Undocumented Alien Emergency Medical Assistance Amendments of 2004

Mr. Speaker, let me first identify myself with the remarks of the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) whose very eloquent and heartfelt remarks certainly touched our hearts, and her actions and her activity and all of the diligence that she has put into this, and the hard work and commitment she has put into this project is to be commended. There are those of us that stand in awe of the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) and all the work she has done for this generation.

I take it as a personal favor to my family that the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) has been doing this because my father, of course, is part of that generation, and everything she said about those brave men and women applies to my father, who served in the Marine Corps during the Second World War and who left a poverty-stricken-type of family background in North Dakota to walk off, save the world, save the world from the dread and the tyranny of Japanese militarism and Naziism. Certainly this heroism is something that we owe such a great deal to.

So, Mr. Speaker, tonight first let me tip my hat to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) and those who put such a lot of work into this project.

Illegal Alien Invasion

Mr. Speaker, let me just note that the person who alerted me to the subject I will talk about tonight was a World War II veteran. His name was Frank Casado, a very proud Mexican American, who owned and built Lucy's Restaurant in Los Angeles. Frank later became very politically active. He was a Democrat, I might add, but he was a very close friend, and I would go to his restaurant as a young reporter and then as I worked in Ronald Reagan's staff in the White House; and Frank would always pull me aside and say, ``Dana, you have got to do something about the illegal alien invasion of our country. You have got to do something about it.'' If there ever was an American of Mexican descent it was Frank Casado.

Frank joined the Navy in World War II, and he always prided himself that he had been on the boxing team and been one of the contenders of the championship of the fleet, and he was a very, very proud man. He was proud of his Mexican heritage as well, but he knew that the flood of illegal immigrants into our country was bound to bring us down, and if we can do anything to keep faith with those veterans who have sacrificed so much for our country over the years, it is that we should have the courage to face the issue of illegal immigration and to deal with it, to understand that those people who fought and died in World War II and have sacrificed over the years for our country to create this wonderful country of ours, they would be appalled to know that we are afraid to discuss the issue of illegal immigration, afraid to discuss the issue that perhaps is the greatest threat to America's well-being today, and that is an onslaught, an uncontrolled invasion of, yes, good people but people who will have a dramatic impact, negative impact on the American way of life. They did not give their lives in order to make sure that this country could be taken over by anyone who would thwart our laws and basically massively come into our country illegally.

We need to have the courage to face the issue. Frank Casado, as I said, first alerted me to how this major influx of illegal immigration was changing the nature of California as he knew it and as he grew up, because he was a native Californian. He was a man who grew up in Los Angeles and described for me how this massive influx of illegal immigrants was bringing down the people of his community. People who should have been on the upward path instead were being brought down by a flood, an uncontrolled flood of illegal immigration.

Let us keep faith with those people who defended this country and won our freedom and wanted us to live in a high standard of living and wanted our people to have a good country. Let us keep faith with them.

And certainly let us not do one thing, let us not permit the benefits that we give to illegal aliens to have a negative impact on these very same senior citizens, these very same soldiers, whether defeated Hitler or Tojo.

In fact, today we have a very limited amount of health care dollars. At a time when our economy is moving forward, but not as strong as it was, let us say 10 years ago, we need to make sure that every dollar counts. Because if a dollar is not spent most wisely, the people most affected will be our senior citizens and also will be our children. And so, today, I plead a case for these seniors and these children. Let us not dissipate the funds that are available to take care of our seniors and our children in order to provide services for illegal immigrants who have come here thumbing their nose at our law and blatantly and arrogantly breaking the law to come here.

And, yes, these are generally honest, good people, coming here to improve their lives, but we cannot afford to take care of all the good people of the world if it means, and it will mean this, that we will have to cut back on what we give to our own citizens.

I rise tonight to alert my colleagues to a vote that will be taken tomorrow on the floor of this Congress, a vote that will mark a turning point for our country or it will reflect a continued unwillingness by America's elected officials to do anything to protect us from what I am calling, what I believe to be the greatest threat to our national security and well-being.

Now, again, what am I talking about when I say that? Tomorrow morning, there will be a vote on legislation that I have offered, H.R. 3722, which will attempt to protect us from a major decline in our quality of life and a decline in quality, I might add, of the health care we have for our seniors and our children due to the uncontrolled onslaught of illegal immigrants into our country and into our hospitals and into our emergency rooms.

If left unchecked, illegal immigration will destroy everything which those World War II veterans were fighting for: a decent quality of life for our people, a government that is reflective of our values, and a country in which we can take care of those who are in need because they are people of our communities and of our States and of our country who have also served our country, whether they be Mexican Americans, like Frank Casado, or black Americans, or Caucasian Americans, or Asian Americans.

We have a country of rich diversity, but all of us need to stick together and care about each other more than we need to care about people who would come into our country illegally and dissipate the funds that are needed for these other Americans and even our own families to get the education and health care that they need.

It is unforgivable that our government has refused to act when the evidence is so clear. Millions of people are being permitted to get into our country and then to stay in our country illegally. And this is having an horrendous impact on our standard of living, on safety in our country, and on the quality of life of average Americans.

For tens of millions of Americans and local and legal residents, real wages have stagnated over the last 15 years. We have seen a major increase in our standard of living and in the statistics that indicate how much wealth our country is worth; yet we have a huge number of people, citizens and legal residents, who live here and have not seen their standard of living increase. In fact, they see all the time little indications that their quality of life is going down, whether it is the fact they cannot afford to buy tires for the family car, or their children cannot afford to buy a home, so they have to stay at home now because they cannot afford to get a house of their own, or the fact that their kids are not expecting really to have a good job. They see these indications that something is happening to our country, where the middle class and working class people are not living as well as they did before and, in fact, have been cut out of this huge increase in the wealth that has taken place in our society of these last 2 decades.

Well, the answer is very clear. The factor that is intervening is a massive flow of illegal immigration that is undercutting the ability of our own people to have good-paying jobs because we are holding wages down with an influx of illegal immigrants. And we are also taxing all of the services provided to our people, the people who have worked all their life to pay taxes; and sometimes, what is happening is, illegals will come into our country and they will not be paying taxes. They will work at jobs where taxes are not paid, and they will bring their families in to consume those benefits in education, health care, and otherwise that are meant for our own people.

Our education and the education of our children has been undermined. Real wages have stagnated. Our health care resources that are necessary to take care of the health of our people have been depleted and the safety of our streets and neighborhoods, and thus, yes, the safety of our families, has been compromised. This is not a back-burner issue. Illegal immigration and how we solve it, or if we ignore it, will determine what America is going to be like tomorrow.

This deals with a crisis of today. It seems to me that we have political people here whose only real goal is to prevent a crisis of the moment. Let us not have a crisis now; let us put that off. Well, I say, no, we need to deal with the threats to our country, just the way the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) was speaking about the threats to the world and to our country that loomed there 50 years and 60 years ago when Hitler and Tojo threatened the world. That generation, the Greatest Generation, did not turn its back and simply say let us try to find a compromise and it will go away. They understood that unless something was done, unless the issue was looked at with courage and with conviction that the United States would cease to be the country that they had inherited from their families and their parents.

So, today, this attitude of elected officials that we should do anything to get away from confronting this issue, let us not have a crisis today, let us not have a confrontation on it today, this works totally contrary to the tradition that we have had that has kept our country free and prosperous. Elected officials have basically remained silent about illegal immigration. Every poll that I have seen, and I include the polls of Americans of Mexican descent, indicates that the vast majority of our people are angry and upset with the fact that illegal immigration is permitted to go uncontrolled and that illegal immigrants are pouring into our neighborhoods and destroying our way of life and the quality of life and the possibility for better jobs for a whole segment of our population. The American people are angry that their elected officials refuse to deal with this issue.

The American people need to ask themselves: Why is it, why is it that elected officials refuse to even think about confronting illegal immigration? Well, a large number of American people, as we know, are deeply troubled and enormously concerned about the onslaught of this massive flow of illegal immigration in the United States. So why are our officials not acting?

First and foremost, I believe that many elected officials have been intimidated from addressing this burning issue. Now, when I say intimidated, what does that mean? Today, in the debate on my bill, 3722, which we will talk about later, one of the Members came forward and said this represents mean-spiritedness. And, of course, that means racism. That is a little catch phrase for racism. And also I was pulled aside by several people after the debate, oh, you should not bring this up, because they think this is a racist attack.

Racism. The elected officials of the people of the United States are afraid to be called racist. They are afraid to be called mean spirited. Well, I can be intimidated in a number of ways, but I can tell you it means a gun or a knife. They can call me all the names they want, but I am confident in my own heart that I am dealing with this issue and other issues based on a love for humanity; and more than that, and I will admit this, a love for the people of the United States of America, in gratitude for the contributions and the sacrifices that people like those people in the Greatest Generation, people like my father and the others the gentlewoman from Ohio was talking about. The sacrifices they made give me strength and give me the willingness to know that I am trying to do things that are positive.

And I will not be intimidated because people are willing to call me, and try to use the tactic of calling me and others, a racist. I will tell you this, the label of racist and hatemonger has caused fear throughout Republican ranks. The liberal left knows this, and they constantly try to play that card. It is time for the American people to totally reject this type of racism in and of itself, the people who bring up racism in order to defend policies that should be discussed on the merit.

Unfortunately, as I say, when someone says you are a hatemonger, most Republicans just wither away because they are afraid to be called hatemongers. They basically know, as I do, that most illegal immigrants, if not all illegal immigrants, are wonderful people. Ninety-five percent, let us say, or ninety-nine percent of illegal immigrants who come to this country are wonderful people. But this is not a debate about whether illegal immigrants are themselves bad people. We can care about them. They are probably good people. And we can care about the rest of the world. But that does not mean that we have infinite resources here in the United States so that we can provide benefits and goods and services and a place to stay for anybody in the world who can make it to the United States.

If we try to do that, if we are cowed from discussing the issue because we are afraid to be called racist because we know we have to draw a line somewhere or it is bound to bring our people down, if we keep doing that, what is going to happen is that our citizens are going to experience a major decrease in their standard of living. A threshold will be reached and the American taxpayer will be spending more and more, and yet our citizens will actually be living lives that are not as high in quality and filled with opportunity as when the tax rates were even lower.

It is not hateful nor is it being racist to use scarce resources, like the amount of tax money we have, the amount of health care dollars we have, the amount of education dollars we have; it is not a racist thing to say we are going to provide for our own people first, realizing that our own people come from every race and every religion and every ethnic group. That is what makes us so proud to be Americans. But if we do not think of our own citizens first, then we have abandoned the one thing that ties our Nation together, and it is a feeling of love and solidarity with all other Americans.

Let me say that I believe even if we take this down to the family level, and we say some family that works hard, saves their money, and spends their money that they have saved on their own family, on their children and on perhaps their father and mother, are these people actually filled with hate, are they hatemongers, do they deserve to be called that simply because they refuse to spend money on the needy people down the street rather than on their children's education or health care? Well, I believe that it is not hateful. It is not negative to try to take care of your family first. And no one should apologize that that is the policy of our government or that that should be the policy of our government, which is what we are advocating today.

That does not mean you do not care about your neighbors or that you do not care about the neighbors down the street. But first and foremost caring for your family is in and of itself an act of charity and love. And let us never forget that charity begins at home. And for us to be giving away the limited dollars available for health care in this country to people who have come here illegally, and taking the money away from that pool of money that should be going to our own citizens, our own children, our own senior citizens, to that great generation that the gentlewoman from Ohio talked about it, is sinful. It is sinful for us to take it and give it to strangers, many of whom have never contributed anything to the country.

