Tom Tancredo

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to have my name removed as a cosponsor of H.R. 397 and H.R. 3799.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, success has 1,000 fathers and failure is an orphan. This is especially true and it comes to mind when the ex- President of the United States recently claimed credit for the passage of the Welfare Reform Act after, of course, he twice vetoed the bill. The reason that Mr. Clinton now wants to be a parent of the bill is because it works. It is wildly successful. Nearly 3 million children have been lifted from poverty and the child poverty rate is at its lowest level since 1978. When we reaffirm the dignity of work and the reality of welfare reform, it is not about a social program, but rather it is about a job. I hope that everyone joins me today and votes for the Welfare Reform Reauthorization.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for his observations. Of course, times have changed and exactly that. First of all, we are talking about a $73 billion maybe $140 billion farm bill. There is a big difference there. It could go to $140 billion. That was not in the budget resolution. And so to say that I have voted for the latter as opposed to the former is inaccurate, and I would also suggest that the gentleman is absolutely correct. If one can get the required number of votes in the House, one can pass anything. And I guarantee you, we have done it year after year, time after time. And it is the way, I understand entirely, it is the way the process is run. But I suggest that it should be perhaps incumbent upon all of us as we approach all of these bills coming up, the supplemental, I do not know, I think this week sometime, and a variety of other spending bills, I will watch for the Democrat and the Cornflower Blue Democrats to see how they vote because I will be voting ``no'' on all of them because I believe we should stick inside the budget. I thank the gentleman for his cordial relationship and his willingness to discuss this issue with me tonight. I also remember thinking while I was listening to the discussion earlier here there was a comedian during the 70's and 80's. And his tag line was, ``The devil made me do it. The devil made me do it.'' And he used to end his little skit with that all of the time. And of course, what he was saying was I did not want to do all of these bad things, but the devil made me do it, so it is okay. I listen to all of this discussion about how bad it is to have these horrendous expenditures and budget-busting bills all over the place for which my colleagues on the other side voted for most of the time as far as I can remember. And then to say, The devil made me do it. I do not know how we got here but this is bad, and somebody has got to impose some fiscal discipline on me. Somebody has got to make me behave. Somebody has got to make me say, you know what, I do not think we should vote for all this stuff. If everybody imposes a balanced budget amendment, then I will be able to take my medicine. I am all for a balanced budget amendment, Mr. Speaker, absolutely. I will vote for it anytime, anyplace, anywhere. It is okay with me. But I think it is just the funniest thing in a way to listen to people who, as I say, from the other side of the aisle especially, and talk about budget constraint and fiscal responsibility, the devil must have been making him do it here for 40 years before we ever came in control in this body and now they want to seek forgiveness. Well, the Lord says that that is possible. So who am I to suggest that they are not truly repentant? On to another issue, the issue of immigration and, specifically, immigration reform. In the past several weeks we have passed legislation in this body, and, as a matter of fact, yesterday the President signed a piece of legislation into law that will have the effect of tightening down on what heretofore can be described only as the most liberal immigration policy in the world of any country in the world. It is almost a misnomer to indicate there is an immigration policy in the United States because that implies, of course, that we have control over the process; that we establish how many people are going to come into the country every year like every other nation in the world does. We control it. We know who is coming in. We know how many. We know what they will be doing here. We know when they leave. I say that is the implication of saying you have an immigration policy. The reality, of course, is we do not. We have not. And even the passage of this recent legislation euphemistically called the Border Security Act, we will not have accomplished the goal of border security. A couple of weeks ago the House passed a bill by an overwhelming margin that was designed and is often referred to as the abolishment of the INS and the creation of a new body. Well, of course, it really was not all of that. As is often the case here, we have a tendency to name things, I guess, a little euphemistically and to create these illusions about what we do here. Now, the reality is we passed a very tepid bill designed to reform the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Much more needs to be done to actually reform that organization, much more than what we did in our bill in the House. In fact, what has to happen is that we must take from every agency presently charged with responsibility for border control, that being the Customs under the Treasury, Agriculture, a variety, DEA, all kinds of agencies have border control responsibilities, of course Border Control under the INS. The Forest Service has some responsibilities in areas. We have national forests that adjoin international boundaries, and what we have to do, Mr. Speaker, is to consolidate all of those agencies, all of these parts of agencies into one agency, with a clear mandate, with a very clear line of authority, so that everyone who works for that agency knows exactly what they are supposed to be doing and know that they have the full support of this Nation in that endeavor. That agency should be put into the Homeland Defense Agency, should be run out of Tom Ridge's shop or whoever is the subsequent head of that organization. That is what we should do. That is what everyone who studies this area understands needs to be done. Now, we did not do that. We did not do that in the bill we passed in this House. We split the agency into two, which is good. We said they are going to have an enforcement responsibility and they are going to have what I call the immigration social worker side of things, the welcome wagon. Those will be the two separate responsibilities. They will be reporting to two different chiefs who in turn will be reporting to a single individual in the Department of Justice. That really is not a lot different than what we already have. It really is not because among other things almost all of the people who will be running those two separate organizations within Justice are the people who are presently running the single organization we call the INS. Names will be the same but titles will be different, and we assume that by changing someone's title we will change their attitude or improve their competencies, but my colleagues and I know, Mr. Speaker, and I think the American public understand fully well that just changing titles will not change the way it is run. Unfortunately, today within the INS we have people who are not, number one, competent to do the job and it starts from the top. The gentleman, very nice gentleman, Mr. Ziglar, whom I have nothing against personally, seems like a very pleasant individual. Unfortunately the water is so far above his head in trying to operate this agency that it is almost pathetic. Mr. Ziglar was appointed several months ago because he had been the doorkeeper of the Senate. That was his job before he became the head of an agency with 30,000 people and an $8 billion budget. He should not be there. He is not able to run the agency. He is not able to run it because the force of his personality cannot control it, and secondly, he is not able to run it because of course it is an enormous bureaucratic organization, moribund, plagued with inertia and internal incompetence and protected by Civil Service. So even if we had some of the finest people, even if we had someone with enormous capabilities as head of the organization, their ability to actually change the course of this big ship, they could be turning the wheel as hard as they can and they will notice that the bow hardly ever moves because all of the people are turning the wheel as fast as they can, they realize there is nothing connecting the wheel to the rudder. It is going its own way, and that is a problem, and it will not be solved by the bill we passed in the House. Here is the rub with that particular bill. It is going to the other body and it will not be improved. It will not be made better. We will see a conference report on this. It will pass and it will be something far short of what we passed in the House, and then we will all walk away from here and tell our constituents not to worry, we voted to abolish the INS and we are going to construct a really great agency to handle this problem. Okay. That is the problem. That is a big problem, and I ask my colleagues to just think about that for a minute over here, that the INS today, regardless of what we pretended to do in the House, abolishing the INS, that was the way it was presented to us, regardless of that, regardless of the words we used, the reality is we added a lifeboat to the Titanic. I voted for it. It is a pretty good idea. I think it is a good idea. In fact, who would say we should not have added lifeboats to the Titanic? That would be good. I voted to do it. It is not going to stop the ship from sinking. Yesterday in the Rose Garden the President signed a bill that, as I mentioned earlier, called Enhanced Border Security, and it is adding a couple of more lifeboats to the Titanic. It is good. Glad we are doing it. It will give us the ability to track people eventually. 2004, 2005, it will give us the ability supposedly, and we have done this before actually. We have actually mandated this before, and nobody ever carried it out, so we will see. If agencies carry out the law, it will give us the ability to track people who come into the United States. People who request a visa will actually have to have some sort of identifier, a biometric identifier, which is a term for fingerprint probably. Eventually other maybe more sophisticated approaches but initially fingerprints. So we will know if, in fact, the person asking for this visa is, in fact, who they say they are. That is good. Good idea. Also, schools will be required to participate in this and tell us whether people who are here on student visas are still in school. We have done this before. Everybody complained. We pulled back because the schools said, please, we do not want all that paperwork and what if it discourages all our foreign students from coming here. We make a lot of money, and we said, okay, well, never mind, we are going to try again. Try again when students were not coming to class, when they were not educated anymore in the course work. That will be good. I am all for it. Another lifeboat. It will create a database that will allow various agencies of the Federal Government, the FBI and the INS and everybody, to identify potential terrorists or people who pop up on a terrorist list. We will be able to go and this name will come up, and it will say, oh, that guy came into the United States, or lady as the case may be, on such and such a date and he is here or he has gone, and that is good. I am glad. We will still have, by the way, Mr. Speaker, we will still have the visa application that anyone can go to the Web site for the State Department and look this up. I love it. This is great. I always think it is a metaphor for the entire INS debate. It is called the temporary visitor visa, and it says about the third or fourth question, I am paraphrasing only slightly. It says are you a terrorist; are you planning to come into the United States and blow things up and commit acts of terrorism; have you committed acts of terrorism in other countries; are you a member of the Nazi Party. It is all one series of questions, and then the person checks over one box, yes or no. So this potential terrorist says, yeah, I am, I am terrorist, I am a member of al Qaeda and I am coming in to blow up a building or distribute some sort of biological warfare agent, and at the bottom of this visa, because of the efforts of a Member of the other body from Massachusetts, very big Member of the body, there is an additional little asterisk and it says, after you answer yes or no to this question, are you a terrorist, if my colleagues go to the bottom and it says answering yes does not mean that you will be denied access to the United States. So we still have that, but now that is okay because we will know if the terrorists come in, they will sign up. Naturally, they will say of course I am coming in, I am a terrorist, here I am and here is my terrorist credentials, and I am coming in to do a lot of damage. Now, for those folks who admit to being terrorists this is a good idea that we have them register. I am all for it, but supposing, just supposing, I mean, I know this is a great hypothetical, but just supposing a potential terrorist decides to come into the United States and not sign up as a terrorist, not actually apply for a visa, now my colleagues say that cannot be because of course everybody coming into the United States applies for a visa, comes here as a visitor, a guest of the United States, tells us who they are, where they are going to be and for how long. I say these things, of course, with tongue in cheek because everybody knows that our borders are porous and that only our most honest people in the world for the most part say they are coming in, especially to apply through the regular process, but of course millions and millions of others come in a different way. They do not wait, they do not waste time filling out visas, requests for application to the United States. They come across the border. These are two pictures of the border along the Arizona-Mexican border near Nogales, Arizona. We took them a couple of weeks ago when we were down there on a fact finding trip. This barbed wire fence, if it can be distinguished on the television, I am not sure, here, that is separating Mexico on the other side of this fence from the United States. Down here, same thing, barbed wire fence, but there is only a cattle guard separating Mexico from the United States. This part of our border is actually more demarcated, more defined than many parts of the border that have absolutely no distinguishment, here and on the Canadian border. We have 1,900 miles in Mexico of the border and 4,000 miles on the northern border. I guess I ask my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, when I hear people on the other side, people on our side, people in the administration, people talking about the fact that we should not try to connect immigration to terrorism, because most people come into the United States and they are completely and entirely looking, they are mostly looking for a good job, a way to send some money home, and they are not looking to do us damage, and this is absolutely true. Undeniably true, but of course, there are people who come into the United States for other reasons, and when they come into the United States for other reasons, may I ask my colleagues if they think it is logical for us to assume that they are all going to come via a visa process, especially when we start to tighten it up. The 19 hijackers who committed the atrocities here in the United States in September were all here on visas. Some of them of course overstayed their visas. Some were here fraudulently, but they were all on visas. If we make it tougher for those people, Mr. Speaker, which I am all for, I am all for asking if you are a terrorist, please, let us know on this document, sign up right here, tell us you are a terrorist, and we can keep track of you. I am all for doing that. But just supposing, I mean wildest stretch of your imagination, supposing they choose not to tell you that they are a terrorist and not to sign up that way on the visa. Why, may I ask, is it so hard to understand that there is a connection? Why is it so hard to understand that they would in fact come in a very easy portal, that they would walk across the border? Here, this one on the bottom, the cattle guard, at least that protects us from illegal cattle coming into the United States. This one does not even protect us from that because there is no cattle guard. It is just a big deeply rutted road. And by the way, this road is not on any Forest Service map. It does not exist on any map you have ever seen because, of course, it is just illegals coming into the United States. And this is the greatest thing of all, Mr. Speaker. You know, you can go to our Web site, it is www.House.Gov/Tancredo, then you go to the immigration part of it and you will see all this stuff in greater detail, and I encourage you to do it because it is hard to see this. But here is a sign that is facing our side of the border, and it says here: ``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. Any person or vehicle entering at this point is in violation of the U.S.,'' certain codes and blah, blah, blah, blah, and a $5,000 fine or penalty. This is on our side. This is facing the United States. Then it is printed down here in Spanish. I am glad they are letting people know. I know a lot of illegal aliens coming into the United States finally get on our side, turn around and look at the sign and say, ``Oh, wait a minute, I guess I better go back. It says here this is not a designated point of entry.'' So certainly they are going to turn around and go back and find wherever that point of entry may be. Probably it is in Nogales. Yes, that is right, it actually is; and they will go on down the road certainly and they will enter the country legally. I am sure that happens a thousand times a day, would you not agree, Mr. Speaker? Here they are not even able to see a sign such as this. They are not able to say, ``Well, gee, after I cross this cattle guard, I see now that I am in the United States illegally. I best turn around and go back.'' And one reason why there is no sign here, Mr. Speaker, as they were often placed there, folks from the other side of the border, primarily Mexican police, come across and tear them down every night. We actually got to the point, the Forest Service people, because this is right on the Coronado Forest, a national forest, where the trafficking in illegal aliens and drugs is so great it is destroying the national forest. The degradation of that national forest is a national disaster. But not one single environmentalist has spoken out against it, interestingly. Not one. The tracks, as I show you here, go on up into the forest. They have worn footpaths through the forest that now make it look like cobwebs all over the forest. There is trash. It looks more similar to a national dump than a national forest. And they set fires, campfires; and then they walk away from them. And of course especially at this time of the year, and this year the drought being what it is, the day we were there and just as we were leaving a fire started, again by someone coming across illegally. They believe it is UDAs, that is the way it is referred to, undocumented aliens, because it is in the very remote areas; and it had consumed 35,000 acres in less than a day. I do not know where it is now. I do not know if it is contained. I do not know. We cannot even go in and use the most up-to-date methods of fire suppressants. We cannot drop slurry because there is so many illegals going through the forest that it actually may harm them. They may get some stuff on them so they do not drop it. And they only fight the fire during the daytime, because in the nighttime they have had fire crews up there and the crews have confronted armed men, people carrying M-16s, because they are the people protecting the people carrying drugs; and they are coming in huge bands 20, 30, 40, 100. The forest is being destroyed. Here, people who are hiking, picnicking, whatever, around the national forest, could mistakenly enter into Mexico, you see, because there are no signs telling you, like this one, be careful, you are leaving the United States, you are going into Mexico. And they do. They go into Mexico. And the reason why is, and I started mentioning this earlier when I spoke of them tearing down the signs time after time, we have actually put up over here, just a little farther inside here, two metal posts, two big metal posts with a metal sign. That had been cut out. The Mexicans came across that night with a torch and cut the sign down, because they want people to wander over, then nab them and throw them into the local hoosegow and then extort money from them. It is a way of making a few bucks down there. They want people to wander in so that they can then say you are here in Mexico illegally and we are going to make you pay the price. But there is no connection, Mr. Speaker, no connection whatever; and how can we even talk about things like immigration reform and terrorist activities? How could we suggest that there is anything related here, just because you can waltz across this border with great impunity? And believe me, hundreds of thousands of people a year come through right here, millions of people across the border, both north and south. By the way, this is not unique in any way, shape, or form to Mexico. Of course the greatest numbers coming through are Mexican nationals. But nonetheless, we have the problem on both our borders and in our ports of entry on both coasts. Recently, 25 suspected Middle Eastern terrorists evidently came in on cargo ships. They are here someplace. We do not know where. I do not know exactly how we found out about it, but I am glad we at least know they are here. Makes me feel a lot better. And hopefully they will be caught. I know we are judiciously looking at everyone in the United States who is not here legally and returning them to their country of origin, so certainly in a short time we will have them. We have a huge problem, Mr. Speaker. It is a national security issue. To suggest anything else is to be naive to the ultimate. And to suggest that we cannot clamp down on this kind of situation, we cannot in fact protect our own borders, even if it means putting troops on the border, because it will be insulting to Canada and Mexico, to suggest that trying to enforce our own borders and protect the lives and property of the people in this Nation is an act that would turn certain constituencies in America against us defies the imagination. It defies anyone's ability to actually and appropriately characterize such a position. There are people in the United States of America, regardless of their ethnic background, who are opposed to their own government trying to protect them and their property? I want to hear that. Because most of the people, Mr. Speaker, I guarantee you, by magnitudes that are actually astounding to me, numbers that are incredible, tell me that they are asking more from their government in terms of protecting them, and they are asking us to do something to cut down on illegal immigrants. And, Mr. Speaker, this is not just something that white WASPish Americans are asking for. This is something all Americans are asking for. Everybody. Because everybody here who has come here legally, who believes in the sovereignty of this Nation is saying to us, What are you guys doing up there? And I mean we are talking Asian Americans and we are talking Hispanic Americans. I do not care what the ethnic background. By and large these people support our efforts to try and actually do something about border security and to reduce even the amount of immigration. A vast majority of the people in this country recognize that is necessary. It is not ethically driven. This is not racially motivated. This is a matter that strikes at the heart of everything we should be doing here in this Congress. We should be looking, first and foremost, at the security of the Nation. And you cannot go in front of your constituents, I do not care who you are or where you are from, Brooklyn or Timbuktu, no, strike that, Brooklyn or Ray, Colorado, you cannot go in front of your constituents and say that we have in fact done anything