Tom Tancredo

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. The gentleman brings up so many good points and addresses them so articulately that I am always inspired listening to him. I enjoy it tremendously because I believe the gentleman is a patriotic American who understands the real challenges to this country. We have said this before, but they do not want to look at this issue of immigration. They are afraid of it for a variety of reasons, but as my colleague says, one reason is they will be confronted by name calling and epithets. And I guaranty you when we get back to our respective offices our phones will have been lit up, and for a long time, with people saying a lot of relatively nasty things. I have gone through this before. I understand it. I am willing to go through it time and time and time again, because I believe this is one of the most serious pressing problems we face as a Nation. I believe with all my heart that we will not exist as we are, a Nation with the kind of quality of life that we have, unless we address this head on and take our lumps. And people can call us all the names they want to call us and whatever, but somebody has to bring this to the attention of the American people. And I will say one more thing about what my colleague mentioned before on the part of many businesses to ignore the alternative, the alternative being to force the school systems. If we are having a problem, if the problem is that our school system just simply cannot produce, does not produce the kind of quality skills and level of skills that business needs, there is a way to address that. They can demand more from the schools. Or they could avoid all that. They can avoid putting money into the school system, they can avoid challenging the schools with school choice and a variety of other things, and they can take the easy way out. Business can say, I do not have to get them here because I can go to someplace else, I can go to India and Pakistan to get them. I suggest it is just like when we talked earlier about the fact that we are giving Mexico and other countries, for instance, the President of Bangladesh, when he was confronted with the growth in his population and what he was going to do about it, he said, ``I'm not going to do anything about it. I will let America take care of it. I will send them to America.'' This is the problem; that we give these nations an out. We become their safety net. It is the same thing here by letting these employers off the hook and not forcing them to go to the school systems, not forcing them to improve the quality of education and then they can get the kind of help they need. We give them a safety net. We say go get illegals.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, the point the gentleman from California makes, especially about the impact, the negative impact of immigration on immigrants themselves, is something that we must not overlook here. It is not simply for a selfish benefit that we propose to reduce the number of immigrants into this country, both legal and illegal, it is because it is also the best for immigrants themselves. We can, in fact, accommodate a certain amount of immigration into this country, and we will all benefit by it, the Native American, if you will, or the indigenous American, if you will, and the immigrant. But we cannot do it at these numbers, not in a million a year legally and 2, 3, 4 million a year illegally. Here is what happens. There was a report not too long ago that was kind of perplexing. It was confounding in a certain way because it talked about the growth of poverty among children in America. Once again, one says to oneself now this is anti-intellectual. It does not seem right. It does not seem logical. How can we have a growth in poverty in the United States of America when in the last 10 years, 12 years, 20 years, 15 years probably we have had this enormous economic boom. Well, if one studies the numbers, what one finds out is that there is a growing number of children that are ``in poverty''. But who are these children? They are the children of immigrants themselves, because they cannot achieve the American dream for the same reason that my colleague explains. There is a depressing effect of the numbers on the wage rates. This has been documented over and over and over again. Yes, maybe it is a little better than they could have made in their country of origin, but they still cannot accumulate the necessary trackings of the good life over here because they have to take the lowest wage jobs. Because in the numbers they come in here, it depresses that whole wage. You bet I hear from others. It is not just ``liberals'' who oppose any sort of lessening, reducing immigration, reducing the numbers and trying to do something about shoring up the border, it is many, many of my more conservative business people who come to me and say, I have to have these people. I have to have them. I would say, what do you mean you have to have them? They say, well, I cannot get people to work. I say, you cannot get Americans to work for that wage. Put that in there, and I cannot absolutely understand that. Yes, it is true. So believe me, I am not just here condemning this sort of, what I call the noblesse oblige attitude of the left. It is also these very selfish interests of many people on the right who are impoverishing both the people coming in who are taking advantage of them, who are manipulating them, and at the same time they are actually reducing this quality and sound of life for the rest of America.

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

Mr. TANCREDO. Absolutely, Mr. Speaker. This was an anathema to them that they would ask an Hispanic parent or any parent, it does not have to be Hispanic, someone who could not speak English, permission to put their kid in a nonEnglish speaking classroom. Colorado, it used to be until a short time ago, that one could spend one's entire career in school K through 12 in the Denver public school system without ever being in an English speaking classroom. Now that has changed: It is down to 3 years. But I will tell my colleagues this, that all of the attempts on the part of the education establishment are to keep these kids in longer and longer and longer even though they learn nothing. I tell my colleagues that thank God for those parents, smart enough to know, smart enough to know they may not have terribly marketable skills in some of the high-tech areas or whatever. But those parents are smart enough to know that their children have to learn English and should, just like their grandparents and mine came over here, mine would not speak Italian, they would only speak what, my grandmother used to say, speak American, speak American.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, the point the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher) brings up about bilingual education is an extremely important point. I hope people understood and heard what he said, about not only the willingness of people of the State of California to eliminate it, but a large, a significant number of a part of that population that voted to eliminate it were Hispanics themselves. Because most of the people that come here from Mexico or anywhere else, they come here as poor people looking for a better life. They understand one thing very clearly; that is, in order to get that good life for themselves and for their children, they need to speak English. They do not want their children in these bilingual classes. It is this educational elite that wants to force these children in. Well, there are a lot of interesting reasons. Some are political, some are cultural. But we passed in the Committee on Education and the Workforce, and in the education bill that we passed out of this House just a short time ago, we included a provision for bilingual education that, for the first time, will require parental approval, not just notification, but a parent has to give their approval, an affirmative statement that they want their children in a bilingual classroom. One cannot imagine how that was looked upon by the other members of the committee, by members on the other side of the aisle especially. It was fought tooth and nail.

Mr. TANCREDO. I would like to know how the gentleman did that.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, there are 375 voting districts in this country where ballots are provided in more than one language. This is a fascinating phenomenon. I ask my colleagues to think about this, and people who may be observing us here. If we have to print a ballot in a language other than English so that a potential voter can understand it, what does that tell us about that voter's ability to have understood the debate leading up to that election? How do they know what the issues are? How do they know how any one of those candidates they are voting for feels about an issue if they cannot understand English? It is an idiotic thing to present someone with a ballot in another language when that means they could not have understood the debate leading up to that election.

Mr. TANCREDO. But there is one thing that is absolutely imperative, it seems to me, in a situation like that. That is to have a common language, so that we can in fact communicate with each other about the things that are important. When we see that, along with massive immigration from countries that do not speak English, English is not the primary language, when we see the pressure that places on us here to expand the number of languages that we teach in schools, let me tell the gentleman an interesting and almost I think incredible fact. Not too long ago, I read that a gentleman who could not speak English was operating a nail gun and, because of whatever reason, he ended up shooting himself in the leg with this nail gun. The gentleman could not speak English. He therefore determined, or I am sure it was some lawyer who determined this for him, that his best thing to do was to sue the manufacturer of the nail gun because the directions and the warnings were not printed in more languages than English, in his particular language. There are places around the country where police have to go on calls and have to take with them linguists, people who will speak a variety of languages, when they get to the door. The reason is because if they get to the door and they cannot speak the language of the person who has made the call, they, the police, could be sued for not appropriately addressing the situation. We have had a 911, and this actually happened, a 911 call that comes in from someone who was not speaking English. The person on the other side of the phone could not speak the language. A lawsuit is developing as a result of this. Manufacturers are being told that they have to start providing all these warning labels in a whole bunch of languages. I ask the gentleman, where will this stop? How many signs do we put up on street corners? How many one-way signs? How many languages do we print them in?