Now, yes, some illegal immigrants have contributed, but let me note that many illegal immigrants who come here do not work at jobs where they take the taxes out of their paychecks. Then they bring their families, and so their families are basically being taken care of by the taxes that come out of our pockets, that we gladly gave to take care of our own families and our own fellow citizens, but these other folks who have come here illegally often do not pay any taxes at all.

To make matters worse, the employer that employs them and gives them a job and then pays them under the table more often than not does not give them any health care benefits. Thus, they do not pay taxes, are taking away the benefits, the health care benefits, that should be going to our own people who are paying taxes.

I say this not because I dislike people, but because I do like people from other countries. Our greatest asset is that we are a country that is made up of people of every race and every religion. But I say this, every person who is an American and who is here and conducting him or herself in a legal way and trying to live their life as best they can, these people are part of our American family, and we need to care more about them than we do to take care of someone, even though he might be a good person, or the family that comes from China or Latin America, that we need to take care of our own people first. It has nothing to do with race.

The people that are involved in the United States of America, they are good Americans who come from every race and every religion, but we cannot take care of every wonderful person in the world. If we try to, we will hurt our fellow Americans. We cannot try to do everything for everybody, especially when we mean everybody in the world, and expect that we will be able to do anything for anybody, and that includes anybody in the United States, because our system will break down.

As Members hear this debate about illegal immigration, whenever we try to draw a line, the other side chastises us for it as if we are being mean-spirited. Where do they draw the line? The Members opposed to H.R. 3722 seem to believe we can give unrestricted and unlimited health care benefits to people who have come here illegally and it will not impact the American way of life or quality of life of our own American people. That seems the height of naivete.

But there are other Members who are not naive at all about this issue. While we are proud of Americans, of every race and religion, these other people have another motive on wanting to have illegal immigrants coming into our country, and it is not just to be benevolent.

But let me get to this issue and that is the idea, and we hear this because it is not just racism that is charged, but those of us who want to do something about illegal immigration, we are being charged with the idea that we are anti-immigrant. I believe around 15 percent of the population are immigrants. They are a sizable force in our communities, and they are doing great things for America, great things.

In fact, one of the things we can be most proud of in the United States is that we permit 1 million immigrants to come here every year, along with 400,000 refugees from many of the horrible spots around the world where people live in total desperation. With a population of 280 million people, I believe we can absorb 1 million immigrants a year along with 400,000 refugees. That is our contribution to the world.

That figure represents more legal immigration into our country than is permitted in all the other countries of the world combined. All of the other countries of the world combined do not permit a million immigrants into their country. But just in the United States, we permit a million people to come here, along with 400,000 refugees.

It has worked well for us because people who come here legally must be healthy, they cannot be bringing diseases into the country, they need to be honest, and they need to be self-supporting or they are not permitted to come in. That is a wonderful thing. I think legal immigration is something we can all be proud of because, of course, Americans are immigrants. We are a nation of immigrants, and proud of it.

In fact, every American immigrated here, and that includes Indian Americans who at one point emigrated from the Siberian tundra when there was some sort of ice bridge between Asia and the New World, so we are all immigrants here. But we have come here to prove that we can show people how to

do things and have a better way of life. We did not come here, however, to take responsibility for the health care and the benefits for everyone in the world.

We have people now who are coming and swarming into the United States above and beyond that million people. There are probably 2 or 3 million illegal immigrants that are coming here every year, but that is just a guesstimate. They are coming here without control, so we have no idea whether they are criminals, whether they are bringing diseases to our country, and perhaps they might be terrorists. Perhaps they want to do us great harm because they identify with Islam or some other faith and hate the United States. Maybe they are coming in as illegal immigrants. We do not know. The fact is by bypassing the legal system, they have thumbed their nose at our law and they are putting us in jeopardy because we do not know.

I want to draw my colleagues' attention to the dire consequences of not stemming the uncontrolled flood of illegal immigrants into our country. Every day tens of thousands more illegals arrive in our country. If they are sick or criminals or they are terrorists, we do not know. This is a catastrophe in the making. It will lead eventually, if left uncontrolled, to a destruction of the American way of life or a major crisis in our country in which our people will suffer greatly.

The American people see what is happening. They know, they can see what is happening in our cities and in our communities throughout the country. The American people are seething with anger, and every poll suggests 60 to 80 percent of the American people are outraged that nothing is being done and their country is being taken away from them by an uncontrolled flow of illegal immigrants from other countries. Where is our courage? Where is our tenacity?

Yes, we stood up to the Japanese empire during World War II and the Nazis and the Communists after that, but now we are going to give our country away to other people who come here illegally thwarting our laws, thumbing their nose at our way of life in order to come here and consume the resources that have been put away by our mothers and fathers, and squander all of the institutions that we have invested in for our own children?

I think the World War II generation, and every time I have spoken to them, they are ashamed that we are not doing anything about illegal immigration, and they give the most support of any segment of our society in the demand to do something about illegal immigration.

Every time it comes to a vote, we can see that the American people do not like and are upset about illegal immigration, and they are upset that their elected officials are not doing anything. Elected officials are blowing smoke in the faces of their constituents. They are refusing to be honest about this issue, and we need to have an honest discussion between the elected officials of this country and the American people about illegal immigration.

There was a direct vote by the people about 10 years ago, Proposition 187, in California. Every news media was against it. The establishment of California was totally opposed to Proposition 187. It was going to lose. People were being attacked for being racist. And I know I was attacked as a racist skinhead for supporting Proposition 187. Although you could not tell it from the commentators who were saying what a great disaster it was for the Republican Party, no, Proposition 187 passed in a landslide, a landslide even though all of the major interest groups were against it and all of the major media were trying to bringing it down.

Even though an overwhelming number of voters voted for Proposition 187, it was portrayed immediately thereafter as a loss and something the Republican Party should really worry about. Let me note that 1994 was the biggest year for Republicans to gain seats than in any other election in my memory.

Let me also note, when we examine the issue of illegal immigrants, that Americans of Mexican American descent like my good friend Frank Casado, they are just like other Americans. They believe that illegal immigration is an evil that is doing great harm to our country, and about 50 percent of the Mexican Americans are with us when we want to make a stand because their children and their homes and their families are the ones suffering the most by the negative impact that goes on, economic impact and elsewhere, when our country ends up flooded by illegals.

So the Mexican American community, however, was told afterwards you have to be against 187. That was drummed into their heads. Even today, examine the polls. The majority of people who are Americans of Mexican descent, people who are citizens or who over the years came here legally, those people are with us. A majority of those people are with us.

Let me note that the gentleman from southern California (Mr. Gallegly) has told me over and over again how there are several cities in his congressional district where a majority of their citizens are Americans of Mexican descent, and he is very proud to tell me in those cities Proposition 187 got a very strong showing. It actually won a majority vote in several of those cities. Why is it then that we have conservatives and Republicans who are afraid to lead the charge on this issue and to discuss it openly and bring it up?

Again, they do not want to be called racist, and they do not want to insult their fellow citizens. They actually care about their fellow citizens of Mexican descent, and they are afraid they may be insulting these folks if they bring up the issue of illegal immigration. That is the guilt trip the news media is putting on these people.

Let me just say that Americans of Mexican descent are with us on this. They do not want their families to suffer from being unable to get higher wages for their children or income earners of their family, or education funds to be totally eaten up or health care funds being dissipated by people who have just come here, whether it is from Mexico or anywhere else. These are great Americans and these are Californians.

We Californians understand that. California is itself a name that suggests a past culture, what we think of as sort of a paradise in California.

It is a Hispanic culture. All of us are proud in California of this Mexican heritage. Before our State was a State, there was a proud Hispanic civilization there. California is based on a mythology of an island where there was always milk and honey, and the fruits were always ripe and ready to be eaten. It was a paradise on Earth. We know that. That came from a mythology that was written out in the Spanish language. We understand that, and we Californians are proud of that. We believe we live in that paradise. Yet we will lose paradise if we do not take those steps that are necessary to maintain the quality of life, not just for the upper middle class and the upper class but for all Californians. Illegal immigration is the greatest threat in California to the quality of life of every one of our citizens and legal residents.

Let me note, they know that we are not hatemongers because we are protecting them. We need to join an alliance of all Americans to solve this problem and to speak frankly about it and not worry about being called names. We Americans must stick together. It is our loyalty that creates one Nation, our loyalty to each other; and if we are going to permit half of our population to suffer because we are giving away the benefits that were paid for by tax dollars to people who have come here illegally at the expense of that other half of our Americans who live with us, then we are committing a very sinful act. We are not caring about our fellow Americans and we are showing our disrespect for them by not trying to ensure that someone from the outside, a stranger, does not come in and take away the health dollars and education dollars they need.

Turning one group of honest citizens against another group of honest citizens in order to keep the flow of illegal immigration into our country has worked to intimidate people, but it is a dishonest tactic. We will hear it over and over again. But I hope that the American people are beginning to fine-tune their hearing and their listening of these arguments so that when people start saying, this is mean- spirited, this is racist, that they will know that that

person is insulting them and trying to get them not to look at the issue of the day. I would alert my colleagues and the American people to pay no attention when they are called names.

The real hatemongers and the racists are the ones who would turn Americans against Americans. They are the ones who do not care about us as a people. We care about each other, and let us demonstrate that. I would suggest today that America is so far down the road towards a disaster that we have got to come to grips with illegal immigration, or there is going to be irreparable damage to our country. Already many of our people are suffering, and sometimes they do not even understand why.

What else besides what I just described, this fear of being called a racist, prevents us from dealing with the illegal immigration issue? There is another factor involved. This is also a powerful factor, but it is not quite as visible as the one I just described. Everyone can see that people on the liberal left are calling other people names. They are calling them racist, et cetera. We can see this effort on the left side of the political spectrum to try to unleash and keep the flow of illegal immigrants coming to our country because they want to use them as pawns, political pawns.

But there is another very powerful factor involved and that is there are some enormously powerful and enormously wealthy forces in our society which are benefiting from the massive flow of illegals into our country. Who am I referring to? I am referring to Big Business. I am referring to corporations and Big Business and all those people who would make a profit by keeping wages down. Keeping wages down. That is what is going on. There are some powerful interests in America suppressing wages so that people who are in the middle class and lower middle class, working people, are finding themselves in a trap rather than finding their own standard of living increasing.

As I say, there is the liberal wing of the Democratic Party who wants to exploit illegal immigration for their own political purposes. They want to use them as pawns. Then we have Big Business in an unholy alliance with the liberal left of the Democratic Party. These people are trying to exploit helpless people who come to our shores, of course in order to make a bigger profit, so they will not have to give health care benefits, so they do not have to pay as much; and in fact, the wages of all their other employees are brought down because other employees know they can always hire some illegal immigrants from China or from Mexico or elsewhere to do these jobs if we will not do them for this minimal salary that they are offering.

These powerful forces obviously do not represent the interests of the American people. First of all, let us note this. It is estimated that if illegal immigration goes unchecked, everything else being equal, our population in our country will jump from 280 million people today to 420 million people just a few decades from now. 420 million people. Is that in the interest of the people of the United States? Is that the type of increase in the number of people that we feel comfortable with? Along with that, of course, with this huge increase in our population comes a huge increase in the demand on scarce resources, especially those scarce resources: places to live, good housing, good jobs, good health care, good education. If we let illegal immigration continue, we will have in the blink of an eye a half a billion people living in the United States. Is that what we want? Is that what the American people deserve?

If we leave illegal immigration unchecked, with millions of new people coming to this country illegally every year, if that continues, as I say, we are going to have teeming masses. We will have people who are trapped in situations that are totally inconsistent with the vision of the American dream that has motivated the American people for over 200 years now, the opportunity to dream of a place where people can uplift themselves with hard work, a place where every person willing to work can live a dignified life. If we continue to allow this to go unchecked, all of that will disappear. The American dream will disappear. It will disappear in a mass of faces, of people who are unhappy because they do not have the opportunity that their grandparents had. We will look into the faces of people who are angry. The level of hostility in our society will increase. The America that we know and love will cease to exist.