to significantly increase the protection of our borders and, therefore, your safety. Because we have not. I repeat: the tepid bill we passed here on INS reform will be destroyed, I predict. And by the time we see it in a conference, it will be something totally different and much less dramatic than it was even leaving here, and that was not much. I also predict that unless we do this, unless we actually reform the INS, actually create an agency that has the resources and the direction to protect our borders, and the commitment internally, the people working for it who know why they are there, who are on our side when it comes to whether or not we should be letting people in here illegally, and our side means saying no, unless we do that, we have not done anything to improve security. All of the other stuff we have done, including the bill the President signed yesterday, which I supported because it was that life boat, and I am all for adding another life boat to the Titanic, but it will not keep the boat from sinking. Signing a bill and calling it border security implies, I think, far too much. It is not security if we have an agency that is completely and totally incapable of actually providing that security. We must reform the INS first. And I mean real reform. Then all the other things we do, all of the other jobs we give it in terms of tracking, all of the other responsibilities we give it in terms of protecting the borders, expanding our observation and control of the border activity, all of those things will be easier to accomplish with an agency committed to that task. Because I know this, Mr. Speaker, and I will tell you, I have spent many hours with the folks who we give the responsibilities of being on the ground down at the borders, and they want to be supported by us. They want clear lines of authority. They want to be able to protect America. But they are working for an agency which is incapable of providing them with the leadership, direction, and resources to get the job done. They will tell you personally, time after time after time, of the horrendous frustration they feel in trying to deal with this issue and do their jobs, do their jobs for their own families and for America. They want to do their jobs, but they are prevented from doing so because the agency itself is so incredibly, incredibly incompetent. We will move just for the next few minutes to one final issue about which I am greatly concerned, and that is the issue of amnesty. We may talk about all that we have done in this body to protect the borders; but every single time we reconstitute, regenerate support for amnesty, every time that the administration pushes it, every time the other party brings it up, we are doing great damage to our ability to actually control the borders; and we are doing great damage to the moral character of the United States of America. Here is why I say that. We call ourselves a Nation of laws. We tell the world to emulate us. We tell every country how important it is to disavow the rule of man and to accept the rule of law as the philosophy of government that all people should abide by and hearken to. And yet we suggest that 11 million people who are here illegally, who broke our laws coming into this country should be forgiven for that and given citizenship, in fact, rewarded. Put them in line for citizenship ahead of all those millions of people around this world who are reading the words on the Statue of Liberty: ``Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,'' and say how do I do that, I want to go there, I believe that the principles of the United States of America are the principles I want to live by; and I want to leave my country, I want to disavow any relationship, political relationship that I have with the country of my birth, and I want to start a new life in America, as perhaps your grandparents, I know my grandparents did. We are telling all of those people every time we give them amnesty, we are telling all of the people who are waiting that they are suckers, and that the better way to get into the United States is to sneak in, stay under the radar screen long enough, and we will give you amnesty. It is a slap in the face to the people who have done it the right way, filled out the paperwork and waited the appropriate length of time, learned the language, learned our history, things we actually require of people coming into the United States. They did it right, and we are telling them, you are suckers. You should sneak in. I know the allure is on our side. It is like the drug issue. We say there is the demand, there is always going to be the supply. There is the demand for cheap labor; and, therefore, they are going to come. I understand that part of the equation. I will be for any attempt on the part of the government, we have the laws, it is illegal to hire people who are not citizens of the United States or not here on the appropriate visa. It is illegal. Recently we finally started actually cracking down. I know Tysons Food and a couple of other big employers who acted covertly to bring workers into the United States for cheap labor are being fined. I would try to dry up the demand, but that does not excuse the supply. It does not excuse the fact that people come here illegally. We cannot reward them for that. I am concerned because Monday, yesterday, President Vicente Fox said in a speech in New York, it may have been just a couple of days ago, President Fox of Mexico said the number one litmus test of our relationship with Mexico will be our willingness in the United States to give amnesty to the people who are here illegally. The number one litmus test. One needs to ask himself, why would a President of one country demand from a President of another country the complete revulsion, if you will, of our own laws? Why would they demand that we ignore our own laws as a litmus test for their friendship, while at the same time, Mr. Speaker, at the same time they are asking for our friendship and declaring themselves to be the best friends of America on the continent? We find that in calendar year 2001, Mexican government border incursions. Here is the seal of the President of the United States. This is the slide that I was witness to, a slide presentation I was witness to when I went down to Douglas, Arizona. The briefing was presented by something called the HIDA, High Intensity Drug Area, and it is all of the agencies that get together and try to control the flow of drugs into the United States and the flow of illegals into the United States. In their presentation they showed me this slide, and it says ``Calendar year 2001, Mexican Government Border Incursions.'' I said Mexican government border incursions, what are you talking about? There were nine from the Mexican military and 14 from the Mexican police for a total of 23 in 2001. When I had a little more discussion about this, it turns out this is not unique in the year 2001; we have had over 100 such incursions over the last 7 or 8 years. The hundred have been documented. Many others go undocumented, we are told by the border police. Some of these incidents have resulted in shots being fired by the Mexican military. Some have resulted in confrontation when guns were drawn on both sides, and finally people backed off. You have to ask yourself, what were they here for? What were members of the Mexican military and Mexican federal police doing in the United States of America? I called the State Department, and they said they were probably lost. Probably lost? I do not suppose anyone wonders why we have 4,000 miles of border with Canada, much less defined, we have 1,900 miles with the border of Mexico, and we have at least 100 of these incursions by the Mexican military on the southern border, and I called the Canadian desk in the State Department and the Canadian Embassy and said, How many times have we had Canadian military wander into the United States getting lost because they could not find the line? They said never. I said, How many times has the Canadian Mounted Police come riding across the border chasing someone and we found them in Detroit because they just got too far? It is not happening. I will tell Members why it is happening on the southern border. Unfortunately, a large part of the Mexican military and the Mexican police establishment are corrupt, and they are coming across the border. Ask any member of our service on the border, any member of the border patrol there on the spot, ask them why it is happening, and they will say they are coming across to protect large shipments of narcotics coming across the border. Sometimes they come across to create a diversion pulling our people away from where that shipment is coming through. Mr. Speaker, 90,000 pounds, and this is another slide. This is a gentleman coming through carrying several bags in these makeshift backpacks carrying drugs. This is Coronado National Monument, Arizona. This is May 7, 2001. Most come 20 or 30 or 40 protected by armed guards. In calendar year 2001, 11,300 seizures amounting to 2.476 million pounds of marijuana; cocaine, 42,000. That is just in this particular area, and I am just talking about the Coronado National Forest area. Now, is this the act, I ask, of a friendly country? Why are we facing this is because President Fox, who I believe is a man who is trying to do a good job, I think he is an honest person; but, unfortunately, I do not believe he controls his own government. He certainly does not control some of the most important parts of it, including his own military. Corruption is so endemic, it is so bad that the President of that country cannot guarantee the actions of his own military and/or federal police. It is a sad commentary. I am sorry for him. If I could wave a magic wand, Mexico would be a place with enormous wealth and a driving middle class, with everybody having the same chance to achieve their dreams and goals. But there is nothing that I can do about that, there is nothing that this body or the President of the United States can do to change the situation in Mexico. The corruption is so endemic and it is connected to a government that still has connection to a socialist economic theory. The government still owns the oil company, for heaven's sake. While that is the case, while you have this combination of socialistic thought and socialistic economic thought and internal corruption, the economic prosperity of the nation will never, ever be achieved; and there is nothing we can do about it. No matter if we open the border tomorrow and walk away from every port of entry, which some would like us to do, even take away the barbed wire fence, for what little good it does, and walk away from the border. That is what some people want. Members know it is true. But it will not change the situation in Mexico. It will not be something that improves the lives of the people down there. I am concerned that the Mexican government is not doing what is necessary to help us control our own borders. I am concerned that they are not helping us as the President asked them to do so. The President said, If you are not with us, you are against us. Then why are they not patrolling their own borders to stop incursions? Frankly, people are coming in through Mexico, not just Mexicans looking for jobs, other nationalities, Middle Eastern. One hundred ten Iranians were captured on a guy's ranch in Texas all dressed in string ties, white shirts and black pants thinking they could blend in, I guess. This is a terrible problem connected to our own national security. It is also connected to the kind of country we will be, how many people will be here, the kind of environment we are going to leave for our children. Will it all be the environment that is today part of that national forest which has been destroyed? Is that the kind of legacy that we want to leave? I think not. We have to reduce immigration into this country. We have to reduce legal immigration to a manageable number; 300,000 a year is plenty. We have to put the same amount of effort into the protection of our borders as we put into the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan and around the world. We have to put the same degree of resources and the same degree of commitment into the defense of our own borders as we do to the prosecution of the war halfway around the world. That may mean, as a matter of fact, troops on our border and demands to our neighbors, Canada and Mexico, to help us patrol it. It is incumbent upon us to do it, Mr. Speaker. It is our responsibility and no one else's. The States cannot do it. The Congress and the President must provide the leadership that the American people are demanding. We and the administration have to stop turning a deaf ear to the pleas of our countrymen to protect and defend our borders.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, before I get into the main topic of this evening's discussion, that being immigration and immigration reform issues, I am compelled to respond to some of the comments made by our colleagues on the other side with regard to the budget dilemma that we all face here this evening. It is the dilemma faced every year, I suppose, and has for many many decades; and that is that we will always be spending more money in this body than we take in, or at least that was the case for all of the time, for the at least 40 years prior to the time that the Republicans took control of this body. The Democrats, of course, ran an imbalanced budget for many, many, many years. And I am in complete sympathy with those Members of the Democratic Party who say that that is an improper way to run government; that, in fact, we should be looking more to how businesses and industries run their business and States run theirs by having balanced budgets every single year. And I certainly completely and wholeheartedly agree. But I must say that as I listen to, on one hand, what I believe is an articulate plea for a balanced budget and, on the other hand, an articulate excuse for a vote for the farm bill which we just passed, it is hard to reconcile those two concepts. This farm bill being, of course, one of the, percentage-wise, the greatest increase in any domestic policy program in, I think, history. I am not sure, but certainly in a long, long time. Widely criticized for being what it is, an incredible pork-laden boondoggle, and then to say in the next breath we have to do something about government spending, we have to control government spending. And, if I may be so bold, I had to ask a staff person, because I am not really familiar with all of the variations of shades of different colors, and I asked one of the staff here a few minutes ago, What is the palest blue there is? And the young lady told me it was cornflower. Cornflower is the name of the color. Cornflower blue. So I would suggest that the Blue Dog Democrats think about changing their names to the Cornflower Blue Democrats because they are not really Blue Dog Democrats. They are not really stuck to this issue of balanced budgets. What they are saying, I think, is that, and there are exceptions to this rule, that we are going to establish today, and, yes, I will yield to the gentleman who I assume is coming up to ask for that particular motion.

Mr. TANCREDO. Reclaiming my time, and I appreciate the gentleman's observations, it is, of course, true that I have voted for a budget resolution that I wish we could hold to and this is a way in which we can all, I think, contribute to that possibility; and that is a vote against any appropriations bill that does not conform to that budget resolution. Any budget, any appropriations bill that puts us outside of that scope which I intend, that is the way in which I intend to vote and have in the past voted. I mean, we have to be, as I say, consistent with this because it is difficult for people who listen to this debate to understand that on the one hand we call for fiscal constraint, which I appreciate the gentleman has in the past and certainly even today has been a strong supporter of that issue, but we cannot accept that mantle of a fiscal conservative while at the same time doing things that bust the budget. But because of our issues, our individual concerns, the gentleman was very articulate in explaining the problems of the farm community in America, and no doubt his observations are accurate. But do you not see, every single person who is connected to any one of the various 13 appropriations bills we have here can come up, and do regularly, talk about the particular issue. It is the problem with education in America that we must, in fact, involve the Federal Government to the extent now that was never conceived of in the past. We should both, I think, use the Constitution as a measure to help us determine what is an appropriate role for the Federal Government. And the gentleman, I must ask and I will yield for his response, what is the constitutional role of the Federal Government? Where in the Constitution does it set out a purpose for us to be the primary support for the farm, for the agricultural community? As I would say the same thing, by the way, in the area of education and Health and Human Services, I believe it is not there. I look at the Constitution. I do not find it. I find only a relatively narrow role for us, especially in the area of defense. Other than that, we could use that. That is the way we could defend our vote against these pork-laden, constituent- driven pieces of legislation that put us every single year in the position of saying, My stuff is okay. My stuff is appropriate. Everybody else's is out of the question and is a budget-busting bill. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, it is not news to anyone in this House that the borders of this Nation for the most part are porous and undefended. As a result, millions of people have over the last several years entered this country illegally. Most of them come with benign intent. Others come with malicious intent. Among the latter are those that bring drugs into the country. I recently returned from a visit to the Coronado Forest near Nogales, Arizona, a forest I should say that is under siege, inside siege. This is an area that is experiencing the highest traffic of both humans and illegal drugs. There are so many people coming through in this part of the border into that particular area that the forest has been degraded. There are literally hundreds of footpaths that have been worn into the mountains. There are thousands of acres that have been torched as a result of people leaving their campfires. Mostly these people are undocumented aliens coming through starting campfires and moving on. Most of these people coming through or a great many of them are carrying narcotics on their backs in homemade backpacks. They come in large numbers, they come in small, but they carry tons of illegal narcotics. Mr. Chairman, they come through in small numbers and in large. They come through with people protecting them with M-16s, and not only that in the same area which had several incursions by members of the Mexican military and of the Mexican federal police. In fact, in the year 2001 there were 23 such incursions along our border, along our southern border, 23 times. In the last 10 years there have been over 100 such incursions. These people are not just lost down there, Mr. Chairman. This Nation is in fact under siege. Our need, our ability to defend our own borders is well known. Our inability to do so with the resources now available is also well known. Mr. Chairman, the reality is this, that we cannot protect and defend the borders of the United States at the present time with the present resources, and that is one of our primary and sole responsibilities. The Federal Government is the only entity charged with the responsibility of defending our borders. We are not doing it now. More help is needed. It is appropriate to give the Department of Defense, it is appropriate to give the President, it is appropriate to give the Attorney General the ability to use the Armed Forces in a case where this Nation is in fact threatened, and I believe we are threatened. We are threatened by drug trafficking. We are threatened by massive immigration. It is definitely an amendment that deserves our support.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, during rollcall No. 131, on the motion that the House suspend the rules and agree to the Senate amendments to H.R. 3525, I inadvertently voted ``present.'' It was my desire to have my vote recorded as ``yea,'' and I ask that the Record reflect that.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, tonight I want to talk about an issue of great concern to me. I hope it is of great concern to my colleagues. I know it is of great concern to a majority of Americans out there. I know that because I receive thousands and thousands of communications from people all over this country about immigration, about their concerns with regard to immigration. And I have certainly taken this floor many nights to discuss my observations, to express my concern, my own personal concerns about massive immigration into the United States and the effects thereof. Recently I had the great opportunity to travel to Arizona, specifically to a site known as the Coronado National Forest. The Coronado National Forest is a beautiful and wild region of southern Arizona that has been a national forest since the early 1900s. It is undergoing a dramatic transformation. It is being transformed from a national forest of great pristine beauty into a forest that resembles more of a trash heap, frankly, than a forest. The environmental degradation of that forest is great, with the thousands and thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands, actually, of people who come through there every year, and I am not talking about campers and hikers and bikers and picnickers, I am talking about illegal aliens. Because, as it turns out, Mr. Speaker, that particular part of the Nation has become the thoroughfare for the movement of illegal drugs and illegal immigrants into the United States. Like every other phenomenon of this kind, this has happened because we have put pressure on various parts of the border and it has essentially moved more and more people into this corridor. They see it as a very valuable piece of real estate from their point of view because it is rugged, it is difficult to be detected, and so it now has become the point through which a majority of the people coming into this country and a great amount of the illegal narcotics coming into this country will flow. As a result of this traffic, as a result of the sheer volume, we find that the forest, the Coronado National Forest, is under siege. Perhaps 60,000, maybe by now as we speak 70,000 acres have been burned this year so far. Fires start in this forest because UDAs, as they are referred to, as the folks coming through there illegally are referred to by the Forest Service and Border Patrol, that stands for undocumented alien, UDAs have started these fires. They start campfires in the evenings to stay warm and then they simply move on and let the fires burn and much of the forest has been destroyed as a result of it. On their way through the forest both now, as we are talking about both people coming through just seeking jobs and people coming through carrying drugs on their shoulders, this traffic has begun to wear into the land so that if you fly over it, which I did the weekend before last, I spent one day, Saturday, on horseback there and Sunday in a helicopter going over the forest. As you fly over the forest in a helicopter, you look down, what you are looking at is simply a spider's web of trails. These are not Forest Service trails. These are trails that are worn into the land by the thousands and thousands of people entering the country illegally. The trash that is left behind by these folks makes the place look essentially like a landfill more than it does a national forest; thousands and thousands of plastic bottles, trash from the backpacks that are homemade. These are the backpacks that are used to carry the drugs. This is a picture of someone, and it is hard to perhaps identify him clearly here, but this is a picture of an individual carrying all of this, and that is closer to 75 pounds of narcotics. This one here looks like it is marijuana. But they will create these homemade backpacks. This gentleman is coming through on his own. Oftentimes they come through in larger numbers, 20 and 30 at a time, preceded by someone with an M16 guarding them