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I have mentioned before that it sometimes gets lonely on this floor talking about this issue, and I should have remembered that there is always one person that I can rely on, because he has both the integrity and the guts to come up and also address the issue with me. That is my friend, the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher). The gentleman is absolutely right when he talks about the fact that this is a dagger pointed at the heart of America. I do not for a moment want to be misunderstood. My desire is not to see a reduction in a certain group of people, a certain ethnic group of people. It is simply the numbers game we play, from my point of view. It is overwhelming us. I will tell the Members that I do have a concern about the way we deal with immigrants from countries where the language is not English, and the kinds of problems that poses to us from a cultural sense. I happen to believe that there is one thing we need, and this is a country of many different colored people, many different kinds of ethnic backgrounds. We do not all worship at the same churches, we do not all eat the same kinds of foods, we do not all dress and think alike. We have a great disparity among Americans. That is, in a way, an aspect of our greatness.

Mr. TANCREDO. Not even that, Mr. Speaker, I am a sophomore.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, America is in the midst of another crisis. It is not just the energy crisis that we face and that was so lengthily dealt with here for the last hour. It is almost ironic, I suppose, that I end up following a discussion of the energy crisis in California, because a lot of what I have to say this evening revolves around that crisis, but it takes perhaps a little bit of a different look at the reason why we have such a crisis. I believe very strongly, Mr. Speaker, that America is in the midst of an immigration crisis, a crisis far greater in terms of its impact on the United States of America than the energy crisis that presently confronts us in several States and perhaps even around the country. Since 1970, more than 40 million foreign descendants have been added to the local communities of the United States. Just last month, the New York Times reported that the Nation's population grew by more people in the 1990s than in any other decade in United States history. Is it not time that we ask ourselves, what level of immigration is best for America and what level of immigration into the United States is even good for the rest of the world, to help the rest of the world? These can be difficult questions to ask about immigration, because we recall, all of us here I am sure, our own families coming to the United States, entering probably through Ellis Island during the height of the immigration period that we sometimes refer to as the golden age of immigration, the early 1900's, the late 1800's. That was a period of time most people believe that the greatest number of immigrants entered the United States through those gates. That is incorrect, Mr. Speaker. It is a myth. The greatest number of immigrants ever taken into the United States during the ``golden age'' of immigration was 200,000, approximately 200,000. Every year, every year, for the last 8 years at least, exactly five times that many immigrants enter the United States legally. Our immigration cap now is approximately 1 million people, plus another 300,000 or 400,000 that we classify as looking for refuge. This would be refugee status. So we have about 1.3 million or 1.4 million immigrants coming into the Nation every year legally. We have probably double that many people coming into the United States illegally every year; and when I say ``coming in,'' we probably have 10 million people coming in, but we end up with about a 2 million person net gain every year, from illegal immigration alone. Now, what does this mean? Numbers like this are really quite extraordinary. If I could get a page to put up one of the charts over there, I will refer to it in just a moment. I think back to my own family's background, and certainly I am a relative newcomer to the United States. My grandparents came here in the late 1890's. They settled, all of them, in Colorado, in and around the Denver metropolitan area, strange as it seems, because most people had some intervening place they stayed, New York or Chicago or someplace like that. But not mine. They came right to Colorado. I often talked with my grandparents, my grandfather specifically, about the trip over from Italy to the United States and the kind of trials and tribulations that he faced. It is an interesting story. I certainly enjoy it. I tell my friends about it. I enjoy my heritage. I understand perfectly the desire for anybody to come to the United States, especially poor people, as my grandparents certainly were. They were looking for a better life. I completely sympathize with all of those people who are looking for that better life. I am sure that if I were in their shoes, I would be trying to do exactly the same thing they are doing, get to the United States. But we have another responsibility here in the United States. It is to our own country and to our own countrymen, because at some point in time we have to wonder how many more people we can absorb and how many more people this Nation can afford to provide for. I know all of the issues that have been debated about immigration and about immigration reform. Many people suggest that we have no reason to be concerned about massive immigration across our borders, that in fact it is an issue of economics; that the more people we let in, the more lower priced help we have, the lower priced labor that businesses can access, meaning in the long run lower prices for the American consumer. Well, I will tell you, what that is is really a euphemistic way of describing what happens when immigrants come here, especially illegal immigrants. They come here, and they are, oftentimes, unfortunately, given jobs that perhaps other Americans would not take, and they are exploited. They are exploited oftentimes by the employer, who pays them less or will not give them the benefits they deserve, because he knows that this person is probably not going to go and complain about it, because they are probably here illegally anyway. Even legal immigrants have an effect of depressing the wage base for people with mid or low skills, low-level skills. So, immigration of this nature, of this kind, massive immigration, is five times greater just in terms of the legal immigration coming into the country, five times greater than it ever was during the heyday of immigrants coming to the United States around the turn of the century, the last century. Well, these numbers have an impact on everything in the United States. It has an impact on the quality of life that we all share here. Do you ever wonder why, when you are driving down the street and you remember that just a few months ago, maybe even a month ago, when you went past this very same point that was at that time a nice pasture land or open area, a greenbelt, do you remember thinking to yourself, gosh, is it not amazing? Now all of these houses are being built here, all these apartments are being built. Is it not incredible how many cars are on the road? I cannot get to work anymore in the same amount of time that it took me just a few short months ago to get here. What is going on? How come there is so much talk about growth? How come there is so much concern about growth in the United States? Is it because our country, the people who live here are simply having so many kids that they are placing this kind of infrastructural pressure on the system? No, Mr. Speaker, that is not the case. The chart I have on the easel down in the well is a very interesting chart. It is a population chart starting in the year 1970. The green area on the bottom is what we would identify as the population growth in this Nation from those people who are already here. These are what we would call indigenous Americans. The fact is that we have had population growth among that group. We call it the baby boomers. There has been a baby boom echo; and it has gone up, as we can see, from about 203 million people living here in 1970 to 281 million people here at the last census, the 2000 Census. But we also see there that of the 281 million of us that there are now in the United States, that 243 million of those would have been the natural growth rate of the country. Those reflect the natural growth rate of the country. The rest, those identified in red, represent what has happened to us from immigration and their descendents. So we can see that we have had the same amount of growth among that particular group as we have among native-born Americans. So we have essentially doubled our natural growth rate in this country by immigration patterns. Is it surprising, then, to anyone that we heard our colleagues on the floor from California spend the last 1 hour complaining about the lack of resources, about the incredible problems that the State of California faces from an absence of energy? I also recognize that my colleagues from California were complaining about the administration's proposals to increase the amount of energy available to all of us. Well, let me suggest this, that there is another responsibility that is uniquely the responsibility of the Federal Government, that the States have absolutely no power to control whatsoever, and that is immigration policy. That is the responsibility of all of us who serve in this body, to establish an immigration policy for the country. And when we ignore the fact that people are coming into the country at the rates they are coming into the country, then it is very difficult for me to get terribly excited about the impact that those numbers have if no one wants to address the issue, no one wants to talk about it. Everybody wants to talk about just simply the fact that we no longer have a lot of oil, or we no longer have a lot of electricity, and is that not terrible, and how are we going to get more. What I am saying is that the reason we do not have the resources is because the demands being placed on our resource base are so great that they are depleting it faster than we can replenish it. Why are the demands so great? It is because of the numbers, the huge numbers of people coming into this country and the children that they both bring with them and have here. It places an enormous amount of strain on our resource base. Now, it is all right, it is perfectly fine for us, I think, to go ahead with a massive immigration policy if we have it, as we have, if everybody in this body agrees with it, understands it, knows what we are doing and says, yes, we have debated it fully. We recognize that bringing a little