Were we meant to have an underclass of working people who have no hope for a better life? We are beginning to develop that now. We can see it. Because wages are being held down. There is no doubt about who benefits from low wages. The people who own companies, people who want servants, et cetera, these are people who benefit from illegal immigration. Let me add, there are a lot of upper middle income people, people let us say in the top 20 percent and upper income people who have benefited by illegal immigration. Those people should understand that their whole way of life would not exist if it was not for the people who went out and fought the wars and work hard every day and are honest citizens and are willing to stand up for the principles of America that we respect each other's private property and we respect their rights to live their lives.

These wealthy people would not have that if it was not for all these other Americans who were willing to sacrifice and they do not need as much. They just need a clean and decent place to live. They need to know that their children are going to be educated. They need to have some hope in their lives. This will be taken from them unless we come to grips with a massive flow of people who are coming into this country from every corner of the world and consuming the seed corn necessary to plant the gardens which will give us the food and the benefits and the good life that the American people have worked so hard for.

My dad and mom came from very poverty stricken homes. I used to go there. My dad joined the Marines, but he was there for 20 years. We used to go back to North Dakota in the summers and sometimes in the winters and work on the farm. They were very poor farms. Those people knew that if they worked hard that America had a promise for them. But what about in the future where that promise does not exist because the education level for the children of working-class people, in California we see it, the education level is going down. It is not going down because of anything they have done. It has been going down because our State is being flooded with illegal immigrants, and their children are pouring into the school system, and they cannot even speak their own languages correctly; and thus the teachers are spending all of their time with problem students from other countries whose parents have never paid the price for the education system in the first place. So the working-class families, their children do not get the education they deserve. It is wrong. It is absolutely wrong. We have got to have the courage to face it.

What are we going to say, that every person in the world will be subsidized in their education and their health care and everything else by the American people? Where do you draw the line? If you disagree with what I just said, where do you draw the line? The other side has no answer for that at all except, you are a racist for bringing it up.

Let me note this: we are being told by those captains of industry who are now condemning any effort to try to get illegal immigration under control, we are told that illegal immigrants are taking jobs that Americans just will not take. That is why we have got to let them here, so they can take these jobs that no one else will take. That is not true. The fact is that that is no justification for allowing this massive influx into our country which is bringing down the wages of all of our people. I suggest that Americans are willing to do just about any job, but they are not willing to do any job at the pay level that is being offered.

Yes, if our country was not flooded with illegal immigrants, employers would have to pay more money for the jobs that they need to have done. That is okay. It is a good thing when you have an increasing standard of living or an increasing GNP that working people get their share and that you have higher incomes and that the people are able to own their own home and have a car and treat their kids out to dinner a couple of times a week. That

is okay. But, instead, we are being told, oh, my, we would have to pay them so much money, it would make it impossible. Let us pay 25 cents more for a hamburger if it means that people who work in those shops giving us those hamburgers and that meat have a decent standard of living and can take care of their families.

A good example of what I am talking about and what has happened to our country when we are flooded with illegals who are now living in substandard housing with their whole families and it has sort of brought down the quality of life of whole areas in Southern California, let me mention this. When I went to graduate school, I worked at night as a janitor. Yes, I cleaned toilets and there was nothing wrong with that type of work. Every person who works and sustains himself or herself as an honorable job and as a dignified person, we honor them. When you are taking care of your own needs and you are self-sufficient, that is what it is all about and that is fine. It has been a long time since I was a janitor. I have to admit I was not a very good janitor, but I worked hard. If you look back, 30 years ago when I was a janitor, the gross domestic product of this country has dramatically increased in those 30 years. Yet the money that janitors make in real dollars is about the same. That is it. Our country has had a major increase in wealth, but the janitors make about the same money. It is because our country has been flooded by illegal immigrants who are willing to take those jobs. The people who run the building say, we could not afford to actually hire all these janitors if we had to pay them more money, the market value, without the illegal aliens there. All that would mean if they were paying more money to our own people to clean those toilets, there would be a toilet-cleaning machine and there would be a fellow there, a man or a woman, who could clean 10 times as many toilets with this technology and they would pay him $50,000, $60,000, maybe $70,000 a year. That is a good thing. That is fine.

But, instead, we have had a flood of illegal immigrants and instead of one American earning a decent standard of living and taking care of his family, we have got seven or so illegals who are living substandard, have brought their families in, they are all totally dependent on government benefits, and it is bringing down the quality of our neighborhoods, et cetera; and we have a teeming mass with no hope instead of an American, a proud American being able to take care of his own family and having a decent standard of living. That is what illegals have done to our society. It is a very sinister impact, but it has happened very slowly.

I had an L.A. Times reporter come to my house this weekend looking around, sifting through everything to find out if I had hired any illegals. I did not hire illegals to do my lawn work.

My wife, who just had triplets, as people know here, we did not hire a service unless that service agreed to guarantee that there would be no illegal immigrants in that service. So I try my best.

I try not to buy products from China, because I believe that China is a slave trade state. They use slave labor. But sometimes I end up buying Chinese things unknowingly, as much as I try not to, and I guess sometimes I buy a hamburger from an illegal immigrant.

But let me put it this way. This fellow came to me and said, ``Who takes care of your lawn?'' It just happens to be that the lady I rent from, and I rent a very modest house in Huntington Beach, her brother, who is a senior citizen and is retired now, takes care of the lawn. That is what he does on the side as a side job.

He said, ``All over your neighborhood, your neighbors are using illegal immigrants to do their lawns. Is that bad?''

I said, well, it really is. I will tell you why it is bad. When I was a kid, I did the lawn work. I actually earned all of my spending money by cutting people's lawns, and a lot of my friends did, too.

I think it has a horrible impact on our society that the young people do not cut their own lawns now and earn their own spending money, but instead we let these slave-like laborers come in from different countries and do our lawn work for us. It would be better for our own children to earn their spending money than to pay someone else a pittance so they can live in destitution in our country and then live off of government benefits.

No, that is not the way to a better country. And we have had this impact, and it has been coming on and coming on, and we have not even noticed it, that our kids do not have the dignity now of earning their own spending money by cutting people's lawns.

So that is why we can be such a prosperous country right now, and there can be so much growth in the wealth that is available in our society, yet there is a whole group of people in our country who are being left out. The illegal immigrants are being left out, but so are those people whose wages are being impacted by the illegals' presence here, and it brings down those wages of our average working people. Their share is being gobbled up.

At one end of the spectrum you have got wealthy people. You have got wealthy people over here, they are gobbling that wealth that should go to the middle-class because they are hiring all the illegals and they do not have to pay as much. At the other end of the spectrum it is being gobbled up by bureaucracy and big government.

You have liberals and leftists basically advocating more and more government programs, and what they do, with more and more government programs, they have to tax you more. So what we are doing is taxing the lifeblood and the way of life out of our people in the middle-class, and we are, as well, keeping their wages down and destroying their way of life. They are being attacked by both sides of the political spectrum.

I would say that if it was not for the influx of illegal immigrants today, many of our college students would be out probably doing these jobs during the summer that they say we cannot get Americans to do. I think Americans will take these jobs, if they are given the right kind of pay incentives.

What we have now is a focus tonight on something that I wanted to bring up specifically about the bill that was debated today. My piece of legislation, H.R. 3722, was brought to the floor for a vote.

This piece of legislation is designed to come to grips with a new issue confronting us on illegal immigration, because something happened a few months ago that very few people saw. What I am talking about is the fact that in the Medicare bill, a bill that passed this House, I guess it was 4 or 5 months ago now, when it passed through the House there was not this provision. But when it came back from the Senate, a provision sort of secretly had been inserted by Senator Kyl from Arizona. It was the creation of a $1 billion fund, a $1 billion fund that will be used to pay for the health care of illegal immigrants, a $1 billion for the emergency health care of illegal immigrants. It is the first time we actually have a budget item to legally pay for the services of an illegal immigrant.

What does that do? That means that $1 billion in this fund will go to emergency rooms who take care of illegal immigrants.

Well, what does that mean? That means that in the future, when this is being used, American citizens who do not have health care benefits, and a lot of them do not have health care benefits because the employers will hire illegals if someone demands a health care benefit, an insurance policy, health care insurance, so if they do not have health insurance and then they have to go to the doctor, to the emergency room, what happens? Unless we do something about it, we have set up a perverse priority.

What is going to happen is that the American citizens who do not have health insurance and the legal residents who do not have health insurance are going to be told to go to the back of the line, because we can get the money from the Federal Government to pay for the health care, the emergency health care, of illegals. We quite literally are taking care of foreigners who have come here illegally at the expense of the American people.

My legislation, H.R. 3722, will ensure that the money that we have, the health care that we have, will not be dissipated dramatically by illegals, because what it does is it states very clearly for the hospitals of America, if an illegal immigrant comes to your

emergency room, you do not have to give them extensive treatment for diseases that are not at that moment life-threatening.

Thus, they will take care of an illegal whose life is being threatened, but they will not have to take care and spend $300,000 or $400,000 for cancer treatments, and this happens, for all types of transplants of organs, for hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars worth of health care that illegals are getting right now.

My bill says they do not have to do that. If they want to, they can, but they do not have to do it. This legislation is vital to make sure that the pool of money available to the American people for their health care goes to the American people and not to illegals.

It also says that if someone is illegal and they come in and they are an emergency and they are taken care at the hospital, when they are seeking compensation from the fund, they just have to make that same information that they are collecting in order to be compensated, they have to make that available in a computer for the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Homeland Security.

What we have heard again are bogus arguments this morning, over and over again, that this is going to increase the paperwork of doctors; it is going to make doctors policemen.

Not true. The bill we are talking about only says the information, that they will collect anyway in order to get compensated by this fund, must be made available to the INS and the Department of Homeland Security. They are not being turned in by anybody, it is just available. The other government agencies at that point have to take over. There is no reporting on the part of the doctors.

So we hear these bogus arguments over and over again, as if people are going to bring some type of contagious diseases into our country if we do not treat every illegal alien that comes into our emergency health care.

Let me note this: If you want to see diseases that will spread in our country being brought into our country from overseas, just make sure that everybody around the world knows that we are now paying for illegal aliens' health care in this country. No matter who gets into the hospital, they will be taken care of. They will bring communicable diseases from all over the world, and that is what is happening right now.

We need to instead come to grips with what my legislation does, that if someone is indeed here illegally and they are dissipating the use and the amount of money that is available for our own citizens or their health care, that illegal alien should be sent home. They should go home to their home country. That is what H.R. 3722 says. The information will be available to the Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and they will proceed from there.

This is not on the back of the doctors. The doctors are freed from responsibility on that, because they no longer have to treat anything, unless someone's life is threatened at that moment.

Let me add one other thing. If they do treat an illegal immigrant in an emergency situation, my bill insists that we go to the employer, because that is the only question that hospital has to ask, who is your employer? And if that employer has not done due diligence to see if he is hiring an illegal immigrant, that employer has to pay for the emergency health care costs of the illegal immigrant. Do you get that? The taxpayers are off the hook.

What has happened is, this bill, which would be an of incredible importance to the middle-class Americans, this bill, which strives to protect us from having our limited health care dollars being drained away by people who have come here illegally, this bill is being attacked by the Chamber of Commerce. It is being attacked by big business on one end, and being attacked by the liberal left organizations that control the Democratic Party on the other.

