal immigration to our social service systems in this country, to our States and to the Federal Government. Especially we are going to focus again a little more narrowly in that area on health care. Mr. Speaker, there is probably no issue that is brought to our attention here more often and with more concern on the part of our constituents than the issue of health care, its unaffordability, its inaccessibility, and the fact is that it is a very, very serious problem. The costs are rising so dramatically, such as in order to pay for new technologies. There are a lot of reasons for the costs to increase. One reason is because, of course, our health care system is being accessed by a lot of people who are here illegally, they are not citizens of the United States, but also because in fact legal immigrants to the United States access social services to a higher extent than native citizens. So the impact of massive immigration, both legal and illegal, on the system is enormous. This map is a condensed picture of our problem with regard to the health care costs that are being incurred by States, by taxpayers in the various States, and by, of course, all taxpayers in the Nation as Federal taxpayers. I say ``condensed,'' because this particular map only takes a look at the uncompensated medical costs along our border, in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. This is an annual expenditure. It says these costs represent only hospital costs. By the way, it is condensed again into just hospital costs in those four States. This is the emergency medical services costs. This, again, is condensed. It is not for all immigrants; it is just for illegal immigration. These costs that we are going to talk about here are not the Nation's costs, just for four States. They are not all medical costs, just hospitals. They are not the costs of all immigration, just the cost of illegal immigration. One in four dollars of uncompensated emergency medical costs for Southwest and border hospitals can be attributed to ``undocumented immigrants.'' That is a way of saying illegal immigration. In California, $295 million; in Arizona, $97 million; in New Mexico, $45 million; in Texas, $393 million in the Year 2000. Somebody does pay for this. Of course, it is primarily the taxpayers of those States that have to pick up the tab. But think about the real costs. Let us go ahead and just extrapolate out what the real costs to the Nation are in all States, because, I guarantee you, my State of Colorado has an enormous cost for both legal and illegal immigrants accessing the welfare system and specifically, again, the health care system. These costs are absorbed by hospitals, by the doctors and, eventually, of course, are paid for by the taxpayer. One extensive study of the cost of illegal immigration is the one we are pointing to here. It determined that care provided to illegal aliens costs border hospitals $189.6 million in uncompensated medical emergency costs in the year 2000. Total reported uncompensated costs at these same hospitals was $831 million. In other words, uncompensated costs to illegal aliens, this is all costs, emergency care to illegal aliens comprised 23 percent of the total uncompensated costs incurred by those hospitals in the year 2000. This, as I say, is just the tip of the iceberg. It does not, as I mentioned, include non-emergency services provided by doctors or hospitals. Furthermore, the study only covers the counties that are along the border, the counties directly along that border. Total costs throughout the United States for all counties are unknown. However, if the numbers for these southern border counties are a sample for the whole Nation, the true costs of medical care is in really the hundreds of billions of dollars. Part of the problem is, of course, self-induced. That is to say, the Federal Government has passed legislation that has exacerbated this problem. The Emergency Medical Treatment Act and Active Labor Act enacted in the Congress in 1996 made it illegal to ask immigrant status prior to rendering services in emergency rooms. As a result of this, hospitals have no way of tracking information that would be helpful in identifying the actual costs of care to illegal immigrants. A lot of this, of course, is estimated. Being able to track this information in a consistent manner would not only help in developing a policy to deal with this problem but also assist in measuring how much medical services illegal aliens were really obtaining. This brings me to another point here that I think is worthy of mention. Let us go to the legal immigrant in the United States, somebody who has arrived here, let us say, in the last 5 years. In 1996, this Congress passed another law; and it said that anyone coming into the United States under what was called the Family Reunification Act would have to identify a sponsor here in the United States and that sponsor had to agree to become financially liable for the person they were bringing into the country. If that person were to go onto some sort of social service, onto welfare or access hospitals and be unable to pay themselves for doctor bills, food banks, anything that was provided to this person coming in here under the Family Reunification Act, you had to have a sponsor. By the way, we have had that law generally on our books for 100 years. For 100 years an immigrant coming into the United States had to have a sponsor, and that sponsor took on some responsibility. The language is very plain on the documentation they have to fill out, that, in fact, you are accepting financial responsibility for that person that you are bringing in. Now, that was the way it was for everybody. But in 1976 we reduced the scope, the field, I suppose, to say, no, we will just do it for people who are coming in under the Family Reunification Act. People who are coming in under H-1B visas or any of the other work visas and all that sort of thing, not to worry, that is not going to matter. Well, as it turns out, about 75 to 80 percent of all immigration into the United States is under the Family Reunification Act, so almost everybody here today, the recent immigrant in the last 5 years, let us say, 10 years, came under that particular provision of our immigration law. It says, if that is the case, you need this sponsor. Now, here is another one of those little interesting aspects of law and the way we treat law around here, especially immigration law. It is ignored. It is ignored by States and the Federal Government, because, you see, it says if a person accesses any of this and they are not a citizen of the United States, somebody else is liable. But that means somebody has to go after them. So about a year and a half ago, I think it was, the chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner), wrote a letter to the Department of Justice and asked the Attorney General what they were going to do to enforce this particular part of the law that says, if you come here and access a social service, somebody else is supposed to pay for that. It is supposed to be your sponsor. Not one person to this date, to my knowledge, not one person in the past 30 years has ever been held to account by either the Federal Government or any State agency. But that is something that we should focus on and let people understand, Mr. Speaker, and that is it is not just the Federal Government that could in fact go after the sponsor and get them to live up to the obligation they signed on to if their person goes on to the welfare roles or has to access medical services. But any aspect, any level of government that delivers the service can in fact seek that payment or repayment from the sponsor, any county that has its social services accessed by a person who is here as a recent immigrant. Of course, illegal immigrants are not supposed to be eligible for anything; and yet, of course, we know that they do access all of these services; and they have become quite adept at it. The costs are enormous. But, at least for the legal immigrants who are here, we could recoup a lot of these costs, because, as I say, statistically, it is shown that legal immigrants into the United States do access social services to a greater extent than non-immigrants. It is just a fact of life. Many people, of course, come to the United States for the purpose of obtaining health care to begin with. On our borders you can see it any day that you go down there. We have had reports at hospitals near the border, some of these States, where a bus load of individuals, a bus load of young women about ready to give birth, will pull up and disembark and go into the hospital for the purpose of giving birth in the United States, because we have something we call the Anchor Baby Program. If you have your baby here, right now the law says that child is a citizen, regardless of whether or not its parents are legally here. That is something also we need to address as a body. We are one of the only countries, and maybe the only country in the world, that has such a liberal policy about allowing someone to become a