over a million, a million and a quarter people in here legally and have at least 2 million immigrants into this country net every year is okay. We understand all of the implications of that. We recognize that it will cause California, for one thing, to have to build a school a day, a school a day in order to keep up with this population pressure. We understand that. We understand that we will have rolling blackouts. We understand that we will not be able to buy gas at a price that most of us would consider to be convenient or acceptable. It is going to get a lot more expensive. So is every other form of resource we have in the United States, natural resource. Why? Demand. Well, where is the demand coming from? We are, in fact, making products every single day that use less and less energy. The refrigerator that is in your house today uses far less energy than the refrigerator that was in your house even a short 5 or 6 years ago. Air- conditioning. Cars getting better gas mileage. All of these things should, in fact, determine a downward energy use per capita in the United States. But it does not matter if there is a downward spiral or a downward pressure of per capita energy use if the number of people keeps going up so rapidly, so dramatically. We will have to continue to exhaust the supplies, to go elsewhere in the world, rely on both our friends and our enemies for help in providing oil resources. We will have businesses going bankrupt, having their business interrupted by these blackouts. All of these things we see are a result of numbers, the numbers of people. And this is something that we cannot seem to get across. I recognize fully well, Mr. Speaker, that I am one of the individuals here who has taken on the challenge of trying to make this a public debate. It has gone on plenty of times in the halls of this Congress. It goes on around the water coolers of Americans in their jobs, I understand and I believe that. I know it happens a lot. I know people sense the problem that exists in the United States with regard to massive immigration; but no one is willing, or I should say, very few people are willing to actually bring these issues forward for public debate, because, of course, there is always someone who is going to stand up and say, this is a racially tainted issue that we cannot talk about it. Any discussion of it, any attempt to reduce the numbers has some sort of racial implication. I say, for one, Mr. Speaker, that it has absolutely nothing to do with race or ethnicity from my point of view; it has to do with numbers. I do not care whether they are coming from Mexico or Guatemala or Nigeria or Canada. I do not care where they are coming from. It is the numbers that we have to deal with. Now, there are other implications of massive immigration from countries that do not have English as their primary language and I will speak to that in a moment or to. But originally, my point is to make reference again to this chart and to show my colleagues that if we were to actually have just relied upon the population growth from the baby boomers in a short time, in just a few years, we would actually see a leveling off of population growth in the United States and an actual decline as we got to 2100. Now, that is not going to happen. Because, as I say, we have already increased the numbers dramatically, and so we are going to have to deal with the fact that the population of this country is going to go up, even if tomorrow we were to stop immigration totally. Growth has enormous impacts, as I have suggested, on all of us, every single State. I can recall just coming back from our district work period and looking at what was happening in my own State of Colorado, the incredible number of highway projects that are being undertaken, the incredible number of schools that are trying to be built, the incredible amount of money and tax dollars that we are going to require from taxpayers in order to pay for all of those things. Now, Colorado is a beautiful place to live. There are no two ways about it. I certainly can recommend it. But I also just recommend that you come and visit and not stay for very long. The reality is that immigration into the country has actually had an impact on Colorado. Most people think that some of the southern tier States, Texas, Arizona, southern California, are the only States that are impacted by massive immigration. That is not true. All States are impacted by immigration. The fact is that huge numbers of people move into these southern tier of States and, in many ways, displace people who were living there. They move because they do not like the quality of life anymore. They move to other States. They move to Colorado in huge numbers, but so have immigrants directly from other countries coming to Colorado. Our numbers are up dramatically in the State. My district is adjacent to the fastest growing county in the Nation, Douglas County; and I should tell my colleagues that when we look around, again, as I drive down the street and I see all of these houses popping up out of the ground where there were simply meadows before, prairies before, I do not like it any more than anyone else. I remember Colorado. I was born there, I remember a much more pristine environment. It is not benefiting us to have this kind of massive immigration. It is a cost to us. Where is it coming from? Do we all just assume that it is from people from other States moving in to where all of us are experiencing growth, just people coming from other States? It is wrong. There are not that many States losing population. Every State gained population. It is not an issue of people leaving all of the rust-belt cities and now moving just to the south; it is an issue of massive immigration, immigration from all over the world. People have to be somewhere. We are going to see the effects of it over and over and over again. Mr. Speaker, I have mentioned the impact on our roads, the impact on highway systems, the impact on our water, electricity; but there is another impact, a huge impact of massive immigration. It is on our schools. Our children are in temporary classrooms all over the place, all over the Nation. We hear about this again and again and again. How come? Where are these people coming from? Remember California? I mentioned that they would have to build a school every day of the year to keep up with the State's increase in population, every day of the year. Well, they cannot do it. So kids, of course, are housed in various facilities, temporary facilities. It will not be long before Colorado, before Arizona, before Texas and other States are indistinguishable from California in terms of immigration patterns and the things that we have to do to deal with it. I guess the attitude of many countries, we talk about the need for other countries to take care of their own people, to develop an economy that would provide jobs and benefits for those people who live there today so that they would not be looking for the need to leave the country; they would not be looking to immigrate. And we get a lot of talk, by the way, we hear a lot of talk from other countries about their willingness to do something to help stop the flow of immigrants, specifically Mexico. President Vicente Fox and others have suggested that they would, indeed, try to help us deal with the massive numbers of people coming across the border. Well, Mr. Speaker, do we know what form that help has taken? Right now, on the border with Mexico, the government is providing people who are embarking upon an illegal trek into the United States, they are providing them with a care package. This care package consists of some food, it consists of a map, it consists of water, it consists of little books about how to take advantage of the system once you get here and oh, yes, condoms, of course. Why that has to be a part of the care package, I do not know, but it is in there. This is how the government of Mexico is in fact helping us deal with massive immigration on its border. The reality is, Mr. Speaker, that most of these countries look to the United States as a safety valve. They do not look to do something constructive in their own country, they look to us to be able to take what they cannot handle; to take all the people in their country that are impoverished and that would become a highly, highly unstable portion of the population if they were kept there because they cannot find jobs for them. One reason, of course, that they cannot find jobs for these people is because they refused to embark upon a free market economy. The only thing I think that will ever get them there is to say to them, it is sort of a tough love thing, to say to the President of Mexico, ``We are going to shut down the border. We are going to put troops on our border.'' That is the only way that we can actually curtail the number of people coming across. It is almost at the flood stage. It could be thought of as an invasion, and therefore, it is appropriate for us to actually put American troops on the border to protect our borders, and we are going to do that. We are going to cut down illegal immigration, and we are going to cut down legal immigration. We are going to put a moratorium on all immigration. That is what I, of course, hope we would do in a very short time. That is what we need to tell Vincente Fox and others. We need to tell people like Sheikh Hasina Wajed, the President of the Nation of Bangladesh, who, when he was confronted with the kind of population explosion that is almost unbelievable, he said, and Bangladesh, by the way, has a population that is expected to reach 120 million by the year 2050. When asked how his country could feed, educate, employ, and house a population of that size, President Hasina answered, ``We will send them to America.'' That is a candid statement. It is not often made by these leaders, but I congratulate these people for actually saying the truth. That is exactly what they think they will do. Our task is to try and figure out what we will do in response, what we will do in response to the enormous pressure that is going to be placed on the United States from a variety of different places in order to achieve some other country's goals. There were a number of people on the other side condemning the administration for what they considered to be a lack of attentiveness to the energy problem, people preceding the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher). It is my contention that there is absolutely a way to deal with the energy problem in California, and the one that is going to get worse for the rest of the country, and that is to deal with immigration, because to a large extent, it is the numbers. Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend and colleague, the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher).