I suggest tomorrow the vote on H.R. 3722 is one to watch, and whose side you are on will be determined by how they vote on that issue.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to alert my colleagues to a vote that will be taken on the floor of this Congress next Tuesday. It is a vote that will mark a turning point for our country or will reflect a continued unwillingness by America's elected officials to do anything to protect us from the greatest threat to our national safety and well- being.

What am I talking about? Next Tuesday, there will be a vote on legislation that I have offered, H.R. 3722, which will attempt to protect us from a major decline in the quality of life and the quality of our health care due to the uncontrolled onslaught of illegal immigrants into our country and into our hospitals and emergency rooms. If left unchecked, illegal immigration will destroy the quality of life for many of our people.

It is unforgivable that government has refused to act when the evidence is clear: millions of people are being permitted to stay in our country illegally, and it is having a horrendous impact on the standard of living, safety, and quality of life of average Americans.

For tens of millions of Americans and legal residents, real wages have stagnated. The education of our children has been undermined, our health care resources depleted, and the safety of our streets and neighborhoods and, thus, the safety of our families compromised.

This is not a back-burner issue. It goes to the heart of what America will be like tomorrow and, in some cases, it deals with a crisis of today. Yet, elected officials have remained silent about illegal immigration. Why? The American people need to ask themselves that question, because it is clear that the overwhelming number of the American people are troubled and enormously concerned about this onslaught of this uncontrolled, massive flow of illegal immigration into the United States.

But why are our officials not acting? First and foremost, I believe that many elected officials have been intimidated from addressing this burning issue. When I say intimidation, what is that all about? Is that against the law? Well, no, one can be intimidated in a number of ways. I mean that our elected officials are afraid to address this issue because they are afraid to be called racists. They are afraid to be called hate-mongers.

Let me note for the record today that I have been called many names when addressing this issue, and I believe that I have love in my heart for all of, not just our fellow citizens and legal residents, but I have love in my heart for other people. People who are malicious, people who are doing ill and bad things to other people, of course we do not love them. But the vast majority of people, even illegal immigrants coming into this country are wonderful people, and I have nothing but love in my heart for those people. But that is not the question of the day. We can be very caring about the rest of the world, but that does not mean we do not recognize that we have limited resources and that we can deplete those resources to the point that it will be harmful to our own citizens if we do not act responsibly.

Furthermore, it is not hateful to use scarce resources to provide for one's family. If one is taking care of their family, if one works hard and has a certain amount of money, and even if there are needy people down the street, down the block, it is important to care for your family first. That does not mean you have any less love in your heart for your neighbors and the people down the street; but first and foremost, caring for your family is itself an act of charity and love.

I am committed to doing something about the threat of illegal immigration, not because I dislike people and certainly not because I dislike people from other countries. Most people who come here, as I say, even the ones who come here illegally, are wonderful people. But we cannot take care of all of the wonderful people in the world and expect that it will not hurt our fellow Americans, in the same way that we cannot, as individuals and as members of a family, give away all of the family's money to people down the street

who might need some help and not expect if we give away too many of those resources for it not to have a horrible impact on our own family and, indeed, hurt our family. We Americans, of course, are very proud that our country represents every race and religion. So it would not be that we have in some way something against people who are coming here from another country. In fact, we are all descendant from people who originated in other parts of the world, with the exception perhaps of the American Indians. Yes, we are a nation of immigrants and we are proud of it. And we are proud also that our country today permits more legal immigration into our country than all the other countries of the world combined.

One million immigrants are permitted to come here every year, along with 400,000 refugees. With a population of 280 million people, we can expect that we will absorb this responsible number of immigrants. It has worked out for us well in the past, because the immigrants who come here legally need to be healthy, they need to be honest, and they need to be self-supporting; or they are not permitted to come here. We have no such controls on people who are coming here illegally, perhaps bringing diseases, perhaps criminal elements, perhaps terrorists.

Tonight, however, I want to draw the attention of my colleagues to the dire consequences of not stemming the uncontrolled flood of illegal immigrants into our country. One can be for a responsible and a sizable legal immigration without then compromising a position that puts one totally against a flood of illegals coming into our country, especially the uncontrolled flood of illegals that we have been seeing in the last decade. Millions of illegal new-comers are arriving in our communities. Every day, tens of thousands more of them arrive. If they are sick or they are criminals or they are terrorists, we do not know. This is a catastrophe in the making. It will lead eventually, if left uncontrolled, to a destruction of the American way of life, the very way of life that has attracted all of our forefathers and -mothers here and has attracted the legal immigrants who come to our shores legally and come with respect for our law.

The American people, they see what is happening. They can see what is happening in our cities and in our communities throughout the country. The American people see this, and they are seething with anger. Every poll shows that 60 to 70 percent of the American people are outraged that nothing is being done and their country is being taken away from them by an uncontrolled flow of people from other countries. Every time it comes to a vote, the American people express this cry for help to elected officials to do something about illegal immigration. Proposition 187 was the first time that that really came to a vote; and let me say, 10 years ago, no matter what people have heard about proposition 187, it passed in a landslide. It passed in a landslide when all of the major interest groups were against it, the major news media. All the name-calling you can possibly imagine was thrown at this little band of activists who put proposition 187 on the ballot. But even though an overwhelming number of voters voted for proposition 187, it was portrayed as some sort of a loss for the Republican Party, because Republicans by and large had supported and identified with proposition 187.

Let me note that there are people in this body, such as the gentleman from California (Mr. Gallegly), who represents many areas in which there are Americans of Mexican descent who represent a majority of areas in his district, but the gentleman from California (Mr. Gallegly) tells me that many of the cities where the majority of the population are legal immigrants and where Americans of Mexican descent hold a majority, that many of those communities voted by majority in favor of proposition 187.

Many people are afraid, even with that staring them in the face, the evidence that Mexican Americans, like everyone else, feel that their way of life is being threatened and their standard of living and their families are being threatened by illegal immigration. Many people still hesitate, thinking that they might be insulting our American citizens who happen to be of Mexican descent. Well, there is no Californian that does not respect our Mexican American and Hispanic fellow citizens and legal residents.

California is, by its very name and by the names of our cities and our streets and our culture, deeply influenced by the Hispanic culture and by the Mexican American culture that has been part of our State since before it was a State, and we are proud of that as Californians. We are proud of that. And yet many people are afraid to be called a racist. They are afraid to be called racist or hate-monger; they are afraid that that might make some people who are right down the street from us, our next-door neighbors or others, feel that we have something against them.

Well, turning one group of honest citizens against another in order to keep the flow of illegal immigration into our country has worked to intimidate people, but it is a dishonest tactic; and we will hear it over and over again. I would alert my colleagues and the American people to pay no attention. The real hate-mongers and the real people who are engaged with racism are the ones who would suggest that we cannot deal with problems like illegal immigration unless we can call each other names.

Well, I would suggest that today the situation has gone so far down the road toward disaster that we have got to come to grips with this illegal immigration flow, or there is going to be irreparable damage to our country and to our people.

What else, of course, has prevented us from dealing with illegal immigration? It is not just a fear of being called a name and racist, et cetera; although that is a powerful factor. There is another factor involved, and that is, there are some enormously powerful interest groups who believe they are benefiting from this massive flow of illegal immigration into this country.

Who am I referring to? I am referring to big business who want to ensure that they keep wages down and suppress wages, and I am talking about the liberal left wing of the Democratic party who believes that they will exploit illegal immigrants for their own electoral purposes, that they can politically exploit them.

So we have two groups of people who want to exploit illegal immigrants: big business and the liberal left wing of the Democratic party, both trying to exploit these helpless people who come to our shores.

These powerful forces obviously do not represent the interests of the American people. First of all, let us note this. It is estimated that if illegal immigration is unchecked, and everything else being equal, the population of our country will jump from 280 million people today to 420 million people just a few decades away. Is that in the interest of any American to have that kind of crowding, that type of incredible increase in the number of people that we have to deal with and the demand on our scarce resources? That is what will happen if we leave illegal immigration, with millions of people coming in every year, and let it go unchecked. If that is going to happen we are going to end up with a half a billion people here in the United States of America.

Why are we letting it happen? There has been a lot of other things happening, and people know this is attributed to this massive flow of illegals. Yet we continue to let those things happen. Wages, for example, are being held down. There is no doubt about it; there are some people who benefit from low wages, the people who own the companies, people who want servants, et cetera. But most people, most Americans, are damaged by the product of illegal immigration, and I might add this keeping down of wages is changing the demographics in our society, thus changing the American way of life.

Let me note, it is a big lie that illegal immigrants are only taking jobs that Americans will not do. No, that is the great lie that is being used to justify this influx into our country, which is bringing down the wages of all of our people. No, no. Americans will do just about any job, but they will not do it at the pay level certain people are offering those jobs at. The pay level in our country for certain jobs, yes, Americans will not take that, but if we did not flood our country with illegal immigrants, those jobs would have to pay more money to get them done.

A good example of this is a job that I held when I was in college. When I was in graduate school, I held the job of a janitor. Yes, I cleaned toilets, and there is nothing wrong with that type of work. In fact, it is very honorable work. Any work where you are taking care of your own needs and being self-sufficient is honest work and dignified work.

During this time period after I, of course, got done with that job, that was 30 years ago, the GNP of our country has dramatically increased. We have had a tremendous increase in the GNP of our country, in the wealth of our country. This is a much richer country now than it was when I was cleaning toilets as a janitor, but if you look to see what janitors are making today in real terms, in real money, they are making almost exactly the same pay as I made when I was working as a janitor.

So why is it that the country can be so much more prosperous, there is so much more wealth here but the people working in regular jobs and more lowly jobs are not making anymore money? Where is their share of the prosperity we have enjoyed?

Their share is being gobbled up at one end of the spectrum by wealthy people and being gobbled up by government, I might add, and bureaucracy, and who is not getting it are the average working American people.

They say, well, no one would have taken that job as a janitor now. Yes, they would have taken that job had we not had a major influx of illegals in to take this janitorial work. What would have happened? They would have had to pay someone, like myself when I was in college, more money to do that job, and then you can bet that somebody would have invented a janitor machine, a toilet cleaning machine that would have cleaned the potties, maybe 100 potties. A man or a woman might be earning $50,000 a year to do a janitorial job.

There is nothing wrong with paying someone those type of wages for that type of work. As I say, any honest work is dignity, and the law of supply and demand will determine how much wages are paid, but instead of having one man working a machine, working technology to keen up our buildings and our bathrooms, we instead have opted in the society to bring in illegal immigrants, give them the jobs, but there are now five or six of those people and they are living in substandard housing with families that are deprived and are bringing the standard of living of their neighborhood down. These are people who are not living the American dream but, instead, are living the type of nightmare that they left in their home countries where there are very poor people and very rich people.

So what we have done, instead of giving working people in America an avenue of earning enough money to buy their own home, we have created a new class of poor people. Is that working for the interest of the American people of our country? Is that what we want? This is on top of, I might add, of course, the legal immigrants that we permit in, a million legal immigrants and 400,000 refugees every year.

Pressure is being felt throughout our society because of this massive flow of illegals into our country. I am suggesting millions of people are coming here every year illegally, and we are not doing anything about it, and the pressure is being felt. We can see it. The American people can see it. They can feel it, but nowhere is that more evident than in the providing of health care for our people.

Obviously we can feel it in other areas. We can feel it in the area of education. We have seen that in education, the quality of our education in California is going down. Everyone talks about class size in California. They are taking illegal immigrants out of the equation. In California, class size is not going up. You take the illegal immigrants out of the formula in California, education is doing very well, and our teachers would have time to teach our own students and give them a quality education; but no, we are permitting that to be eroded. For the average person out there who depends on educating their children in the public schools, we have permitted illegals to come in in order to help people who live in gated communities and send their kids to private schools. So education is being affected.