and being followed by someone with an M16. A lot of times these folks will run into campers and hikers and bikers and people just there to enjoy the national forest. They are confronted by illegals coming through. It is a dangerous situation, to say the least. But I want to just focus for a little while longer on the environmental aspect of this thing because that is what I went down there to see, Mr. Speaker. I went down to the Coronado National Forest because I had been told that the problems that the Forest Service was facing with UDAs, or undocumented aliens, in this particular area were so great that the forest was actually in jeopardy. So I thought to myself, what an interesting situation. I have been on this floor many, many evenings and certainly I have been in committee meetings and I have been on radio programs and television programs to talk about the problems with massive immigration into the United States. They are many. There are political consequences to massive immigration. There are economic consequences to massive immigration. There are social ramifications, cultural and national security issues that arise as a result of having essentially open borders. All of these things warrant our concern in this body. All of these things warrant the concern of the Nation. But another dimension of this whole problem is, of course, this environmental tragedy that is occurring not just in the Coronado National Forest, I should tell you, but in many areas on the southern border. It is an environmental problem, along with all of the other ones I mentioned. On our side of the border down there, we have operated a range management program that has successfully brought back many thousands of acres of native grasses, has kept the land from being overgrazed. Maybe I should have put all of that, by the way, in past tense. Because over the last several years, livestock fences are routinely cut or knocked over by undocumented alien individuals trafficking through there. Consequently, livestock from the Mexican side comes into the United States side and begins grazing on the rangeland. This results in the overgrazing of carefully managed public lands. It results in erosion, a shortage of forage for U.S. ranchers who hold valid permits to the land. These people also utilize and damage livestock water tanks. They break into Forest Service corrals and private buildings. You can see where the livestock have come across and where the land has been essentially denuded, looking very similar to land on the other side of the fence in Mexico, where, of course, there is no range management program. That is the ravages on the land just stemming from overgrazing. Then, of course, there is the fire issue I brought up. So far this year, over 53 fires have broken out in the Coronado. People on the ground tell us that UDAs and the smugglers starting unauthorized warming fires in the forest likely cause 70 to 90 percent of all the fires. Fires have consumed over 5,000 acres in the tinderbox Coronado, not including the 35,000-acre fire that started the day that we left there, the Ryan fire. It is burning near the communities of Sonita and Huachuca City. We do not know, but now it could be closer to 50 or 60,000 acres. We are not sure. Not only do we have the problem with these fires being ignited by careless activity as a result of these people coming through the forest but their presence in such large numbers in this forest actually prevents our people from being able to fight the fires effectively. During one fire that was referred to as the Oversight fire earlier this year, which consumed over 2,000 acres, the Forest Service was forced to suspend evening firefighting efforts after a, quote, pack train of 70 to 100 emboldened and potentially armed smugglers walked through a firefighters' camp in the vicinity of the fire. Air tanker fire retardant drops also had to be delayed and coordinated to account for the presence of illegal aliens in this area. So we could not fight the fires they started. We could not do it effectively for fear of harming somebody on the ground because there are so many people in this area. These are not the folks from the United States and other countries who have come there legally, who have paid their fees to come into the forest and who have, in fact, tried to enjoy that forest. These are undocumented aliens in the area. Millions and millions of dollars have been expended to try to fight these fires. As I say, they have to fight them with one hand tied behind them, essentially, because of the presence of so many people. When these fires start and when they are finally put out, we still have horrendous problems that develop. Erosion, caused by the fact that we have lost the ability for trees and shrubs to actually hold the ground in the area where they have been burned, erosion becomes a horrendous problem. It is a problem that is not easily remedied or rectified. Along those same lines, the thousands of people, as I mentioned, create these foot paths, these trails, and everywhere we go, we see them. The Forest Service people tell us those are not Forest Service trails, those are UDA trails. And because the undocumented aliens coming in are fearful of having sensors placed in certain areas detecting their presence, they will use a path for a certain amount of time and then they move over to the side and start another one. So now, they have worn literally thousands of trails into the mountainside of the Coronado. It is an ugly sight from the air. When one is on the ground, that ugly sight is compounded by the litter. Hundreds of thousands of one- gallon plastic jugs mark the trail that these people take. We can see here that this gentleman is carrying, as I say, several packages of narcotics through the forest, and it is not easy to distinguish on this picture, but they have created their own homemade sort of backpacking materials, which are really just kind of nylon ropes and some sort of nylon material that wraps around it. Well, when they get to the place where they are going to stop and unload this and subsequently load it into trucks, trucks that come in, by the way, on roads that are not Forest Service roads, but that are carved into the mountain as a result of so much traffic, to come and pick up the drugs that again, they are everywhere. One can see them everywhere. When they get to one of those roads where they can unload this into trucks, they just take all of this stuff off and dump it there. So periodically, we will see these large, large stacks of trash, trash; just their drug accoutrement trash, I guess I will call it. This forest and our Nation are under siege. This forest is a microcosm, in a way, of what is happening in America because, of course, there are environmental consequences to massive immigration. Hundreds of thousands and now up to 11 million people we think presently are in the country illegally, plus the massive numbers of people that we allow into the country legally, create enormous problems for us from an environmental standpoint. If one doubts this, go to East L.A. and take a look at what has happened to that part of the city. Take a look at what has happened to many cities where the infrastructure cannot keep up with the number of people coming in, and sprawl is the result, and people move out and move to other areas of the country, like my State. I happen to represent a district now that includes a county called Douglas County. Douglas County is the fastest growing county in the Nation for the second year in a row. Now, Douglas County is being impacted by immigration and impacted by people who are coming here directly, coming to this county and others in Colorado, directly from other countries, but also people who are coming from cities like Los Angeles and cities in Texas and cities in Arizona that have been impacted by immigration. So it is a process by which massive immigration comes in at certain points, it causes people to leave the area because of a variety of reasons dealing specifically with quality of life issues, and they go somewhere, and they are coming to Colorado. Our task is to try to keep up with it, to build the infrastructure necessary to provide services and schools, hospitals, roads and all the rest. It is a very expensive undertaking and it is environmentally challenging, to say the least. I have lived in Colorado all of my life, and I must admit to my colleagues that asphalt and concrete are not nearly as appealing as trees and grass, but asphalt and concrete are what are expanding in Colorado, not trees and grass. And that is happening all over the Nation, of course. And the reason is, as I say, immigration, massive immigration in numbers that we have never before witnessed in this Nation. Presently we bring in about a million people a year legally; add to that about another quarter of a million that we identify as refugees, and about another million or so that we net gain every year from illegal immigration. That 2 to 2.5 million people a year number is about 10 times the number of immigrants that came into this Nation at the height of immigration into the United States, the heyday of immigration in the past century and the previous century to that. Around the early 1900s, 1902 or so, we received about a quarter of a million people a year. Now, admittedly, the population of the Nation was smaller and so the percentage of immigrants was higher. But I still say that it is becoming more and more difficult to deal with the issue of immigration. It is more difficult now because this is a different country, for one thing. It is a country that will encourage people to come here and not disassociate from the country of their birth; it encourages them to keep their own language. We tell them that their children will be taught in their native language in the schools. We do not force them into English language proficiency which, of course, creates a number of problems educationally. We are creating an impoverished class as a result of refusing to teach children in a language, in this case English, that is the language of commerce, industry, and business and is the language that one must speak somewhat fluently in order to be successful in this country. We are stealing that away from them. And why? All because we worship at the alter of multiculturalism and we believe and we teach children that whatever culture that was prevalent in the land from which they came is a culture that is better than the one to which they have arrived, the one they are living in today. We teach them that any culture is better than the United States, that any country is better, that any society is better, that all we are as a Nation are people with a heritage that is not worthy of great merit or praise. Not only that, we provide welfare. When our grandparents came here, great-grandparents, however long ago the bulk of America's ancestors came to the United States, there was no such thing as welfare. People had to work, or they starved. So they got jobs, and menial jobs at first. But then, in order to move up the ladder, they had to learn English in order to improve themselves, to get better jobs. And the combination of the lack of welfare and the lack of this bizarre multiculturalist philosophy, we had people who integrated into American society. Most of them wanted to. Most of them came here for that purpose. They came with a desire to disconnect from their culture, their history, their heritage, to a large extent. Still, certainly everyone is proud of their heritage and can hang on to certain aspects of it but, for the most part, people came to be Americans. That meant learning English, that meant melting into and becoming part of an American mosaic. That is changing today, so that we have a different kind of America to which people are coming and a different group of people who are coming. Many coming today do not wish to be part of that mosaic. They wish to remain separate. They want to celebrate not only the achievements of their own societies, of their own culture and history of the past, but they want to supplant that here in the United States. We have about 6 million people in the United States today that claim dual citizenship. This is new. This is different. We never, ever had anything like that in the past. When people came here, for the most part they wanted to become Americans. That meant giving up their citizenship. Mr. Speaker, when one takes an oath to become an American citizen, one says they disavow all the rest, they disavow any allegiance to any foreign government, potentate, and there is a whole large thing one goes through to describe their task. Well, people take that oath, but they do not live up to it, because they will retain their citizenship and retain voting rights in other countries, and they are encouraged to by other countries. We are creating a nation that Samuel Huntington in his book ``A Clash of Civilizations'' warns us will be our own destruction. He calls it a ``cleft society,'' one cut into. Two sets of principles, two sets of ideas, two cultures, two languages, at the minimum. Of course, there are places where many more languages and cultures and everything are maintained in the country. This is the Balkanization of America. It is different today than it was in the past. Certainly from our Nation's beginning, there has been a debate over how many immigrants should come in, from what country, for what purpose. And many of these debates, unfortunately, were based upon the basis of emotions, fear, racism, xenophobia. So therefore, today to talk about immigration in a way that is a negative or to make any sort of critical remarks about it, all of those old stereotypes are brought out by the opponents of people who want education reform. And therefore, it is fearful to stand up and talk about this issue in a public forum. But it must be talked about, and it certainly should be talked about here in this body. Mr. Speaker, this supposedly is the marketplace of ideas, this place, where we should never shrink from bringing to the attention of the Nation and our colleagues issues of great importance to our own future and, certainly massive immigration is something that is incredibly significant when we are talking about the future of the Nation, and it should be discussed. We should determine as a Nation, as a Nation we should determine how much immigration we want, for what purpose, for how long, all of these things a sovereign nation does. There are people, Mr. Speaker, who wish to abandon the concept of a sovereign nation. There are many people who believe that borders are no longer relevant, that they are anachronistic, as a matter of fact; that they are impediments to the free flow of goods and services, and that we should abandon them for all intents and purposes, and that in the United States, we should adopt a model similar to the model prevalent in Europe today referred to as the European Union: Common currency, the essential elimination of borders, and the amalgamation of a lot of people into one sort of quasi-governmental entity. Well, okay. That is a point of view. It is a point of view I do not share, I do not believe in, but it is a point of view, and it should be debated openly. But my concern is, Mr. Speaker, that we will reach that point in a relatively short period of time and we will turn back and say, how did this occur? How did it happen that we lost essentially our own sovereignty as a Nation? And we will be surprised by the fact that America is a different place than it was a short time ago. Now, as I say, if we make that decision in this body, if we make that decision in a democratic fashion, a bill is introduced to abandon the borders, it passes, the President signs it, okay, fine. But if we make this decision in a de facto way, that is what is disconcerting. Because I believe, Mr. Speaker, that a majority of Americans today do not want that, yet that is where we are going. That is actually the direction that this government is taking, our administration, and even this Congress. Some are doing it purposely. Some want that end result that I have just described. Some are doing it for other reasons. Massive immigration into the United States is beneficial to us, to certain people, to certain groups, and is a very politically sensitive topic. Let us be candid about it. The reality is that massive immigration into the United States is supported by one party, in this case, the Democrats, because they know that massive immigration will accrue to their benefit politically. For the most part, immigrants going into the United States will, as they become citizens, and sometimes, unfortunately, even before they become citizens, cast votes. When they cast votes, they will do so for the Democratic party. That has been historically the case. On our side of the aisle, on the Republican side of the aisle, we are hesitant to try to stop immigration, or reduce it, I should say, to manageable levels because we hear from our constituents in the business community who say, we need cheap labor. There are many jobs that we have available that Americans will not take. I hear that all the time. The H-1B is an interesting example of that. This is a category of visa, the H-1B visa, that we now give out to people to come into the United States who have certain talents in the area of high-tech, especially. We are told that there are not enough Americans to fill the jobs in the high-tech community. Now, Mr. Speaker, I do not know what is happening in others' States, but I will tell the Members that in mine there are plenty of workers available, because thousands and thousands have been laid off in that particular industry. Yet, we still bring in 195,000 H-1B visa recipients every year to take the jobs of Americans who have been laid off. But this is an example of the kind of pressure that our side of the aisle is under, to not do anything about immigration. Then also on our side there are people with a libertarian perspective and libertarian philosophy. That is what I described earlier: Borders are anachronisms. They really are unnecessary. We should eliminate them. People should move from country to country at their whim, get jobs as they are available, and we should not be actually trying to determine who are coming across these borders. Now, I mean, that sounds bizarre to some people, but I guarantee that this is a strong sentiment among many of my colleagues. It is certainly a sentiment among some of the think tanks in this Nation, the Cato Institute being the foremost of them, espousing this libertarian philosophy. Certainly the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal pushes the same kind of philosophy. So it is not something that I am telling the Members here that is coming about in some sort of sub rosa fashion. These are people who believe in this, who push this concept. Now, they were set back a little after September 11. They could not talk about open borders after that as willingly as they had in the past because people would say, what are you, out of your mind? Open borders? Are you crazy? The people who came in here to do such damage to this country, the people who came in here and hijacked these planes and drove them into buildings, they all came in here on visas. Or some of them, of course, had overstayed their visa, and some were here illegally, but they were all immigrants. They were all noncitizens of the United States. Are you suggesting in your right mind that we should simply ignore people who come across these borders? So because the sentiment of the American people was so quickly riveted here against open borders, we do not hear much about it. But I guarantee that the sentiment is not gone and the desire to move in that direction has not dissipated. It is simply going dormant for a while. It is going through their quiet period, if you will. They do not want to talk about it, but I assure Members, that is what they want to accomplish. So we move in that direction in a variety of ways. We refuse to do anything to significantly change the nature of the immigration service. We have passed a bill out of here that everybody touted a few a few weeks ago, or excuse me, last week. We passed a bill out of here that was touted as the reform of the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Do I not wish, do I not wish it was the reform of the INS. But it is so like us in this building, in this body, to create an illusion because we know there is great public sentiment out there for reform, so we pass something that we call INS reform. But is it reform? Not at all. Is it better than what we have today? Yes. I often liken it to giving the Titanic an extra lifeboat. Before it left, if we knew what we know now and somebody said, do you think we should put another lifeboat on, we would say, well, yes, sure. That is better. But it is not the solution. But the person goes, that is all we are going to do right now. We will call it the salvation of the Titanic. Of course it is not. Of course it is not. I assure the Members that simply dividing the INS into two parts and keeping it in Justice, the Department of Justice, and keeping, for the most part, the same people as the administrators of that agency, the same people who are completely incompetent and incapable today of administering that agency will be the people who will be unable to administer the new agency that we are creating in the Department of Justice. What are we doing about all of the other parts of border control that are under other agencies, and making it a confusing mish-mash of responsibilities: Customs, Agriculture? All these agencies have different responsibilities for border control. We are doing nothing about that. There will still be confusion, overlapping authority, indirect lines of communication, inability to communicate among all the various groups that have some sort of responsibility. All that will be there. It will still be on the border, each one honoring points being run by a different agency, so that the people who want to come into the country illegally or to ship drugs in will be able to look through binoculars, as they do today, sitting on a hill overlooking the port of entry, and see which agency is handling which drive lane. Then they radio down and say, if they are smuggling drugs, they will want to go through this lane because that is being handled by this agency and they are less concerned about that; and if they are smuggling people, it is over here. That is what happens today. That will not change. We will still have an agency managed by incompetent people, having been shown their incompetence, or unwillingness. In some cases, they are competent individuals, but they are completely unwilling to actually uphold the law of the land when it comes to immigration control, Border Patrol. They do not believe in it. Even the present head of the INS has said he does not like that part of his job. He does not like being a policeman. This gentleman, who should have been, of course, dismissed, if not when we recognized the failures of the INS after 9/11 then certainly when we, 6 months subsequent to 9/11, sent a couple of the hijackers their visas, although they were dead. But he is still there. In fact, Mr. Speaker, not one single person in this great debacle we call the INS, and all of the things that we know that have happened that have been documented over and over again, the failures of the system, not one person has been dismissed, not one. What makes us think for a moment that just changing the nameplate on the door will change the way people act? But we have people on the ground who are trying, who are working as hard as they can, people in the Forest Service, people in the Border Patrol who face this day in and day out, this particularly in the Coronado National Forest, but, of course, it is like this in many, many places on our borders. This is a couple of pictures I took of a fence, a barbed wire fence. This has a cattle guard that goes through it here, and this has a regular gate over here. There is nothing else here, nothing else for miles and miles except a rather well-used road. This road is not on any map, and neither is this one, because this road is a road that is used by illegals, primarily by illegals to come into the country; yes, to come across the border. That fence is the border between the United States and Mexico. That cattle guard is the port of entry, if you will. Up here, there is a sign on our side of the border. I have to get it a little closer to me to see this and read it. It says here: ``All persons and vehicles must