citizen. But because of that and because of the various benefits that a person can obtain as a result of having your child here, the social services, the WIC program, a whole bunch of other things, people will come here for just the purpose of having a child, so much so that many of these hospitals along the border are saying they are closing down their neonatal wards and delivery rooms because they cannot afford it any more. They have been inundated with people that come across the border to have children, and they cannot pay for it, and, of course, that service is provided to them. There are multiple reports that women come to the border just to wait until they go into labor and then be rushed not to Mexican hospitals but American hospitals. One hospital in California reported that near- term pregnant women will sit in cars in the parking lot and enter the emergency room when they go into labor. In the instances where these women arrive at the border crossings, the Border Patrol, instead of returning them to Mexico to be taken to Mexican medical facilities, they allow them into the United States. When I asked the Customs officials about this, they say, ``You know, we are not medical people. We don't have that kind of expertise. We don't know. Somebody says they are sick, we wave them on in.'' We have been down there on our border. You will see ambulances coming up to the border, coming up to the Customs agent at the port of entry, and saying, ``You know, I have got this really sick person here, and I need to get through.'' And they wave them on through. Ambulances are delivering sick people to our hospitals, sick people from Mexico, because the treatment is better, and it is free. Now, I am sympathetic to the needs of the people who are in dire straits. I will tell you, this country can never be the health care provider to the Third World. It is impossible. There is not that much money in America, let alone in the health care system. And yet that is what is happening. The issue here is one that does affect everyone, and that is what I really want to try to point out when we talk about these separate issues in migration. They do have an effect far beyond what one might think of to be an immigration-related issue. So when we talk about costs at our hospitals, when we talk about health care in general, it is important to understand the impact of immigration, both legal and illegal immigration, on the system and on every single tax-paying American. I have to ask you if that is fair? I just would like to know, Mr. Speaker, is that fair? Is it fair that American taxpayers are being asked to pay for the health care benefits of people who are not legal residents of this Nation? There is just no way that we can do that and hope to maintain some quality in that system. I visited, as I said, not too long ago, near Douglas, Arizona; and I was talking to a nurse at a hospital in Douglas, and she was telling me of the situation that exists in that hospital. It is on the verge of bankruptcy. I believe it has already. If I remember correctly, it has already claimed Chapter VII, I think it is, and may go out altogether, and there is one reason, and it is because of this: they cannot afford to provide the services to people who come across that border from Mexico and access them. They cannot afford to do it anymore. The county is not that wealthy that they can keep it open. And when this hospital closes, the nurse told me, there will not be another hospital. There will be no hospitals available within a 100-mile radius of Douglas, Arizona. So it does matter. It only matters, I guess, if one is in Douglas. You can say, that is their problem, really. Too bad. Those poor people in Douglas, Arizona, should probably move someplace else and get better health care. I assure my colleagues that the problem is not unique to Arizona, as more and more people enter the United States. And by the way, we have to understand that Mexico contributes about 40 percent of all of the illegal immigration into the country. About 40 percent come from Mexico, and we have another 40 percent of the people coming into this country illegally from places other than Mexico, and they are simply overstays. They come into our ports, to our airports, with visas; they come into the country legally, and they simply overstay the visa. And 20 percent, another 20 percent from along our northern border enter the country illegally. At least that is the estimates we have been given. My State, Colorado, is having a very difficult time, as most States are, trying to meet their responsibilities, given the sad state of the economy in many areas, the many problems we have had with both drought and fire and now a massive storm that actually has caused the Governor to request emergency aid. The problems that the State faces are not unique; most States in the Nation, to some extent or another, are in the same sort of fiscal dilemma. One of the things that they chose to do was to look at one category; it was called Medicaid services for noncitizens. Now, this is something many States do. They provide Medicaid services. Now, Medicaid, of course, is a program that is designed to provide services for people who are financially unable to provide services for themselves. And the States, many of them, decided to embark upon this very altruistic path and establish Medicaid for noncitizens. And guess what? The use of that particular program grew dramatically. I will be darned. They can get a 50 percent match from the Federal Government. So they thought, let us do it, it is, again, an altruistic thing to do. Even though, as I said earlier, anyone who is here legally has a sponsor, and that sponsor can be made to pay for the person that they sponsored if they do access these services, if someone wants to do it. So Colorado axed that particular program. And there is a human cry about it. Almost every day, there is something in the paper about the fact that Colorado has eliminated Medicaid for noncitizens, and how heartless and how cruel. I suggest that one of the things the State of Colorado could do, Mr. Speaker, and every other State and every county, as a matter of fact, is begin to total up the costs for the provision of services to noncitizens and then, all they have to do is communicate with the Department of Justice, because by law, the Federal Department of Justice has to look at the names that it has provided and match them up against the documents that were prepared and filled out for that person to come into the United States. So all that the hospitals have to do, all that any State has to do, all that any county has to do, if they want to recoup some of the costs that they have been forced to lay out for the provision of services to noncitizens legally here, is to actually take that step. Send the Department of Justice the names, obtain them from your hospitals, from your clinics, from your Department of Social Services, obtain the names of the people who are here as immigrants, send that to the Department of Justice, they will identify those people and who the sponsors are for each individual, and then each of those entities can go to the sponsors and ask them to live up to their responsibility that they said they would live up to when they signed the document. As I say, it does not happen. I know that people are thinking, well, of course, that is there, but nobody really does it. So what. They access it. We will pay for it. Nobody should do it. Well then, we should eliminate the law. We should repeal that law. If we are not going to enforce it, like every other immigration law on the books almost, we should repeal all immigration laws if we are not going to enforce them. If we do not mean it when we pass the law, what is the purpose of all of the debate we have here taking up the time of the stenographer? It just does not matter, if we are not going to enforce the law. So let us repeal that portion that says, if you come into this country, you have to get a sponsor. Let us pull it back and say, you know what, we were just joking. It really does not matter. You will get all of the services you want and the taxpayers of the country will pay for it. Let us be honest. But we go through this charade: well, if you are going to come into the country, you have to get a sponsor and fill this out right here and show us that you are a fiscally responsible person. You have to actually show that you can take on that responsibility financially, so that you can do it. So people sign it, and then they know it is forgotten about; nobody is going to actually force them to do it. As I mentioned to my colleagues, the chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary wrote the letter to the Justice Department; and we got a letter back saying, essentially, yes, we do collect the names, but that is about it. And, yes, we will give them out if somebody wants them; but, no, we are not going to go enforce this stuff. We have a lot of other things to do. We are chasing terrorists and whatever. And we certainly do not want them to stop chasing terrorists, but