Our criminal justice system is being affected. We can see that throughout California as well, and health care is being affected.

Emergency health care is something that all of us depend on at one time or another. We just heard before us a few minutes ago by some of my Democratic colleagues talking about all these uninsured Americans, and there are uninsured Americans who do not have health care in this country. I have a piece of legislation aimed at trying to make sure that we do not put the status of illegal immigrants above our concerns for our own American citizens who do not have health care. My bill, H.R. 3722, will come to grips with an element that has just been put into our system unbeknownst to most American people.

What we did not know and what most people do not know is that a provision was slipped into the Medicare bill of a few months ago that passed through this House, and this provision established a $1 billion fund to compensate American hospitals for providing emergency health care to illegal immigrants. Let us make this clear: $1 billion of Federal money going to compensate hospitals for providing emergency care to illegals. Thus, we have officially opened the door to our own Treasury and to the taxpayers' money of providing services for illegal immigrants into our country.

We are providing this and it is $1 billion to start off with, and you can imagine that 10 years from now we are talking about 10s of billions of dollars, and we are talking about attracting more and more people here to the United States of America in order to get health care for their families.

We cannot spend money providing health care for people who come here illegally and not expect that we are not going to have even more people come here illegally to get that health care. It does not take a genius to figure that out. We have seen what has happened. We have seen this flow continue. We had an amnesty back in 1986. That amnesty was supposed to say there will be no amnesties after that. What happened? What happened was a dramatic increase in illegal immigration into our country.

The American Hospital Association reports that there were $21 billion in uncompensated health care services provided last year, and illegal aliens amount to 43 percent of those who do not have health insurance in this country. So 43 percent of all these people we are talking about that do not have health insurance are illegal immigrants. That is about $9 billion we are spending already for illegal alien health care. Yet we have established a fund that will provide health care for illegal immigrants' emergency health care.

What does that do? What does that mean? That means that we have created a perverse incentive for our hospitals to take care of the illegals who end up coming to their emergency center and treating the Americans and legal residents who come there, who do not have health insurance, as second class to the illegal immigrants. We have got the priorities totally backwards, but that message is not going to be lost on people overseas. They know they can come here and get that health care.

We all remember Jesica Santillan. She was an illegal alien who died after receiving not one, but two, heart and lung transplants in North Carolina. The Santillan family paid $5,000 to be smuggled across the border to get here to have care, care that they knew would take a long time to get if they could ever get it at all in Mexico.

There are American citizens who desperately need organs, and they are being knocked out of line by a family who broke the law to come here. Yes, that was a nice, little girl and that family's a very nice family. We hear stories in the newspaper every day about people who come here from China and elsewhere in order to get their families treated by America's health care providers. Yes, that touches your hearts, but let us be fair to the American people.

This is depleting our health care dollars that should be going to our own senior citizens. If we cannot provide medical care for our senior citizens, we cannot provide them medicines, how is it that we can provide $1 billion to treat illegal immigrants and then we are going to get more of them?

My bill will come to grips with this particular issue, H.R. 3722. It is meant to deal with this travesty. If passed, it will signal to the leadership that the American people no longer will stand for this type of providing services for illegal immigrants.

What does this bill do? It requires that hospitals ask questions that they are going to ask anyway. The hospitals are opposing my bill because they said it is going to add all kinds of questions that you have got to ask. No, I have got to tell you this. In order to get those funds to get compensated for treating those illegals, what we have got to do is ask questions anyway. My bill provides almost no extra paperwork. When you hear that argument, it is a lie.

What we have done is we have asked for a photo to be taken or a fingerprint, and one other question to be asked: Who was your last employer?

And I might add that my bill also says that if that last employer of this illegal who is now in the emergency room to get care, if he has not taken the due diligence to even make a telephone call to verify that this employee is here legally or not, and that system will be in place in 2005, well then that employer is required to pay the bill, not the taxpayers. The employer will pay that health care bill for being so arrogant as to try to hire a guy, probably not even paying his taxes and not giving him any health insurance.

So, number one, it suggests the hospitals have to take a minimum of attention to collect a fingerprint or a picture of this person, and enough information, as well as a few minor questions that they ask anyway, and that that information be provided to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Homeland Security, and that we expedite deportation of that person who is here taking hundreds of thousands of dollars of health care away from our people.

If that person is here illegally, they should be deported; and that information should be available. But the hospitals are not required to do anything else than that which is minimal. It will not cost them time or money. And right now, by the way, these hospitals report abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse. That is all reported. They can do this. And, as I said, we require the employer then to pay for it if he has not taken due diligence.

Most importantly, this bill limits the amount of health care that we are going to provide illegal immigrants if they come to the emergency room and expect treatment. This is the all-important provision. Today, we have people coming from all over the world here illegally. They arrive at the emergency room and they say, you have got to take care of me. I just mentioned this young lady, this young girl from Mexico who we spent millions of dollars on, and then her family ended up suing the hospital for heart and lung transplants. No. Under my bill, the hospitals will not be required to do anything except treat anyone who comes in for a life-threatening condition.

If an illegal immigrant is there and they want to have leukemia treatments or treatments for genetic problems they have been carrying all their life, the hospital only has to treat that patient to the point that that patient then can get to an airport or get to a transportation system that will take them back to their home country to be treated for that disease there. That is where they should be treated, instead of having our hospitals being forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for leukemia treatment, for example.

There was a fellow in my congressional district who came here from El Salvador, and he was dying of leukemia. He received $300,000 worth of treatment for leukemia. That $300,000 comes from the money available to take care of our children. It comes from the money that is available to take care of our seniors. Imagine, $300,000. It is a crime to permit someone who has come here to this country to deplete our resources like that.

Now, we are going to have a chance to vote on this next Tuesday; but it is not going to happen on its own, because H.R. 3722, which is the bill, is going to be the target of every interest group that you can imagine that wants to keep the flow of illegal immigration coming into this country. But the American people need to know that H.R. 3722, my bill, which will be on this floor next Tuesday, is going to be voted on. And the decision that is going to be made is the decision that we have limited health care dollars in this country; so are we going to spend them for illegal immigrants or are we going to try to get control of this situation so our health care dollars are going to our own legal residents and our U.S. citizens.

Is that hateful? Is that racist? Is that a horrible thing for people who care about other people to do? I say that that is the loving thing to do. I say that you can have love in your heart and try to be responsible. We know that if we try to do everything for everybody, we will end up not being able to do anything for anybody. We have seniors right now that cannot afford their medicines, yet we are talking about spending billions of dollars to take care of illegal immigrants.

Now, the only way that I got this vote to the floor, the only way that this bill, H.R. 3722, was permitted to come here to the floor for a vote was that they needed my vote. The leadership in the House needed my vote on the Medicare bill.

I voted for the Medicare bill because I felt that our health care had evolved now so that a lot of people who depended on operations and the type of things covered by Medicare in the past now took care of these problems by using pills and medicine. So we had to evolve so we could help people get those pills and medicine as they get to be older. Well, that bill only passed by one vote as it went through the House. And I voted for that and I am proud of that.

Then it went over to the Senate and that is where they stuck this provision in, this provision of a billion dollars, which is of course an installment. Ten years from now it will be $20 billion. We know that. So they stuck this provision in, and on the way back they did not have enough votes to pass the Medicare bill. That is why there is a miracle that is going to happen here next Tuesday.

They needed my vote in order to get the Medicare bill passed, and I said I cannot vote for this with this provision in here. I already voted for it when it was not in; I cannot vote with it in here. Unless it is mitigated, I cannot vote for this bill, and the bill was going to go down. The leadership said, what do you mean by mitigated. I said, I need to bring a bill to the floor that will undo the negative impact of the money that we are going to provide for illegal immigrants' health care in this bill. They said, you have a deal. We will let you bring this to the floor and the people of the United States will be able to hear the arguments and your colleagues will be able to vote up or down on the legislation that you have in mind.

That is how this bill came to the floor for a vote. The American people have to be involved in deciding this issue when this bill comes onto the floor on Tuesday. H.R. 3722 is very easy to understand. It means limited health care dollars are going to go to illegal immigrants, or it means that we are going to try in some way to restrict the use of our limited health care dollars in the servicing of illegal immigrants.

As I say, we have a situation in this bill that goes to the cost of illegal immigrants as well by making sure that our hospitals no longer feel compelled to provide extensive services, like cancer treatments and genetic engineering and bypasses and things to help people who are not in a life-threatening situation. We cannot afford to do that for illegal immigrants. We cannot afford to do it.

First of all, it is unfair to our own U.S. citizens to have a fund that will compensate hospitals for taking care of illegal aliens who do not have health care insurance, but then we are not doing that for our own citizens who do not have health care insurance. That is wrong. It is immoral, and it is wrong.

We need to make sure when the illegal immigrant is there that we do not end up spending massive amounts of money. The only money that should be spent is in case that person, his or her life is in danger at that moment. We cannot afford anything else. There are some people who believe that we can do everything for everybody. They never vote against any spending in this body.

They vote for any new government program. I do not know how they can think they are being responsible, but they do.

I can tell you right now, we cannot be the HMO of the world. If we try to be the HMO of the world, and we attract people from all over the world, which we are doing now, and taking care of all their maladies and all their health care problems, we will be doing so at the expense of the American people.

Yes, illegal immigration is out of control. It is dramatically hurting our way of life. We have wages that have been kept down so some of our people cannot afford health insurance, and now we are taking care of illegals and not their health insurance. We have people now who come to this country and will work and not pay taxes, so that means they are not getting health insurance, they are not paying taxes, and that means doubly that we end up paying for their bill.

Who are we really subsidizing? We are subsidizing the employers of these people who are basically not only exploiting them, they are exploiting the taxpayers. The people are getting filthy rich by hiring people who have come here illegally and not providing them any health care and not having them pay taxes to make up for the services they are consuming here. This has to be stopped. It is bringing down the wages of our people and it is destroying the American way of life.

We cannot sustain millions of people coming into this country without harming our own people. Wake up, America. We can do something about this, but we have got to take a stand.

Next Tuesday, it will be very easy to understand, except there is going to be all kinds of rhetoric about the burden of paperwork that we are going to put on the hospitals. By the way, there is no burden of paperwork unless the hospital wants to be compensated. H.R. 3722 will not require the hospitals to do anything if they do not want the Federal dollars to compensate them for taking care of that illegal immigrant.

If they want to opt out, there is no burden. But if they want compensation, they are going to have to ask certain questions to prove this person was illegal to get compensation. My legislation requires a minimal amount, maybe an extra 30 seconds, enough to snap a Polaroid shot and ask who the former employer is. That is it. All they are doing is putting this information into a computer that is available to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and then the legislation requires our government employees at the Immigration and Naturalization Service to look at that information and they will analyze it and they will begin deportation against an illegal immigrant.

Why should we do this? First, some will say it will mean more people are not getting treated in our society. There will be more sickness in our society.

Let me note that if Members want to see sick people coming to America, let everybody in the world know if you get to America, you are going to be treated. You are going to get free health care. They are going to bring their kids here with polio and everything else because they know their family will be treated in the United States of America. If we want to spread disease in our society, let us make our society the HMO of the world, and that is what we are doing here today.

No, this is not an imposition on the hospitals. They can opt out if they want. It is no more bother than what they are already doing. For example, child abuse cases go to the police. They make a report to the police; or some spousal abuse case, they do that already. No one is complaining about that. But let us compare what illegal immigration is doing to those situation.

This illegal immigrant from El Salvador who died with leukemia and taking with him $300,000 of U.S. tax dollars with him, how bad is that? Is that awful? The girl in North Carolina, we spent $5 million on her. Why is that bad?