enter the United States at a designated port of entry only.'' By the way, this is facing the United States side. ``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. Any violation is,'' blah blah, and then here it is printed in Spanish. We had the same sign over here on this side of the border, the same signs telling American citizens or anybody else that this is not a port of entry, but certain people on the Mexican side would come across every night, steal the signs and tear them down. They put them up on our side. We welded them up on two metal posts. They came one night with a torch and took them down, cut them down, all because this happens to be an area that is heavily trafficked also by hikers and people visiting, tourists. Sometimes they will wander across into Mexico. When they do, they are grabbed by the Mexican police, taken to jail, and essentially extorted of all of their money. What I mean by that is they are held because they are told, well, you are here in Mexico illegally and it is going to cost you so much to get out. It is blackmail. That is all there is to it. They take down the signs on our side so as to hopefully track people coming across from our side to theirs. But this is the border. Now, I am told that the administration has come out with something they call a ``smart border'' program. ``Smart borders,'' I do not know exactly what that means, of course, but I have an idea that there is going to be a lot more technology and that sort of thing. I am all for it. It will be interesting to see how long these gates remain, because, by the way, they were made into gates because they simply trampled down the fence so many times that they gave up putting it back up. They just left it and said, I cannot stop it anymore. This is an example, perhaps, of smart border. It is an example of what the people on the border have to put up with constantly. There are a total of four U.S. Forest Service personnel to guard 60 miles of border along that Coronado forest. They do so with the help of I am not sure how many Border Patrol people, but they do a great job. I want to tell the Members right now that I want to wish every one of them the very best. I understand what they are up against. I want to mention John McGee, who is the forest supervisor for the Coronado forest; Rocky Stone, who works for the Arizona High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area; Dan Bauer, the National Forest Service Drug Enforcement Program coordinator. These are some of the folks I went down there with. There is Richard Padilla and Greg Zelo of the Forest Service, special agents. All these people were immensely helpful in getting us a good, clear picture of what is going on on this border. Let me tell you one of the most peculiar and interesting aspects of the trip I took down there. It was not just to see, I mean, I was surprised by and certainly distressed by the amount of environmental degradation that is occurring in this forest as a result of the thousands of people coming through there illegally. But there is another aspect of this thing that was fascinating. During a briefing that we had the first day by Mr. Stone with the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area folks, they explained to us a project they are working on and a process called ``cobija,'' which is Spanish for blanket and it just means essentially that they are trying to get the various agencies, Customs and Border Patrol and Forest Service all of the agencies that have responsibility for border protection to sort of bring together all of the information that they have, they have accumulated over the course of the last couple of months since they last met and so they can plot out where best to deploy their resources. Because, of course, during certain periods of time you recognize that you are having more traffic of a certain nature through certain parts of the border, more heavy drug trafficking coming through here, more heavily in the area of people coming through smuggling over here, smuggling of guns. In this case from north to south is a huge problem. So they try and figure out where they can deploy their resources the best, and they try to do that by getting all the information from all the agencies together. This is one of the slides that we saw during this briefing. And I had to stop them because I said, What do you mean here? It says here UDAs by border patrol sectors, and this one here is a major drug trafficking organization. But over here this one is talking about the number of people that were actually arrested or that they got in the last year or so, 400,000. It was not the last year. I am sorry. That was during the last period of time that they met. 403,000 through that Tucson area, which is where we met. It is a huge number. We got to talking about this, and they showed me another slide that said incursions of the Mexican Government into the United States territory in the year 2001. And I was taken aback by that and I said, What do you mean incursions into the United States? They said, That is just it. We have 23 times in the year 2001. We confirmed incursions of the Mexican military or members of the federal police in Mexico who came into the United States. And we confronted them at some point. We met them. That is how we knew they were here. And sometimes it became a very tense situation with guns drawn on both sides. And in most cases the members of the military withdrew; the members of police withdrew but in some cases shots were fired, and it became a very difficult thing to deal with. I just was surprised by that because I had never heard of that. I mean, I guess I ask you, Mr. Speaker, have you ever heard of, did you know that just last year foreign troops, in this case Mexican government troops and/or members of the foreign police establishments, came into the United States without our permission? You have to ask yourself, of course, why. We have found out, by the way. I should say we found out this was not unique to 2001, that over the course of the last 7 years or so we have had over 100 documented incursions. And you have to say, well, why? And I asked that question. What do you mean? Why were they coming? And they could only speculate. And I said, Well, could it be that they were lost? And they found that quite humorous, the folks I was talking to, and laughed and said, Everybody down here knows where the border is. No, the people who came down here knew they were on our side. What were they doing on our side? And the speculation was it was in conjunction with some drug trafficking activities, that perhaps members of the military or the police down there were protecting a cartel moving some product through the area, or perhaps they were creating a diversion so that this drew our border people away while it did move through another area. We are not sure yet. We are not sure. But I wrote a letter to the Mexican President Vicente Fox, and I asked him to explain to me what he knew about it, and, more importantly, what he was doing to stop it. Although I did not receive a letter from him, I received a letter from the Mexican ambassador to the United States that told me essentially that he did not like the tone of my letter and that these issues were handled satisfactorily, that in each case some explanation was made and everybody is happy about it. Well, I know that not to be true. I know when I talked to the State Department they were concerned about this. They told me of a time around Nogales, Arizona, just a short time ago, told me of an incident that occurred just a short time ago, where a group of maybe 100 illegals were coming into the United States. They were hiding in a culvert in and around Nogales. They were all carrying large amounts of drugs in, smuggling drugs into the United States; but we got them. We arrested them, and about half of them were members of the Mexican military. Now, I do not know if these guys were on leave or something; but I do know that the problem of corruption in the Mexican military and the police is endemic. We all know that. There is not a soul in here that does not understand that corruption in Mexico is debilitating for the government. And I do believe that Vicente Fox is going to try to do something about that, to try and produce a better situation down there. But I want to know what they are going to do, and I want to know now. I want to now how they are planning to stop these incursions, because, Mr. Speaker, this is a very dangerous situation. Not only do I believe that these incursions are a result of drug trafficking into the United States, and that these people are participants in that in some way or other, but I also believe that it is a very dangerous situation. At some point in time someone will be killed here in the confrontation because these people are heavily armed, and they are coming up against our folks who are armed. And one of these days something very ugly is going to occur. I want to know what the Mexican Government is doing to stop this; and do not tell me they were lost. Do not tell me these people came wandering across the border heavily armed, retreated only when they came across some part of the American Forest Service or Border Patrol, and do not tell me they were lost. That is not true. They were here for a reason. I want to know what it is, and I want an answer; and I will not stop discussing this until I get one. I know it is embarrassing to the Government of Mexico. It may be embarrassing to our own government that does not want these issues to be dealt with openly. Even the State Department told me, look, we are trying to deal with this at the highest levels. We are trying to negotiate. Well, it has not worked. It has been 7 years as it turns out. I was surprised when I heard about it. Twenty-three incidents in 2001. It turns out it was not unique. This was not an aberration, the year 2001. It has been happening a lot. It is starting to increase. Talk to the people down there at the border. They will tell you the problems they face. They will tell you these people are not lost. They will tell you that they are armed. They are dangerous. They are worried about what is going to happen when they confront hikers and bikers and campers in the national forest. This is a dangerous situation. What are we going to do about it? There is a wall that is built. There is a wall that separates the countries that goes through Nogales for 3 or 4 miles. It is about 15 feet high or so. I suggest that that wall should be continued at least along that forest border. And, yes, it will simply move people around it. I know that is true, but at least we can start to protect that forest in that area. Because if you are an environmentalist, Mr. Speaker, if anyone in this body has the slightest concern about the environment, they should go to the Coronado National Forest. They should begin doing all the things they do so effectively in any other part of the United States when they believe that the environment is being jeopardized: chain themselves to trees and start protests and demand action on the part of the government, and start a letter-writing campaign and boycott certain industries, or I do not know. Do whatever you want to do as environmental activists, but do it for the sake of this forest. Why is it, Mr. Speaker, I ask you, why is it that we have not heard a word out of the Sierra Club or Friends of the Environment or any of the myriad of organizations that call themselves environmentally sensitive? Why have we not heard a word about the Coronado Forest? I will tell you why. It is because they do not want to say anything that would be thought to be derogative of immigration. Well, you cannot have it both ways. In this case, immigration, massive immigration through this forest, massive illegal immigration through this forest is causing the problem. We have to do something about it. If it is a wall, it is a wall. If it is more border patrol, that is what we need. If it is an agreement with Mexico to actually clean up their act, then that is what we need. But I do not know that we will get it, Mr. Speaker. I do not hold any illusions here about the degree to which we will press this issue for fear that we will lose votes among Hispanics here in the United States, for fear that Mexico will take affront at this. But I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, when we become concerned enough about our national security to recognize that it is not just drug traffickers, not just people looking for jobs in Tucson who are coming across this border or who could come across this cattle guard, but it is the next Mohammed Atta. Today they are crossing through these gates and over this fence carrying literally tons among the accumulated mass of narcotics coming across, literally tons of narcotics being carried on shoulders into the United States. What is to say that tomorrow or yesterday somebody did not come across this border with 50 pounds of something much more dangerous on his shoulders? Smart border? I do not think so. This is a national security problem. It is an environmental problem. It is a cultural problem. It is an economic problem. It is a political problem. It is all of those things. To ignore it is an act of incredible idiocy. These things have implications for us, for who we are today, and who we will be tomorrow as a Nation. If Mexico is our friend and ally, as I often hear them referred to, I would ask again, What are you going to do about this? How are you going to help us stop this? How are you going to help us stop people coming into the United States? Why do you not stop pressuring us to give amnesty to those people who are here illegally? Why is it so important to you in Mexico, I would say, Mr. Speaker, why is it so important to you to have us give amnesty to people who are here illegally, especially from Mexico? What does that matter? How come that is a major foreign policy issue? Now, these questions are questions for every American citizen. They have to ask themselves if, by the year 2100, they want a Nation of a little over a billion people, because that is exactly where we are headed now if we keep the population growth at the present level. And 90 percent of that population growth by the year of 2100 when we hit a billion will be as a result of immigration. Is that okay? Is that where we want to go? Some do. It turns into political hay for them, political benefit. Others do. It turns into cheap labor and the bottom line, the immediate bottom line. But I ask all of my colleagues to think beyond the immediate. Think about the Nation. Think about the implications of massive uncontrolled immigration into this country. Think about September 11. How many of those days do you want to relive?

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. I thank the Speaker for his admonition. This conference needs to be voted on by this House and by the whole body, and we need to do it as quickly as possible in order for us to bring some relief to the people who have suffered for so long. As I say, it is in our interests, it is in this Nation's interests, to bring peace to this land and to deal directly with the issue of the kind of horror and devastation that has besieged it for so long and that has plagued it for so long. So I hope that we will do that soon. As I say, on this National Day of Prayer, as we think about our own wonderful gifts that we have in this Nation and the challenges that we have as a Nation, certainly as a result of actions in the Middle East, the activities in the Middle East and other places, there are challenges to the nation, but what is happening in Sudan is not just a challenge for us to look at in a foreign policy sense. It is a challenge to our own moral precepts. It is a challenge to who we are as a Nation, who we are as a people. Can we make the time, even though so many other things are pressing upon us in this body, can we make the time to deal with one of the worst situations that exists anywhere on the planet? In fact, the Secretary of State described it almost exactly in that way in testimony in front of our committee as one of the worst situations that exists anywhere in the world. Now, if that is the case, and I believe it to be, then does this not deserve our attention, our continued attention? If it is one of the worst situations that exists anywhere on the planet, does it not behoove us to do everything we can to bring this to an end and to help the people in this country begin to think about a new life in a new land?

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, it is appropriate on this national day of prayer that we recognize the great gifts that we have been given and the great land in which we live and we give thanks for it. It is also, I think, important for us to think about some places in the world that desperately need our prayers and our help, in a variety of ways, but certainly our prayers. It is appropriate that today we think about a place far away, quite remote, someplace that does not come to mind very often but should because of the horrendous conditions in which people are forced to live. The place I refer to today is Sudan. We have often seen pictures like these. They are often presented on television as the basis of appeals for aid or for charity for people who are certainly less well off than we and who are in dire straits. The horrendous thing here in the Sudan is that these people, people of southern Sudan specifically, are suffering not just because of the vagaries of the weather and the difficulty with the terrain in that area of the country, the arid part of the nation in which many live. They are not really, in fact, dealing with that as their major problem. They are, in fact, starving to death, it is true. They are dying of diseases by the thousands. To date, 2 million have died over the course of the last 10 years as a result of a civil war that has been going on there. That war is really what has caused the great damage to the people and to the land and to the lives of literally millions upon millions of southern Sudanese. So today I want to refocus the attention of this House on the plight of these people. We have in the past acted in this body and passed something called The Sudan Peace Act. It languishes in the Senate, as do other pieces of legislation. This one no one seems to care about. It does not have the high visibility, of course, of so many of the other things we do around here, and so no one seems to care. I hope today to bring to the attention of this body and to the people in this country the plight of these people in south Sudan and to once again help us focus on what we can do to help and why we should help. To aid in that endeavor, I will turn to my colleague, a member of the Committee on the Judiciary, the distinguished gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence), who has graciously agreed to come down here and discuss this issue. I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I must say that listening to the gentleman helps recharge my batteries on the issue. I think that the gentleman has been, certainly flattering, but more than that, he has in a way that I could never have done, focused the attention of this body on an issue of, I think, monumental importance, and I thank the gentleman for his kind words. I had the great privilege of going to the Sudan. Actually, it was the very first trip I ever took as a congressman. It was in 1999. Senator Brownback and the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Payne), we were privileged to go to the Sudan. I did not know what I was going to see there. I was concerned about the conditions there, and our own safety, as a matter of fact. I have to admit that was of some concern to me. We were told that we should not go. The State Department sent cables to my home stating do not go there. We have no people that we will give you as support. You should not go. Some of these places are in an area that is actively involved with the war effort in the south. There are towns that are being bombed, so we cannot really say anything about your safety except that you will have very little security. Under those conditions, I wondered how sage I was about actually making a decision to go on such a trip. But it was important to do. I felt moved to do it, and I was going with someone who had been there before. The gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Payne), has been there several times and is another stalwart in support of our efforts on behalf of the Sudanese people, especially the people of the south. The gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Payne) had been there several times. What we saw was devastating in many ways because we could see the incredible obstacles that confront these people. There was a severe drought, but it was only exacerbated by the activities of the government of the north. People were being massacred and hospitals were being bombed and schools were being invaded, and teachers and children shot and people were being rounded up, taken away, forced into slavery in the north. We think to ourselves and certainly we did on that trip, what can we possibly do about this? How can we possibly change the policies of our Nation, change the situation in a country so far away. Yet certainly I felt, and so did Senator Brownback and the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Payne), felt compelled to do something. I will never forget being in a town called Yei in the southern tip of Sudan, and there was a great confrontation just a few days before we got there. Armed confrontation. The place had been bombed many times. As we walked through that small town of maybe 1,000, maybe 2,000 people, we were immediately surrounded by hundreds of children. They kept pressing closer and closer to us, so close we could hardly move. They kept saying something that I could not understand. Our guide interpreted. He said they said they are trying to get close to you because they assume if they get close to you, an American congressman, whoever is dropping bombs will not drop a bomb at that point in time. Of course I was hoping the same thing, that that would be the case, but I was hoping that there was something that I could do to stop that fear forever for them because the fear in their eyes and the hunger in their eyes, it is just a vision that no one can experience without coming away with a sincere desire to do something to help. I also remember the last day I was there, it was spent in a small mud-sided facility with a grass and palm roof, and it was the local church which had been constructed in a place where there were over 30,000 refugees. This was actually just one of many small churches in this refugee center, and all of these people had been driven out of their homes in the north, the northern part of Sudan. Almost everyone had lost someone. Somewhere near 6,000 people died from the trek from the Nuba Mountains down to this particular village, almost all of them children, and yet they came together in this makeshift church and they began to sing the praises of Jesus Christ. They were spirit-filled in a way I can tell Members I hardly see in the United States, and I am an evangelical Christian. It was almost miraculous to see these people with that expression of emotion and that much joy that they were expressing in that kind of a setting. As I say, almost everyone had lost someone. They were living in a foreign land, land that they could not farm. It was a life that any of us would probably find fruitless and perhaps hopeless, and they had hope, and that hope was in the Lord. I remember thinking to myself and telling them, as a matter of fact, that I had been moved to come there because of something that had happened in my church in Colorado about 4 or 5 years prior where I was witnessing a program that was done, it was called the Persecuted Church Around the World, and it focused on the Sudan. I was not in Congress at the time. I was not even thinking of running for Congress. A gentleman was in this position, and we assumed that he was going to be in that position for quite a long time. But I felt a need to do something. After many twists and turns, I ended up in the Congress, and I asked for the Committee on International Relations, and then I asked for the Subcommittee on Africa, and I ended up in Sudan in this church. I said I want to tell you a story. It is only right that my trip to the Sudan ends in a church because it started in a church. I told them the story about hearing about their plight, and wanting to do something