Mr. TANCREDO. I thank the gentleman very much for coming down here. I hope we will do this again and that I will be able to convince the gentleman that even a million a year illegally is too much.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Mr. Speaker, we offer this concurrent resolution today to honor a brave and courageous mountain climber from Golden, Colorado. On Friday, May 25, Erik Weihenmayer reached the summit of Mount Everest, one of several Americans to top the peak last month. However, Erik's accomplishments demand much more attention because he became the first blind person in the world to stand triumphant at 29,035 feet. When Erik was 13 years old, he lost his eyesight, and began rock climbing just 3 years later. Erik, a loving husband and father of a 1- year-old daughter, scaled the mountain by following the directions of his climbing mates, Erik Alexander of Vail, Colorado, Luis Benitez of Boulder, and Jeff Evans of Denver, and listening to bells that were attached to the climbers ahead of him. Just think of that for a few seconds. I am not sure I could close my eyes and even with directions follow them from here to the podium and 20 feet in front of me, yet Erik climbed the world's tallest mountain. Here is how Erik describes one section of the climb: ``It is just 2,000 feet of jumbly ice where you are just weaving in and out of ice blocks. There are big crevasses, and you are either stepping over or jumping over them, and sometimes there are tiny little narrow bridges that you have to tiptoe across, or there are ladders that you are walking across.'' On May 25, Erik became the hero of not only the blind community but all Americans. He showed all of us what we can accomplish; that we can accomplish our goals, regardless of the curve balls life throws us. Erik has also accomplished the important goal of pulling down barriers that are constructed in the minds of individuals regarding what persons with disabilities can accomplish in life. His success will cause all of us to stop and think about his monumental climb and the struggle of disabled Americans every day. There are thousands of Mount Everests. Some of them may be as small as taking a single step. Others may be as monumental as Erik's climb. Erik has brought all of them to our attention. Erik put it best when he recently said that his climb ``. . . does not just ask people to change their opinions about blind people. It sort of forces them to.'' Erik is scheduled to arrive home in Colorado from Nepal today. He has said he is looking forward to hugging and smooching his daughter and wife. I would imagine that those were two of the great incentives he had to reach the top and get home safely. I believe this Congress should give Erik a fitting welcome home and pass House Concurrent Resolution 350, thanking him for inspiring all of us. We welcome Erik home and thank him.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. Mr. Speaker, it has been a pleasure listening to the gentleman discuss the accomplishments of Mr. Weihenmayer. Although I have not had the opportunity to meet him in person, I am certainly looking forward to that. Our office has sent him a letter congratulating him. I hope he is receiving it even as we speak here today, because I know he is scheduled to be returning as I mentioned early today. The fact is that there are a number of people that achieve the recognition that is set forward in the resolution of this nature. We do this routinely in the House. But I must admit to you that I think this particular resolution and this particular individual is something other than routine, I should say, that the accomplishments go far, farther than those of many, many of the people that we have identified in the past year. So it is especially fitting today that we are able to provide him with this kind of tribute. We always wonder here what it is that we can do to inspire others. What we can possibly do on this floor to encourage other people to take on the tasks taken on by individuals like Mr. Weihenmayer. I am not sure if it is anything that we can do here, because all of it has to come from something internally. All of it has to come from something that builds in an individual over which we probably have very little control. But to whatever degree we can add our support for those people who are out there throughout our land and throughout the world, for that matter, who have this sort of burning inside of them something, an ember starting to smoulder, to do something with their lives of major accomplishment, even if they are disabled, we say Godspeed to you all. Mr. Weihenmayer is a great example for everyone.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to talk about an issue that I care very much about and one I hope that will garner the attention of this House during the 107th Congress. It is an issue that is seldom discussed, unfortunately, although I consider it to be one of the most significant problems, one of the most significant issues facing the United States from a domestic policy standpoint, and that issue is massive immigration into this country. I hope that we can demonstrate tonight to everyone, to my colleagues and to those listening, the numerical realities of mass immigration and some of the burdens that come with it. Mr. Speaker, since 1970 more than 40 million foreign citizens and their descendants have been added to the local communities of the United States of America. Just last month, The New York Times reported that the Nation's population grew by more in the 1990s than in any other decade in the United States history. For the first time since the 19th century, the population of all 50 States increased, with 80 percent of America's counties experiencing growth. Demographic change on such a massive scale inevitably has created winners and losers here in America. It is time that we ask ourselves, what level of immigration is best for America and what level of immigration into America is best for the rest of the world? Now, as we have witnessed, Mr. Speaker, the previous speaker spent some time discussing the problems of energy in California specifically, or I should say the lack thereof. Of course this is a monumental problem facing the Nation. Something almost unbelievable is happening to us, a Nation, the richest Nation on the face of the Earth is now experiencing, in one of the richest States of that Nation, rolling blackouts, energy shortages. How can this be? The previous speaker had some idea as to why it occurred. But, of course, it is only a symptom, Mr. Speaker. All of the problems experienced by California and that will most certainly be experienced by other places around this Nation, the problem with not enough resources, not enough energy to supply the needs of the population, goes back to a much deeper root. It is not just the inability of the bureaucracy to move quickly for the approval of power plants or the number of companies that are transporting the product from place to place. It is, in fact, numbers. It is people. California has experienced, as well as the rest of the Nation, an incredible increase in population over the last couple of decades. That population increase naturally forces all kinds of other things to occur: Great demands on our natural resources. We wonder when we look around, all of us, is it not interesting that every single day as we come to work and we recognize how difficult it is, how many more cars there are on the road and how much longer it takes to get to work and we say to ourselves, gee, where are all these people coming from? Believe me, in Colorado, my home State, we are experiencing a dramatic, almost incredible growth rate. And where are these people coming from? Is it the natural growth rate of the population, the indigenous population of this country? No, sir it is not. It is, in fact, immigration, massive immigration, the size of which, the numbers we have never experienced before in this Nation's history. Now, we have for a long time found it difficult to wrestle with this question of immigration. People are concerned about coming forward and actually debating this point. The reason, of course, is that there is always a taint associated with it. When you start talking about the problems of massive immigration, opponents of those of us who want to limit immigration always want to use race cards in the discussion. They always want to talk about this as being a racial issue. But I assure my colleagues, from my point of view, it has nothing to do whatsoever with race. It is simply a matter of numbers. It is difficult to talk about it when we see nostalgic images of Ellis Island and we know that our own families, all of us here, have come to the United States, probably most of us, I should say, through that particular port of entry. We all recognize that that is our heritage. We all know someone, an immigrant who is here, who is struggling and striving to achieve the American dream, and we think about them nostalgically and we think about them as admirable people, and they are. Mr. Speaker, I have absolutely nothing against those folks who come here, and I would be doing exactly the same thing if I were living in their condition, in their situation. I would be looking for the way to get into the country. But, in fact, we have a responsibility in the United States, and the Federal Government has a unique responsibility here. It is something the States cannot deal with on their own. We constantly fight this battle about what is the appropriate Federal role and the appropriate State role, but in this case with the issue of immigration, there is no question, it is a Federal role. Only the Federal Government has the role and responsibility to establish immigration policy. And so it is only appropriate that we should be discussing this tonight, and I hope many more evenings and many more days on the floor of this House in the 107th Congress, because, Mr. Speaker, it is about time somebody brought this up. It is an issue that underlies so many of the things that we discuss here that are really in a way the veneer. We just passed an education bill out of this House increasing the Department of Education's budget by some $20 billion to $22 billion. There was a lot of discussion about the need to build more schools. We are quite concerned about our Nation's schools, and we are forced to come here to the floor of the House of the United States Congress to deal with education which