Today if that guy would have lived and gone into a drugstore or liquor store and stolen a couple hundred bucks, he would be in jail. If one of our people, our citizens, goes into a store and robs it of a couple hundred dollars, that person is going to jail. But instead, we are taking people who have entered the United States illegally or have overstayed their visas and are just here illegally, and we are permitting them to consume hundreds of thousands of dollars, taken directly from our pockets; and the money available for providing services, we are permitting them to take this money. They are stealing from our society, but their accomplices are the people in our government who refuse to come to grips with this grave threat to our society.

We all know that we have a threat here to the institutions, our health institutions and to our schools. We also know that with illegal immigration out of control, we do not know if these people are terrorists, if terrorists are coming here. We have to come to grips with this.

We have to look in the mirror and say we are proud to be a country that is made up of every race and every religion. We are proud to be a Nation of immigrants. We are proud that we have more legal immigration in our society than any other country in the world, but we are not going to be browbeaten and called names in light of our generosity, simply for doing things that are responsible in protecting our own citizens and legal residents.

We have got to watch out for each other. We have to care for our other fellow Americans more than people who have come here illegally. If we do not, no one is going to stand in line and go through the process of legal immigration.

This is a situation that threatens our way of life. We have to proceed with love in our hearts, but we have to proceed with determination to turn the situation around. Next Tuesday, Members of Congress have got to know that their constituents will be judging them on their vote on H.R. 3722. No one should be fooled by any smoke that is blown into the air to try to confuse people on the issue. This is the issue of using scarce health dollars for illegal immigrants versus using those dollars for American citizens and legal residents.

People need to have their voice heard in Washington, D.C. Elected officials need to come to grips on this, and we need to have more votes on this than simply those votes that are required whenever there is some type of arrangement made because votes are needed on another piece of legislation.

There are good people on all sides of this issue. There are good people who are concerned about large numbers of illegals. We have 12 million illegals in this country, but we have to be more concerned with American citizens and legal residents.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman for yielding to me.

Mr. Chairman, I just want to inform the House of something that I think is very important. Over the last year, Mr. Chairman, we have watched the horrors of Darfur unfold before our very eyes. President Bush and Secretary Powell, the Congressional Black Caucus, and Members on both sides have focused on this issue and using every tool possible to save life.

Today the United States took the historic step of calling what is occurring in Darfur, Sudan, genocide. In his testimony this morning before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Colin Powell stated: ``We concluded that genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the Government of Sudan and the jinjaweid bear responsibility, and genocide may still be occurring. We believe, in order to confirm the true nature, scope and totality of the crimes our evidence reveals, a full-blown and unfettered investigation needs to occur. Sudan is a contracting party to the Genocide Convention and is obligated under the Convention to prevent and punish acts of genocide. To us, at this time, it appears Sudan has failed to do so.'' And then he went on to say what the position is.

I want to thank President Bush, and I want to thank Secretary Powell, and I want to thank the people in the State Department for calling this genocide and to doing everything they can to stop the genocide that is taking place in Sudan.

Remember Rwanda? Nobody would say anything about Rwanda. This administration has said it is genocide, and I say, God bless President Bush and God bless Secretary Powell.

Mr. Chairman, I submit for the Congressional Record the full remarks of Secretary Powell before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

The Crisis in Darfur

(By Secretary Colin L. Powell)

Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, thank you for the

opportunity to testify on the situation in Darfur. Let me

start by reviewing a little history.

The violence in Darfur has complex roots in traditional

conflicts between Arab nomadic herders and African farmers.

The violence intensified during 2003 when two groups--the

Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality

Movement--declared open rebellion against the Government of

Sudan because they feared being on the outside of the power

and wealth-sharing agreements in the north-south

negotiations. Khartoum reacted aggressively, intensifying

support for Arab militias, the so-called jinjaweid. The

Government of Sudan supported the jinjaweid, directly and

indirectly, as they carried out a scorched-earth policy

towards the rebels and the African civilian population.

Mr. Chairman, the United States exerted strong leadership

to focus international attention on this unfolding tragedy.

We first took the issue of Sudan to the United Nations (UN)

Security Council last fall. President Bush was the first head

of state to condemn publicly the Government of Sudan and to

urge the international community to intensify efforts to end

the violence. In April of this year, the United States

brokered a ceasefire between the Government of Sudan and the

rebels, and then took the lead to get the African Union (AU)

to monitor that ceasefire.

As some of you are aware, I traveled to the Sudan in

midsummer and made a point of visiting Darfur. It was about

the same time that Congressman Wolf and Senator Brownback

were here, as well as Secretary General Kofi Annan. In fact,

the Secretary General and I were able to meet and exchange

notes. We made sure that our message to the Sudanese

government was consistent.

Senator Brownback can back me up when I say that all of us

saw the suffering that the people of Darfur are having to

endure. And Senator Corzine was just in Darfur and can vouch

for the fact that atrocities are still occurring. All of us

met with people who had been driven from their homes--indeed

many having seen their homes and all their worldly

possessions destroyed or confiscated before their eyes--by

the terrible violence that is occurring in Darfur.

During my visit, humanitarian workers from my own Agency--

USAID--and from other Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs),

told me how they are struggling to bring food, shelter, and

medicines to those so desperately in need--a population of

well over one million.

In my midsummer meetings with the Government of Sudan, we

presented them with the stark facts of what we knew about

what is happening in Darfur from the destruction of villages,

to the raping and the killing, to the obstacles that impeded

relief efforts. Secretary General Annan and I obtained from

the Government of Sudan what they said would be firm

commitments to take steps, and to take steps immediately,

that would remove these obstacles, help bring the violence to

an end, and do it in a way that we could monitor their

performance.

There have been some positive developments since my visit,

and since the visit of Senator Brownback, Congressman Wolf,

and the Secretary General.

The Sudanese have met some our benchmarks such as engaging

in political talks with the rebels and supporting the

deployment of observers and troops from the AU to monitor the

ceasefire between Khartoum and the rebels. Some improvements

in humanitarian access have also occurred through the

government continues to throw obstacles in the way of the

fullest provision of assistance.

The AU Ceasefire Commission has also been set up and is

working to monitor more effectively what is actually

happening in Darfur. The general who is in charge of that

mission, a Nigerian general by the name of Okonkwo, is

somebody that we know well. He is the same Nigerian

general who went into Liberia last year and helped

stabilize the situation there.

The AU's mission will help to restore sufficient security

so that these dislocated, starving, hounded people can at

least avail themselves of the humanitarian assistance that is

available. But what is really needed is enough security so

that they can go home. And what is really needed is for the

jinjaweid militias to cease and desist their murderous raids

against these people--and for the Government in Khartoum to

stop being complicit in such raids. Khartoum has made no

meaningful progress in substantially improving the overall

security environment by disarming the jinjaweid militias or

arresting its leaders.

So we are continuing to press that Government and we

continue to monitor them. We continue to make sure that we

are not just left with promises instead of actual action and

performance on the ground. Because it is absolutely clear

that as we approach the end of the rainy season, the

situation on the ground must change, and it must change

quickly. There are too many tens upon tens of thousands of

human beings who are at risk. Some of them have already been

consigned to death because of the circumstances they are

living in now. They will not make it through the end of the

year. Poor security, inadequate capacity, and heavy rains

(which will not diminish until late September) continue to

hamper the relief effort.

The UN estimates there are 1,227,000 Internally Displaced

Persons (IDPs) in Darfur. In July, almost 950,000 IDPs

received some form of food assistance. About 200,000 Sudanese

refugees are being assisted by UNHCR and partner

organizations in Chad. The World Food Program (WFP) expects

two million IDPs will need food aid by October.

U.S. Government provision of aid to the Darfur crisis in

Sudan and Chad totaled $211.3 million as of September 2,

2004. This includes $112.9 million in food assistance, $50.2

million in non-food assistance, and $36.4 million for

refugees in Chad, $5 million for refugee programs in Darfur,

and $6.8 million for the African Union mission.

The. U.S. also strongly supports the work of the AU

monitoring mission in Darfur. In fact, 23 initiated the

Mission through base camp set-up and logistics support by a

private contractor. The Mission is staffed with 125 AU

monitors now deployed in the field and has completed

approximately 20 investigations of cease-fire violations. The

AU monitoring staff is supported by a protection force of

305, made up of a Rwandan contingent of 155 (they arrived on

August 15) and a Nigerian contingent of 150 (they arrived on

August 30). Recognizing the security problems in Darfur, the

UN and the U.S. have begun calling for an expanded AU mission

in Darfur through the provision of additional observers and

protection forces. Khartoum appears to have signaled a

willingness to consider an expanded mission.

I am pleased to announce, Mr. Chairman, that the State

Department has identified $20.5 million in FY04 funds for

initial support of this expanded mission. We look forward to

consulting with the Congress on meeting additional needs.

As you know, as we watched through the month of July, we

felt more pressure was required. So we went to the UN and

asked for a resolution. We got it on July 30.

Resulution 1556 demands that the Government of Sudan take

action to disarm the jinjaweid militia and bring jinjaweid

leaders to justice. It warns Khartoum that the Security

Council will take further actions and measures--UN-speak for

sanctions--if Sudan fails to comply. It urges the warring

parties to conclude a political agreement without delay and

it commits all states to target sanctions against the

jinjaweid militias and those who aid and abet them as well as

others who may share responsibility for this tragic

situation. Too many lives have already been lost. We cannot

lose any more time. We in the international community must

intensify our efforts to help those imperiled by violence,

starvation and disease in Darfur.

But the Government of Sudan bears the greatest

responsibility to face up to this catastrophe, rein in those

who are committing these atrocities, and save the lives of

its own citizens. At the same time, however, the rebels have

not fully respected the ceasefire. We are disturbed at

reports of rebel kidnappings of relief workers. We have

emphasized to the rebels that they must allow unrestricted

access of humanitarian relief workers and supplies and

cooperate fully, including with the AU monitoring mission.

We are pleased that the Government of Sudan and the rebels

are currently engaged in talks in Abuja, hosted by the AU.

These talks are aimed at bringing about a political

settlement in Darfur. The two sides have agreed on a protocol

to facilitate delivery of much-needed humanitarian assistance

to rebel-held areas, and are now engaged in discussions of a

protocol on security issues. We are urging both sides to

intensify negotiations in order to reach a political

settlement.

At midsummer, I told President Bashir, Vice President Taha,

Foreign Minister Ismail, the Minister of Interior and others,

that the United States wants to see a united, prosperous,

democratic Sudan. I told them that to that end we are fully

prepared to work with them. I reminded them that we had

reached an historic agreement on June 5--an agreement

between the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People's

Liberation Movement (SPLM). That agreement covered all the

outstanding issues in the north-south process.

Since then, the parties have been engaged in final

negotiations on remaining details. However, the parties are

stuck on the specifics of a formal ceasefire agreement and

have not yet begun the final round of implementation

modalities. Special Envoy Sumbeiywo met recently with the

parties, but could not resolve the remaining ceasefire-

related issues. Khartoum appears unwilling to resume talks at

the most senior level, claiming it must focus on Darfur. That

would be fine if its focus were the right focus. But it is

not. The SPLM is more forward leaning, but still focused on

negotiating details. We believe that a comprehensive

agreement would bolster efforts to resolve the crisis in

Darfur by providing a legal basis for a political solution

(decentralization) and by opening up the political process in

Khartoum.

President Bashir has repeatedly pledged to work for peace,

and he pledged that again when we met in midsummer. But

President Bush, this Congress, Secretary General Annan and

the international community want more than promises. We want

to see dramatic improvements on the ground right now. Indeed,

we wanted to see them yesterday.

In the meantime, we are doing all that we can. We are

working with the international community to make sure that

all of those nations who have made pledges of financial

assistance meet those pledges. In fact, the estimated needs

have grown and the donor community needs to dig deeper.