they can simply give the names to any county or any hospital or any Department of Social Services in this Nation that has had a cost that they have incurred in providing the services, and I suggest that somebody in fact do that. It is the law. And if one does not like the law, do as Colorado does: repeal Medicaid for noncitizens. The other part of this picture, of course, is just welfare in general, and not just health care. As I said earlier on, it is a fact that immigrants into the country will access social services to a greater extent than nonimmigrants. This may have always been the case; but, Mr. Speaker, we never really had the ability to determine that when my grandparents came or, for the most part, most of the Members here that serve in this body, I should say, would say when their grandparents came, we could not really have this kind of statistic. We would not know, because there was nothing to access. When my grandparents came here, they had two choices: work or starve. That was it. There was nothing like a social service agency to provide any sort of relief. So we do not know what would have happened in 1900, but we do know what is happening today. In 1996, 22 percent of immigrant-headed households used at least one major welfare program, compared to 15 percent of native households. After a decline in the 1990s, welfare use rebounded with 23 percent of immigrant households using welfare compared to 15 percent of native households. The presently high rate of welfare used by immigrant households stems from their heavy reliance on Medicaid, I mentioned that earlier, which has actually risen modestly. In contrast, immigrant use of TANF funds has fallen significantly from a little under 6 percent to slightly over 2 percent, and food stamp use has also declined significantly. Now, these rates are only slightly above those for native Americans. The average value of benefits and payments received by immigrant households has changed little and remains at about 50 percent above that which is the average for native Americans. So what we see is that again, there is a cost attributed to massive immigration into this country, and our social service systems are overburdened, our health care system is, of course, overburdened, and our Social Security system is challenged. And I will add Social Security here for a moment, because to a large extent, it does fall, I think, into the category of a social service. Social Security, there is always a debate on this floor as to how long it is going to last. And the trustees of the Social Security fund will give us dates maybe 20 years out, sometimes 30 or 40 years out; but everybody said it is coming to a screeching halt, at least mid-century. And the reason is simple: there are relatively few people working to support the number of people who are retired, and because, of course, demographic profiles in this country now are such that we see this increase, significant increase in the number of people who are living passed that magical age of 62. So the costs are rising dramatically. The United States of America is engaged in negotiations with the Government of Mexico to do something that is referred to as ``totalizing,'' and what that means is this: that along with about 20 other countries, we have agreements that say, if you work for a company, if you are an American working in Sweden for a Swedish company, that the time that you spend there will be counted in your Social Security eligibility and, likewise, a person from Sweden working in the United States for a Swedish company could count it for their Social Security. That is just a reciprocal arrangement that we have with about 20 countries. It is called totalization. It is not really a very big deal. But now with Mexico, we are now talking with them about providing that same benefit, providing American Social Security benefits to illegal immigrants in the United States who are working here illegally. Now, people will say, well, you know what, it is really right. Even if they are illegally here, that is okay, because they are working and maybe paying into the system. Well, think again. A large number of people who come to this country illegally and seek low-pay, low-skilled jobs are people who are not getting paid quote, ``on the books.'' That is one reason why they are sought after by employers. Employers keep telling us, I just do not know where to go. I have no place else to go. I have jobs that no American citizen will take. Well, what they are saying is, yes, no jobs that an American citizen will take for what I want to pay, and I want to pay under the table and avoid all the other kinds of taxes. I can get somebody who will work here and who is illegal. What are they going to do about it? Who are they going to squeal to? So there is a large amount or there are a great number of people who are working here under those conditions who are simply not paying taxes. There are many others working here, and if they are paying taxes, they are working at low-skill, low-wage jobs. The amount of taxes being collected from them would be certainly nothing in income tax, very little in Social Security, and never enough to pay for what they are going to, in fact, claim, because they will work some time in Mexico. If this agreement goes through that will allow them to claim the time they work in the United States for United States Social Security benefits, then, of course, I assure the Members that the amount of money they will be collecting is far, far greater than the amount of money they put into that system. Mr. Speaker, there is a certain degree of concern we should all have about the Social Security system and the impact of illegal immigration on the Social Security system. By the way, just a little tidbit, kind of a strange story emanating out of San Louis, a town in Arizona on the border with Mexico. San Luis is a town of 2,000 residents. It has 6,000 mailboxes. Everything has been turned into one of those little mailbox centers, where it is a rented mailbox. Everything in the town, all the old 7-11 stores and everything, are simply turned into a mailbox place because of the number of people who rent mailboxes. But these people who live in Mexico, they are Mexican citizens who once a month come across in the United States to San Luis, collect their Social Security checks, SSI money, various other kinds of social services. This was on a program called ``20/20'' not too long ago. It is not unique. The town is not unique. That happens all across the border. The Social Security system is being jeopardized by the actions of people who are trying to commit fraud and by the reluctance of our government to protect the Social Security system and to defend those borders. There are sites that are located throughout the Southwest. They are called pick-up sites. They are just places where massive numbers of people have come through the border, walked into the United States, and gathered at certain places near a road, sometimes a highway but more often than not just a dirt road, because at a point in time a truck will come and pick them up and take them into the interior. Sometimes these places are mammoth. They are 50 or 100 acres of accumulated trash, where literally thousands of people have accumulated on ranchlands, pristine desert environments. They have become essentially trash dumps. They have ruined the land. They have destroyed the property. They are places of enormous amounts of trash, paper, plastic, human waste; because everybody has to discard everything, their coats, backpacks and everything when they get onto these trucks in order to make more room to get more people packed into them. They are told by the ``coyote,'' people bringing them across, they have to discard everything, and they do. They throw everything down, and there are all kinds of pharmaceutical drugs, health care products, just tons of trash. By the way, where is the Sierra Club? This is an environmental disaster. It is all over. I am not talking about one little thing here. This is all over the country. The Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, I call it the Organ Pipe Cactus National Dump because of what has happened there. The fact is, we were walking through one of these places 2 or 3 weeks ago. I was with several other Members of Congress and with a group of people from the area who live in that area, some of the ranchers down around Douglas. They took us to one of these pick-up sites on one rancher's land. His cattle cannot drink the water anymore. The water has been polluted by human waste that has drained into their system. Cattle eat the plastic bags and die. All their fences are torn down constantly. So many people have gone across the land, they have created paths that will never, ever, or for a hundred years, if they are left in pristine condition, from now on it would take 100 years to get the land back to where it was. There are car tracks all over the place. Again, the Sierra Club does not say a word about it. Imagine if this would happen anywhere else. Imagine if that would not be done by illegal immigrants into the United States, imagine what the environmental community would do about these kinds of things. They would go ballistic. We do not hear a word about it from them down there. At any rate, we were walking through one of these pick-up sites. I looked down, and there is a tax form. It struck me because, of course, along with all this trash it was a strange place to have a U.S. revenue, Department of Revenue tax form, IRS form. I picked it up. It was for a gentleman, a Mr. Delgado. At any rate, he had filled this out using, if I remember correctly, an ID number that the IRS will give you simply by asking for one. You can have a taxpayer ID number. You fill it out with that. He claimed that he made $9,000 some last year and paid about $1,800 in taxes and claimed about a $2,700 Earned Income Tax Credit. So when they do come and they do in fact pay taxes, believe me, we are not getting the benefit of those tax dollars. They actually become a responsibility, a social service responsibility through the Tax Code. We have had estimates of literally hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud going to people in this particular one program, the Earned Income Tax Credit program. But this I could not even say would be fraudulent, because I think the fellow did what he was supposed to do: He got a tax ID number. The fact that he was in the country illegally, the IRS does not care about that. They do not check it. They do not know. They do not care. They will send a check. The Social Security system will send a check. All one has to do is have a mailing address inside the United States. Go to San Luis, get a box. Go to any town along that border. They do. They come across. They were interviewing them on television, all these people the first of the month coming across from Mexico. They were interviewing them and saying, do you not know this is illegal, that you should not be doing it? And they say, yes, but as long as you are going to hand out the dough, are we not going to take it? We cannot argue the logic. But do not tell me that immigration and porous borders, that these things do not have an impact on a wide variety of activities in the United States. Do not tell me it does not have an impact far beyond such those borders. These people are receiving the brunt of it now, but I assure the Members, it moves northward. All of us pay the price. Our social security system is jeopardized, our health care system is jeopardized, our welfare system is overtaxed. Immigration is something this Nation has thrived on since its existence, of course. Everybody here is an immigrant or a son or a grandson or a great grandson, as far as we want to go, a granddaughter of an immigrant. I do not care if people call themselves Native Americans, but if we go back far enough, their people came across a land bridge from Asia. There was no one here. There is no indigenous population, at least that we can identify, so everyone, everyone in this country is an immigrant by background. That is great. However, that is totally irrelevant as to what we should be doing now about immigration. As I said earlier, when my grandparents came, they did not have TANF programs, they did not have Earned Income Tax Credit, they had no social service benefits. You worked or you starved. That was it. Now, we can debate whether we are attracting people just for the benefits. Certainly, it is an attraction when we consider the fact that our benefits are certainly relatively rich, considering the benefits that would be available to them in their country of origin, especially Mexico. It does impact America, and this is an issue with which we must deal. I talked about the issue of border security and national security last time. I talked about the fact that, because we have porous borders, our Nation is more at risk than it would otherwise be, especially in this time, a time of war. That is only one part of the picture. It is a very significant part, it is a scary part, but it is only one part. We talked about social services tonight. We talked about the environment, the impact on the environment. We talked about drugs, about a variety of other things that are attributable to massive immigration, legal and illegal, and do in fact matter. Mr. Speaker, I believe they matter to a majority of the people in this country. I do not think that there is a bigger divide between what the people of this country want and what this government is willing to give them other than the area of immigration, immigration reform. Poll after poll after poll says that the people of this country want reform of this program. They want to reduce immigration to a manageable level. I have a bill to reduce immigration to 300,000 people a year down from the present a little over 1 million people a year. I think that is a goal that we could achieve. I think we can still benefit by the diversity and the value, the added value that immigration can bring to the country, but we can begin to operate our social services system and we can begin to recover if we reduce the number of illegal immigrants coming into the country by securing our borders and reducing legal immigration, at least for 5 years while we try to catch our breath.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to bring to the attention of the body another group of people that I would like to bring into what we are now calling the homeland heroes. These are folks whose daily lives confront them with incredible stresses and challenges far different than what their business had provided them with to begin with. They started out ranching, and that is a difficult task in and of itself. But after generations in that particular industry and living in the same area on the border of Mexico, living in Arizona, many of the people who reside there are now living in what we can, I think, accurately describe as a war zone. Every week I have been bringing to the House the names and pictures of those people that I want to induct into this homeland heroes hall of fame, I guess is the way we will describe it. Tonight I want to talk about Rob and Sue Krentz, who own and operate a ranch located on the far southeastern corner of Arizona, about 12 miles north of the U.S./Mexico border and 25 miles northeast of the city of Douglas. They are third-generation ranchers. This ranch has been in their family since 1907. Rob and Susie Krentz have three children they raised on that ranch. Their two sons, Andrew and Frank, attend New Mexico State University, and their daughter, Kyle, is a high school senior. The Krentz family story is similar in many ways to the experiences of hundreds of other ranchers in this border region. Yet to them and their children it is unique and it is personal and dreadful in the impact it has had on their lives and the future viability of their way of life as ranchers. Just one tiny statistic that begins to tell the story of what these folks face every single day. In the month of November, 2002, in the Tucson Sector of the U.S. Border Patrol, which includes Cochise County, where this the Krentz ranch is located, the Border Patrol apprehended 23,000 border crossers. That was in the month of November. It is anybody's guess as to how many people actually come across, but many, many people would suggest that the ratio is just about maybe one in five, and that is a very conservative estimate, that for every one person we apprehend on the border, at least five get through. Again, I think it is closer to one in ten, but I will accept even this very, very conservative estimate, that for every one we get at the border apprehended, five go by them. This means that in just the month of November near this ranch and over their property, when we had 23,000 apprehended, using the conservative estimate of one to five, it meant that 115,000 people cross the border illegally, that same area. We are just talking about one little chunk of the border, the Tucson Sector. That means if we project that out over the course of a year that 1,300,000 people come across that border in that sector. I guarantee that is a conservative estimate, but let us use it. One million three hundred thousand people coming across that border and coming across the lands of the people that live there, including the Krentz family. I had the opportunity to spend some time down there just a few weeks ago, and I can attest to the fact that on any given evening one can watch dozens and dozens of illegal aliens trespassing across the land. The Krentz family will call the Border Patrol to come and intercept them. Sometimes the Border Patrol will come; sometimes they will not. Mr. Krentz estimates that over the past 5 years his family has suffered a loss of at least $300,000 a year due to cut fences, stolen and damaged vehicles and farm equipment and damage to the rangeland itself. This is very, very delicate land. It is desert land. It is something that has to be conserved and protected; and when we have got 1,300,000 coming across there every year, believe me, it is not being conserved and protected. It is being