about it. What was interesting to me, and what I told them in that church, was that I thought of course that I was doing something for them, to help the people in Sudan. In reality, of course, what had happened was God had done something to help me. He had done far more for me, and the trip did more than I could do for the people of Sudan. That is the way of God. It is intriguing, and certainly it inspires us. I came back and we did introduce the Sudan Peace Act. It calls for a number of things, including an end to any sort of corporate participation in Sudan. We already banned corporate involvement in the United States, but our bill says any foreign corporation that goes in there would be delisted from the American stock exchanges, the New York and American Stock Exchange. This is a very significant step to take, and it is probably why the bill is languishing in the Senate because that is a major, major step. A lot of concerns have been expressed about the kind of precedent that it would set. Let me tell Members why we have to do that. The war in the south, and I should back up and explain, it is in our interest, it is in the interests of the United States of America to bring this conflict to an end in Sudan. As the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence) mentioned, the northern part of Sudan is an area where we have found in the past people like Osama bin Laden who have been given safe havens there. It is still a place where al Qaeda finds a respite. One was just found there not too long ago. It is not in our interest to have this conflict ongoing in the south. It is in our interest to bring it to an end, and if that means the separation of the country into two parts, so be it. I used to think that perhaps we could do something to just simply stop the fighting and keep the country united, maybe under some sort of federalist system where there is some sort of autonomy for the south. But because of the many times that the government in Sudan, and I will refer to it as Khartoum, the northern government, Khartoum has simply promised something but almost before the ink is dry on the promise, they have broken it. They are in the process now of pursuing the war in the south in a vigorous way, even though they promised that they would not. They promised a cease-fire. They are funding this war through the revenues derived from an oil pipeline recently opened, and that is why we have to ask the corporate world to be aware of what they are doing in the Sudan, be aware of the fact that the revenues that are derived from the sale of the oil in Sudan, those revenues are going to the prosecution of the war. Without those revenues, this war may very well have come to an end, but now that money is used and can be used and is being used to purchase arms, to pay for troops, and to continue the persecution of the south. Now, it is a complex situation. It is not just the fact that the south is Christian and the north is Muslim. It is the fact also, of course, that there is a different culture, different languages and different interests entirely for the two peoples of this nation. It may very well be that we are at that point where that nation has to split asunder and that the people of the south will be allowed to actually construct their own government and determine their own faith. At any rate, the only step we can take, the only step open to us right now in this body, is to encourage Members of the other body to advance the bill, the Sudan Peace Act. Let us bring it to a vote. It has passed in both Houses. We are awaiting the appointment of a conference committee. That is all that is stopping us from actually taking the next step and doing something significant to bring peace to this troubled land. Let us appoint a conference committee. Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to come to the floor for a couple of reasons. First of all, to express my gratitude to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer) who has spent as much time on this issue as he has. It is important for everyone to understand that an issue like this does not get this far without at least one person devoting himself almost entirely to its advancement. It is because of the dynamic involvement of the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer) that we are actually on the cusp of doing something here with it in the House of Representatives. I thank the gentleman. We would not be talking about it, and it would not be formulated in a legislative package if not for the gentleman. It is a long history that this movement has had, the idea of school choice. For years we were confronted, those of us who were pushing concepts like vouchers, in the past, were confronted by an educational establishment that reverted back to the time-tested responses like this will take money away from public schools. This is a creaming scheme, a reason to get other kids, the good kids out of public schools and into private schools. It is not a level playing field. All of the rest of the stuff that we have heard for years. The beauty of this plan, this idea, is that it takes away all of the arguments that the other side has used for years to try to stop it. It does not take money away from public schools. As the gentleman was saying, it is, in fact, adding money for the most part to the educational pile that is out there. The wonderful thing about this plan, a tax credit for scholarships to be given out by agencies at the State level, the wonderful thing about it is that we can concentrate on one thing, the children. All the rest of the stuff, all of the spooky stuff that the enemies of educational reform keep throwing out, and have for years and years about the destruction, this will destroy public schools, all of those things are swept off of the table here. We are talking about one thing and one thing only, and that is the child. What is in the best interest of a child seeking an education in this Nation? This makes us focus on that, and it takes away all of the stuff that surrounds the argument otherwise about the system. What we are saying here is that if individuals, especially those individuals who are economically disadvantaged, quite frankly they are probably going to be the people who benefit the most as a result of this, most of the State scholarship organizations will probably focus on low-income kids, and what we are saying is we are going to give a child an opportunity to obtain an education, and the Federal Government is not going to participate by writing rules or regulations or trying to strangle the private school. What we are talking about is freedom. The one thing we know now, empirical evidence, we have thought for a long time that educational freedom would, in fact, enhance educational quality. But it was a theory. Now we know something. We have evidence of it. We have cities around the country, Milwaukee with a very long experience, Cleveland, which is just getting into this, but we have now tons of empirical evidence that shows us that educational freedom does, in fact, translate into educational quality. That is all we care, and that is the beauty of this concept. It has nothing to do with systems or trying to construct a special kind of educational system. What we are saying here is look, we are not the school board members in the sky. The Federal Government is not going to take on a role as the school board member for every kid. What we are simply saying is parents, parents will be able to make a choice. They will be economically empowered for the first time in their lives to make a choice, and that has got to accrue for the benefit of the child. That is what makes this so good. I compliment the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer) for his devotion to this concept.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. This legislation, or this proposal, I suppose, and the opposition to this motion has been characterized as anti- Latino and anti-family. Well, in a way I would suggest that it is an insult to suggest to anyone that in fact if you are doing something here to reform welfare, that the only people who would benefit by overexposure to welfare, give out more welfare, are Latinos. That, of course, I think is an insult to Latinos. In fact, I believe everything we do to try to stop the expansion of welfare, especially, in this case, food stamps, we are doing as a pro- family activity. I will tell the Members why I believe that. The welfare law, the reform law of 1996 to which I referred earlier, replaced AFDC with a brand new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, often referred to around here as TANF. This reform has been widely acknowledged, once again I say, widely acknowledged by both opponents of it originally and its supporters as a tremendous success leading to a dramatic drop in dependence and child poverty. Hear that: The TANF is an improvement, a reform of the system; something that had work requirements ingrained in it, something that had a number of other activities that were required before a recipient could get help. That improvement had a dramatic drop in dependence, a dramatic drop in child poverty, increases in employment, and it slowed down the growth of out-of-wedlock childbearing. Critics of the original program said it would throw millions of children into poverty, and in fact, the opposite has occurred. Poverty rates of black children and children in single-parent families are now at the lowest point in our Nation's history. TANF requires people to work as a condition of receiving aid. Food stamps continue to provide a long-term one-way handout. Work requirements are virtually nonexistent, and they are nonexistent in the proposal put forward by the Senate, the one this motion is designed to have our conferees accept. So which of us is in fact here pro-family, which of us is in fact pro-Latino, if they continually reference that as part of this debate? Is it those who would suggest that welfare, especially the handout that does not have any work requirement tied to it, is not the best thing that we can do to the people of this country? By all accounts, by empirical evidence, it is no longer theory, we now have 6 years of evidence to show that work requirements and a different kind of philosophy with regard to welfare is better. It does reduce poverty rates. It does do better things for families. So I certainly take it as a personal affront when someone suggests that I would promote something that is anti-family, anti-Latino or any of the other anti- arguments that were thrown against it. I suggest to my colleagues that it is exactly the opposite. Creating another system of welfare without the kind of requirements that TANF has intrinsically brought to bear in this discussion is anti- family. That is what we can do to screw up families; to increase poverty is to expand this program of food stamps. My opposition to this plan is not designed to be anti-family. It is just the opposite.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman from California earlier suggested that if we did not pass this motion, that this would be a signal to people coming into the country that we were denying them the American dream. We have gone from suggesting that some help may be needed for families here who are not employed sufficiently, to saying that essentially welfare is the American dream. That this is what we should hold out, this is the carrot that we should hold out to people, because part of the American dream is access to welfare. We have heard continual references to the degradation that would be the result of nonpassage of this motion and continuing the process of restricting Food Stamps to people who are not citizens for a period of time. But listen to what degradation, in fact, occurs. This is all documented. The reports from which I quote are reports that are available to anyone in this body. Again, they are empirical information. It is not something that we just make up or theorize about with regard to the effects of especially Food Stamps. ``The traditional welfare system comprised of programs such as AFDC, Food Stamps and public housing dramatically undermined work ethnic, reduced employment and generated long-term dependence. For example, the Seattle-Denver Income Maintenance Experiment, a massive controlled experiment on effects of welfare conducted in the early 1980s, showed that for each additional dollar of welfare aid led, on average, to a reduction of employment and earnings of 80 cents. These anti-employment effects should apply to cash as well as noncash aid.'' Mr. Speaker, this is what we are trying to avoid. I suggest, and I must say that I would go further than the gentleman from California, I do not believe that Food Stamps are an improvement on one's condition. I do not think it is a good thing. I would be opposing an expansion for any group; but I guarantee, it is not a good thing for the people that we are identifying here. As all empirical evidence suggests, welfare, especially the old AFDC program and Food Stamps, are degrading.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, in 1996 we had much of a similar debate on an issue of this nature. We debated the whole concept of welfare and determined that some change had to be undertaken. After several attempts by this body, by this Congress, to pass legislation, in fact, they did; the previous President had vetoed it a couple of times and eventually he got on board with it and decided that, in fact, it was a good thing. It has proven to be a very good thing. It has proven to be even more successful than many of the folks who had originally supported it could hope for. The numbers of people, as we all know, on welfare have gone down dramatically. Percentages in some States have gone down so dramatically that it boggles the imagination. Somewhere around 70 and 80 percent the caseload has been reduced subsequent to the 1996 act. A lot of people say it has everything to do with the economy being better. But historically we can look at it and find out that over the past century, as a matter of fact, and at least for the past 6 years when we have had a much more intensive welfare program in the United States operating, that the number of people on welfare continued to go up. Regardless of the economic conditions in the country, whether we were in a recession or whether we were in good times, it did not matter; the number of people went up, the number of people on welfare went up. So we cannot draw a conclusion to this phenomenon based upon simply a good economy. Now, we now know that that plan worked and the plan was to get people off of welfare. It was to do everything we could to get people off of welfare. That is a good idea. We undertook it, and it worked. Here we have a proposal to reverse that, to put more people back on welfare; and frankly, I would be opposing it if it was for a nonimmigrant family, a native American family or anybody else. It is not a good idea basically; it is not a good idea to expand the opportunities and expand the number of people eligible for food stamps or welfare in this country. The fact is that the proposal from the Senate side goes much farther than even the expressed intent as described earlier on. One part of it actually eliminates a part of the law, or at least a concept that has been in practice in the United States for well over 100 years, and that is making someone responsible. If someone is applying for immigration into the United States, a document has to be filled out. This is it. It is an affidavit of the U.S. Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service. The fourth item on this is, and this is called, by the way, an affidavit of support. It says that ``This affidavit is made by me for the purpose of assuring the United States Government that the person or persons named in item 3,'' the person coming into the country, ``would not become a public charge in the United States.'' Number 5, that ``I am willing to be able to receive, maintain and support the persons named in item 3. I am willing to deposit a bond, if necessary, to guarantee such persons will not become a public charge to the United States.'' Now, there is again a reason for this to be in the law, and a part of the law, by the way, that has been there for well over 100 years. And of course it is to not make the welfare system in any way, shape or form a magnet for immigration. I think everybody would agree that that should not happen. Now, it is true that even under the present change that is being proposed, someone would still had to have been here 5 years; but they actually wipe out this part of the law of the Senate amendment. It says for this purpose, for food stamps for this purpose, this affidavit would not be required. Now, I am not going to suggest here that we have been very judicious in our approach of enforcing this particular provision of the law. I do not know the last person that was actually forced to do it. It is nonetheless a good idea. I have a letter from the gentleman from Wisconsin (Chairman Sensenbrenner) to the Attorney General asking him essentially why there has not been that kind of enforcement, and what we were going to do in order to try and begin the process of enforcing this particular provision. I hope, of course, that we will. But we should certainly not eliminate it. We should not, and whether or not we forcefully employ it is one thing, but to actually strike it out of the law and say that we would not hold anybody responsible, if one comes here with a sponsorship, no one would be responsible for the financial well-being of the person coming into the country, as, of course, has been the case, at least in the law if not in practice; de jure, if not de facto, it is irresponsible of us to move ahead to accept the Senate amendments. It is especially irresponsible to abolish this part of the law.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 586 agreed to earlier today.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to deliver a tribute to M. Scott Billingsley, legislative director for Colorado's Sixth Congressional District from December 15, 2001, to March 25, the day of his death. First and foremost, I am honored today to share with you Scott's dedication to his career, his fellow man and his country. Mr. Speaker, my staff and I were given the great privilege of working with Scott for the last few months of his life. When Scott became my legislative director this past December, he instantly gained my respect and, more importantly, generated a sense of enthusiasm in his office which empowered my staff to reach their personal best and to strive to work toward perfection. Scott's infectious personality and poise drew people close to him. We instantly enjoyed getting to know him and were eager to learn from him. Scott possessed a rare gift that allowed him to do his job thoroughly, in a way that nurtured the work ethic of his peers while at the same time enabled him to act as a mentor. Mr. Speaker, we were blessed to have Scott in our lives. Scott will always be remembered as a person who lived life to the fullest, with a passion for knowledge and a sincere desire to make a difference in the lives of those around him and the people of Colorado's Sixth Congressional District. The news of his sudden death saddened all of us beyond words. His presence is irreplaceable, his character exceptional. Mr. Speaker, I would like to submit Scott's eulogy delivered by both his father and fiancee for the Congressional Record. It is important to let history know that Mr. Billingsley was a man who dedicated his life to improve the livelihood of his fellow citizens and America. In closing, Mr. Speaker, I would like to quote a verse from the Bible. In the short time we were blessed with Scott in our lives, we believe he would say these words to help ease the hearts of all those who knew and loved him. The scripture is from Numbers 6:24-26: ``The Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make his face to shine down upon thee and be gracious unto thee. The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee and give thee peace.'' While losing Scott was tragic, his spirit remains with all of us. Eulogy by Scott's Father, Dr. Michael L. Billingsley (march 30, 2002, grace episcopal church, colorado springs) To the Family and Friends of Michael Scott Billingsley: This is the most difficult thing that a father ever has to do, but I must say a few words about our son. Most of you have known and loved Scott for some or all of his 32 years, and I know you are devastated by this loss. His mother and I, his sister, and our family are crushed beyond words, and I don't know if we will ever completely recover from this. Scott and Rebecca have always been our life and our joy. I have no words to express the pain his passing has caused. We are comforted, however, by our firm belief, that only Scott's physical presence is gone. His spirit is everlasting, and is bound up in than mysterious force, that binds us all together, the Holy Spirit of God. I will let others recount Scott's accomplishments and attributes. We all know that he achieved much in his short time with us. He was a gifted and talented young man, and contributed a great deal to the lives of all who knew him well. I would like to focus for a moment on his spirit, the enduring essence of his being. Scott's spirit is fiercely independent. From the beginning, he asserted his uniquely individual style, never egotistical, but always assertive, and firm in his convictions. From his earliest use of words and phrases, Scott was an able debater and advocate. When Rebecca was only 2 years old, and Scott 5, she refused to talk, though able, because she had only to point at something she wanted, and Scott would instantly become her legal counsel, explaining in full sentences what Rebecca really meant to say. I don't remember a time, when he was at a loss for words. Blessed with a keen intellect, and once convinced of the merits of his position, he was a formidable partisan for his issue. His assertiveness was, more often than not, balanced with sincere sense of fairness, and respect for his opponent. His friends will tell you that he was always up to a debate on nearly any issue, and was even occasionally willing to consider other reasonable and well thought out points of view; that is, if he couldn't readily destroy their argument. Scott's is a loyal spirit. His bonding to kindred souls, regardless of differences of opinion, was remarkable. Some of his best friends were often his polar opposites on world and political views. His spirit was able to transcend those differences and inspire comradeship in many of the ``loyal opposition,'' as he might describe them. Finding and bonding with the essential goodness in others was one of his great strengths. Often through humor and wit, Scott could bridge strong differences in opinion and diffuse anger and confrontation. Scott's sense of humor was treasured by our family. He was always able to bring laughter to even the most contentious family matters. As many of you know, he could incite hysterical laughter in his sister with a mere gesture or an off-hand remark. The real center of Scott's spirit is love. A great deal of this attribute certainly came from the unending love and nurturing of his mother, his wonderful relationship with his sister, his grandparents, his aunts and uncles, and his cousins. He was fortunate to have many long-lasting close friendships from high school, college, law school, and from his work experiences in Washington. My personal relationship with him was almost perfect. We agreed on almost every philosophical principal. Our last game, a week ago, was a tie. We didn't even have a playoff. All of these life experiences helped develop in Scott a strong sense of compassion and justice. There is more, however, that came from Scott himself. In the past few years, he has developed a closer relationship with God, and had been at last, able to make many life shaping decisions. The most important decision was to marry Katie, his soul- mate, to whom he had dedicated his life. She brought him great joy, laughter, and fulfillment. His mother and I know that since meeting Katie, he had more direction and contentment than ever before. After a recent reunion with Scott, Rebecca remarked that she had never seen so much happiness and joy in her brother's life. Our hearts weep for you Katie, God bless you. Something that I had not been able to verbalize before, has occurred to me over the past few days. It is the realization that Scott is a rare and very special person, who has the gift of connecting to people in a way that most of us can only wonder at and admire. Scott is one of the glue people that hold us together, who can transcend our differences and make us feel part of the same whole. I have known a few other extraordinary people like this, whose presence remains with me, and we all have these feelings for members of our families. But Scott had a special ability to connect with even those of short acquaintance, to build and maintain special ties. I believe that God was and is doing his work, through Scott, and continues to use his spirit to connect us. His mother, sister, Katie, and I have certainly felt his continuing presence, as I am sure many of you have also. Let Scott's life, and continuing presence, help us all understand this binding of our spirits, the inescapable conclusion that we are not alone, now and forever. We will miss your person so much, Scott, but we will always be comforted knowing that your spirit lives. This is not the end, but only the beginning. We know that you will always be with us, by the grace of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to clause 7(c) of rule XXII, I hereby announce my intention to offer the following motion to instruct House conferees tomorrow on H.R. 2646. The form of the motion is as follows: I move that the managers on the part of the House at the conference on the disagreeing votes of the two Houses on the Senate amendment to the bill H.R. 2646, an Act to provide for the continuation of agricultural programs through fiscal year 2011, be instructed to disagree to the provisions contained in Section 452 of the Senate amendment, relating to partial restoration of benefits to legal immigrants.