of course is not even in the Constitution as a role and function of this body. But we do it because the pressure is building out there across the land for something and somebody to do something because education is a problem. Let me again suggest that one significant aspect of this education problem in America is massive immigration. In California alone, to meet the demands imposed upon that State by the massive number of people that are coming in there, immigrants, and, by the way, we are only so far talking about legal immigration. We are not even discussing for the moment the numbers of people who come here every single year illegally and actually stay here, become part of the population, do not return to their country of origin. I am just talking about legal immigration and the pressure that legal immigration puts on this country. Specifically, the State of California would have to build a school a day for the next several years in order to meet the demands being placed upon it because of the population growth in that particular State. It is not unique. We are seeing this happen all over. These are tough questions but they can no longer be avoided, Mr. Speaker. As we enter the fourth decade of the highest immigration we have ever experienced in this country and we struggle with its impact, we must discuss it. Some people express shock that Americans could consider cutting immigration and thereby violating what they claim to be the country's tradition of openness. But they truly misunderstand U.S. history. It is actually the high levels of immigration during the last three decades that have violated our immigration tradition. From the founding of the Nation in 1776 until 1976, immigration has varied widely but the average was around 236,000 people per year. Now, this was a phenomenal flow into any single country. It was unmatched by any country on the face of the Earth. It should be noted that during these times, the United States had vast expanses of virtually open land and was certainly much better able to handle 236,000 newcomers annually. Then suddenly in the 1970s and 1980s at the very time the majority of Americans were coming to the conclusion that the United States population had grown large enough, due to changes in our immigration laws, immigration soared above traditional American levels, rising to an average of more than 500,000 a year. We averaged around 1 million a year during the 1990s. The cumulative effect of years of high immigration has taken a while for Americans to comprehend. But many have awakened to a rather startling realization that the unrelenting surge of immigration above traditional levels is changing their communities, changing communities throughout the United States into something oftentimes the residents do not like, do not recognize even as their own. I am joined on the floor by my dear colleague and friend the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode), who has I know some great concerns about the issue because he is a member of our caucus, a caucus we started last year called the Immigration Reform Caucus. I would like to now turn to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) for his comments on this issue and thank him very much for joining us this evening.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) for joining us this evening and for his comments. The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) brings out a number of issues specifically related to the problems that we confront in the nature of when we have pressures brought in our schools to teach children in languages other than English, in our businesses to have forms in the language other than English, in our politics to go to the polls. At a time, there were probably half of the counties in Colorado that actually, by law, had to have ballots written in two different languages. There are still counties who do that. There are still places throughout the country that require that. Now, let us think about what that really means. If, in fact, one cannot understand English, and at the point in time that one comes to vote, one has to be given a ballot in a different language, does that not mean that one is also most likely unable to understand the debate that occurred prior to the decision one makes to vote? All of the discussion of the issues were inevitably in English. All of the candidates speaking, let us say 90 percent of the time anyway, were speaking and telling us their particular positions, their attitudes, their ideas in English. But if one cannot understand that, and one goes to the polls to vote, on what basis does one make these decisions if one cannot understand English and have to be given a different ballot? But that is just one point that we have addressed this evening that I have mentioned before as being many facetted, many, many different problems that we confront as a Nation as a result of massive immigration. Many Americans have awakened to a startlingly realization, Mr. Speaker; that is, that the unrelenting surge of immigration above the traditional levels, as I said earlier, is changing our communities and, as the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) mentioned, in ways that we find distracting. The unprecedented flow of immigration has dramatically reshaped the social and ecological landscape all over America. None of this, none of this has been inevitable. Legal immigration into this country has quadrupled over the traditional American level for one reason and one reason only. Congress and the various Presidents for the last several years have made it happen. I do not know if anyone ever intended for such an onslaught to take place when the immigration laws were changed in 1965, but for nearly three decades during various efforts to control illegal immigration, Congress has stood by as the much larger legal immigration numbers have soared and citizen opposition has risen correspondingly. It is common when discussing negative trends from high mass immigration to focus on individual immigrant skills, education morals, their country of origin, culture and race. If one side points out that some immigrants are prone to crime and destructive behavior, the others note that most immigrants arrive with high motives, good character, and laudable behavior. Some observers fear that the volume of nonEuropean immigration threatens to swamp America's cultural heritage. Others welcome an evermore multicultural society. Nonetheless, the chief difficulties that America faces because of current immigration are not triggered by who the immigrants are but how many they are. That is the point we have to focus on. It is the numbers. The task before the Nation is setting a fair level of immigration, and it is not about race. It is not about some vision of a homogenous America. It is about protecting and enhancing the United States' unique experiment in democracy for all Americans, including recent immigrants regardless of their particular ethnicity. It is time for us to confront the true costs and benefits of immigration numbers. They have skyrocketed beyond our society's ability to handle them successfully. These huge nontraditional numbers have led to many unwanted consequences. Every single committee I sit on, the three committees I sit on, deal with some aspects of this. I am on the Committee on Resources, and almost every single hearing, we are confronted by the problems that the citizens of this country face when trying to actually even access on a recreational basis the beautiful places in this Nation that are available to them. The other day, we were talking about Yellowstone National Park, and there is a great concern because of the numbers of people presently trying to visit that park every single year. We are talking about making reservations, having people make reservations to visit any of the national parks, sometimes years in advance because we cannot accommodate the numbers. We are talking about what happens to the deserts of this country by the many people who are trying to exercise, again, their rights to recreate. We understand that. It is a constant balance, a constant tug of war between the desire to get out there and experience this great and wonderful land on the one hand and the recognition that the numbers of people that we have trying to do that will eventually lead to the complete elimination of those valuable resources. It certainly will lead to their almost immediate degradation. Why? It is because of the numbers. Everything we face, it seems like every time we turn around in this Congress, we are faced with numbers. We keep looking at the symptoms. We try to figure out a way to allow people to get into the national parks and, like I say, making reservations for them years and years in advance and saying one can only use snowmobiles on certain trails, one can only walk on certain trails, one cannot drive one's car off the road here. We keep trying to figure out ways to contain the numbers of people. What happens, of course, is that the quality of life declines for all of us, not just those who want to seek the pleasures of a pristine America, but those who live in cities where all of the services in that city, the demands for services grow astronomically, almost exponentially. The demands for schooling, the demands for sewage treatment facilities, the demands for streets and highways all grow beyond our ability to actually deal with them successfully because of the numbers. The huge number of people that are coming into this country as immigrants have created for us a significant problem. There is another aspect of this. Mass immigration has depressed the wages of many an average American worker. Despite two decades of economic boom, the wages of our most vulnerable working Americans have remained relatively flat or even declined. This sorry recent record contrasts markedly with the rapidly rising wages of all Americans during the two decades after World War II. Before 1965, the Congress wisely pursue a supplied-side labor policy of managed immigration that limited the number of immigrants to the traditional and historic level of around 200,000 a year. During that age of managed immigration, tens of millions of Americans rose from poverty into the middle class. A supply-side labor policy demonstrably works. Mass immigration does not. To protect America's middle class and help more people at the bottom move up to the middle class, it is time to end America's