America has been in the forefront of providing assistance to

the suffering people of Darfur and will remain in the

forefront. But it is time for the entire international

community to increase their assistance. The U.S. has pledged

$299 million in humanitarian aid through FY05, and $11.8

million to the AU mission, and we are well on the way to

exceeding these pledges.

SYG Annan's August 30 report called for an expanded AU

mission in Darfur to monitor commitments of the parties more

effectively, thereby enhancing security and facilitating the

delivery of humanitarian assistance. The report also

highlighted Khartoum's failure to rein in and disarm the

jinjaweid militia, and noted that the Sudanese military

continued to take part in attacks on civilians, including

aerial bombardment and helicopter strikes.

We have begun consultation in New York on a new resolution

that calls for Khartoum to cooperate fully with an expanded

AU force and for cessation of Sudanese military flights over

the Darfur region. It also provides for international

overflights to monitor the situation in Darfur and requires

the Security Council to review the record of Khartoum's

compliance to determine if sanctions, including on the

Sudanese petroleum sector, should be imposed. The resolution

also urges the Government of Sudan and the SPLM to conclude

negotiations on a comprehensive peace accord.

And finally there is the matter of whether or not what is

happening in Darfur is genocide.

Since the U.S. became aware of atrocities occurring in

Sudan, we have been reviewing the Genocide Convention and the

obligations it places on the Government of Sudan.

In July, we launched a limited investigation by sending a

team to refugee camps in Chad. They worked closely with the

American Bar Association and the Coalition for International

Justice and were able to interview 1,136 of the 2.2 million

people the UN estimates have been affected by this horrible

violence. Those interviews indicated:

A consistent and widespread pattern of atrocities

(killings, rapes, burning of villages) committed by jinjaweid

and government forces against non-Arab villagers;

Three-fourths (74%) of those interviewed reported that the

Sudanese military forces were involved in the attacks;

Villages often experienced multiple attacks over a

prolonged period before they were destroyed by burning,

shelling or bombing, making it impossible for villagers to

return.

When we reviewed the evidence compiled by our team, along

with other information available to the State Department, we

concluded that genocide has been committed in Darfur and that

the Government of Sudan and the jinjaweid bear

responsibility--and genocide may still be occurring. Mr.

Chairman, we are making copies of the evidence our team

compiled available to this committee today.

We believe in order to confirm the true nature, scope and

totality of the crimes our evidence reveals, a full-blown and

unfettered investigation needs to occur. Sudan is a

contracting party to the Genocide Convention and is obliged

under the Convention to prevent and to punish acts of

genocide. To us, at this time, it appears that Sudan has

failed to do so.

Article VIII of the Genocide Convention provides that

Contracting Parties ``may call upon the competent organs of

the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of

the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the

prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the

other acts enumerated in Article III.''

Today, the U.S. is calling on the UN to initiate a full

investigation. To this end, the U.S. will propose that the

next UN Security Council Resolution on Sudan request a UN

investigation into all violations of international

humanitarian law and human rights law that have occurred in

Darfur, with a view to ensuring accountability.

Mr. Chairman, as I said the evidence leads us to the

conclusion that genocide has occurred and may still be

occurring in Darfur. We believe the evidence corroborates the

specific intent of the perpetrators to destroy ``a group in

whole or in part''. This intent may be inferred from their

deliberate conduct. We believe other elements of the

convention have been met as well.

Under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment

of the Crime of Genocide, to which both the United States and

Sudan are parties, genocide occurs when the following three

criteria are met:

Specified acts are committed: (a) killing; (b) causing

serious bodily or mental harm; (c) deliberately inflicting

conditions of life calculated to bring about physical

destruction of a group in whole or in part; (d) imposing

measures to prevent births; or (e) forcibly transferring

children to another group;

These acts are committed against members of a national,

ethnic, racial or religious group; and

They are committed ``with intent to destroy, in whole or in

part, [the group] as such''.

The totality of the evidence from the interviews we

conducted in July and August, and from the other sources

available to us, shows that:

The jinjaweid and Sudanese military forces have committed

large-scale acts of violence, including murders, rape and

physical assaults on non-Arab individuals;

The jinjaweid and Sudanese military forces destroyed

villages, foodstuffs, and other means of survival;

The Sudan Government and its military forces obstructed

food, water, medicine, and other humanitarian aid from

reaching affected populations, thereby leading to further

deaths and suffering; and

Despite having been put on notice multiple times, Khartoum

has failed to stop the violence.

Mr. Chairman, some seem to have been waiting for this

determination of genocide to take action. In fact, however,

no new action is dictated by this determination. We have been

doing everything we can to get the Sudanese government to act

responsibly. So let us not be preoccupied with this

designation of genocide. These people are in desperate need

and we must help them. Call it a civil war. Call it ethnic

cleansing. Call it genocide. Call it ``none of the above.''

The reality is the same: there are people in Darfur who

desperately need our help.

I expect that the government in Khartoum will reject our

conclusion of genocide anyway. Moreover, at this point

genocide is our judgment and not the judgment of the

International Community. Before the Government of Sudan is

taken to the bar of international justice, let me point out

that there is a simply way for Khartoum to avoid such

wholesale condemnation. That way is to take action.

The government in Khartoum should end the attacks, ensure

its people--all of its people--are secure, hold to account

those who are responsible for past atrocities, and ensure

that current negotiations are successfully concluded. That is

the only way to peace and prosperity for this war-ravaged

land.

Specifically, Mr. Chairman, the most practical contribution

we can make to the security of Darfur in the short-term is to

increase the number of African Union monitors. That will

require the cooperation of the Government of Sudan.

In the intermediate and long term, the security of Darfur

can be best advanced by a political settlement at Abuja and

by the successful conclusion of the peace negotiations

between the SPLM and the Government of Sudan.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Today, Congress has the opportunity to reassure the American people that there are elected representatives on their sides. No vote could be more indicative as to the priorities of a Member of Congress.

Is America to have a policy of unrestricted health care for illegal immigrants at the expense of American citizens and legal residents? That is the issue we are discussing today. Voting for H.R. 3722 means that my colleagues are not in favor of spending our limited health care dollars in an unrestricted way to give illegal aliens all the health care that they need in terms of today's standards.

Those Members of Congress voting against H.R. 3722 are draining limited health care dollars that should be going to our own citizens and legal residents.

H.R. 3722 would put some common-sense controls over the $1 billion fund that was created by a rider that was added onto the Medicare bill that passed just a few months ago.

What does H.R. 3722 do? One thing it does not do is add a burden of paperwork to the hospital emergency rooms, and that is a bogus argument. I would warn my fellow constituents that that lie has been spread around this body in order to get people to vote in the wrong way. It is a bogus argument.

To be reimbursed, the hospitals will be asking questions. To get part of that $1 billion fund they will be asking questions anyway. This legislation does not add considerably to any major degree to those questions. It simply adds a following question: Who was the immigrant's last employer or his current employer? Plus, the hospital must then take a photo or a fingerprint, which may be required to get that fund money in the first place. This information would then be available to the Department of Homeland Security and the INS.

This legislation does not require any reporting by the hospitals or the doctors or anyone else to the Department of Homeland Security. That, too, is a bogus argument that is going around, only we will hear it in the debate, I am sure. The hospitals do no investigating, no reporting; they simply have the information that is given to them when the patient is put into the system and that is made available to government agencies. It is the government agencies, the Department of Homeland Security and INS, that do the investigating, that do the rest of the work. Do not fall for bogus arguments.

Our hospitals today feel compelled to provide extensive and even long-term treatment to illegal aliens. That is what our bill, H.R. 3722, does second. It makes sure that our hospitals are relieved of this enormous burden of trying to provide unlimited health care to any illegal that comes into an emergency room.

We have been giving heart bypasses, even transplants. A young girl from Mexico had $5 million worth of expenditures in heart transplants just a few months ago, and then when the transplant did not work, her family, who were here illegally and actually had emigrated here with a $5,000 fee to a coyote, then sued the hospital because the transplant did not work. Well, this cost us billions of dollars a year.

If someone has a genetic disease or something like that, our emergency rooms should not be treating this in the first place; and the fact is, this bill will alleviate that burden by saying that only if a person's life is imminently threatened by that malady do the hospitals have to focus on that and treat someone whose life is immediately being threatened rather than provide hundreds of thousands of dollars of long-term cancer care, genetic problems, et cetera.

This alone will save billions of dollars that should be going to the American people. The doctor will only determine how much treatment is necessary to get this person to a transportation source that will get them back to their home country so their home country can pay for the health care costs, rather than our senior citizens and our young people being deprived of the resources for their health care.

Number three. If it is a life-threatening emergency, the illegal alien will be treated. There is no doubt about that. This bill does not change that. But if he has no insurance, the alien's employer or former employer will be given the bill. Businessmen will be given the bill if they hire illegal immigrants who end up draining away our health care dollars. This makes all the sense in the world.

Now, the businessmen are coming out against this, saying how can we judge? In 2005, there is a system already being worked on and being established that with one phone call they will be able to determine if they are hiring an illegal immigrant. If a businessman has not made that phone call and has hired someone without checking it out, then he will pay for the health care costs rather than having the taxpayer pay for it.

We will hear a lot of people trying to tell us there are a lot of other things in this bill that are not. But it comes down to this: Whose side are we on? Do we care about our own senior citizens more than we care about strangers from overseas? Do we care more about our own people than we care about strangers from overseas?

If we keep trying to provide everything for everybody, our system is going to break down, and it is doing so right now in California. I would urge my colleagues to support 3722 and prove to their constituents just whose side they are on. We could have corrected this a long time ago, but we hear people all the time, and we will hear it today, with every excuse for not doing something. But the fact is some people in our country are benefiting from illegal immigration. They are very powerful. But it is hurting American citizens, and this bill tries to put a stop to that, or at least turn that situation around today with H.R. 3722.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, how much time remains on each side?

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds and just note that this fund of a billion dollars that was created that we now have to put some controls on, and that is what 3722 is trying to do, creates a perverse incentive. If we let this go through as it stands, what is going to happen is this: people who come to the emergency rooms who are American citizens or legal residents who have no insurance will be put behind and at the end of the line and the illegal immigrants will be put to the front of the line because the Federal Government is picking up the tab.

This is a perverse priority. We should be taking care of our own citizens before we take care of illegal aliens.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

What is shameful is how shameful some of my colleagues are getting the facts totally wrong and do not know what they are talking about. Someone must have briefed them with the wrong information.

This bill does not require our hospitals to gather any significant more information. The information that is being gathered that my colleague is complaining about, what we just heard, the great condemnation of all the questions that must be asked and all the information that must be gathered from this U.S. citizen, who might be an illegal, is already required of the hospital in order to get the funding, the billion dollars, that was set aside for them. It is not required by my bill. It is required in order to get reimbursement.

My bill simply says that if they are going to ask those questions, and they are going to expect to get reimbursed, they also have to ask who the employer is and get a fingerprint or a picture, which they are probably going to have to get in order to be reimbursed in the first place. So the gentleman's complaints are not against 3722. His complaints are that the Federal Government is now going to have an unlimited reimbursement for illegal immigrants and they are going to ask some questions for it. Do not blame 3722.

And let me note this also: we have had an example given to us of an American citizen who is there, and he is being threatened because he has to answer whether or not he is an illegal immigrant or not. The greatest threat to the treatment of American citizens and legal residents is that we are going to spend all of our available health care dollars taking care of illegals who should not be getting that money. The greatest threat to our senior citizens, to our young people is that we have a limited amount of health care dollars and my colleagues want to spend it on people who have come here illegally.

My colleague pointed out this will bring tens of millions of more people here and even a greater drain until the system breaks down.