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, before I give my comments tonight, I want to take note of one individual in particular here in the room with us tonight and those that are also here every single night, every single day on the floor, and they are the pages that have worked so hard to make the operation of this House successful as it is. In particular, one Katie Roehrick, who I spoke to just a little earlier, I want to especially point out and thank her for her work and staying late in the evenings as she does and to her mom, Brenda, for producing such a lovely daughter. Mr. Speaker, there are a number of issues with which I wish to deal tonight. Before I begin the major body of my presentation, I want to refer to the comments that were made by members of the minority party here earlier this evening, and for at least an hour, perhaps longer, they went on about the concerns they have with the fact that we have, that this body has passed and this Congress has passed, a package of bills that we refer to as a stimulus package and essentially, they are measures designed to reduce taxes on the people of the United States of America. I think, and they were concerned about this, and they certainly do not want, as they said, they do not want these measures to become permanent. They want all of the temporary tax cuts to remain only temporary. In fact, they are concerned about the fact that we passed them at all. They would just as soon that we never had passed tax cuts. I would like the people listening, and also, most importantly, Mr. Speaker, I want to address this comment to the House, and reflect upon exactly what it was that we had to do in order to get Democratic support for our package, the package that we refer to as a stimulus package. I think it is very elucidative. It tells us a great deal about the difference between the two parties, and about the way in which we do our business here in this House. It tells us a great deal about how we view government and its relationship to the people. Now, it is undeniably true that as a result of a number of things, traditional economic downturns, the war we are facing, a variety of other issues have impacted negatively on the economy of this Nation. That is undeniably true. No one argues with that. As a result, revenues have dropped, jobs have disappeared, and Federal, State and local governments are having a more difficult time meeting their commitments because revenues have decreased. That is undeniably true. That is the only thing upon which we agree. Everybody here can agree there is a problem. The President has articulated the problem, and has postulated a response and a solution. This is what separates the two parties, this philosophy of government embodied in this whole idea of a stimulus package, ``stimulus,'' meaning to get the country moving again. What can we do, what is there that the Members of this body can do, to reinvigorate the American economy? Now, when we presented this in the form of a motion here on the floor, in the form of regulations and/or laws, here is what we came up with. On the Republican side, we said that the best thing that we can do as a body is to in fact reduce the tax burden on the people of the country and on the businesses that employ the people of this country, because we believe in order to get the economy in fact stimulated, as the title of the package implies, we need to increase the number of jobs that are available to the people of the country. We have to make sure that the government does what it can do to make it easier for corporations, for small businesses, to employ other people, to sell their products and services, and thereby prosper. We believe that is the way to get the economy moving again. What did our friends on the other side offer to this stimulus package? What did we in fact have to include in order to get it passed? The one proposal, the one and only proposal that came from the minority party to stimulate our economy, was to increase the length of time people could be on unemployment compensation. Now, we can argue for the need for the Federal Government to increase the length of time people can be eligible for unemployment, but that is a separate debate. It should be a separate debate, totally and completely different from the debate over what it is we can do to get the economy moving again. Yet, this is the only thing they put forward, an increase in the amount of time people could be eligible for unemployment. Now, I suggest, Mr. Speaker, that that is a perfect example. I cannot think of a better way to explain to the American people the difference that exists between two parties, two philosophies, two ideas of government. One, because we want tax breaks, we are characterized as heartbreakers, cruel, or only wanting to help the ``rich.'' But as has been said often on this floor, and certainly something with which I agree, Mr. Speaker, I have never personally been given a job by a poor person. Jobs only come from people who can afford to give jobs, companies that can afford to employ people. And their ability to do so, their ability to employ people, is directly related to the costs they incur to be in business. One of those costs, in fact, I think a very expensive cost, is the cost of the government. I think it is too high. I think we interfere far too much with the marketplace and with people's ability to actually do business. There are legitimate roles for the government, undeniably, legitimate roles in this area. But when we are talking about trying to get this economy moving again, and then to hear our friends on the other side of the aisle come up here tonight and talk for over an hour about their fear that a tax break, that a tax cut would in some way or other jeopardize the success of our stimulus package, that is absolutely incredible. Actually, it is not incredible, it is to be expected, but it is also to be rejected. It is a failed philosophy. We cannot tax ourselves out of a recession. What we can do is, of course, unleash the power, the spirit, and the enterprise of the American people, and that is what we have done. That is what this President has requested. That is how this Congress has responded. We should not only disavow any attempt on the part of the minority party to retain the degree to which all of these things were temporary, but we should in fact move quickly to make all of these tax reductions permanent, and we should do so with haste and with great pride, because it is in fact what will get this country moving again. Now, it is interesting to note that although we heard a number of protestations from the other party tonight about the cost of government, about the expenditures of the Federal Government, something I am sure they are not used to actually doing, when we consider that for 40 years this body was controlled by the Democratic Party and for 40 years we were in deficit spending, and the idea of a balanced budget was almost laughable. In fact, I know that many people did consider it a joke: How could we ever do that? Impossible. It is only right and just and God willed somehow that we would always be in deficit spending, as long as they were in charge. So the idea of actually coming to the floor and talking about fiscal prudence, fiscal responsibility, I am happy to hear it. I hope somehow or other those words begin to actually take root within the Members of the other side. I hope they actually begin to listen to what they say about being able to actually prioritize the needs of this Nation in a way that allows us as a nation to live within our means, as we all must do, or face the consequences. I say that that is ironic in a way because, on another note, we will be and have been for some time and we will continue to debate the issue of immigration into the United States of America. We will talk about the need for immigration, and we will talk about its impact, and the fact that diversity plays such a wonderful role in the American landscape. We will soon be debating whether or not we should in fact be increasing the amount of money, and in particular, the amount of food stamps, that will be made available to people who are here who are not citizens of the country: an expansion of the food stamp welfare program. That may be up on this floor as early as tomorrow. It is the motion that I made earlier upon the beginning of my comments here that I intend to instruct the conferees, at least I intend to bring a motion before this body that would instruct the House conferees that are presently in conference with the Senate over the farm bill to not agree to any expansion of welfare benefits for people who are not citizens of the United States. Now, we passed just a few years ago, 6 short years ago, we passed a bill in this body that is widely, widely accepted as being a monumental improvement in the area of welfare. The Welfare Reform Act that we passed in this body did a number of amazing things. It was a sea change, if you will. It was one of the few times that a government reverses its policy and begins to go in a different direction. That hardly ever happens around here, as we know, but it happened in 1996, and to the benefit of literally millions and millions of Americans, millions of Americans who were no longer besieged, in a way, by the plight of welfare. I say it in that way, I couch it in those terms, because that is exactly what welfare is in reality, it is a plight. It is something that we understood in 1996 to affect intrinsically, I say, intrinsically, the character of the Nation, and to negatively affect the people it was designed to benefit. Welfare was always, since the beginning of the country, designed or thought of as being a very thing. For the most part, of course, we know at the beginning of the Nation it was never thought of as being a government responsibility at all; it was the responsibility of churches and of local communities. But we have expanded that concept dramatically, as we all know. We did so, I think, for the most part for very altruistic reasons. We did so because we believed that the people who were more well off needed to help and benefit those who were in need. That is something that I think we can all agree to. But the whole idea of welfare was that it was a temporary thing, meant to get them over a particular bump in the road, a problem they were having in their lives that, with a little bit of help from the government, they could overcome and move on to self-sufficiency. But we all know, Mr. Speaker, what happened over the course of time: it was no longer thought of, for the most part, as just a temporary thing; it was thought of as a lifestyle. It became a lifestyle for far too many, literally millions of Americans, far too many Americans. And it did not benefit them, in the long run. In a way, there is a great metaphor. We could think about penguins who were at one time able to fly. I always think about this, and realize that over eons of time, these particular birds did not use that ability and they eventually lost it. What we did to a lot of people was to take away their ability to fly; in this case, I mean to actually make their own way in life. We took away their self-esteem. There have been many books, many research papers, written on the effects, the negative effects, of welfare on our society. We came to that conclusion as a majority of this body, and with the President. After he vetoed it two times, the past president, President Clinton, he eventually came to the conclusion that it was the right thing to do, and it was. That was to stop doing what we were doing and begin to move in a direction that would once again reflect that original attitude about welfare; that is, that it was a temporary intercession on the part of the Federal Government or the State or local government, and that the worst thing we could do was to make it a continuing process. So we started a new era, and almost without exception, every State began to see a reduction in the number of people on the welfare rolls. Now we are something like 50 percent below where we were. Some States, I am told, are 80 percent or 90 percent below where they were in 1996. Now, a lot of people say, well, naturally, it is because, of course, we had a time of economic prosperity. But I would refer to the many, many studies that have been done on this issue that have shown that heretofore, prior to 1996, it did not matter how many economic boom and bust cycles we went through in the country, it did not matter that the graph showed this fluctuating line in times of great prosperity, in times of economic downturns. It did not matter that, over the course of time, the number of people on welfare went up, and the economic boom cycle had nothing to do with bringing it down. It never came down. It went up in good times, it went up in bad times, prior to 1996. It was not the economic good times of the nineties. After all, we only passed this in 1996. It began to take effect maybe 1997-1998, and we had already been in a period of at least 10 or more years of economic upturn. Why had we not seen an increase in the number of people employed during that period and getting off of welfare during the time prior to 1996, say, from about 1985 to 1996? We did not see it because, of course, the welfare system only encouraged people to stay on welfare. We encouraged generation after generation after generation of people to be on welfare. It is all they knew. It is all they trusted. It is all that they could actually hope for or think about. We actually forced a change in the character, the national character of a nation, an amazing thing. So what are we now proposing in the farm bill? We are proposing to add people to the welfare rolls, 200,000, perhaps more, depending upon which version of this thing is passed by this body, if it is passed. I suggest if history is any guide to this, it will be far more than 200,000; but what we are saying is that all of the things we did right in 1996 we are going to undo, little by little here; and we are going to start with people who are immigrants to the country, legal, that is true, but nonetheless ineligible for welfare at the present time, ineligible for food stamps at the present time. Mr. Speaker, there is a peculiar thing that we do, one of the many I guess that we do with regard to this issue of immigration, and that is, that when someone comes here as an immigrant they have to actually find a sponsor who is willing to say and swear to the fact that when this person comes in as the person they sponsor, that they, in fact, will be held financially responsible so that that person coming in will never be a drain on the resources of the Nation. We say that all the time. I mean, that is every single person comes in, they actually sign it. Amazingly, Mr. Speaker, we do not enforce it. In fact, there is not a mechanism to enforce it. We would not know what court to go to. There is no regulation that allows us to actually have a pathway to do this. So it is never enforced. Not one person, not one person here today as an immigrant, and some are eligible under our laws because of economic status, but none should be eligible because of the fact that we have someone who said they would be responsible, financially responsible. Yet not one person has ever been held responsible for an immigrant family coming here that then goes on welfare, not one. It is a big joke, as much of the immigration issue is a nasty, ugly and really not- so-funny joke. No one has ever been held responsible, no one; but that is the law. They are supposed to. I ask my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, should it be the business of this body to actually reverse some of the activity, some of the benefits of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and now begin an expansion of the number of people who are on welfare, in this particular case, on food stamps, who are made eligible for food stamps? I believe it is wrong-headed. I know that there are political motivations for this. I understand that in this body is what really makes things work. That is the mother's milk of this organization, that is, what are the politics of the issue, and in this case, it is pretty clear. There is a rapidly- expanding immigration population in the United States; and the hope that we can garner their support, the political support of these people who will soon become citizens and eligible to vote and even those who vote, even though they are not citizens, and they do en masse, believe me, fraudulently vote, but we are all concerned about the impact of this massive immigration on our own political futures. This goes from the White House down through the House and Senate. Mr. Speaker, it is fascinating, because in the Zogby poll I saw not too long ago there was one portion of it where they actually went to Hispanic Americans, and in this case Hispanic immigrants to the country who are not yet citizens, and said there is a proposal to, among other things, provide amnesty for people coming into this country, and would you be more or less inclined to vote for someone who supported amnesty for someone here illegally? Amazingly, a majority of the people, Hispanic Americans, said no, I would not be in favor of that. I would actually vote against someone who proposed that. I believe with all my heart, Mr. Speaker, that we can appeal to every American, whether they be Hispanic or black or Italian, as I am, or Hungarian or Polish or whatever, we can appeal to them all to vote for our party based on our principles. I am a Republican. The principles of my party rest on less government, less welfare, more individual freedom, a greater degree of trust and understanding of the importance of individual responsibility. That is what I believe we can appeal to people on. People on the other side have their own principles and ideas, all just as deeply felt, all principled. I do not suggest for a moment that the folks on the other side of the aisle do not feel these things as strongly as I feel our principles. Let us go forward based on who we are and what we are and ask for the support of the people who are here in the country; and I think, as Republicans, I think we will win. Certainly we will win our share. We will not win every single person, but I believe we can win our share by saying to them that we trust you, we want you to be part of this American mosaic, and we want to give you the freedom to both succeed and the freedom to fail. That is the essence of freedom. Every country on the Earth that has tried the other experiment we call socialism, that experiment that tells people you really cannot fail, you really cannot, do not worry, we will always make sure you have a job even if your job produces nothing of value, the government will subsidize it, we will always make sure you have a home, a little apartment maybe someplace, because this is a guarantee against your ever failing. Well, when you say to people you cannot fail, you also say to them, well, you cannot succeed; and the greatness of America is the fact that here we do say to everyone or at least it is the promise of America that you have this great opportunity. The great opportunity is to succeed even beyond your wildest imagination, and yes, you may fail, but that is an important part in the process, and to fail does not mean it is all over. It means you start again on a new path. That is what I consider to be the American way. That is what I consider to be the promise we should hold out to everyone coming into the United States and to people who have been here for all of their lives, that we give them both the freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail. There is an immediate allure I know to going up to people and saying we will protect you from failure, we will make sure you cannot; and we will hide any of the negative from you, but to fail as a system cannot work like this, and they have failed all over the world. It is only our system that now shines a light as a beacon really to the poor and impoverished of the world as to how we can improve the lives of everyone. The poorest American for the most part lives even a better life than most of the people in the Third World. The poorest American has a better life today than most people in the world. I say in the world because, in fact, the Third World populations dwarf those of the rest of the world and so, in reality, the poorest American still lives better than most people in the world. That is an amazing thing. It is an incredible thing, and of course if you are here and the only thing against which you judge it is what your neighbor has you feel impoverished, and I do not mean for a moment that we should not do everything we can to make sure that everyone in the United States does not move as quickly as they possibly can toward economic self-sufficiency, but welfare is not the way to do it. It is more often than not a political ploy. It is a political carrot we dangle in front of people for their votes, but it is in a way as destructive to them as a drug that we put in front of them. Welfare is a drug that once injected becomes addictive. We recognize that. This is what I am saying now. What is amazing to me is that we came to this conclusion as a body, as a country just 6 years ago. Yet here we are talking about expanding the number of people eligible for, in this case, food stamp benefits; and again I say it is simply for political reasons. The issue of immigration is one with which we must deal; and it will be interesting to see tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, if we do bring this motion to the floor to instruct conferees. It will be interesting to see how all the people who stood on the floor tonight to talk about fiscal discipline, the importance of not spending more than we take in, it will be interesting to see how they vote on this $2 billion proposal, an expansion of welfare. My guess is that most of them will vote to expand it. Regardless of the fiscal implication of this country, it really does not matter. I would bet, Mr. Speaker, that most of the people on this floor would vote for it even if it expanded welfare by $20 billion, by $50 billion, because the issue is not fiscal responsibility at that point. It is politics. It is votes. How many votes can we buy with welfare; and as I have told people on my side of the aisle so often, Mr. Speaker, we will never be able to outbid the folks on the other side of the aisle for votes when it comes to handicap welfare because everything we offer they will up the ante. After all, it is not their money. It is just the people's money. Why not buy votes with the people's money? It is not yours, and that is in fact what we are doing here when we expand welfare. It is, in fact, what we are doing when we expand the number of people that can come into the United