experiment with mass immigration. Immigration, massive immigration and the numbers that we are watching here has endangered American education. Children native-born and foreign-born are not achieving the educational standards that are certainly possible and necessary for them to eventually go on and get a slice of the American dream. So these children are not only threatened by the depressed wages of many of their parents, but they are menaced by the decline of America's public schools. It is a decline not made because of immigration, but it is exacerbated by mass immigration. The poverty level for America's children is growing, a phenomenon none of like to imagine. How can this be happening in the United States, in the richest country in the world? Let us look specifically, if we look closer at the problem, as is so often the case with this issue, we see that it is in fact growing but growing among only a particular group of people. These are the children of immigrants, both legal and illegal. Now, these problems that confront this country again, we will try to deal with here. We will pass massive budget increases. We have been doing it every single year for Health and Human Services. We will actually in 5 years, of course, double the appropriations for the National Institutes of Health, and I have voted for that. I understand the concerns that we have and that we have to address it. But the reality is, where is this coming from? Why are we facing these problems in a way that has never before confronted the United States? I tell my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, I believe with all my heart it is the numbers. I mentioned earlier that the massive overcrowding that is plaguing America's public schools can be blamed specifically, it goes directly back to immigration. Mass immigration also harms recent immigrants. It is the recent immigrants themselves who are most at risk on America's default on its commitment to a middle-class society. It is the children of recent immigrants, many of whom cannot speak English, whose future has been put at risk by the damage mass immigration has done to America's schools. We hear more and more about a disturbing trend involving immigrants who cannot speak English holding society liable for their inability. The other day, I was reading an article in the Denver Post relating to a story that the ambulance drivers were being forced to hire a Spanish speaker to ride along to communicate with non-English speakers being treated by them, primarily, of course, illegal immigrants. These teams felt obligated to retain these foreign speakers for one reason, to protect themselves from the rash of lawsuits being filed by non-English speakers against emergency medical teams who could not understand them when the ambulance arrived. The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) alluded to another aspect of this where products being made, manufacturers of various products are being threatened with suits because their products were misused by the people who could not read the instructions in English that accompanied them. According to the New York Times, the product liability consultants have begun to advise companies to provide warnings in foreign languages or that at least include Spanish on warning labels because ``it may be thought to be necessary by some judges and juries in certain jurisdictions''. Mr. Speaker, with over 140 languages being spoken in America, the issue of warning labels leads down a very slippery path. How many are necessary? If one opens a box and cannot read the instructions or the warning label, how many languages should that be printed in, in order for one not to have the possibility of being sued? How many street signs do we need to change into how many languages so that the people driving down the street will not sue the city if someone runs into them because they are going down the wrong way on a one-way street? But they say, hey, that sign was in English. I could not read it. As bizarre as this sounds, as incredible as this sounds, this is happening. Police now are having to hire, not just medical teams, but police are having to hire these people to go with them also on their rounds. Well, okay, maybe one can handle this. Maybe the cost of this can be borne by one's local community if one is just one language other than English that one has to be concerned about. But what happens when there is, in my own school district, when there are literally hundreds of languages that are being spoken? How many people need to go with the cop to the door to answer the domestic dispute call? It could be in a variety of languages. Will they be held liable, will the police be held liable if they cannot understand the language of the person at the door? There are other recent newspaper articles demonstrating the problems with and attendant to a massive immigration. Monday in the Denver Post was a printed story about just how overtaxed Amercians enforcement mechanisms have become. In Durango, Colorado recently a group of illegal immigrants were detained in a motel because the Immigration and Naturalization service had no other place to hold them. The illegal immigrants, of course, escaped out the window of their motel room, perhaps never to be seen again. But of course the numbers, again, these are the numbers we are talking about, massive, 1 million a year, legally. Then we add to that about another 300,000 or 400,000 who come here under a different category all together but still legally. Refugee status that is called. Some people estimate even double that number all together, 2- or 3 million that we gain every single year, net gain, of illegal immigrants. And what does that do to all of the mechanisms that I have described here? Enforcement mechanisms that are at our Nation's border have become a farce. Another news outlet recently reported the Mexican government has begun providing ``survival kits'' to 200,000 people planning to head north illegally. The kits contain medicine, condoms, cans of tuna, granola, and information about crossing the desert. This is at a time when the Mexican government is telling the United States Government that they want to act to discourage illegal immigration. But, Mr. Speaker, I put it to you that there is no desire whatsoever on the part of the government of Mexico or several other countries to discourage immigration because we are their safety valve. That border, an open border, is their safety valve. And, Mr. Speaker, it would be one thing if we only had to be concerned about the quality of life in Mexico, but it is also our responsibility to be concerned about the quality of life in the United States. Now let us take a closer look at the demographic effects of these decades of mass immigration. From 1924 to 1965, approximately 178,000 immigrants annually are brought into the United States. At no other time in history was the country so positive about immigration or did immigrants assimilate so quickly or were they so welcomed. In 1965, Congress changed the law. Democrats promised that our immigration numbers would not rise by more than 40,000 a year, but that quickly rose by hundreds of thousands a year, and Democrats have fought all efforts to correct the mistake. So during the 1990s, we averaged not 178,000 a year, but 1 million legal immigrants each year. That is why there is so much concern about immigration out there. It is not that everyone has turned mean-spirited and not that we have suddenly changed our minds about immigrants or the foreign born. It is just that the numbers have gotten so high at the very time most Americans had decided they wanted to stabilize the population like the rest of the world. Now, there is actually quite a bit of ambiguity on the part of Americans on the topic of the population. Polls show that most Americans, when asked, like the immigrants they know. In general, they say they are hard-working and add some things to America individually. I would certainly say that if asked. But a majority also say there are simply too many. I am now going to show something that I believe is most important in the context of understanding the immigrant issue that is before us. In fact, I do not believe any immigration decision should be made in this country without referring to this or how they relate to the charts I am going to show you. The chart in the well there is U.S. population growth since 1970 in millions. In 1970, we had 203 million people in the country. A small number down there in the circle, left-hand side of the chart: 203 million. The green part of that chart represents the growth in U.S. population that lived here in 1970. You can see now that there was a baby boom. It is called on the chart the baby boom echo. So there was an increase in the number of people who lived here. Now, we are not talking about immigration, just indigenous population at that time, from 203 to 243 million people recently. Around 1970, American people, through personal choices, decided to start having small families. As a result, we ended up with a fertility rate that was just below replacement level. We still had growth, because even though the baby boomers had small families, there were so many baby boomers that we kept on growing in population, but by less and less. Demographers have taken a look to see what the growth will be in the rest of the century from 1970-based American population. As you can see from the green, the baby boom echo will add for a while and then actually, about 2030, it stops. That baby boom growth stops, and then it begins to recede back to the 1970 levels. Now, does the green assume a zero immigration level? The answer is no. This is actually replacement level immigration. Because it assumes the same number of immigrants coming into the country as Americans are leaving it, at about, by the way, 200,000 a year. But look at the red on the left-hand side. It represents every immigrant above the replacement level who came here since 1970, plus their descendants, minus the death from both groups. Now, that means that there has been more population growth from immigration as there has been from natural growth from 1970 stock population. So where it says 281 million, that is where we are now. And what it shows is the growth in the immigrant, the legal immigrant remember, legal immigrant population into the United States which matched the growth of this country naturally. That means that in this period of time since 1970 to today we have had to double all of the additional infrastructure expenditures we have had for the country. We have had to build twice as many schools, twice as many sewage treatment plants, twice as many roads and streets. All of this additional needs of this country have doubled because the Federal Government has quadrupled immigration. Now, let us look at where we are headed according to the U.S. Census Bureau numbers. The Census Bureau tells us that this will be the future if immigration continues at today's rates. This is what we will bequeath to our children and our grandchildren this century. This is not conjecture, this is not speculation, it is not subjective, this is not what might happen, this is what will happen if Congress keeps immigration four times higher than traditional levels. If Americans are feeling overwhelmed by congestion, the traffic, the overcrowded schools and the sprawl at this level, down there at the 2000 level, when you go to school, when you go to work every single day and everything around you, you see all the land being consumed, of what was yesterday a beautiful farm is today beginning to sprout houses, and what was a pasture not too long ago is now an industrial park, and you keep saying where is this coming from? I do not understand it. It is surprising because I just did not think the natural population of this growth of this country was creating this, well, you are right, it is not the natural population growth of the country that is creating it. It is the massive numbers of immigration of immigrants into this country, both legal and illegal, that is causing the problem. Remember, this chart, the red you see on that chart, does not reflect illegal immigrants. It is just what would happen if we keep our immigration policy today at the same legal number. So if you think we are crowded today, if you think that it is harder and harder to find a place to go and recreate, harder and harder to get out to the mountains and get away from it all, to find a place where there is nobody around, and how many times have we wished we could be in that situation, just be alone for a while, when it is harder and harder to be alone for a while today, what do you think it is going to be like in 2050 or at the end of the century at these levels? We have some of our coastal areas even today showing signs of societal breakdown, at this present level of immigration. As I started out with my whole discussion this evening, I was reflecting upon the previous speaker's concerns about California. Well, California is just a microcosm of where this Nation will be in the not-too-distant future. And not just in terms of its energy problems, but in terms of the population growth and all of the other problems that are attendant to massive population growth. There are people who suggest that it is our responsibility to bring these people in because, of course, they are poor, they are impoverished, and we need to help them out. Please understand this. Even if we continued to take a million a year legally, we cannot even put a dent, not even the slightest dent into the world population of poor. Every single week, every single year, millions upon millions are added to the number of poor people in the world. And that is a terrible shame. Every year, 80 million. We take one. We are adding 80 million a year impoverished all over the world to the already 3 billion people who fit that category. What can America do about that? How many can we take to make a difference? I suggest that if we truly wanted to be concerned about and show concern about the people in other countries, do not allow those governments off the hook, do not allow Mexico, for instance, to use the United States as their escape valve. Force them to deal with their problems internally. Force them to improve the quality of life for their own residents. That is the only way that we even can remotely hope to improve the quality of life for people around the world. We cannot do it by taking them in here. We will bring both ships down. A lot of people wonder if immigration will be brought down to something in the more traditional level. Well, I do not have a crystal ball, but I can say that I believe the pressure for us to do something will grow, and I believe that this Congress will act. I do not know if it will be today. I hope it is today. But my gut tells me that it will not be. That it will be some time before we will ever have the courage to actually address this problem of immigration. Let us be realistic about it, there are people in this body who look at this problem and look at this issue from political vantage points and suggest that massive numbers of people coming into the country will benefit one particular party over another. And it is, I suggest, their own very shortsighted, very political point of view that has prevented us in this body from doing anything about limiting going immigration now for some time. There is a political advantage to be gained by one party over another by having high levels of immigration. But look at what it is going to do to the rest of the Nation and to the immigrants themselves. It is not the best thing. Massive immigration is not the best thing for immigrants, it is not the best thing for America. Do we act now, while we have the strength to help the rest of the world, or do we wait until years from now when we are in such a situation of disintegration and turmoil that we can only look inward? Do we cut the numbers now, while most Americans still have favorable feelings about the foreign-born Americans living with us? Those are the options we face as Americans. It is why it is urgent and important that every American make sure that their own Member of Congress is working towards something like this rather than what the majority is now doing, giving us something like that on the chart. There are really two immigrant debates taking place in America today: the numbers debate and the characteristics debate. There are those who argue that we should either increase or decrease the total level of immigration and others who argue we should increase immigration based on the characteristics of the immigrants themselves. I believe that the second debate cannot take place independently of the first. After all, every immigrant that we admit to the United States has specific skills or good characteristics, and that contributes to a huge overall number of immigrants that I spoke of earlier. I want my colleagues to understand I am not anti-immigrant. I am anti-mass immigration. I firmly believe that we must take overall numbers into account in any immigration debate and look at the impact of those numbers and how they affect our communities. Mr. Speaker, I hope that we have begun the process even tonight of establishing a dialogue and a debate on this issue. It has for too long been held in secret even around the halls of Congress. For too long there has been a fear to address the issue of immigration for fear that people will attack those of us who are attempting to deal with it and use all kinds of spurious arguments against it. I encourage us all to think about the need to once again gain control of our own borders, reduce the number to a level that is the more traditional level of 175,000 to 200,000 a year legally coming into this country and then try our best to deal with the illegals who are coming at a rate of 1 or 2 million into the country, a net gain to the country. We have to address it. The States cannot do it. Mr. Speaker, it is our responsibility and ours alone. It is time to take that responsibility. Stand up, take the heat. There will be plenty of it. Mr. Speaker, I can guarantee that tomorrow, and probably tonight, the phones are ringing off the hook. The racial epithets; we have been through this before. I am willing to take the heat and be called the names because I believe that this problem is a significant, perhaps the most significant, serious domestic problem we face as a Nation. Whether it is resource allocation, schools, buildings, hospitals, or just the quality of life, it is the numbers, Mr. Speaker. It is the numbers.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Armey) for yielding me this time. Mr. Chairman, not too long ago a gentleman was testifying in front of a committee here in this Congress, a gentleman by the name of Al Shanker, late president of the AFT, American Federation of Teachers. When asked by the committee why the AFT was not doing more to help children, why was it not doing more to bring about reform, he said something that was very candid and was almost incredible. He said, when children start paying union dues, I will start representing the interests of children. Now, everybody got upset about that. A lot of people attacked him. I said right on, because of course he was being very honest. That is exactly what the AFT and the NEA care about. They are unions. Now, would it not be nice to have this debate framed on the basis of our true feelings about this issue and why we are going to vote one way or the other on vouchers, on school choice? Is it because we really have the interest of kids at heart, or is it because we know the system, the NEA, the AFT, the PTA, the NASB and all the other organizations I have listed there on that chart, we know they are opposed to vouchers but in our hearts do we not believe, every single one of us in here, in our hearts do we not believe that giving those kids an opportunity, a key to the lock that may be on the door to stop them from getting a good quality education, is where we should be? That is what we should be casting a vote on here, not the system. Mr. Chairman, I have right here, this is title XX of the U.S. Code, 3,200 pages of school law that Federal Government has passed, and we are going to add another 1,000 pages to it pretty soon. We are going to probably pass another part of this adding another 1,000 pages. All of it to do what? To tell schools how to be good schools, how to provide quality education; 4,000 pages of rules. This does not count the regulations. We could not even fill this room with all the regulations written about it when we could do one thing instead to actually provide true accountability, and that is to pass this one amendment. It could take the place of all the rest of this because we put accountability into the right hands, into the hands of parents. They will make the decision about what is the good school, not us.