The bottom line is the people who are in favor of spending our limited dollars on American citizens and a very doable system here that is no more complicated than what the hospitals are

going to have to go through to get reimbursement in the first place should be voting in favor of H.R. 3722. If they want to spend their money on people who came here illegally, rather than our own citizens, waste those dollars, make sure more illegals get in, go ahead and vote against H.R. 3722.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, again we hear this bogus argument that this bill is going to create more paperwork. The paperwork and the questions that we are talking about are required by hospitals who are going to be trying to get reimbursement through this billion dollar fund, which was snuck into the Medicare package with a back room deal, I might add. It is not required by my legislation; it is required to get reimbursement. If a hospital does not want to be reimbursed, they do not have to ask any questions, they can do whatever they want.

Let me note, all contagious diseases have been exempted by this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds.

Let me note that if we really want to have the spread of disease in this country, let us set ourselves up as the HMO for the whole world. Let us make sure that everybody in the world knows that if they can get their kids to the United States, we will take care of them, and see how many diseases we are going to get.

That is what is happening in California right now. Diseases are beginning to materialize because people have brought their children and brought their seniors as well to come to the United States to be treated. We have got to end that syndrome because the money is coming directly from the health care dollars that should go to our own citizens, and it is luring more people with disease into our country.

This is a catastrophe. The best way to prevent it is to vote yes on

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.

We keep hearing the bogus arguments. This requires the doctors to ask so many questions; we know now that is not true. Only the people who are trying to get reimbursed from that billion-dollar fund are going to ask the questions. This bill has minimal added questions. Two. Who is your employer and then taking a picture or getting a fingerprint which might be required in order to get reimbursed in the first place.

Do my colleagues on the other side of the aisle really believe in unlimited treatment for illegal immigrants without asking any questions? Is that what we are going to do? Who benefits from that? Certainly the illegal immigrant does and the tens of millions of other illegal immigrants who come into our country seeking health care, yes, they are going to benefit.

Who else benefits? The employer who does not want to offer health care to his employees. That is who benefits. That is who is being subsidized here. Behind the scenes when you get to the Chamber of Commerce and these other people opposing this, that is what their motive is. They do not want to offer health care to their employees. This gives the government the subsidy to subsidize them hiring people at below minimum wage level and, in fact, off the books at times. If you want to combat illegal immigration, this is the way to start; and it does not add any new paperwork or any new questions for the doctors.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds. This bill does not require the first order of business to ask questions. This bill says if you want to be reimbursed from that billion dollar fund, yes, you are going to have to ask some questions, anyway, and adds one other question: Who is your employer? It does not require the doctors to turn anybody into the INS, although we have heard that over and over again in this debate. It does not require that. It requires their files to be available to the INS and to the Department of Homeland Security. It is those agencies that then follow through. The doctors do not have to report anything. It just has to be available on a computer.

Communicable diseases, we keep talking about that, that also is wrong. The bill exempts communicable diseases. Let us talk about the real issue, illegal immigration. How many services are we going to give people until we get tens of millions of more immigrating into our country?

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Culberson).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I would ask my colleagues to seriously consider this vote, and I would remind them that there are people all over the United States, especially their constituents, who are looking at this vote as a determinant as to whether or not we believe that illegal immigration is something that should remain uncontrolled and should continue in the years ahead, or whether we should start doing something about it.

There is a seething among the American people, among the working class and middle-class people. They know that illegal immigration has had a horrible impact on their lives. It has brought down wages. We actually had a policy that permitted unlimited illegal immigration into our country, and because of that, working class people do not make as much money as they did before.

Now we have a situation where illegal immigrants who go for emergency treatment, we are being told that we have to give them unrestricted and unlimited treatment, health treatment, and it is going to be paid for by the Federal Government. But that is not true of U.S. citizens. What about those middle-class, working-class people? They are out of work; they do not have insurance.

In this situation today, we have created the perverse priority that our government is reimbursing hospitals and helping illegals, but we will not do it for our own citizens.

We have a horrible problem in this country with illegal immigration. It is hurting many people's lives. Yes, rich corporations in the Chamber of Commerce, they get to hire people who are not even paying taxes half the time. They do not have to provide health insurance anymore because there are all these illegals willing to work anyway. That is very damaging to the American people.

Also we are spending billions of dollars here already on cancer treatments, organ transplants and genetic problems. We are spending about $10 billion on this every year.

This legislation says the only free treatment that somebody gets at an emergency center, illegal or not illegal, is if their life is under a threatening situation. I think even that is very generous of us in the United States. Interestingly enough, if someone goes through the process of being a legal immigrant, they do not get their health care covered, they do not get it reimbursed by the Federal Government.

Mr. Speaker, unless H.R. 3722 passes, we have set up the priority of helping illegal immigrants. Do not think that will not attract tens of millions more illegal immigrants to this country who have diseases that need to be treated. That makes sense. Think about it. This is common sense.

The American people are waiting to see whether or not we are going to use our scarce health dollars to take care of our senior citizens, to take care of our own people, to take care of our own little kids, or whether we are going to attract tens of millions of new people here and give that money away to strangers.

This is not mean-spirited. This is down-in-your-heart. We love everyone in this country. We have a diverse country, every race and religion. It is that love for each other that keeps us together. We have to care more about our own people, and that is not mean spirited, than we do about people that come here illegally.

Mr. Speaker, I would ask my friends and colleagues to support H.R. 3722.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, in May of 2004, the National Labor Relations Board overturned 30 years of its own precedent and ruled that it has jurisdiction over tribal government enterprises located on tribes' own sovereign lands. Where tribal law has governed relations between tribes and their employees, the National Labor Relations Board seeks to replace that law with its regulatory authority in this area. This decision by the NLRB is a frontal assault on tribal sovereign rights.

The National Labor Relations Act expressly exempts States, cities, and local governments from its coverage; and the NLRB has ruled that territorial governments, such as Puerto Rico and Guam, are also exempt from its jurisdiction. But the National Labor Relations Board incorrectly decided that it should exercise its own jurisdiction over tribal governments on their own lands. If this unfair decision stands, the only governments that will be subject to NLRB jurisdiction will be tribal governments.

There is a basic misunderstanding here, Mr. Chairman. The NLRB misunderstands that tribal governments, like State governments, rely upon government-owned enterprises to generate revenue to support governmental purposes, such as reservation law enforcement and fire services, and programs for the health, education and welfare benefit of tribal members. Consistent with the policy behind the NLRA exemptions for governments, private parties such as labor unions should not be able to hold government-owned enterprises hostage where disagreements arise.

Ironically, the NLRB specifically ruled against the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, a tribe based in Southern California, that has enacted into its tribal law a tribal labor relations ordinance with greater, let me repeat this, with greater labor union rights than the National Labor Relations Act. In fact, the tribe has a collective bargaining agreement with the Communication Workers of America. The heavy-handed, activist NLRB overlaid an incompatible legal regime where a tribal one, agreed to on a government-to-government basis with the State of California, was in place and was, in fact, working. Now, San Manuel and other tribes have conflicting laws and great uncertainty about which law applies.

I strongly support the tribes in their efforts to protect their sovereign rights. Congress should reaffirm these rights and make clear that tribes are exempt from the NLRA, which was the view of the National Labor Relations Board until this misguided decision was promulgated.

There are certainly sound policy reasons for such a fix. Tribes are sovereign governments that exercise jurisdiction over their own territory. Although some Federal laws compel tribes to deal with other sovereigns, such as States, on a government-to-government basis, this NLRB decision would force tribes to deal with private entities, labor unions, for the first time, contrary to long-established Federal Indian policy.

But until Congress can consider a permanent solution to this problem, this amendment, Mr. Chairman, would have the effect of calling a temporary time out to allow this body to more thoroughly consider a more substantive solution, to avoid additional confusion among the tribes and to limit unnecessary conflict between tribes and labor unions.

Mr. Chairman, this amendment enjoys broad-based support from across the width and breadth of Indian Country. The National Congress of American Indians, the oldest and largest intertribal organization in the United States, and the National Indian Gaming Association strongly support this amendment. The San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, along with many other tribes, also have weighed in with strong support for this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, this is a question of sovereignty. We dare not equivocate nor abdicate the role of Congress in dealing with government-to-government relationships and the sovereignty that tribes enjoy. Accordingly, Mr. Chairman, I would urge all to vote in favor of this amendment because it is a vote that supports sovereignty for Indian nations and a vote for the fundamental rights of the first Americans to

maintain their status of sovereignty and their rights as sovereign governments.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute.

Mr. Chairman, I have a great deal of respect for my colleague from Michigan, and it is an honor to cochair with my colleague the Native American Caucus in this body, and listening to his rationale in response, quite candidly, is a bit confusing because on more than one occasion we have stood united on this basic point, that sovereignty is nonnegotiable. Yet the foundation of his argument is that an amicable relationship exists between some in this House and some in organized labor and some in the tribes; and if they only have the time, they can work this out. Mr. Chairman, I find that rationale one that just does not pass muster.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Boehner), my friend.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Regula), the chairman of the subcommittee.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Chairman, I thank my friend for yielding, and this would make the point. In terms of the negotiations in California, were they not, in fact, conducted on a government-to-government basis?

Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to my friend, the gentleman from California.

Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield to me for that purpose.

The gentleman talked about the California situation and the negotiations that went on in the gentleman's home State. I would just simply ask: Were not those negotiations conducted with sovereign tribal entities negotiating with the State of California on a government-to- government basis?

Which is exactly my point.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute, and I would simply make the point in response that what we are dealing with here today, contrary to the comments of my friend from Rhode Island, sovereignty was not created in the wake of IGRA. Indeed, a part of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was a government-to-government negotiation between sovereign tribes and the respective States.

Now, with reference to what has gone on and what has been described as productive negotiations, yes, indeed, tribes met with several union officials in attempts to negotiate. Our understanding is essentially the negotiations went nowhere. And, Mr. Chairman, the tribes are in no position to negotiate because of this NLRB ruling. This amendment is an immediate solution for now, and it will fix this problem, offering a time out, until a final solution can be crafted.

Sovereignty is not conditional. We cannot accept it in some instances, but then, when it somehow is politically inconvenient, ignore it in others. That is why this amendment should be passed, and I ask my colleagues to join me in this.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute.

It is interesting to listen to my friend, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown), try to characterize this amendment, when I think more accurately we would characterize this as a choice. And this is the choice to make in this Chamber, and, Mr. Chairman, especially for those who say time and again they are friends of sovereignty.

Are we, in fact, going to respect the provisions in Article I, section 8 of our Constitution that grants sovereign rights and sovereign immunity to Indian tribes in that document of limited and specified powers, or are we going to make a change for political convenience, for political alliances?

And I understand it may be very uncomfortable for some in this Chamber, but are we basically going to say, Mr. Chairman, that the rights of union negotiations supersede the rights of sovereignty?

Make no mistake, Mr. Chairman, in this Chamber, at this time, this decision will be made. And I would offer for

all to note that we should never suborn sovereignty for political convenience. We dare not make that mistake. Support this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.

It is very simple at the end of day. I listened with interest to the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller), who would not let me answer a question. It had nothing to do with my advocacy of any policy, simply the notion that negotiations take place on a government-to- government basis.

Now, much has been made of the National Labor Relations Act and the National Labor Relations Board; but many in this Chamber, friends who unfortunately line up on the other side of this issue today, often cite the document that trumps all of these organizations, the United States Constitution, article 1, section 8, that Congress shall have the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the several States and with the Indian tribes.

Sovereignty is not situational. The Constitution of the United States trumps the National Labor Relations Act. It trumps any treaty, and tribes, as sovereign governments, should have the freedom to determine if this should go forward. Support this amendment.