destroyed. The Krentz ranch has 1,000 head of cattle. The continual movement of people across that domain constantly disturbs the livestock, impacting their own value, and sometimes somethings happen that are even worse. In February of last year, for instance, a calf was butchered by illegal alien trespassers. Two men responsible were caught. They were tried. They were found guilty. They served a total of 51 days in jail. They were also ordered to pay $200 in restitution to the Krentz ranch. The Krentz ranch has not seen a cent of that money; and, of course, our best guess is they will not because these people have been released. They came back into the population either up here or have returned to Mexico. These losses that are estimated in the neighborhood of $300,000 include damage and disease that comes into the water tanks and the waterlines on their ranch. The family and their employees cannot drink out of the water tanks any longer because of the disease that happens to be in the water on the land brought in by illegal alien trespassers and the damage done by purposeful, deliberate vandalism. The estimated value of the water that has been lost on their property to date is $4 million. In June of 2002, the Krentz brothers discovered two separate instances of damaged waterlines. Illegal aliens had broken the two-inch PBC waterline in order to get drinking water. The Krentz ranch waterline runs for 40 miles and is one of the best gravity-flow waterlines in the State of Arizona. Because of these two breaks in the long pipeline, several hundred thousand gallons of precious water were wasted. The Krentz family continually has to deal with threats, physical threats, from illegal border crossers. Recently, a family member came upon a group of 39 trespassers and was threatened by them when he asked them to turn around and get off his land. He returned home, called the Border Patrol, and they did come and apprehend them. But we both know what happens is they put them into a revolving door near the border and in a few days or in a few hours many times they are coming right back across the border. The Krentz family members are not vigilantes. They do not try to apprehend illegal aliens by force. They do not carry arms for their own protection. They will always call the Border Patrol when they observe trespassers. They and the other ranchers are trying to follow the law and work with the Border Patrol, and all they want from their own government is to enforce the law as well as to protect them and their property, and that is what we owe them. I mean, they are only asking the minimum, protect their lives and property from people coming across that border, from this invasion. And there are no two ways about it. That is an appropriate word to use to describe what is happening on our southern border especially. It is an invasion, and they are asking their government to protect them from that invasion. I want to salute Rob and Susie Krentz, Phil and Carrie Krentz as homeland heroes who are bearing the brunt of an invasion of over a million illegal aliens crossing our southern border. We need to understand their plight. We have a moral obligation to do something about it. Now for the rest of my time I would like to talk about another aspect of the issue of illegal immigration, and we are going to be doing this for the next several weeks, going to be taking this issue and breaking it down into, I think, more understandable parts. We are going to be explaining its various aspects because I will assure the Members this is one of the most complex, this is one of the most challenging aspects of domestic policy. It has ramifications that go on and on and on. They will affect every aspect of our life. Massive immigration into this country, as I have said on many occasions, combined with a pernicious multiculturalist attitude and philosophy in this country is a cocktail mix of dangerous components. The one component we are going to talk about tonight, the one part of this picture that we are going to focus on this evening is the issue of our national security, the threat that exists to the United States of America as a result of the fact that our borders are porous and that people can and do cross them at will. There was a time that the United States of America could be seen as somewhat naive, and because we were protected by two oceans we felt that the world was a place of general safety for us and that we really did not have to be too concerned about borders. There was always illegal immigration into the United States. That has certainly been the case, but it never reached a level that posed a threat to the Nation's existence. It now has reached that level, not just, as I say, because of the fact that we have far more people coming across these borders than ever before in the Nation's history and into our ports and into our airports, people who come here legally but then overstay their visas, which comprise about 40 percent of the maybe 13 to 20 million people in this country here who are here illegally, but the southern border alone, as I mentioned earlier, is a place of enormous illegal immigration. The numbers are just staggering. What is very, very worrisome is that in the last several years there has not just been an increase in the number of Mexican nationals coming across the border, but there has been an alarming number of people who are classified as OTM. This is ``other than Mexican'' coming across our border, coming from all over the world. This phenomenon has been observed and has been noted by the Border Patrol, and they have talked about it. They have indicated that there is a change going on and that this is a strange situation because, all of a sudden, through that southern border and our northern border with Canada, we are seeing people come from many Middle Eastern countries, from Asian countries, many from South America, specifically from a place called the tri- border region. Let me tell the Members about this. The tri-border region is an area that is really the borders of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, and there is a very large group of Muslims in that area, a very large Muslim population in that area. Over the last decade or so, without much attention being paid to it, there has been an enormous increase in the number of Muslims living in South America, and even in Canada. Many of them, in the millions, live in this tri-border area. It has become a place through which now we are seeing a great number of people transiting from Middle Eastern countries into Brazil, getting Brazilian documents, then coming north into the United States through Mexico. When we intercept them, we chalk them down as Brazilian. But we are finding that they are not really Brazilian. For the most part, they are Middle Easterners coming from places throughout the Middle East. Brazil is a very eclectic country. It is a place where it is difficult to look at someone and say, you are from Brazil. It is not that easy. So people who are Middle Eastern can easily be characterized as Brazilian, especially if they are carrying Brazilian passports and Brazilian papers. But we have had this enormous increase in the last couple of years, it goes off the charts, of Brazilians intercepted at the boarders. It is up in the thousands. Our Border Patrol people are saying, what is this all about? How come we are seeing so many people from this area? It is because that is the area that actually provides the funnel from the Middle East through South America up into the United States across the Mexican border. As a matter of fact, there is a statement that I think is certainly worthy of us spending a few minutes on here. Here is the quote. It comes from the National Commission on Terrorism established in the year 2000: ``The massive flows of people across the U.S. borders makes exclusion of all foreign terrorists impossible.'' Now, this is not an amazing quote, not a very profound quote, but something we should pay attention to. This was a commission established to look into the issue of terrorism. What they are essentially saying is, because so many millions of people are coming across our borders illegally, that we cannot possibly hope to defend ourselves from terrorists coming into the United States. Is that not an incredible statement, when you think of it? On the one hand, it is completely logical. It is certainly truthful, we all know that is true, because the ``massive flows of people across the U.S. borders,'' this makes the exclusion of all foreign terrorists impossible. ``Duh,'' as the kids say, sure that is the case. What are we going to do about it? What kind of a challenge does this pose to us? This is 2000. This is before 9/11, remember. So, this particular statement, along with the entire commission report, as far as I know, was tossed into File 13, because no one wants to hear this. No one wants to deal with this. No one in this body, no one in the administration, really wants to tackle this issue, because, you see, they know that if you try to stop people from coming across that border, if we actually try to defend our borders with our military, which is absolutely necessary, which any country on the face of this Earth would do in these circumstances, any sane policy would tell us that if you are going to be fighting wars halfway around the world and you are doing it today with the new kind of threat we face, that it is not just the war on the battlefields of Iraq that we have to be worried about; it is also the United States of America, the homeland; and just creating a Department of Homeland Defense does not in fact create a defense of the homeland. It may create the illusion of a defense by the name, but that is it. Because there is no way that that department, funded at the levels that are anticipated, could possibly deal with this one statement, ``the massive flows across the United States border makes it impossible to exclude terrorists.'' They could not deal with it. They need technology. We need the military. We need the military on the border. Maybe at some time in the future we will have a homeland defense agency that is so competent, so technically advanced, using the best kind of monitoring devices and cameras, and even the low-tech stuff of things called walls and fences; yes, fences. You know, we actually can employ that low-tech type of device to stop a lot of what is happening here. But we will not even do that, and the reason is because we do not want to stop illegal immigration. That is the dirtiest little secret that passes around this place periodically: We do not wish to stop illegal immigration. That is this government's policy. It is to allow that flow, for a variety of reasons. On one side we have a political party, the Democratic Party, that sees that flow as a source of support for their political party, that eventually those people will turn into supporters of the Democratic Party, as tradition has certainly proven, that immigrants into the United States, at least for a generation maybe or so, tend to vote Democratic. So the Democratic Party sees that as a source of support. They also, of course, have to cater to a very strong minority group within their own party who wants open borders, who wants illegal immigration. On our side, unfortunately, we have a problem also, because there are a lot of people who look at illegal immigration as a source of cheap labor. I certainly hear from a lot of folks who tell me all the time that they would not be able to open their business, their dry cleaning establishment, their restaurant, their hotel, unless they had illegal aliens working for them. This is amazing. Today, in the Denver paper I was reading, flying out here from home, it talked about a job fair, a job fair held in Denver over the weekend. Something like 6,000 people attended. There were maybe 400 jobs available. Six thousand people attended, maybe 400 jobs available. But I hear from people all the time that tell me they simply cannot hire any ``American willing to do the work.'' I have a neighbor who has been unemployed for over a year. He was at first employed in the high- tech industry, very, very competent individual, very significant job with a very good salary. He has been unemployed. That industry, everybody knows what is happening to it. He is right now doing data entry work and driving a limo to try to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. I hear all the time that we do not have Americans who will do these jobs, these other jobs. There was another article in the paper not too long ago in Denver that talked about the fact that one restaurant, the Luna Restaurant, a Mexican restaurant on 38th and about Lowell, put an ad in the paper for a $3-an-hour waiter position. They had 600 applicants the first day for that one job. Six hundred applicants for one job at $3 an hour. Are all 600 of those applicants illegal aliens? I do not think so. I think there are a lot of American citizens who want those jobs. I think right now American citizens are in competition with those people coming in across the border, but in fact employers want to pay people less. That is natural. Unfortunately, many employers want to exploit their employees. We see accounts of this happening all the time. So, they want illegal immigration, they want porous borders. They do not want anybody stopping their flow, even if this means that it is something that could pose a danger to this country, and it does pose a danger to the Nation. It is a very immediate danger, because, you see, when you cannot distinguish at the border, which no one can do, nobody has shown me a way today to distinguish between that illegal immigrant coming in who is just coming to do the job no one else wants to do, who wants to be a restaurant worker or whatever, noone can distinguish just looking at these people, of course, what they are coming for. You can't say, ``that one looks like he is just looking for a job, but that one over there, they look like they might be coming to do something bad.'' You cannot tell. You have to secure the borders and have everybody coming into this country legally through a process that allows us to identify them, find out what they are coming in for, how long they are going to be here and for what purpose, and find out when they leave. You need internal enforcement in the United States of our immigration laws to make this thing work. So it is not just the border where we need to have the military, but we have to have the INS using its resources inside the country to identify people who are here illegally and remove them. I absolutely do not want us, I am not asking for, we never have proposed, using the military for interior enforcement of law. There is a law against that. It is sometimes referred to as the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about using the military to augment our homeland defense forces on our borders, at our ports of entry, at our coasts, until that Homeland Defense Agency is ready to take on that job itself. We can do it. We do not have to have people strung out arm-in-arm across 5,000 miles of border. That is not what we are talking about. It would take relatively few people but people who are trained and have the technology. That is what the military offers us, training and technology, which can be employed for that purpose. Yes, people say to me all the time, we have got this war going on in Iraq, and are you saying you would use troops on the border? I say, yes. Yes, I would use troops on the border. Because, of course, we only make life more dangerous for everybody. There is not a soul who does not think life is more dangerous for the average American as a result of us going to war in Iraq, at least at the outset of this thing. I pray to God that our efforts in Iraq will be successful. I hope they are successful immediately. I do not want to see another person hurt or injured. I certainly do not want to see an American soldier in that situation. I want them home as quickly as possible. They are fighting a just war. We have to win it. I hope we win it soon. Then I do believe the world will be safer. But I know this: That the threat of terrorism will increase as a result of our efforts in Iraq. Even our own government admits that. We went to a heightened state of the alert status immediately upon going to war. Everybody knows that is the case. Everybody knows it is more dangerous right now. So, yes, I would say use troops on our border, because in fact that is our first line of defense. That is exactly where we should be employing some of our military assets. We do not need many. We do not need hundreds of thousands of troops. I was on the border, the northern border, observing an operation that used 100 Marines to control 100 miles. That was the test, 100 Marines, 100 miles. And do you know what? When you combine their efforts with the Border Patrol and the Forest Service personnel on that border, it worked. I saw them interdict people coming across that border on ATVs, all terrain vehicles, and people flying small planes across the border. Believe me, they would have gone unnoticed. It is the most rugged terrain you have seen up on the northern border, in this case just a few miles north of Bonners Ferry, Idaho. We can do it. Let us extrapolate here tonight and say 100 Marines, 100 miles. You have 5,000 miles, you employ 5,000 troops. It would be more difficult than that, I recognize, but it would not be that much more difficult, and it would not take that many more troops. If nothing else, we can train them there. Our troops have to be trained somewhere. The Marines told me that that was the best training experience they have ever had. I was told that by the Marine commander of the unit that that was the best training they had ever had, because it was real time, they were trying to stop real bad guys coming across that border, and it was the most rugged terrain you could possibly imagine. So, if nothing else, we should be training on the border. It could serve two purposes: The training of our troops and also the interdiction of people coming across this border illegally. Let us go to some of