Mr. TANCREDO

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

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Gilman). (Mr. GILMAN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith).

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham).

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I would just note in response to my colleagues discussion here that I do not believe the Taliban asked permission from UNESCO when they blew up those statues, and of course they never would. That is the whole point here. UNESCO is irrelevant in this whole issue. Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hyde), the distinguished chairman of the committee.

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 3 minutes. Mr. Chairman, during committee consideration of this bill, an en bloc amendment was adopted authorizing the $67 million per year that it would cost the United States to rejoin UNESCO and added a sense of Congress provision that the President should renew the membership and participation of the U.S. in this organization. My amendment would strike these provisions from the bill. I am well aware that several of my colleagues have argued that this agency has reformed itself over the past 15 years, but serious arguments against rejoining UNESCO remains. I believe that UNESCO can best be described as an organization in search of a mission. Unfortunately when it does stumble upon the mission, it is almost always one that is quite perverse. As I mentioned just a minute ago, it would cost us some $67 million per year to get back in; and I question whether this is a wise use of resources. David Malone, the president of the International Peace Academy in New York and a former Canadian Foreign Ministry official, is not optimistic about the prospects for reform by the new Director General of UNESCO, Mr. Koichiro Matsura of Japan, ``the problem of UNESCO is that successive heads have turned it into a personal patronage machine, neglecting programs and bloating the staffing.'' Mr. Malone went on to say, ``we used to all know what the UNESCO objectives were. Now nobody knows what UNESCO does beyond the World Heritage sites, and whoever consults UNESCO now on science?'' By the way, UNESCO is the organization that has charge of the man and the biosphere sites, another one of those peculiar entities that this House, by the way, has struck down several times. An article from The New York Times from March of last year reported that the new director general plans to use millions of dollars of his organization's funds to help restore colonial Havana. It is not at all clear to me why we should be rejoining an organization which is promoting tourism in Cuba. According to an independent audit by the Canadian government, UNESCO rarely evaluates the cost effectiveness of its programs or sets specific objectives. It is an annual budget of close to $400 million. It continues to promote such things as the New World Information Order. This is the name of this organization, quote, ``Presenting and Revitalizing Our Intangible Heritage'' and ``Planet Society, a Worldwide Exchange Network for a New Art of Living on Earth.'' One of the arguments of the proponents of rejoining UNESCO appears to be based on the principle that the U.S. should be a member of every major organization in the United Nations. Mr. Chairman, in light of our summary exclusion from U.N. Economic and Social Council, the International Narcotics and Drug Control Board and the Commission on Human Rights, now is the time to critically review our existing memberships in the United Nations organizations and not the time to rejoin another U.N. body at enormous expense. Finally, the U.S. government now gives $2 million to $3 million annually to UNESCO in voluntary contributions to cover projects we believe to be worthwhile. If we were to rejoin, we would be obliged to fund the good and the bad alike. In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to vote for the amendment. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. TANCREDO

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, today, I rise to give honor to efforts by Governor Bill Owens and the Jefferson County Board of Education in declaring April 20th ``The Heart of Columbine Day,'' in support of the Heart of Columbine organization. Last week, the Littleton community and everyone across our state of Colorado came together to quietly mark the second anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School. In January, in remembrance of this terrible tragedy, the Heart of Columbine organization was created by Gerda Weissman Klein and students and staff members of Columbine to encourage community involvement. The organization is actively recruiting other schools across the country to follow their lead and, already, schools in Illinois and Arizona have started their own programs. This year, Columbine chose to focus its efforts on hunger prevention, has worked in soup kitckens, sponsored a child in the Philippines and collected more than 7,200 cans of food. Heart of Columbine also hosted a community day in the school's parking lot to involve the community in their project. I hope that my colleagues will join me in honoring this extremely outstanding organization, which has done such a tremendous job of turning tragedy into triumph.