States. It is exactly what we do when we try to stop organizations of our government from actually enforcing the immigration laws, because we want for the most part, many people here want more people coming into the country. Why? Because they want diversity? Because they have some sort of altruistic feeling? No. No, sir. I do not believe that that is the case. I think for the most part, this is my feeling, Mr. Speaker, I believe that what we are talking about here is the most crass politics. I see it as verbose. I see the people coming in as potential voters that I know want to retain power and even if you have to buy them off to do so, through government programs and services, some people will do that. There is a great danger to this country from massive immigration, both legal and illegal. It is on many fronts. One is, in fact, the economic implications of massive immigration. For many, many years, immigration was thought of as one of the things that drove the economic engine of this country, and we still talk about it in that way. We still talk about the need for labor, especially low-cost labor. People on my side of the aisle especially talk about the need for low-cost labor and the importance of, in fact, keeping the engine running with those folks, and therefore, the need for massive immigration. For a long time, Mr. Speaker, I think that that was a legitimate argument. When the country was going through the industrial revolution, it was in desperate need of low-cost labor. That was necessary for the accumulation of capital and for the eventual development of our system. And there were horrendous examples of the excesses of the time, sweat shops and the like. Nonetheless, a case could be made for the need for massive numbers of low-cost, low-skilled workers. I suggest, Mr. Speaker, like everything, the economics of this changed dramatically and that the impact today of massive numbers of low-skilled, low-wage workers is actually negative on the country. I know that there are people who will disagree with me, recognizing as I hear all of the time from certain industries that they could not run their business, a lot of ski areas in Colorado, talk about the fact that they cannot find enough people, they have to rely on immigrants; and they know that most of them are illegal. Here is an interesting concept put forth by a Vanderbilt professor, and I will characterize it in this way. Massive immigration of low- skilled workers privatizes profits and socializes costs. That means that there are undeniably a number of people who do profit as a result of having a lot of low-skilled people working for them. They do in fact have greater profits in that regard because you can pay lower wages. But on the other side, there are costs to society. There are costs for schools, costs for streets, hospitals, costs for social services, including welfare. What we have found is that the cost of immigration, especially for low-skilled, low-wage people are higher than the profits they return, higher than the benefits that they provide in terms of taxes, higher than what they actually turn in in terms of their own tax revenues. Low-wage, low-skilled workers naturally pay less in taxes, naturally. Many of them, of course, are paid in cash because they are illegal. They are here illegally. So there is an advantage to the employer who can skirt the law by paying the employee in cash, thereby avoiding all kinds of employment taxes, and to the employee who takes it in cash who therefore does not have to pay taxes on it, does not have to account for it or fill out any forms. So a huge amount of money, a huge part of this economy, is a cash economy from which the government receives absolutely no revenues. For those people who then in fact do pay taxes, they are people who pay a low level because naturally they are low-skilled, low-wage earners. Most pay none. Even if they are filing, they do not really pay taxes with the exception of sales and use taxes, but they pay no income taxes for the most part. But the costs of society are significant. The cost of adding each new person to a community is about $1,500 and that is the first year, taking into account all of the things that have to be put in place for that additional person, streets, houses, all of the infrastructure. It is not economically viable; it is no longer something that pushes the engine of the economy. It is a drain on the economy. It is a governor, if you will, on the engine, on the speed of the engine. It does in fact benefit certain people, undeniably true. The hotel owners in the resort areas in my State are benefited by having low- skilled, low-wage people come into the United States seeking jobs that perhaps no one else would take. That is what we always hear. But what we do not hear is the rest of that line, jobs no one else would take for the price I am paying this person. Well, it is true that perhaps they will have a harder time getting other folks to take those jobs, but it is not true this is an overall economic benefit to the Nation. The numbers are staggering. In a recent article, and I should preference this by saying at the height of the immigration wave into the United States in the early part of the 20th century, we saw about 200,000 people a year coming in. That was only for 2 or 3 years, and after that it went down. That was tops. That was at the heyday of immigration into the country. Today, about a million come in legally. We do not know how many come in illegally. Mr. Speaker, here is an interesting article that appeared recently in World Net Daily. It says in Cochise County, Arizona, the U.S.-Mexican border is the most heavily used corridor for illegal alien traffic on America's southern border, and the numbers of unauthorized immigrants smuggled across the porous border dumbfounds the imagination. As of October 19, 2001, the U.S. Border Patrol had apprehended 158,782 illegals. That was in 2001. By the Border Patrol's own admission, it catches one in five and admits that around 800,000 have slipped across the border up to that point in time. Local ranchers who have been watching the border for several generations strongly disagree and estimate that the agency nets one in 10. Estimates are that in 2001, over 1.5 million unlawful immigrants crossed into America in what the Border Patrol people called the Tucson sector. The numbers are staggering. It is growing dramatically. Mr. Speaker, please understand, we are not just talking about people from Mexico or South America; we are talking about people from all over the world coming through Mexico. This article goes on to identify the many people coming through that border illegally from the Middle East. A Border Patrol spokesman stated that the other than Mexican detentions has grown by 42 percent. Most of the non-Mexican immigrants are from El Salvador, but they have picked up people from all over the world. Arabs have been reported crossing the Arizona border for an unknown period, and border rancher George Morgan encountered thousands of illegals crossing his ranch on a well- used trail. He talks about an incident where he saw literally hundreds on his property one day. They were all Iranians, 100 Iranians, coming across the border. This article goes on to detail that particular phenomenon. That is to say that just because we have a porous border in the south and we talk about the danger that that poses to America from an economic standpoint, please understand that there is another danger that it poses to America, and that is a very vital part of this discussion, and that is the danger to our national security that is as a result of our porous borders, that is as a result of the fact that we do not care. Mr. Speaker, we do not care who comes across. We are afraid of actually putting into any sort of order our border control efforts. We are afraid of it. Why are we afraid? How can this be, Mr. Speaker? That after 3,000 Americans were killed by aliens, people who came here from other countries for the purpose of doing harm, some of them here illegally as a result of overstaying their visas, how can we say that we turn a blind eye and that we do not care about the fact that these borders are porous? How can we continue to encourage people to come across those borders illegally? How is it that we can be so cavalier about what I consider to be one of the most important aspects of our national sovereignty, the establishment of, the protection of, the defense of our borders. Is it really passe? Is it really outdated for me to stand on the floor of this body and this House and plead for the protection of our borders, the defense of our borders? Is that really that odd? How is it that we can look at this whole phenomenon and not reel by the impact made when we understand the fact that every day, literally thousands of people are crossing our borders without our knowledge, certainly without our permission. For the most part, I am sure that their intentions are benign. But whether their intentions are simply to take a low-cost job that no one else will take or their intentions are to do something more evil, the fact is that the impact is negative on the country, negative from an economic standpoint and negative from a national security standpoint. This body has failed to produce a single piece of legislation, both the House and the Senate together, failed to produce a single piece of legislation which will significantly increase the security of the people of the United States as regards the borders. We have done a great deal to improve our ability to respond to the threats of terrorists in Afghanistan, in Iraq maybe soon, in the Philippines, in the Republic of Georgia, the many other nations where we have identified tentacles of the terrorist threat Al Qaeda. We have done a marvelous job. It is to the credit of this President, this body, the Congress of the United States and more importantly to the people, the men and women who serve in the Armed Forces, that we have been able to accomplish what we have been able to accomplish since 9/11. But it is not enough, Mr. Speaker. We have one primary responsibility here in this body, one thing that is more important than making sure that we fund health and human services activities, education activities, transportation and all of the other budget bills that we deal with. Something more important than that is the protection of the life and property of the people of this country. We shirk that responsibility if we do not pay attention to our borders, if we do not get some sort of hold on our own immigration policy and become a real nation. Because a real nation has borders. It defends them. It determines who comes across them to the best of its ability. It expels people who come across illegally. We laugh at that. We wink at it. It is a joke. Let me tell you, Mr. Speaker, we will not be laughing the next time we have an incident. God forbid that another event occur in this Nation that we can attribute to the evil intent of people who come here from other nations and who sneak across or come across legally and stay beyond what they should or who lie to us for telling us why they are coming in. All those people coming in illegally, we have a responsibility to do everything we can to protect the American citizens by defending our borders. Do not shirk this responsibility, I beg my colleagues. It is our primary responsibility. God and the American people will judge us for our actions.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to praise the work of the chairman of the Committee on the Budget, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle), and the Republican members of that Committee on the Budget. As we all know, this year has been very challenging as the results of the attacks of September 11 and the downturn in our economy. Mr. Speaker, we will hear a lot of people talking about this budget today. As always, a great deal of rhetoric will emanate from this House. There is one thing that seems to frighten the members of the Democratic minority here more than anything else. There are a couple of words that absolutely petrify them, apparently; it is called ``balanced budget.'' They do not know what it is, they had never had one during the time they were in charge of this body, but we are presenting them with one today. It is a scary thing for them, unfortunately. Mr. Speaker, it is important to note that if we accepted all of the 17 amendments offered in the Committee on the Budget this year by members of the minority, we would increase spending over the next 5 years by $205 billion and require $175 billion in additional taxes. That is the old way of doing business. There is a better way. It is called a balanced budget. It is called defending America, and that is what this budget does.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. I thank the Speaker for that reminder. The issue is, of course, this particular agency and the security of the Nation is dependent upon having an organization like the INS do its job, do it effectively and efficiently. I hope that I have indicated to you and to the Members and our colleagues the difficulty we would have if we were to just give this agency the responsibility to actually increase border security. It has to be abolished. We have to start with something new. It has to be something we create. The President today, as I understand, has called for something far more dramatic, far more significant than the original proposal to just split the agency into two parts. He has called for the complete elimination of this part of the agency, the enforcement side, creating a brand new one that would combine various other offices, various other functions of other agencies, including Customs and Agriculture, perhaps DEA, putting them into one agency, with the clear purpose, the clear line of authority, with people who are not philosophically inclined to open borders, but actually have a belief that they have a responsibility to help defend our borders. He has called for that today, and I applaud his call for a new agency, brand new, new people, and I would suggest we take it out of Justice and perhaps put it into Governor Ridge's Homeland Security Agency. That would be appropriate. Now, we have to do something like that, and it will be dramatic. It is a big test of our will in this body and in the other body as to whether or not we can actually accomplish this, because, of course, there is a lot of turf we are going to be treading on, and in this town turf is very important and people do not give up their turf, even a tiny little bit of it, without a big fight. What we are saying here is we have to take some things away from you, and some things away from you, and we have to put it into another agency. It is going to be tough. It has to be done, and I will tell you why. People will often say, hey, who are we really afraid of? Are we afraid of the people coming across the borders? They are just coming for jobs. They are not really coming here to do us any harm and that sort of thing. Madam Speaker, I am going to be quoting from something here, an article that was put out on WorldNetDaily, written by J. Zane Walley. A lot of the references I will be making will be to this particular article. It is called ``Arab Terrorists Crossing the Border.'' This was a very elucidative analysis, I think, of the problem, and something that every American should be aware of, especially when we talk about the need to make sure that we are fighting the war on terrorism both here and abroad, because if we do not have a two-front war, we will certainly lose. The article says that to date, the U.S. Border Patrol has apprehended, and this is up to this time of the year, 158,722 illegals, just in the year 2001. By the Border Patrol's own admission, it catches one alien in five, and admits that about 800,000 have slipped across this year. Others contend that this is inaccurate. These are the ranchers down there, and they contend the agency only nets one in ten. An estimate is that over 1.5 million unlawful aliens have crossed into America in what the Border Patrol calls the Tucson Sector. By the way, that is just one part of our border, of course. Many border ranch owners are validly apprehensive of speaking about their desperate situation because of likely retribution by narco- militarists, the drug runners, and coyotes, the smuggling of human beings. Unsolved murders and arsons are alarmingly ordinary in Cochise County, so pure fear keeps locals from speaking on the record. The foot traffic is so heavy that the back country has an ambience of a garbage dump and smells like an outdoor privy. In places, the land is littered a foot deep with bottles, cans, soiled disposable diapers, sanitary napkins, panties, clothes, backpacks, human feces, used toilet paper, pharmacy bottles, syringes, et cetera. U.S. Border Patrol agents are doing the best they can, considering their sparse numbers and the impossible terrain they patrol in four- wheel drive vehicles, quad-runners and on foot. Agents of the Border Patrol have their other fears besides being ambushed by rock-chucking illegals and confrontations with assault rifle-armed narcos. They are not allowed to speak about what they cope with each day. This is what I mentioned, Madam Speaker, as being endemic in this agent. They have intimidated their employees so that they are afraid to speak out in what they see to be as clear violations of the regulations they are asked to uphold. One agent who spoke anonymously said, Look, I can tell you a lot of stories, but I have to be unnamed or I will be blackballed and might lose my job. He worriedly added, I have a family depending on me. Another agent of supervisory rank stated that smuggling traffic of Mexicans has really slowed. We are experiencing a tremendous increase in what he calls OTMs. That is border lingo for ``other than Mexicans.'' When queried about the ethnic makeup of the OTMs, he answered Central and South Americans, Orientals and Middle Easterners. When he was questioned about that further, Middle Easterners, he said yeah, it varies, but about one in every ten that we catch is from a country like Yemen or Egypt. Border Patrol spokesperson Rene Noriega stated that the number of other than Mexican detentions has grown by 42 percent. Most of the non- Mexican immigrants are from El Salvador or other parts of Central America, she said, but added that the agents have picked up people from all over the world, including the former Soviet Union, Asia, and the Middle East. Arabs have been reported crossing the Arizona border for an unknown period. Border rancher George Morgan encounters thousands of illegals crossing his ranch on a well-used trail. He relates a holiday event: ``It was Thanksgiving, 1998, and I stepped outside my house and there were over 100 crossers in my yard. Damnedest bunch of illegals I ever saw. All of them were wearing black pants, white shirts and string ties. Maybe they were hoping to blend in,'' he chuckled. ``They took off. I called the Border Patrol, and a while later Agent Dan Green let me know that they had been caught. He said all were Iranians.'' According to Border Patrol spokesman Rob Daniels, 10 Egyptians were arrested recently near Douglas, Arizona. Each had paid $7,000 to be brought from Guatemala into Mexico and then across the border. According to the San Diego Union Tribune, hours after the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, an anonymous caller led Mexican immigration officials to 41 undocumented Iraqis waiting to cross into the United States. The Associated Press reported that Mexican immigration police detained 13 citizens of Yemen on September 24, 2001, who reportedly were waiting to cross the border into Arizona. The Yemenis were arrested Sunday in Agua Prieta, across the border from Douglas. Luis Teran Balaguer, in the northern state of Sonora, said the evidence indicates that they have nothing to do with terrorist activities. The Agua Prieta newspaper clearly did not agree with his assessment. The editor, Jose Noriega Durazo, claimed in a front page El Ciarin headline, ``Arab terrorists were here.'' He quoted Agua Prieta police officials as identifying the 13 Yemenis as terrorists. Reportedly the Mexican immigration police returned the Yemenis to a federal detention center near Mexico City, but the new information would indicate they were released and returned to Agua Prieta. Carlos Carrillo, assistant chief, U.S. Border Patrol, Tucson Sector, told WorldNetDaily in a telephone interview Monday that nine Yemenis were reportedly holed up in a hotel in the border town of Agua Prieta, Sonora. ``We have passed the tip on to the FBI,'' he said. When pressed for information, he said he could not confirm the number, because they were under OP/SEC, which is a counter-intelligence acronym for ``operations security.'' The Border Patrol field patrol agent, who spoke anonymously, confirmed the presence of nine Yemenis. The agent said they could not get a coyote to transport them, and they are offering $30,000 per person, with no takers. The article goes on. Some people are being offered $50,000, specifically of Arab descent. This is happening at the same time that we are debating whether or not we actually can control our own borders or whether we should. Today I had an interesting discussion with a member of the press, specifically a lady I think from USA Today, and it became apparent after a short time she was annoyed with the fact that I was pressing for border control. She put the pad away for a second and talked to me, you know, sort of ``off the record''; and she said you cannot really expect to do this. We are going to turn into a police state. Are you really going to try to keep these people out? So I said to her, Tell me the alternative to trying to defend the border. Just tell me what you think the alternative is? It is to abandon it. There is no other way. You have two options. You either defend the border as well as you possibly can, and it does not mean we will absolutely be sure that no one will ever be able to get into the country without our permission. Of course not. But we do everything that we can do, just like the President has said that we are going to do outside the country. He said we are going to do everything we have to do. I ask the President to do everything that he can do, and I certainly will do everything I can do, and I will ask my colleagues in this body to do everything that we as a body can do to stop people from coming into the United States illegally, because it is dangerous. It is not just the person coming across to get a job in a factory or a field somewhere. We cannot discriminate. We do not know. It is not easy to determine which one is coming across illegally for some purpose that is benign and which one is coming across illegally for some purpose that is quite deadly. It is impossible for us to know that. We have only one ability, only one charge, only one responsibility. That is to defend the border against all people coming across illegally. It is our responsibility as a Congress, and although there are many people who shy away from it, who are frightened by that because they know that politically we will be attacked by the immigration support groups and various other organizations, and by people who in fact have as their purpose, even here in this body, there are many reasons that many people vote against tightening immigration laws. Some are directly political. Some people know that massive numbers of immigrants coming into the United States, legally and illegally, will end up supporting the Democratic Party, and therefore they say, we do not want to reduce immigration, whether we are talking legal or illegal. Many people on our side are split in that Libertarian camp that say, ``I want open borders,'' or say, ``I want cheap labor.'' That is the problem we deal with here. But I ask all of my colleagues to overcome those very parochial, partisan interests in the hope of and in the desire to try and defend America as successfully as we are doing in Afghanistan. It is imperative that we do it here, also. Our very Nation's survival is at risk. We recognize that, and we respond to the call that the President makes when we appropriate money and in every other way indicate our support for the effort to fight terrorism overseas. But why, why, Madam Speaker, is it so hard for us to get the same job done here in the United States? It should be the first place we look, it should be the first thing we do, because the defense of this country begins at the defense of its borders.