the specific instances that we have witnessed here in the recent past. Here is an interesting one. Wadih El Hage, he was arrested in the Saguaro National Park for possession of an automatic weapon, an AK-47 rifle. He was using this AK-47 for target practice. On September 15, 1998, Wadih testified before a Federal grand jury which was investigating the bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam. Several days later, he was charged with perjury. On October 7, he was indicted in connection with the embassy bombings. He was subsequently convicted for both offenses and is now serving a life sentence. Now, what happened? How they got him is that he was observed and arrested after he had just come across the border; he was observed in the national park by a park ranger. He was testifying, Wadih was testifying at this trial in September and he was saying that he has never fired a weapon, he has no arms, he does not know why he was being harassed. A Border Patrol agent came across this guy's picture and he said, you know what? I remember that guy. I remember arresting him not too long ago in the Saguaro National Park. And you know what? He was practicing with an AK-47. So that testimony ended up, the testimony and evidence provided by the Border Patrol ended up with this conviction for perjury in September; and later they were able to connect this gentleman to the embassy bombings. Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, a 23-year-old Palestinian, 1996 arrested twice within 6 days for crossing over the Canadian border illegally. Both times turned over to the INS who released him back across the border and, of course, the revolving door, he came right back down. In 1997 he was arrested a third time coming across the border illegally, and later arrested in New York in a plot to blow up the New York subways. This guy, talk about a lucky catch, my colleagues may remember something about him. Ahmed Rassem, December 1999, Ahmed Rassem was arrested with 1,000 pounds of explosives and four timers, the timers are right here in the picture at the bottom. He was arrested at the Olympic National Park, Washington. He chose Port Angeles because of the lack of technology and the manpower there. He was convicted of participating in a plot to blow up Los Angeles Airport on New Year's Eve, 1999. Now, these are three we got. Remember what I said earlier that for everybody we actually find, actually interdict at the border, for every one of them, at least five people get across. Now, let me tell my colleagues, those are folks who get across and they are the most unsophisticated and perhaps unskilled in the manners and mechanisms that could be employed to come across the border. These are folks, many of them, that are just simply looking for the jobs that are available. They get by on a ratio of 5 to 1. Can we imagine how much more, what the ratio is, I should say, for people who are a little more sophisticated in the smuggling business? How many more Ahmed Rassems got through? We know that the Center for Immigration Studies has indicated that we have 115,000 illegal immigrants from various Middle Eastern nations who are currently residing in the United States, as many as 115,000 from Middle Eastern nations. Day after day after day we are confronted by news stories of very scary folks coming across the border, sometimes doing very scary things. This is an interesting article. This was in the Tucson paper not too long ago. An Arizona couple has discovered a diary written in Arabic in a backpack apparently dropped on their property by an illegal alien entering the United States, reports the Sierra Vista Herald Review. According to the report, Walter Kolbe, he owns a ranch down there, was chasing some wild animals away from his home last week when he stumbled upon the backpack. Not an unusual occurrence on his property, since it is a path used routinely by illegal aliens coming from Mexico. He brought it home, but did not immediately open the backpack. After going away for a weekend, Kolbe's wife, May, looked into the backpack and discovered the diary. He says, I found it about a hundred yards from the house near a barbed wire fence. I was just going to throw it in the trash. According to Mr. Kolbe and, by the way, his brother serves in the House of Representatives here from Arizona, most of the writing was in Arabic, though there was some Spanish writing as well. When I was down on that border in that same area, I came across a lot of material in what are called pickup sites. What these are are places where a large number of people will gather after walking into the United States illegally, they will gather, and it is near a road always, sometimes a dirt road, sometimes a paved road, and they will await transportation northward. It is all arranged, it is taken care of, because now this has turned into a very big business. And the people who used to be selective and only were involved with the importation of drugs are now importing people because it has become very lucrative. And in these pickup sites, as I say, there will be thousands of people gathered and there is trash strewn everywhere, lots and lots of backpacks, as is evidenced here, and lots of materials laying all over the ground. Not too long ago in this same area we found a prayer rug, a rug that is used by Muslims to conduct prayer ceremonies. It was found, by the way, at one of these pickup sites. There are all kinds of instances where we have found Arabic materials, Arabic passports, Arabic papers, accoutrements in these pickup sites. Now, there is a road not too far from Douglas, Arizona, that is referred to by the locals in the area as the Arab Road. And when you ask them, what do you mean by that, they say, well, because the Arabs are willing to pay so much more to come into the United States, up to $30,000 per person, that they are sometimes transported separately. They will not come in through the same pipeline as the Mexican nationals. Some of these, the high-paying folks, they will be brought across a different area, brought in a little nicer, like going first class. They pay a little more so that they can come in with a little less possibility of heat exhaustion or dropping dead in the desert from exposure because they will pay, as I say, a lot more money. But they are coming into the United States with purposes that we know are the most diabolical, to do something here that threatens our safety. They are coming across the border because it is the easiest way to get into the United States if you want to do something bad, because our borders are undefended. They are unprotected. It is incredible. Certainly it is something to go down in future history books. I just hope that those chapters will not be titled something like ``The Last Days of the American Experience.'' I see I am joined tonight on the floor by a friend, a member of our caucus who has been a champion, is the best way I can describe it, ever since I came to the Congress of the United States and have been pushing this issue. The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) preceded me here and certainly was laboring in this vineyard before I ever got here and continues to offer his observations, which I invite him to share with us this evening.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. He brings up an incident I recall well, and I am glad he did bring it to our attention. It was a very emotional time when the father of some young man that was lost in the World Trade Center did in fact say exactly that, that those people were allowed to be in the United States because they were able to swim in this sea of illegal immigration and they were undetectable. This is why when people talk to us about immigration, and we often have people respond when we start talking about the national security issues. I have been in Mexico and have had Members of the Mexican Government say, you know, none of those people were Mexican that committed those crimes. Of course not. It is the fact that we are only as strong as our weakest link. If we cannot control our borders because we are trying to let illegal immigrants come across from Mexico who are not trying to do anything really bad to us, we cannot possibly hope to protect ourselves from those who are trying to do something bad. That is the point here. That is why we are talking about this as a national security issue. My friend, the gentleman from Virginia, mentioned this Newsweek article. He has learned that 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed told interrogators that he discussed bringing operatives through the Mexican border. They worry about these people coming across, suicide bombings at soft targets like malls, public transportation. Another worry, of course, is that a terrorist could acquire shoulder- fired missiles and shoot them at passenger planes. Of course, any number of horrendous things could happen. Our minds could run wild on all the things that could happen in this country because we are an open and free society. We do not want to change that. The best way to avoid having an overreaction in the United States and trying to pass laws that we worry about in terms of what we will do to civil liberties, as Members know, we get lots of mail on the PATRIOT Act, and whatever kind of legislation that may be being formulated here as an addition to the PATRIOT Act. There are concerns, and concerns I share, about overreaching government activity. But one way to avoid that, Mr. Speaker, is to protect our borders. It is to stop, to the extent humanly possible, them from getting here to begin with. Maybe we will not be able to make it absolutely secure. No, in fact, I know we cannot. Even if we do all the things I and the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) and other Members of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus are suggesting, we cannot make it perfect; but it is our best effort we are supposed to exert here in this Congress. That is the best we can do. If we have something happen even after we have done it all, we can at least say we have tried everything. That is our responsibility. We cannot continue to ignore the existence of this threat to our very existence. Other recent news, the Nation's biggest commercial nuclear power facility faces a possible terrorist threat. It just came out. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said Thursday, he told the Senate Committee on Armed Services that terrorists may have targeted the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant in Arizona. He said he would not go into details about intelligence reports concerning the plans that may include an attack on the plant. The Washington Times reported Thursday that terrorists have targeted the Arizona plant, and security officials are looking for Iraqi government sleeper cells that might carry out the attack. The threat to the facility came from sensitive information indicating the plant was targeted by Middle Eastern terrorists who were not further identified. Earlier this week on our Florida coast, a Cuban Coast Guard vessel slipped in, it was a military vessel, got into Key West without ever being detected. These things go on and on. In Miami, U.S. authorities made a fresh and urgent call for public help yesterday to find a Saudi-born man who could pose what they termed a very, very serious threat as part of an al Qaeda plot against the United States. Stepping up their search with an appeal to the U.S. Muslim community for information, the FBI said Adnan El Shukrijumah was a friend of a man now serving prison time for plotting to blow up a Florida power plant. The agency said that this individual is not charged with a crime but is being sought for questioning, involved with al Qaeda activities. Just a couple of days ago as Baghdad was being bombed, it was reported on Fox News and Sky News as well as Worldnet Daily that there was a search going on for six Iraqis in either northern Mexico or the U.S. Southwest. They were said to be carrying toxic materials requiring temperature control. That means they are either biological or radiological. Either way, they are ominous and dangerous. According to tips by undercover investigators, the search had been going on for 2 to 3 days on the Mexican side, and now it is starting on the United States side. We could go on through stories like this all night long. Long after I have run out of time to deliver those stories they could be available, because they are there. When we talk about immigration and immigration reform, we have to understand the importance of this concept. It is not just an issue of jobs; it is not just an issue of acculturation, of integration into the society, of balkanization of America. All of those things are disconcerting. It is not just an issue of American citizens who are out of work and being displaced by people coming here from foreign countries. All those things are serious issues. It is not just the issue of the amount of drugs coming across both borders and into our ports every single day. We talk about harmful substances and dangerous substances. Certainly the tons and tons and tons of drugs that are being brought in by illegal smugglers, by illegal aliens carrying things on their shoulders and backpacks, in those backpacks it could be 60 pounds of marijuana, sarin gas; it could be all kinds of very, very ugly things. All of those things are serious consequences, serious threats, I should say, serious issues. But we decided to start this series of discussions tonight with this one specific one of the danger to the country posed by porous borders because of the threat of terrorism that is so real. I hope and pray that we never have to stand on this floor and say, I told you so, I told you, unless we secure those borders, something horrible is going to happen. Somebody is going to waltz across them and do something very, very bad. Do Members know what is going to happen? Not only are we going to be rushing to the borders to try and do something, but we are going to be overreacting, probably, internally. There are going to be threats to civil liberties that will develop as a result of some incident that occurs in this country. I hate to think about this, and I hope and pray I am absolutely wrong in this prediction, but it is certainly not out of the question to suggest that this could happen. We are told by Homeland Security Director Ridge and everybody else in positions of authority to expect such a thing, to expect an event. Well, at least if this event occurs, let us at least be able to turn to our constituents and say, we have tried everything we can do. We have committed to you, when we have asked you for a vote and you have asked us to adhere to the Constitution and uphold that Constitution, we have tried to do that. The part of the Constitution that specifically refers to the protection of life and property, we have tried to do it. That is what I want to be able to say. We cannot ensure perfect security and safety, but we can try our best. That is the least we can do is the best that we can do, and we are not anywhere near it, I am sorry to say.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, there are words we should remember. There are quotes worth quoting again. Here is one: ``If we are to prevail in the long run, we must expand the long-run strength of our economy. We must move along the path to a higher rate of growth and full employment. ``For this would mean tens of billions of dollars more for each year in production, profits, wages and public revenues. It would mean an end to the persistent slack which has kept our unemployment at or above 5 percent for 61 of the past 62 months.'' ``To achieve these greater gains, one step, above all, is essential, the enactment this year of a substantial reduction and revision in Federal income taxes. ``For it is increasingly clear, to those in government, business and labor who are responsible for our economy's success, that our obsolete tax system exerts too heavy a drag on private purchasing power, profits and employment. Designed to check inflation in early years, it now checks growth instead. It discourages extra effort and risk. It distorts the use of resources. It invites recurrent recessions, depresses our Federal revenues, and causes chronic budget deficits.'' ``This net reduction in tax liabilities will increase the purchasing power of American families and business enterprises in every tax bracket, with the greatest increase going to our low-income consumers. It will, in addition, encourage the initiative and risk-taking on which our free system depends, induce more investment, production and capacity use, help provide the 2 million new jobs we need every year, and reinforce the American principle of additional reward for additional effort.'' Mr. Chairman, there are Democrats that we should quote, there are Democratic words that we should remember, and those that I have just quoted came from the Democratic President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in his State of the Union message in 1963. There is a contemporary Democrat who offers to his party also very good advice. It, of course, is Democrat Bill Richardson from the State of New Mexico, who says that ``reducing taxes,'' and this year he is talking about, this is not in 1963, he is talking about 2003, ``reducing taxes puts us on the road to economic growth.'' His plan reduces New Mexico's income tax by 40 percent, from the current 8.2 percent to 4.9 percent. He agrees that his plan sounds sort of like the Bush tax-cutting agenda. All I am saying, Mr. Chairman, is this. There was a time when the Democratic Party could be counted on to do the right thing for the government, to do the right thing regardless of whether or not you could make a class envy debate out of this thing. They knew it was the right thing to do. It was the right thing to do when the President of the United States said so in 1963, it is the right thing to do today when the Democratic Governor of New Mexico says to do it, and I encourage this body to do it by striking down this substitute and supporting the underlying amendment.