Mr. TANCREDO. Madam Speaker, several of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle have risen tonight to decry the budget that has been proposed by the majority party and that we will be voting on tomorrow, the budget resolution, that is to say, and they have each identified specific parts of it that they find unattractive, unappealing, or in some way something that they can complain about. The real issue, of course, that is perhaps annoying to them, I think, or at least discomforting to them, and the one that was never referenced, but is the one accurate representation of the budget resolution that the majority party will offer tomorrow, is that it is balanced. That is to say, this budget resolution will set out for the Congress of the United States and for the American people a budget that will spend no more money than we will take in. Now, this is something that is not very comfortable to the minority party. They have really not operated under that kind of restriction for as long as they held control of this House. For 40 years, of course, profligate spending of the minority party Members, when they were in control of this House, put us into a situation that we in fact had robbed the Social Security trust fund every single year. There were IOUs in that trust fund that approximated $800 billion by the time that we took over. In the last 4 years, something again that the minority party does not discuss when they talk about the budget or our control during that period of time, in the last 4 years we have paid down almost $450 billion of the national debt. That is an unheard of, unprecedented phenomenon that came as a result, of course, of the fact that we had an economy that was expanding and government revenues were increasing. But does anyone listening to the debate tonight on this floor think for a second that if the Democratic Party had been in charge during that particular period of time that we would have taken the dollars coming in to the government and not spent them on new programs and expanding the Federal Government? Madam Speaker, I hasten to add that I think even Members of the other party would recognize that is the history that they give us. So to come tonight, and I am sure as will happen tomorrow to the floor of the House of Representatives, and talk about the need to be more concerned or more focused on the budget issue begs the question. What happened when they had the reins of control here? What did they do? The fact is that they spent not only every dollar that came in, but hundreds of billions of dollars that did not come in, hundreds of billions of dollars that we had to borrow from the taxpayers. We have tried to change that direction in the last 4 years; and we are going to offer a balanced budget, a frightening concept perhaps to the other side, but it is one with which they will have to deal. The primary issue that I raise tonight is not, however, the one dealing with the budget. There will be plenty of discussion dealing with that tomorrow; but it is the issue of our national security, because of course that is the most important thing with which this Congress can ever deal. Whether we are talking about budget or anything else, the reality is we have relatively few true responsibilities given to us by the Constitution of this Nation. They are delineated in the Constitution, and the Constitution is added to by the Bill of Rights. The last of the 10 amendments to the Constitution is very specific, and it says in case there is something you are confused about in the list of things that are the responsibility for the Federal Government, we are going to make it even more clear, that is, if it is not clear, it is not your responsibility, it is the responsibility of the States and the people therein. But there is something that is uniquely our responsibility, and that is the defense of the Nation. We cannot rely upon States individually to raise the budget to defend the country through any other process. That, of course, is our responsibility. There are several ways to do that. One is to make sure that our military is quality funded, make sure that the men and women serving in the military of the United States have every possible weapon at their disposal and in our arsenal that would first protect them; and, secondly, get the job done wherever we send them. Time and again when we are watching television or reading reports in the Congress about the marvelous and incredible undertakings with which the military is involved, we recognize that the valor of the men and women who serve really and truly is the bottom line. We can give them all of the equipment in the world, but it boils down to the individual that is there on the field of battle and what is in his or her heart at the time. We can be proud and we are proud of the people that serve in our military, and we work hard to make sure that they have what is necessary to get the job done and to protect them because they are, in turn, protecting the Nation. We recognize that the fight for the Nation, that the battle goes on in a variety of different venues. It is not like any other war. This has been said many times. The war we are in is not like any other war we have ever been in, or likely to be in, in that it will not be marked by a confrontation between two huge armies until one capitulates and the state that they represent or are fighting for has fallen. That is certainly not going to be the conflicts of the 21st century. The conflict arises in Afghanistan, the Republic of Georgia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. All over the world, we find we have to stamp out the tentacles of fundamentalist Islam as represented by al Qaeda specifically, and the terrorists who have as their end-desire the destruction of this Nation. We know that is the case, and we know we are doing a good job there. I commend the President of the United States for his leadership and my colleagues for their support of all of the appropriations that have been passed and made available so that all of the people out there are fully equipped. But there is another thing, there is another side to this battle that we pay little attention to, unfortunately. Far too little attention. It is the battle that goes on to defend our own borders. The one thing that is typical in this battle, in this war, typical to other kinds of wars we have been in, is the fact of invasion where large numbers of people come across the border of one country undetected without permission of the country they are entering; and some of them, certainly not all, thank God at this point in time, but some of them have ill-intent. Some of them choose and come here with the very purpose of doing us harm. Many others, unfortunately, who come across the border, do not choose to do us any physical harm, but are not really connected to the United States in any way similar to the immigrants who have come to the United States in the heyday of immigration, in the past 100 years or so. For the most part, people coming into the United States during that period of time, during the 1800s, early 1900s, came with the distinct purpose to separate themselves from the land from which they came, and to attach themselves to a new land and a new idea and new set of principles. They wanted to break the political and even linguistic ties they had with their country of origin and start something new. They committed to America. Of course they wanted a better life and of course they looked forward to giving their children a better life, just like the immigrants of today do. But there is a significant difference. Millions of people are looking for that better life, but they are not disassociating themselves from the country of their origin, not linguistically, not culturally and sometimes not even politically. Today, as I speak, we find that there is something happening in the United States which has never happened before, and that is a dramatic rise in the number of people who are here in this country, relatively recent immigrants to the United States, who claim dual citizenship. That is to say they claim to be both Americans and citizens of the country of their origin. They choose not to break those ties. Now that I would suggest, Madam Speaker, has never happened before. That is a new phenomenon. Something is peculiar about that, and something is dangerous about that when we talk about what is going to be necessary in order for us to survive this clash we are in with international terrorism, which can be characterized as a clash of civilizations. Samuel Huntington in a book I reference often called ``Clash of Civilizations'' talks about the fact that the United States will be significantly hobbled in its ability to lead the West if we ourselves are a cleft Nation, a Nation divided in half. That is exactly what is happening to us, and one of the reasons why I have raised the concern about massive immigration, legal and illegal, into the United States, over the past couple of decades. The agency to which we entrust the responsibility for protecting our borders and for helping us maintain some sense or even a tiny bit of hope that we can actually control the process of who comes in, for how long, for what purpose and knowing when they leave, the agency to which we entrust that responsibility is the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. This agency has 35,000 employees. It has a budget of about $7.5 billion. In the budget resolution we are going to pass tomorrow, it will call for about a billion dollar increase. It is an increase of 250 percent over the last 10 years. I bring that up because we are going to hear from that agency when we talk about the problems within it that they do not have enough money, they do not have the resources. They will talk about not having enough people, but in fact we have actually increased the number of people serving in the INS by 83 percent over the last decade. A 250 percent budget increase, 83 percent personnel increase, and what do we have to show for it? We have an agency that is incapable of managing the responsibility that is given to it. They are both incapable and undesiring of doing so, and that is the real crux of the matter here. Madam Speaker, if we had an agency made up of people from the top to the bottom who had the intent, the desire internally to patrol the borders of the United States and make sure that our Nation is secure against people who are coming in illegally, making sure that the people who do get by them there are found in the United States and deported, making sure that the people who are here even legally but then commit some crime, taken to court and ordered deported, making sure that those people leave the country, if we had an agency like that, we could be somewhat sympathetic to their needs and desires and to their protestations of wanting to do a better job. Today, the Subcommittee on Immigration of the Committee on the Judiciary held hearings; and called in front of them, among others, were the commissioner, the head of the INS, Mr. Ziglar. I want to preference my remarks by saying that Mr. Ziglar seems to be a very nice man, a very pleasant individual. I have no doubt of that. Certainly that is my observation. But I am going to make another observation here; and that is from everything I have been able to see, read and hear about Mr. Ziglar and the situation in the INS, I will say that he is in water way over his head; that he is not really capable to do what we have asked him to do. Perhaps we should not blame him. Perhaps the fact that we brought him from a position that had absolutely nothing to do with immigration, perhaps the fact that he has absolutely no background in the area of immigration or immigration control, perhaps that is the problem; that no one with a similar background could possibly be expected to begin to wield control in an agency of 35,000 people, all bureaucrats for the most part, or I should say they are mostly bureaucrats. I think there are 5 or 6 political appointees in that entire agency. And it is difficult, certainly, I know. I ran the Department of Education's regional office for 12 years, and I am aware of the difficulty of trying to manage an enterprise that is peopled by employees who have civil service protection, and in my case had the protection of the public employees union. It is difficult to fire somebody from doing a bad job. Indeed, Mr. Ziglar said in a recent television interview which I watched, when he was questioned about the problems in the INS, specifically what was going to happen to the people who had approved the visas for Mohammed Atta and his colleague Marwan al-Shehhi, the visas that arrived on March 11, 2002, 6 months to the day after they were killed in their attack on America, visas arriving at the school that they were attending to learn to fly, that has made the news. That has made a lot of people begin to say, What is going wrong? That is a peculiar thing. When Mr. Ziglar was questioned about this, he said, I can fire no one, absolutely no one that was responsible for this. I have control over five or six people, but that is it. We remember that the President said he was furious, he was mad, hopping mad or some words to that effect, but no one was fired. Furious is another way I think you could describe the President of the United States about this incident. But no one was fired. Four or five people had their job titles changed. That was it. That was the response to the visa flap. It is almost incredible, Madam Speaker, but it is indicative of the problem we are having with this agency and our need to do something about it. As I say, Mr. Ziglar came from a situation that did not give him any sort of real background. He came to this position after having served as the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper for the Senate. That was his job. That is his background. Again, I want to reiterate, I am sure he is a very pleasant fellow. That is not the issue. The issue is, we are in a world of hurt here. There is another aspect to his philosophy that needs to be brought up. He has stated on more than one occasion that he is a lifelong Libertarian. Fine. There are certain aspects of Libertarian philosophy that I think are intriguing, but the fact is, there is one part of it that is quite peculiar when you consider that to then place him as the head of the INS, the agency designed to help us control the border because, of course, Libertarians believe that we should have no borders, that borders are sort of artificial and sort of anachronistic barriers to the flow of goods, trade, ideas and people, therefore, we should abolish them and have these open borders. Not only does he feel that way, but the one political appointment he was able to bring in as his second in command is a gentleman who shares those feelings exactly, coming from the Cato Institute. The Cato Institute is again an organization of, I think, great allure for some people, I use some of their stuff myself, but the Cato Institute is a Libertarian think tank. Their position on these issues of immigration is quite clear, open borders. They have every right to espouse that position at the Cato Institute. Mr. Ziglar, when he was the Doorkeeper for the Senate, had every right to feel that way, to espouse that point of view. He is now the Commissioner of the INS. I would suggest that that is akin to the old fox in the henhouse. There are a million analogies you can come up with, but it is a wrong place to be for him. He is the wrong person to put there. Now he is forced to try to defend the actions of this agency which heretofore have been allowed to essentially begin an open border or continue the process of developing open borders, because it is not unique to this administration, of course; but now, because of 9/11, because of all these embarrassing things that have happened, he is forced to try to defend this situation and to say, we really are trying. Because he is not going to stand up and say, I am still committed to open borders, I do not think, so he is going to have to suggest that there is a way he is going to deal with this. But in reality, Madam Speaker, there is nothing that is going to change in that agency, and there are bills, I know, that are being proposed to do that, to actually split the agency in two so that it has as its one responsibility the complete, what I call social work side of immigration, the benefits side, helping people get their green card, helping people become legalized; that is one thing. And then the other side is enforcement. Today they are sort of a mixed bag, and they do neither one, not just they do not do it very well, they are a complete disaster in both cases. So just splitting that agency, keeping all the people there, the same people who internally, in their minds, are not on the right side of the issue, they are not intent on trying to defend our borders, Mr. Ziglar actually said that himself at some point in time in a more candid interview, I think it was, with, I think it was the New York Times. He said, ``I don't like the policeman part of my job. I don't want to be a policeman. I don't like that.'' Of course, the reality is, most of the people who are there in that agency do not like it and do not want to be that. I am going to try to narrow it down, because I am not talking about the men and women who serve on the border, the Border Patrol people, the agents whose job it is to try to find people in the United States who are here illegally. For the most part, I should tell you that almost every single one of them I have met, and I have met many, are dedicated to doing exactly what that job says. They are dedicated to trying to stop people from coming here illegally and find them when they are here, but they know that there is absolutely no support they get from anyone up the ladder in their administration. They are, most of them, afraid to talk openly about this. Mr. Cutler today did testify in the hearing that I mentioned, the Subcommittee on Immigration from the Committee on the Judiciary, Mr. Cutler felt a little freer to talk today because, frankly, he was fired last week. Although the INS will suggest it was not because he is a whistleblower, I think that it is hard to make that case. I think he was fired because he is a whistleblower. That sends, of course, shock waves throughout the INS. People become less and less willing to say what they know to be the case. I had a similar situation, someone, not a patrol agent but a judge, an immigration law judge several months ago called my office because he knows that I have been a critic of the INS. He said, ``I've got to tell you something. I've been a law judge for X number of years,'' I will not say, because that could help identify him and he wants to be sure we do not do that. He says, ``I have been an immigration law judge for several years. I am frustrated to the point that I just don't know what to do, because every single day I try my best to make sure that the people who are brought in front of me, that the adjudication process is fair; and when I know there is someone who should be sent back, who should be deported because they have robbed somebody, murdered somebody, raped somebody,'' because frankly, Madam Speaker, you do not come in front of an immigration court just because you have overstayed your visa. That is not it. Usually you have gotten caught doing something and then they find out, by the way, you are here as an alien or an illegal, and they bring you to immigration law court. He said, ``Every single day, I bring the gavel down and order someone to be deported and some of these people have made threats against the United States. Every day they walk out of my courtroom and they walk right back into American society.'' I said, ``How can that be? What happens?'' He said, ``The problem is at that point in time, the INS is in charge of incarcerating, taking them away. And they just don't do it. They just don't do it. Oftentimes the INS comes into the courtroom and they are supposed to be the prosecutor in the case, but they act as the defense attorney. I know that there are thousands,'' he says, ``I think hundreds of thousands of people who have been allowed to essentially walk, people that I know I and my colleagues have ordered to be deported for various reasons who are still simply out there.'' I said, ``How many do you think?'' He said, ``I've done some preliminary checking here, and I think there are at least 200,000.'' I said, ``That's incredible. I'll check with the INS.'' Of course we called them. I often say on the floor of the House here that the logo for the INS, something that should be on all of their documents, on the top of everything they send out, the logo on their Web site for the INS should simply be a person shrugging their shoulders. That is it. INS, that guy going, ``I don't know, I'm not sure.'' Because that is all you get from them, whenever you call them, ``I don't know, I'm not sure. Could be.'' We said, ``Do you realize there are a couple of hundred thousand people, that someone has alleged that there are a couple of hundred thousand people here?'' They say, ``We don't know.'' We kept, of course, pushing the issue. Finally, we got the INS to say that yes, they looked into it and maybe there were 200,000 people, 250,000 people. Shortly thereafter, I cannot remember the exact time line, but I happened to be at a meeting with Mr. Ziglar, the head of the INS. He was here in the House, he was meeting Members of the House. I went up to him at the conclusion of his speech. I said, ``Mr. Ziglar, do you know about these people who have been ordered to be deported but they are still here?'' He said, ``Well, no, I don't.'' I said, ``Do you know how many we're talking about?'' He said, ``No, I really don't.'' I said, ``There are at least a couple of hundred thousand.'' He said, ``That have been ordered deported?'' I said, ``Yes.'' He said, ``I don't know. I don't know anything about that.'' It was shortly thereafter that we got the information from the INS and it was, they said, a couple of hundred thousand. It turns out, because we pressed the issue and because the media kept hounding them about exactly how many are there, how many have been actually ordered deported, they put out some sort of directive, whatever, they sent something to Congress. In fact, after that, Mr. Ziglar testified under oath in Congress to a specific number. He said there were 314,000 that they had identified. Remember, he told me first he had no idea, he had no idea what I was talking about, he did not know that there was anything like that happening, he certainly did not know how many. But several months after that he testified in front of the Congress, 314,000. Recently, a reporter for ``Human Events,'' Mr. Joseph D'Agostino, has been doing his own work and looking at the records. According to his analysis, it looks to him like there were 425,000 in just the last 5 years, from 1996 to 2000. We do not know because there is no record of anything that happened before 1996, people who walked away who are still here. So he went back to the INS. He said, ``Could this be? I have come up with at least 425,000. We don't know. That is just from 1996. We don't know. It could be a lot more than that. It could be double that amount.'' They said, ``Well, you're right, we're not sure ourselves. We're not sure ourselves.'' Then today I am told, in response to this, they said, ``We don't think he is right, either.'' But, Madam Speaker, this was evidently something that Mr. Ziglar said in response to a question, that he does not think these numbers that Mr. D'Agostino has pointed out are right. He does not know. But this is the guy that told me he did not know it even existed. So why would we feel comfortable in listening to him tell us what the real numbers are when he did not know that they even had a problem? This is the head of the agency. We do not know how many. Let us say it is between 300,000 and 1 million. I think from everything I can read, that is a pretty good guess. Between 300,000 and 1 million people have simply walked out of immigration law courts and back into society. This is a national security issue. I started out my comments this evening by explaining that we are in a war. We are fighting it overseas, but we are not doing a very good job fighting it here at home. The borders are undefended and unprotected for the most part. Good men and women, working hard, but frankly all we do is we hand them a sieve to hold back the flood. They know that they are working really almost against their own agency. They will tell me that and they would tell you that if you went down on the border today, Madam Speaker, and you talked to them, they know that their agency does not support their efforts. That has got to be the most frustrating feeling, to be putting your life on the line, and I assure you they do. There have been seven killed in the recent past, seven Border Patrol people, by people who are simply waiting. By the way, not waiting just to cross the border and waiting for this Border Patrol agent to get by, but waiting to ambush them, waiting in the bushes to ambush them, just to kill them, because they hate America, for whatever reason, I do not know, but there have been seven killed in the line of duty. I was made aware of that when I went down there, and that is in the recent past. It is getting worse. It is getting more dangerous all the time. I have tried to portray the picture, an accurate picture of the INS, of the organization to which we have entrusted the responsibility of protecting the border. I have indicated that they have two roles: one is in enforcement and one is in the social work side of things, the benefit side of things. Let me tell you about a GAO report that came out just a month ago, released February 15. By the way, this is one of a series of GAO reports on this particular agency. This report focuses on the benefit side, the social work side of INS, the thing they tell us they like to do and that they are good at. The GAO says the INS allows the fraud to flourish by stressing that applications must be processed quickly. In some districts, adjudicators who decide whether a benefit will be granted are ordered to spend no more than 15 minutes on an application. This effectively discourages checking for fraud, the study says. The GAO found that 90 percent of 5,000 petitions for workers sought by foreign companies, particularly in the Los Angeles area, were fraudulent, a 90 percent fraud rate. An official in the INS operations branch said that a follow-up analysis of about 1,500 petitions found 1,499 fraudulent. This is the same agency and, by the way, these are the things that we just a few nights ago on this floor, we actually passed something called 245(i), and it provides amnesty for people who are here illegally. If they come in, all they have to do now, they can be here illegally, but we have said to them, that, okay, come on in and give us your application to determine if you are here under certain guidelines, whether you have had a job for a long time, whether you are married. We know the last time we did this, by the way, fraud was rampant. Sham marriages occurred in the hundreds of thousands. Bogus documents for work histories were drawn up. We know that. We know what happens. And we are going to entrust to the INS the responsibility to look at another 1 million. By the way, Madam Speaker, the 1 million or so that will apply as a result of the 245(i) extension that we passed will be added to the 4.5 million backlogged applications that the INS has right now, so there will be 5.5 million backlogged. What do you think the INS will do when they are told they have 15 minutes for every one of these things? Does anybody think anybody is going to get really checked here to determine whether the background is appropriate for coming into this country? Now, I am told the 245(i) extension is going to be held up in the Senate, partly because Mr. Daschle does not want to give this win to the President, partly because a particular Member of the Senate, of the other body, I should say, has decided to put a ``hold'' on it. I hope the hold works. I hope they hold it forever. I hope they never, ever, let it go in the Senate, for whatever reason. I do not care. If they want to do some political shenanigans, whatever it is, I hope they hold it and do not pass 245(i), because it is the wrong thing to do. Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore