New IDEA (Illegal Deduction Elimination Act)

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address you, Mr. Speaker, and address this United States House of Representatives. I have a series of issues on my mind here tonight. As I listened to some of this discussion, I promised myself to discipline myself and speak to the subject matter I came to the floor to address, and that, Mr. Speaker, is the issue of immigration.

First, I would say that we have a history of immigration in this country that certainly goes back to the very beginnings of the colonization of the 13 American original colonies.

America certainly is a nation that has benefited greatly from immigration, so that is why the Founding Fathers and the ratifiers of our Constitution put into this Constitution the directions to the United States Congress, Mr. Speaker, that we establish immigration policy. That immigration policy is the responsibility, the constitutional duty and the province of the United States Congress, and throughout the decades, and now centuries of immigration, that policy has been established by Congress, and we, for the most part, have adhered to those amounts and values that were reflected.

As I look back across those two centuries, I think there was a time in the early part of the 20th Century when there was a significant and massive amount of immigration that came in, much of it through Ellis Island, there was a real effort to settle a land that did not have a lot of population in it.

The region I represent in Western Iowa is one of those areas, as most of America is, I will say west of the East Coast. In fact, the population peaked out in my home county in the year 1912, much of it because of immigration. Since that time, it held steady for quite a while and has actually reduced in my agriculture county because we found ways to get the same amount of work done with less people because we have machines now to do a lot of that farm work that wasn't being done any way except by hand.

So immigration has been certainly the only way that this continent could have been settled. As I look around the United States, that is the case for most of us.

Mr. Speaker, I should back up to about 1924. That was a watershed year for immigration. That was the year in the aftermath of World War I, after the huge numbers of immigration had poured into the country, after my ancestors arrived here in a legal fashion, I would point out.

In 1924, Congress made a decision that they wanted to slow immigration down significantly. They wanted to do so so there would be an opportunity to have a time period where there could be an assimilation into this American culture. There was a concern that the picture of America would be different if the immigration kept continuing to refuel the cultural values that came from mostly Europe in those days, Mr. Speaker.

Our predecessors in this Congress understood that there is a limit to how much immigration a nation can prudently accept. They understood that there is something called a unique American culture, an overall civilizational culture here, that is the sum total of the values of all the sub-cultures that come into America.

They understood that we needed to have come on values, and one of those common values was a common language. They understood that we needed to have a common sense of history, a sense that we were pulling together, all pulling that same wagon together, not riding in it, but pulling together toward a common destiny. Those things that bind a nation together, our commonalities, common sense of history, a common sense of similar religions for the most part, a common language, English the official language, an opportunity to chase one's dreams, an opportunity to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. And part of this American dream is to leave this world a better place for the succeeding generations and for each generation to have more opportunities than the preceding generation had.

That has been a true fact, I believe, for every generation of Americans. Each generation has had more opportunity, and it is because this American work ethic, this culture that we have, has always striven to provide for more opportunities for the next generation.

So in 1924, they dramatically shrunk down the legal immigration coming into this country and they stalled immigration throughout that period on from 1924, on through the Second World War, on through the 1950s, up until about 1964 when they passed an immigration act that began to open up immigration in a larger way here in the United States. That was perhaps a 40 year hiatus from significant immigration numbers, and that was the period of time by which actually two parts of two generations were assimilated into America and there became a distinction here in this country, very much commonality.

We lost our sense of what was the country that our ancestors came from, we lost our sense of ethnicity, and we absorbed this American ethnicity with this great dream we are all created in God's image and there is not a distinction between his creation, and we could all come here and thrive and prosper together and all under one flag.

Well, so in 1964, perhaps 1965, when immigration laws were changed, it began to open this up, and it was opened up in a way that they didn't realize at the time I don't think the kind of numbers that would be coming, but it began to set a new set of parameters.

Chain migration was one of those, where a person could immigrate into the United States and then begin to be able to bring their family members in. Later on there was legislation that was passed that provided for a visa lottery so that there would be 50,000 people that would come into the United States by just entering their name in a lottery, and if their name was drawn from the lottery, they would come to the United States.

Those kind of policies began to come into play, and as that went along, immigration accelerated then from 1965 on up until 1986 when there was an amnesty program that was passed by Congress and signed by the President. This truly was an amnesty program. It was about 3 million illegals in America at the time that were given a lawful permanent resident status and a chance to become citizens of the United States.

I have met some of the people that came here illegally that presented themselves under the amnesty plan and became citizens of the United States, and I don't quarrel with the contribution they have made to this country, Mr. Speaker, but I do quarrel with the idea that we could present amnesty to people and expect them to respect the rule of law. If they came here by breaking the law and then we gave them a break on the law and eliminated the penalties that they were facing for breaking our laws, why should we be surprised if they don't respect the rest of the laws here in the United States of America?

So, from 1986 on, there was a contempt for the law, and the pledge though in 1986 was we will give amnesty to those perhaps 3 million people that are here in this country illegally because we really don't know how to deal with them otherwise, and then we are going to make sure that we enforce employer sanctions.

That was when I as an employer received my I-9 forms, and any employee application that I had, I had to take their identification down, their Social Security number, get the data introduced on an I-9 form, put that on file, and that was my protection in a way, but my responsibility as an employer to ensure that I was doing due diligence to hire lawful residents here in the United States, people who were legal to be here in the United States and could work here legally in the United States. I followed that with due diligence for years and years, anticipating then the INS would knock on my door some day, go through my files, check my employees and verify that I had been doing that due diligence and hiring legals.

Of course, the INS never showed up in my small operation. They showed up in a few of the larger operations back in 1986, 1987 and through the early nineties. But as the years went by, there was less and less enforcement at the employer level, fewer and fewer employer sanctions. And I wasn't very happy during the Clinton years as I saw a lack of will to enforce our immigration laws.

So we come to the year 2000, the election of our current Commander- in-Chief. And as I watched the enforcement, and I have noticed that within

the last couple of years there haven't been a half a dozen employers that have been sanctioned for hiring illegals, that is how far we can have come with this rule of law. We sent the message to people that came into the United States illegally that there was a reward for breaking our laws, there was amnesty at the end, there was a path to citizenship, which many of them did receive.

And then the trade-off was that there would be enforcement. And that would make it harder, that would shut off the jobs magnet, and, of course, then it would take the incentive away for people to come across the border to come into the United States illegally. That was the idea on how we were going to slow down border crossings, especially on our southern border.

But when the employer sanctions wound down, slowed down through the Clinton years and came to essentially a stop in the last couple of years, at least from all practical purposes came to a stop, that message echoes down below our southern border.

In fact, that message was going below our southern border well before it was clear that there are no employer sanctions. I happen to know that there was at least one corporation within the region that I represent who put up billboards in Mexico to recruit Mexican citizens to come to the United States illegally, to come to work for this particular company. There were other companies that did the same thing.

So the message goes down clear into southern Mexico, here is a path for you, come on up, we will set up your transportation, we will recruit you down here, we will bring you into the United States, we will put you to work, and we can put you to work under whatever Social Security you might submit, because, after all, there would not be any employer sanctions, there would not be an INS raid that would come in and pick people up and deport them back to their home country, which is what the law says.

That is what has happened with the immigration picture here in the United States over that century called the 20th century and beginning into this new century that we are in, this 21st century. And we have evolved into a situation now where people in America understand we do not control our border. We do not enforce our laws. We do not stop illegal traffic in a significant way coming across our border, and once they get into the United States they are essentially home free. They can go to work for about any company that is willing to hire them, and we will not see now ICE show up, the Immigration Customs Enforcement people show up, to enforce employer sanctions or to do a round-up and do a deportation.

And so businesses, being what they are, capital is always rational, Mr. Speaker, and so it will follow this path of least resistance. And you need a series of components to run a successful business anywhere, and certainly that is true in the United States of America. And some of those components are raw materials, facilities. You need capital, and, of course, you need administrative ability and know-how. You need a product or service that you are going to sell and a marketing ability and all of those things that go with it.

But you also need labor. And generally the highest cost to any business, single cost, is the cost of labor. And so business, being astute, will reach out to fill that gap in the cheapest way they possibly can. The most effective way for the dollars they will invest, I should say, because if they can get good, high-quality labor and pay a little more money for it, they will go that route, because that is rational, as capital, we know, is rational.

So business has set about bringing in cheap labor, especially across our southern border, putting them to work essentially with impunity, without fear of sanctions.

And this process as it began, it accelerated. Well, it was not a new process, especially along our southern border where we have a large amount of producers that raise specialty crops. It takes a fair amount of stoop labor and hand labor to raise those specialty crops. It took more 20 years ago than it does today, because machinery and technology has replaced some of that labor.

But that problem along the southern border was often the kind of situation where it was fairly localized. I do not excuse it. I do not agree with it. In fact, I disagree with it. But it did not bother the rest of the United States very much because that human traffic would come across the border and go to work and go back south of the border to live.

It was cheaper to live south of the border, and the money could be made north of the border. As that flowed back and forth, there was not a lot of public outcry until such time as the penetration of that illegal labor began to come up into the heartland of America and spread out to our coasts, along the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts, and on up into the Upper Midwest and Chicago, New York, the Northeast part of the United States. But in Iowa also we received a significant number of illegal workers.

And so as that happened, America began to understand what was going on in our southern border. But business was taking care of themselves by going to the well for cheap labor, because they could make profit with cheap, illegal labor.

Now, there is a thing in business called supply and demand. I mean, Adam Smith articulated it better than anyone and earlier than anyone in 1776 in his book Wealth of Nations. But I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that labor is a commodity like oil or gold or corn or beans, where I came from, and the value of that labor is determined by supply and demand in the marketplace. If there is a large supply of cheap labor, labor that is willing to work well under the going market for the existing labor, that cheap labor is going to underbid those workers, displace those workers, and businesses are certainly going to make that hire, and cash the profit. That is what they are in business to do is to return investment to their shareholders.

So they did not need to ever come up with other alternatives to labor because they had the easy supply of cheap labor just south of the border. So business did the rational thing. It was capital, after all, driving the decision. Capital is always rational.

The United States had that option, because we have a 2,000-mile border on our southern border, and wages are significantly cheaper down there. But just, Mr. Speaker, take, if you will, if the United States were a Nation unto itself, a continent that were sitting out in an ocean, perhaps like Australia is, if we did not have a border that was adjacent to a country that could supply cheap labor, if we did not have an ability to just open that border and let that labor pour in and find its way through the marketplace as this illegal labor has, what might we have done as we saw that we had a need for this and a demand for more labor?

And I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that we would have done a number of other things if illegal labor were not an option. And perhaps we would have recruited from other countries, and gone to this Congress and asked this Congress under its authority granted in the Constitution to open up legal immigration into the United States. We might have reached out and recruited people to come here, people that had assets, that had skills, that were trained, that were trainable, people that could best and the most quickly assimilate into this society and this economy.

We probably would have raised the numbers of legal immigrants if we had not had the border open for the illegals to fill that demand. That would have been one alternative--to go to more legal labor, in a prudent, manageable style that we could regulate.

Another alternative, and it would happen more than it has, would be to develop technology to replace the labor. I happened to see a show on television the other day about how they have replaced the hand labor picking tomatoes with machines and, through selective genetics, produced a tomato that has a tougher skin on it that can now be handled by machines. And many of the tomatoes in America are now picked by machine. It has cut down dramatically on the amount of labor that is necessary.

That is one kind of technology that has come forward. And the technology that used to be, the hand harvesting of sugar beets, is now done by machine. And the list of those items that we

used to think were all hand labor has dramatically changed.

A lot of the grapes in America are now picked by machine rather than picked by hand. If we had not had access to the labor, we would have produced more machines, developed more technology. In fact, as there is pressure on labor today, there is more technology that is being developed.

And another thing that was always evident, Mr. Speaker, in the ag communities in the world, it has always been the case, you know, to some degree it has been the case in my particular life, with my aspiration in the construction business where I spent my life, families tended to raise the labor that they needed. They had large families on farms because they needed the people to do the work. That was an alternative. It was a rational decision to have quite a few children.

That has stopped. And I should not say stopped, but it has dramatically reduced. And families before that would have had 5 or 6 or 8 or 9 or 10, or some of the households I have been in that have 12 or 14 or 15 children, the next generation has 1 or 2 or 3 children. And those children are trained and educated to move off the farm, go get a college education, take that diploma and cash it in for the biggest paycheck they can get anywhere in the country or even in the world, and not come back to the farm except to visit.

That is the message that has been sent out, Mr. Speaker, and I would ask, what are we doing in this country for the young man or the young woman who wants to finish their high school education and not go to college, they do not see themselves as a student, they just want to go to work, they want to go to work in the plant, the manufacturing plant, or they want to go to work in the food processing plant, or whatever the industry happens to be that is close to home? What if they just want to grow up and go to work, punch the time clock, do their 40 or 50 or even 60 hours a week, take their paycheck, hang up their hard hat and go home and raise their family, buy a house, and build their future?

Those young people in America do not have that chance anymore, Mr. Speaker. They do not have that chance because illegal labor has underbid those kind of low-skilled jobs that used to be respectable jobs that used to pay a reasonable wage, and used to pay reasonable benefits. But there are young Americans that do not want to go on to a higher education. Are we operating under the presumption that everyone should be a college graduate?

I applaud education, a good man or a good woman with an education is better than one without as far as revenue of their life work is concerned, but, still, they do not all want to go to school, Mr. Speaker. So we have taken that away from them. We have allowed that to be taken away from them by the underbidding of cheap illegal labor.

That is what business has done. They have done the rational thing because we have not enforced our laws.

Now, on the political side. There is the other benefit that is there. Why does not Congress have the will to step in and ensure that our immigration laws are enforced?

I will submit that there are significant numbers of Members in this Congress that are here because they represent a significant supply of illegals that are residents within their district. When we do the census every 10 years, as we did in the year 2000, we do not count U.S. citizens for redistricting purposes for these 435 congressional districts. We count human beings that happen to be residents in the United States and then we draw the district lines around that, about 600,000 people within each one of those district lines.

When people go to the polls to vote on whether they will send me back to this Congress, Mr. Speaker, it will take a minimum of 120,000 votes for me to be returned back to this Congress, and that is because that is perhaps one more vote than half that will be cast. About 240,000 votes will be cast in the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa. But there are at least two congressional districts in California that it will only take 30,000 votes to win a seat in Congress and come here and represent the people of those districts. And the reason is because our census counts people, not citizens. Noncitizens do not vote, at least they should not vote. The law says they cannot vote. And so because of the massive numbers of illegals that are residents in those regions, they have representation here in Congress whether they vote or not.

Their Member of Congress is elected from that region, certainly influenced by the public opinions in that region, and sent to this Congress on a mere 30,000 votes when those of us who represent predominantly citizens in our district are required to earn four times that many votes. So one can say that an illegal in America has at least as much representation in Congress as a U.S. citizen does.

I think, Mr. Speaker, that is wrong; and I think we need to amend the Constitution so that in our census, we can count the people. We should know how many residents that are in America. That is the intent of our Constitution. But for redistricting purposes, our Founding Fathers did not envision that we would be giving representation to people who are here illegally. And so that is the political benefit that comes from illegal labor.

Additionally, there is also on the liberal side of the aisle, there is a strong push to legalize and give a path to citizenship to people that are here illegally because they see the political benefit to having more numbers, more votes, more political influence here. I have a real strong bias in favor of citizens of the United States of America and I am a great cheerleader for legal immigrants. And I submit that they are the people that deserve the representation in our country and that those that are here illegally do not deserve representation in this country and they are not fully protected by the rights of citizenship as some would submit in this Chamber, Mr. Speaker.

There is a business demand for cheap labor, Mr. Speaker. There are the political benefits. Then people will argue that we cannot replace this labor supply. We cannot get along without this illegal labor. They will not say illegal labor. They always confuse the term of legal immigrant with illegal immigrant. Immigrant to them is a generic term that covers everyone, and I will tell you that when I am talking about illegal, that is the people who have come in here illegally. Real legal immigrants, I do not know anyone that opposes legal immigration. I certainly do not. It has been good for the United States of America. It is something we must manage.

But for 3 years that I have been in this Congress, we have talked about 11 million illegals in the United States of America, 11 million. If you go back and look at the numbers and look at the proportion that is employed, the workforce is about 6.3 million of the 11 million illegals. These are numbers that have been bantered about here for at least 3 years. Well, that 6.3 million workforce represents 4 percent of the labor force, 2.2 percent of the gross domestic product or, excuse me, of the overall wages of the many dollars, I think it is trillions of dollars of wages that are earned altogether in America. It is 2.2 percent of that that goes to the illegal workforce.

So if by some miracle, illegal labor did not go to work tomorrow morning and that was stopped for an extended period of time, we would have to find 4 people out of 10 to fill those roles but the productivity is down to perhaps half of that. So maybe we do need someone to fill those roles. We noticed the difference, but it is only 2.2 percent of the overall earned wages.

So it is something that if I have a crew, a work crew of 100 people and I am going to lose two of them tomorrow morning, you can bet we will keep things running. We will keep your operation going. We will keep our production up there. We will notice a difference but we will find a way to adapt.

People say, well, you cannot replace those illegal workers, that 6.3 million. I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that today there are 7.5 million on the unemployed rolls. Those people are being paid not to work today, 7.5 million. There is another 5.2 million who are looking for work, who have exhausted their unemployment benefits but they will answer the polling questions and say, I want a job. I am still looking for work.

So you add that up and that is 12.7 million. Then you add to that the young people between the ages of 16 and 19 that presumably would be looking for at least perhaps some part-time

work and some that would like to go into full-time work. There are 9.3 million in that group between the ages of 16 and 19. They are not in the workforce in any way whatsoever, not even on a part-time basis. They may be going to school. They may be full-time students, but many of them could be brought into the workforce and at least work part time. They can flip some burgers or cook some steaks or mow some lawns or fix some roofs or go out and do some harvest out here in the time that we really need the labor.

Additionally, between the ages of 65 and 69 there are 4.5 million Americans and some of them presumably would go to work if we did not penalize them for earning too much money once they start to collect their Social Security check.

Additionally, Mr. Speaker, between the ages of 20 and 64, that age group that is really the workforce age group of America, there are another 51 million Americans that are not in the workforce and they are not listed on the unemployment roles and they are not part of that 5.2 million that are looking for work. This 51 million Americans, they may be retired because they are wealthy. They may be homemakers. They may be working in the black market somewhere doing some cash trade so they do not show up in the workforce. But there is a potential for 51 million Americans between the ages of 20 and 64.

So this all adds up, Mr. Speaker, to 77.5 million Americans that are not currently in the workforce. There are a universe of people that could be gone to hire them to do these jobs that people say that Americans will not do. So I took the 6.3 million illegal workforce, divided it into the 77.5 million Americans that are not working and that comes out to 12.3 times.

There are 12.3 people in America that are not working for every illegal in America that is working. So if you just hired one out of those 12.3 and put them to work you could solve this problem. I cannot believe that business is not smart enough to figure this out. They are smart enough to figure it out but they are taking the easy option, the cheap option, the option that avoids liability, the option that really, again, it is rationale to higher illegals because they will go to work cheaper for one thing, Mr. Speaker. They do not file unemployment claims. They do not file workers' comp claims. You do not really have to have a lot of health insurance for somebody that is here illegally. You do not have to put together their retirement plan. You do not have to worry about an illegal worker getting mad at you and filing a lawsuit that might shut your company down.

You add up all of those burdens that become part of the risk and responsibility of hiring legal people to work here in the United States and then you add to that that you can hire the illegals cheaper, but let's just say you can't. Let's just say that you will put $10 an hour out on the table and you will higher an illegal for $10 an hour or you will offer $10 an hour to a legal person. Now, the legal person might be working right alongside the illegal and they might be getting gross wages $10 an hour each. But the legal one, even if they are a single dependent, they have to claim themselves as a dependent, and then there will be withholding for their Federal income tax, and their State income tax, and their payroll tax including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

That comes out of their check. The illegal almost invariably, and I have stacks and stacks of check stubs in my filing cabinet that show me this, claim the maximum number of dependents. So there is no withholding for Federal or for State. They give up their payroll tax to Social Security and Medicare the .0765 side of the thing, 7.65 percent of their payroll, but there is no withholding for Federal and for State if they claim the maximum number of dependents.

So what it amounts to is, if you are an illegal worker working for $10 an hour and make that decision to claim the maximum number of dependents, whether you have them or not, the withholding different is about $1.54 an hour. What American citizen wants to go out and work alongside someone who is here illegally? The American citizen is making $10 an hour, and the person who is here illegally is making $10 an hour, and you see the take-home pay. You work next to somebody. You often see that, and you realize that guy is taking home $1.54 more than I am. Why would they stay there in a job like that? Why would there not be resentment when the employer on this other side of the equation sees once he pays that $10 an hour, he is done with that?

It is kind of like piecemeal work. It is like custom work. It is not like you really have a full-time employee that carries all those responsibilities with it. You just pay the hourly rate, and when the shop closes that night, you are done until the next day. There is not a lingering liability that goes on like there is with a legal employee.

I have dealt with those things on my side, and believe me, I have great respect for all employers. But I wrote out payroll checks for over 1,400-and-some consecutive weeks. We did it all legally, and we competed against people who did not often. It is unjust for us to put employers in this country, who want to do it right, and competition up against those who refuse to do it right, but a lot of it is our public policy.

So, Mr. Speaker, we passed some legislation here before Christmas, enforcement legislation, on the floor of this Congress, and it does a number of things, including tighten up our borders.

It requires employers to use the employment verification program, so I call it the instant check program. When they hire someone, they will have to enter the Social Security number, date of birth, place of birth, perhaps the mother's maiden name, a series of different indicators. That information then goes out on the Internet, out to the Department of Homeland Security database, and also, it goes to the ICE database, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, those two databases. It will verify if that information that is entered into that computer identifies a person legal to work in the United States.

I have this program entered into my computer, and I have run a whole series of different tries on it. The longest delay I have had is 6 seconds. That is not so long when you think about how long it takes to fill out the paperwork to hire someone and the effort you have to put in it.

That bill requires that the employment verification system be used by all employers. That will be helpful, Mr. Speaker, if we can enforce anything, but I am not optimistic that this administration will enforce. So I have introduced legislation called New IDEA legislation, the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. IDEA is the Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. It brings the IRS into this.

The Internal Revenue Service has demonstrated a desire to enforce the laws that they are entrusted with. They want to enforce that we all pay our income tax, and they seem to be entirely willing to levy interest and penalties against underpaid taxes. So New IDEA would give the IRS the authority to take the Social Security numbers that are introduced on the 941 employee withholding forms, enter those into the instant check program, the employment verification program, and if the employer knew or should have known they were hiring an illegal, it allows the IRS to disallow the wages and benefits that were paid to illegals as a business expense. The IRS makes that decision. That $10 an hour that was an expensed item goes over into the plus side, into the profit column, and presuming that the business is profitable, perhaps a corporation would be in a 34 percent corporate income tax bracket. If that is the case, then the $10 an hour expensed item, that becomes now a profit item. It gets the 34 percent tax levied against it and also interest and penalties. This totals up to about $6 an hour on top of the $10 an hour.

The net result of New IDEA, H.R. 3095, Mr. Speaker, becomes a $16 an hour liability for this illegal employee. Now, I will not tell you that you can hire then a $16 illegal because we have all of those things we talked about, health insurance, workers comp, unemployment and retirement benefits and all that contingent liability that comes with that, but perhaps a person can take a job that is legal here for maybe $12 an hour, and that levels the playing

field so that lawful permanent residents in the United States and especially citizens of the United States then can have some opportunities instead of being undercut and underpriced by cheap, illegal labor.

That is the idea of New IDEA, the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act, H.R. 3095, and it will generate billions of dollars for the United States Treasury until employers figure out that it will be enforced by the IRS.

You might, Mr. Speaker, contemplate that it would be unjust for us to go in and levy that kind of a penalty on employers if we did not give them some kind of safe harbor if they use the instant check program. New IDEA does give safe harbor to employers if they use the instant check program and they used it in good faith, then that gives them safe harbor. So the IRS then cannot levy interest and penalties against the employer if they happen to hire someone that is illegal and maybe the instant check could potentially have a mistake in it.

So we set this up with the right kind of structure. We bring in the IRS to do a good task, to help enforce our immigration laws. We direct the IRS then to make those kind of reports to Immigration and Customs Enforcement so that once there is a determination made that an employer was, I will say, willfully hiring illegals, then Immigration and Customs Enforcement can come in and levy employer sanctions under those cases.

So the risk could be significantly greater than another $6 an hour on top of your $10 an hour, but what it does is it puts enforcement in place where enforcement did not exist before. It brings a new agency in that has demonstrated a willingness to enforce Federal law. It changes this dynamic. It shuts down the magnet so that this magnet that is bringing people into the United States for the jobs, it shuts down the jobs magnet, Mr. Speaker. That is what New IDEA does, and you couple that with building a fence and more employer sanctions, those are encouraged. They are required to use the basic pilot instant check program. These things all go together to shut down the jobs magnet.

Another thing that we need to do and we can do so statutorily, not requiring a constitutional amendment, is to pass a law here in the United States Congress to put an end to anchor babies, birthright citizenship. That was not envisioned either in our Constitution. It is a practice. It is kind of a bad habit that we have gotten into, and so it is not guaranteed in the Constitution that a person born in the United States can be granted or shall be granted automatic United States citizenship. It is a practice that we have take on and it has gotten out of hand.

So we need to shut down the jobs magnet. We need to end birthright citizenship. We need to build a fence because not only is it a way to control the flow of humanity, which in the last year we have had perhaps 4 million illegals come across our southern border. I can tell you how many we stopped. We stopped 1,159,000, thanks to an effective border patrol, and I say effective given the manpower that they have, faced with the manpower that they are faced with. That is a fairly astonishing accomplishment to pick up 1,159,000, but we only adjudicated 1,640 to go back to their home country.

The rest of them, some of them, perhaps 155,000 OTMs, other than Mexicans, were released because we did not have a deportation agreement with their home countries. So they just disappeared into America's society.

Then on top of that, the rest of them were released on the promise that they would return to their home countries. Will you go back to your home country? Yeah, I will go. Okay, fine. Nobody took them down to the turnstile and saw to it that they went through and were put in airplanes and flew back into Mexico City and put them on a bus and took them to their hometown and did so because it was further for them to come back here to the United States.

You know, I think that is a questionable policy, and I do not know if it is very effective on the dollar, but we did some of those things. And yet the Border Patrol has testified that they stop perhaps one- fourth, or, maybe on a good day, a third of the illegal entrants. So that will take that 1,159,000 that came in and it takes that number up to about 4 million. So 2 to 3 million, if you do your math, that came into the United States unobstructed, and reasonably thinking that most will stay here. And yet for 3 years we have been saying 11 million illegals. But in 3 years we could have accumulated another 11 million illegals. And if the number was right 3 years ago, today maybe it is 22 million illegals rather than 11 million illegals. And maybe this workforce is a little bigger than 6.3 million. Maybe it is 12 million. Maybe you have to hire 2 out of every 12 that are not working in America to fill that gap.

But many have said they are doing work that Americans won't do, and that concerned me. I heard a story that if you need your roof fixed in Dallas and it is 105 degrees, no American will go up and fix that roof. Well, Mr. Speaker, I would submit that myself, this Member of Congress, and my crews have worked in an environment that from the heat index temperature on up to 126 degrees, and from a wind chill index temperature down to 60 below, and we have done that for days at a time. So that is 186 degrees, and it feels like temperature range. And certainly at 126 it doesn't feel a lot hotter than that on that roof in Dallas. But I asked myself, what would be the hottest, dirtiest, most difficult, most dangerous job there is anywhere in the world?

I conducted a little informal poll and came back with a consensus that rooting terrorists out of Fallujah probably is the hottest, most difficult, the dirtiest, most dangerous job anywhere in the world. And we have soldiers and marines that have been doing that, Mr. Speaker. And if it is noncombat pay, it pays them $6.80 an hour, and with combat pay it comes to $8.09 an hour. Plus benefits, I admit, Mr. Speaker. That is $8.09 an hour for a soldier to put his life on the line when it is 130 degrees, with bullets flying and RPGs going through the air. That is what is going on with brave American patriots.

If they will do that kind of work for that kind of money, then I believe that the difference is this work that is here in this country, that people claim Americans will not do, has simply just been bid down or it pays too little. And I have watched entire crews, almost entire crews of, I will say, 1,300 in a packing plant that were only about 8 Hispanics 10 years ago go to 81 percent today. And it is not because all of a sudden those people that were there 10 years ago picked up and left. They have been displaced one at a time. The wages and benefits stayed low, and so the illegal labor came in and replaced the labor of the people who had built their lives and their dreams around that plant and around that job.

So there is work, and Americans will do all of this work. And I always argue that if you want to see it on the other side, if marines rooting terrorists out of Fallujah for $8.09 an hour doesn't move your heart, Mr. Speaker, then I would say this: that I could hire Bill Clinton tomorrow to mow my lawn if I just paid him enough money. That is the other side of the equation.

In between those two extremes are all kinds of solutions. There are the 77 million nonworking Americans and there are ways to recruit them and to motivate them. We can have bigger families and we can use more technology and open up illegal immigration. But the rule of law must be maintained, and it must be restored if we are going to have respect for the laws in this country.

A question that is never asked, or seldom asked and never answered by the proponents of open borders, Mr. Speaker, is the question: Is there such a thing as too much immigration? That is the number one most obvious question of all. If you are going to enter into this discussion and this debate and you are going to seek to establish an immigration policy and be a part of that debate and put your vote up, you ought to have an opinion on whether there is such a thing as too much immigration.

Some will go off on tangents and not answer that question. If you pull them back from their tangents and just insist, is there such a thing as too much immigration, in the end they have to admit that if there isn't such a thing, then they have to argue, well, okay, we can have 6 billion people here in the United States. Everyone wants to come to America, for good reason. So if there

is not such a thing as too much immigration into the United States, legal or illegal, then everybody in the world might well want to come here, and 6 billion people living in these 50 States of America and depopulating the rest of the world, I do not think that is the formula we want to look at.

So someplace between this 283 million that we have and the 6 billion that are out there to be recruited might be the right kind of number. Maybe the number is even perhaps less than the 283 million. I don't think so, but it should be part of our discussion.

So there is such a thing as too much immigration. We can establish that clearly, unless they are willing to take the position that 6 billion people would be an appropriate number for Americans. So if there is such a thing as too much immigration, then the next question is, well, how much is too much? And what are the reasons by which we would come to a conclusion?

I would argue, Mr. Speaker, that we need to bring people into this country who can assimilate into this society, who can contribute to this economy, and people who hopefully have an education and perhaps some capital. We need to look at the industries that are there and have these debates about H1 and H2B visas so we can supply the demand that is there.

But I am hearing people whine when I say we need to enforce our immigration laws, and it is because they are afraid they are going to lose their gardener or they are going to lose their housekeeper. I talked to an individual the other day that drove up to the illegal immigrant distribution center, where some of the communities have built a building so they can gather the day laborers there. He pulled his car up and he said, I need someone to work for the day. He had 100 people around him. Then he said, I have got $10 an hour, and they all walked away. He had to get out of his car and say I have $15; now I have $20. He found one that would work for $20 an hour for a short day.

I would submit that that is not a national security issue if you can't hire someone to pull the weeds out of your garden. If you cannot go out there or hire someone to do that, go rent a condo and sell the house to someone who can figure that out. This economy will sort this out. Supply and demand is always taking care of this. People used to migrate to go to work. They migrated out of Oklahoma to go to California. The Okies picked grapes out there.

I read a story about a 6-by-6 area in Milwaukee, 36 square blocks, where they used to have heads of households all working in the breweries. They came there in the 1930s from the South. And on that day, and this has been some years ago that I read this article, but on that day there wasn't a single working head of household because those jobs had disappeared in the breweries in Milwaukee. But nobody thought that that labor force might want to migrate somewhere where there was a job, because the safety net that is there has become a hammock. That is why we have 7.5 million on unemployment and that is why there is another 5.2 million that are looking. And many of those are good people. But if we provide a safety net there, it is easier to set back on that, rest a little on the hammock instead of having to get out there and go to work.

So if there is such a thing as too much immigration, then how much is too much? And I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that we are working at an effective rate right now. We will see differences in numbers, but the legal numbers are about a million a year. That is a lot of people. I think we can assimilate a million a year. But at some point we need to make sure that they have an opportunity for education; that they can learn the language.

We are printing ballots in more than 22 different languages just in Los Angeles County alone. We are in the process of reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act and people are arguing that even after all these generations people need a ballot handed to them in the language they are comfortable with. And I would argue that if you are born here in the United States or are a naturalized citizen, you should have had enough access to the English language to be able to read the ballot and cast a vote.

The only way that you can argue that a person that is legal to vote in the United States, that means a United States citizen, doesn't have a command of the English language, it wouldn't be if they were a naturalized citizen because they have to demonstrate proficiency in English to be a citizen, so they would have had to have been born here in the United States, had birthright citizenship, lived in an enclave, and didn't learn enough English to be able to know President, Vice President, Congressman, State senator, or State representative. Now, how long would it take to learn that? And if you couldn't learn that enough to vote, how could you understand the current events and the culture well enough to make an informed decision?

So I think that we are going down this wrong path with catering to people. We need to bring people together under one umbrella. A common language is the single most powerful unifying force that there has ever been throughout history. God knew that at the Tower of Babble. We have known it many, many times.

There was an emperor in about 245 B.C. in China. And I will never get the pronunciation right in Chinese, Mr. Speaker, but I call him Qin Shi Huang Di. He was the first emperor of China, and that part I know I have right. But he looked around and realized there were all these different tribal regions within China. They had a common culture, they wore similar clothes, ate similar food, a lot of similar habits, but they couldn't communicate with each other because they didn't speak the same language.

He set about to unify the Chinese people for the next 10,000 years, and that was a quote from him, by hiring scribes to draft the Chinese language. They did that, and that language has bonded those people together for a fourth of that time. That is how powerful language is as a unifying force.

I will submit that we have a debate ahead of us, and it is going to be an intense debate. Immigration is a very, very complicated and convoluted subject. There are people whose oxen are going to be gored. There are people who walk away from the rule of law, and they say, What are we going to do? We have businesses that are dependent on illegal labor so you need to legalize this labor.

I heard that last Friday in testimony in a trip out West. I heard a witness testify that they had set up their business near the border based on the premise they could bring illegal labor to do that work. Now they have what I call an attrition rate of 9 percent a week, and we should legalize that, that is their request. We should legalize because, after all, the business cannot get along without illegal labor.

If they premised their business on illegal labor, it does not tug at my heartstrings so much because I have great reverence for the rule of law, the order that is here in the United States of America, for this Constitution that I carry next to my heart every day, to the continuity of our history, to our responsibility to this sacred covenant that really is our Constitution, this responsibility, the legacy that is left us by our Founding Fathers, this rule of law, this greater American civilization, the one that welcomes people in a legal way and gives everyone here an opportunity to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and succeed.

And often, newly arriving immigrants surpass their peers, those born here in the United States that maybe take some of this for granted. A lot of the vitality in America comes from immigration, but the idea that America is a Nation of immigrants and therefore we cannot have a rational immigration policy is an idea that is built upon a fallacy.

I asked the question in an immigration hearing of a series of witnesses: Is the United States a Nation of immigrants? And the answer was yes from all witnesses. Then please submit to me, since you are here as an expert, name a nation that is not a nation of immigrants? No one could answer that question because all nations are nations of immigrants. All nations have benefited from the flow of human traffic.

When people come to go to work, temporary worker, guest worker programs, there is no model in the history of humanity where there has been a

successful temporary worker program. When people are brought into a country to work, they put down roots. It is human nature. They raise a family and buy houses. They should do that. If we bring people into this country, however we might do that, and whether I lose this debate on the rational side of this or not, we ought to ensure that they do have an opportunity to become full-fledged American citizens and not create a second-class category of citizens here in the United States. That will build resentment. People who come here and live and work here, and do so legally, should have a path to citizenship. It should be an earned citizenship. They should respect and revere our laws and our history, but a second-class level of citizenship will be a wedge between us. It will pit people here in America against each other.

And a guest worker, temporary worker program sets up a lower class of residence, quasi-legal workers, but that does not guarantee that there will not be competing groups of illegal workers that are underbidding the guest workers. With guest workers, you have to make sure they are not putting too much pressure on the services, such as health care and education. If you do all of that, it raises the price of labor. They are going to want more money anyway because now they are legal and they have some options.

The people who come in to underbid that will be another wave of illegal workers, and that other wave will drive the price down even further.

So we must control our borders and insist that there is respect for our laws. We must look down range to the future and what America is going to look like in a generation or two. We must maintain our cultural continuity, respect the rule of law and make a prudent decision here, not one that is based upon the idea of we do not have any alternatives. We have many alternatives. We have 77.5 million nonworking Americans. We have technology that we could develop. We could increase our birth rate, open up legal immigration for the skills that we need, and those are just some of the solutions that I can come up with. But, in fact, business is so creative, they can think of many, many more.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I would express my appreciation for the privilege to address you and this United States House of Representatives.

As always, I profoundly appreciate the opportunity to address you, Mr. Speaker, and in doing so addressing this Chamber; and the echo of the voice that comes here echoes to the American people all across this continent, and indeed and in fact across the world.

Mr. Speaker, as I listen to the dialogue here in this deliberative body and listen to some of the statistics and some of the opinions that were presented here several speakers ago, primarily by the gentlewoman from Ohio speaking in opposition to our operations in Iraq and the concern that she has about the loss of life, which I share, but also the advice and the admonitions that came through that were not supportive of our Secretary of Defense, not supportive of the strategy. I think, though, that her remarks were

made all in good spirit and I think in a fashion that she believes is the best course for this country to take. So I don't take issue with the motive, Mr. Speaker, but I just have a different opinion and I have a different viewpoint on a number of the statistics, so I will try to illuminate this issue a little bit.

The statement was made by the gentlewoman that there have been 27,000 civilians that have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of our operations there, and that date for me would be March 22, 2003. That, indeed, may be the number, and I don't take issue with the specificity of that number of 27,000 civilians killed. I would point out, though, that there have been now 3 years and a little more than a month go by, so one would need to divide that down to take a look at it from an annual perspective, and that would take that down to about 9,000 civilians a year.

Mr. Speaker, it occurs to me as I sit here in this Chamber and evaluate this that not too long ago I was down in South America on a trade mission through Brazil and also Argentina and a couple of other smaller countries briefly, and there in Sao Paulo, a large city in the southern part of Brazil, they informed me that they had an annual number of murders in that city of 10,000 people that died violent deaths at the hands of murderers in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Now, whether you want to measure that that city is the compressed inner city with a lower population or the city and its suburbs with a larger population, and perhaps that could go as many as 16 million or maybe even larger for the size of the city, Mr. Speaker, that is still an astonishing number to think of 10,000 people in a single city that are murdered in a single year, a high level of violence.

So when I came back, I took a look at some statistics to try to get a handle on this, to try to put it in perspective. And one of the ways we can do that is we look at the communities that we know that we live in where we see the crime figures day by day on the front page of the paper, and sadly often they don't make the front page of our paper, and look also at other countries where we are paying intense attention. So I pulled those statistics together for a number of countries.

Of course, Iraq would be number one on that list. And the statistics are given on many web pages and easily available to all, Mr. Speaker, but the number of murder victims, deaths due to violent acts, murder victims per 100,000. So you take it down into that number per 100,000, it puts it in a balanced perspective, it is apples to apples, and it will give a person an idea of about what kind of a violent society we might be dealing with.

So as I look at these numbers, Mr. Speaker, I actually didn't come up with the numbers for Brazil and I couldn't find the numbers for the city of Sao Paulo, but I did find the numbers for Iraq. For Iraq, the victims of violence, and in that we include the bombing victims, of civilians and those that are victims also of murder in Iraq, it comes down to 27.51 deaths per 100,000 per year; 27.51 is the number. So if you are living in a city of exactly 100,000 people, statistically there would be 27.51 of them who would die a violent death in any given year. That is the statistical number. And, of course, we know there are anomalies, and we know there are concentrations of tragedies, and we know there are long terms of peacefulness that go on in other parts of the country. But this helps us understand how a country like Iraq can continue to move forward with the kind of violence that we see on television. It makes me wonder, Mr. Speaker, if we aren't seeing almost all of the violence that goes on in Iraq on television because we are seeing those high levels of violence continually in front of our faces every day. I think it is sometimes intentional and strategic rather than news; 27.51 fatalities per 100,000 in Iraq.

Now, how does this compare across the rest of the world? Well, one might look at a country, say, like Venezuela, 31.61 violent deaths per 100,000. So Venezuela is slightly more dangerous to live in than Iraq is.

And Jamaica, 32.40 violent deaths per 100,000 compared to the 27.51 in Iraq. Jamaica is slightly more dangerous to live in than Iraq.

And then you have South Africa. It jumps all the way up to 49.60.

Now, we are starting to see some numbers here that take us up to almost twice the rate, it is a little less than twice the rate of Iraq's fatality rate; 49.60 in South Africa per 100,000.

But we do have some numbers that go over twice the rate. One of those would be Colombia. Iraq, 27.51 deaths per 100,000; Colombia, 61.78 violent deaths per 100,000, more than two times as many deaths there. It is more than twice as dangerous to be a civilian living supposedly in peace and harmony in Colombia than it is to be a civilian living in the middle of this chaos in Iraq that I hear is intolerable.

Mr. Speaker, I would point out that if it is intolerable to face that kind of violence as a percentage of the population in Iraq that is unsustainable and that somehow we should pull out of there and wash our hands and give up or cut and run or maybe split the country up into three different sections, and then imagine what kind of violence we would have if we pitted those three factors against each other. But, instead, I will submit that we are being treated with a relentless drum beat of television violence in Iraq that, even though it is honestly represented in those significant instances, we don't have our television cameras lined up on the emergency rooms in the United States. We don't have them lined up here in the emergency rooms in Washington, D.C. or Detroit or Baltimore or New Orleans or Atlanta or St. Louis.

Mr. Speaker, speaking of those cities, I would point out that there is a way also to draw a measure, a measure that Americans will have a different feel for when I lay out the casualty rates for violent deaths in our cities in America. And it occurs to me when I look at these statistics that it is far more dangerous for my wife to live here in Washington, D.C. than it would be if she were living as an Iraqi civilian citizen in a random place in Iraq. Now, we know there are places with higher violent rates, but 27.51 deaths per 100,000 in Iraq per year.

I am going to go to Washington, D.C.; 45.9 deaths per 100,000, Mr. Speaker, compared to the 27.5 in Iraq per 100,000.

Detroit, 41.8. It is getting a little safer in Detroit than it is in Washington, D.C., but still far more dangerous in Detroit than it is in Iraq to be a civilian.

Baltimore, 37.7; Atlanta, 34.9; St. Louis, 31.4. We are getting down there closer to the fatality rate to live in St. Louis rather than living somewhere in Iraq at 27.51.

So what city might be comparable, a city that we would be familiar with that would have a violent death rate that one would compare to the equivalent of being a civilian in Iraq? Well, Mr. Speaker, if there are people out there that are sitting in Oakland, California, tonight and they are thinking about how they are living safe in their living room, they are just slightly safer in their living rooms living in the community of Oakland, California, than they are living in a random community in Iraq. The Oakland fatality rate for a violent death is 26.1 compared to the 27.51 in Iraq.

Mr. Speaker, I think this makes the point very well that we can be delivered a constant drum beat of violence, and then we begin to think that it is an intolerable violence and something that is such a high level that it can't continue, that a civil society just simply can't sustain that kind of an onslaught, when, truthfully, the violent level in Iraq is well less than half of the violent level in Colombia, and they sustain themselves although not so well. Slightly higher than half the rate of South Africa; they sustain themselves.

We go to Jamaica because it is a wonderful place to visit, but the violence level there is a little more violent than Iraq, slightly less violent than Oakland, California.

Venezuela, I mentioned.

The one that I left off was New Orleans. Thinking in terms of 27.51 deaths per 100,000 violent deaths in Iraq; New Orleans before Katrina, 53.1, almost twice the violent deaths in New Orleans as there is in Iraq.

So that gives us a sense, I think, Mr. Speaker that this is a manageable violence rate. And although we abhor all violence and as much as we have struggled to bring a civil society and order there, there is still the insurgency. There are still the people who believe

that they will gain their power back if they keep attacking Americans, if they keep attacking Iraqis.

But we heard today from the Secretary of Defense that there are 254,000 Iraqis in uniform defending Iraqis. Those numbers are going up. They are heading towards 325,000. And each day that goes by, we have more Iraqi troops in uniform, better trained, better equipped, taking on more and more of the security tasks that are there. Yes, some are being led by Americans; many are being advised by Americans. They have taken over 30 of the bases, the Iraqi troops. These are the good guys on our side, taking over 30 of the bases there to manage. They are performing well, they are engaging in battle, they are not cutting and running, and we are standing up a military in Iraq that can more than face down these insurgents.

Mr. Speaker, the point of all of this, and I think it is a point that needs to be made, is we have been engaged in a war on terror, and we continue to be in this global war on terror, the operations that go on globally and primarily in Afghanistan and in Iraq. I don't hear complaints from this side of the aisle about the operations in Afghanistan. They are essentially universally acclaimed as a tremendous military accomplishment. But you can't have a sustainable military accomplishment unless you have also an effective political accomplishment. There has to be a political solution to follow every military operation and accomplishment, or it cannot be sustained, and behind that political solution needs to be an economic solution. Afghanistan is on the way.

Iraq has been a more difficult struggle, but it is essentially the same equation with a couple of important differences. One is that Iraq is surrounded by countries who have been funding, equipping and sending insurgents in, our enemies. That consistent supply of munitions and equipment and people has made it a relentless insurgent effort in Iraq. We will get a handle on that, especially the more the Iraqis step up, the more tips they get, the more they are able to come in and, with special forces, knock out the leadership of al Qaeda. There have been several times that Zarqawi has been within a few minutes of coming under the control of coalition forces. In fact, he was at one time under the control of the Iraqi forces, and they didn't realize who they had, and had they realized that, that part would be over. But the effort that is going on in Iraq is more complicated; it has a more organized opposition.

But the rewards on the other side, Mr. Speaker, also can be more substantial than the rewards in Afghanistan, and for a couple of important reasons. One of those reasons is the strategic location of Iraq. It is surrounded by Syria on the one side and Iran on the other side, in close proximity of course by Kuwait and in close proximity to Saudi Arabia. The image that comes from a successful and prosperous Iraq emanates into those countries and into all Arab countries. And if this military solution in Iraq, which is nearly at its completion, and now that we have an opportunity watching the politics in Iraq with our new prime minister and I should say their new prime minister whom they selected, Jawad al Maliki, the new prime minister of Iraq, they now are in the process and forming a truly legitimate government. It has taken them 4 months, but they are putting in place people now, and the minister will soon be seated. And when that happens, this government that I hoped would be up 3 months ago could likely be up in just a few weeks, up and running and functioning, giving order to the country, giving direction to it, carrying on command-and-control operations from the top down, sending out the payroll to the people that are working within government, getting supplies out, fixing the infrastructure, keeping the flow of goods and commerce and munitions and essential supplies to the people of Iraq, giving order.

Mr. Speaker, when that order comes, the insurgents will realize something, and I think that what they will need to realize is what the losers in every war have to conclude. And that is, a war is never over until the losing side realizes that they have lost. They have got to get to that point where they don't have the hope any longer, they don't have the ability any longer to carry out war.

Von Clausewitz wrote, his most common summary of his quotes on his book on war, that, ``the object of war is to destroy the enemy's will and ability to conduct war.'' I put it down into simple terms. I say, ``War is never over until the enemy realizes they have lost.'' And so that message is getting through to the other side, and I think that Zarqawi is desperate.

As they beat the drum and put more information out through the media, we are not seeing the kind of activity that would indicate to me that they have an ability to carry on this war very much longer. As the Iraqis step up in uniform and go from 254,000 on their way to 325,000, they will be in a position to occupy, to control order, and they can penetrate any operation going on in Iraq. The day will come not too far from now when the enemy has to realize that the object of war has been reached by the Coalition Forces and that they have lost.

Now there is another thing that happens here when you are engaged in a war, especially when you are in a free country, a constitutional republic with constitutional rights, freedom of speech, press and assembly. You cannot control the freedom of speech, press and assembly that goes on in the United States of America. So we sometimes do the foolish thing: We sometimes have people who are tools of the enemy. We sometimes have people who utter words and phrases, people who are viewed as quasi leaders of the United States who undermine our effort.

I have with me here a poster.

Mr. Speaker, this is a poster of the senior Senator from Massachusetts; and he says this back on April 6, 2004, ``This was made up in Texas. This whole thing was a fraud. Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam.'' April, 2004.

What does this mean to the people who are fighting against us? What does this mean to the insurgents who are sitting in their hovel somewhere, making a bomb, trying to get the courage to plant and detonate that bomb? It encourages the enemy.

If one does not think so, I thought I would go to the Vietnam archives and see what I could learn about what kind of message did they get during the Vietnam War. I came across a quote that came from a 1995 interview with a North Vietnamese colonel, Colonel Bui Tin. He was the colonel that received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975. He later became editor of the People's Daily, the official newspaper of Vietnam. He now lives in Paris where he immigrated after becoming disillusioned with the fruits of Vietnamese communism. He has a viewpoint different than when he was fighting for communism.

But when asked, when Colonel Tin was asked this question, how did Hanoi intend to defeat the Americans, he replied, by fighting a long war which would break their will to help South Vietnam.

Ho Chi Minh said: ``We do not need to win military victories. We only need to hit them until they give up and get out.''

The follow-up question: Was the American anti-war movement important to Hanoi's victory? Colonel Bui Tin responded, ``It was essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American anti-war movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark,'' who has not given up his tactics yet, Mr. Speaker, ``gave us confidence we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she with ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.''

And another question of Colonel Bui Tin: ``Did the Politburo pay attention to these visits?''

``Keenly.''

``Why did they pay keen attention?

His response: ``Those people represented the conscience of America. The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power into our favor. America lost because of its democracy.

Through dissent and protest, it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.''

Mr. Speaker, that statement bears repeating in part. He answered, ``Those people represented the conscience of America. The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor.''

Does it sound like some of the voices we have heard today coming from the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker? And is it the same sentiment and will it be the same result? Or will we have the courage and the fortitude and the foresight and the will to stand up for truth, to stand up for this mission, to stand up with our troops that have put their lives on the line for us and for our freedom and for the free destiny of America?

Can we let Bui Tin make a point that a democracy, because it has freedom of speech and we allow people who are seen as the leaders to speak without consequence, sending a message out to all of the people in this country and the people across the world that want to listen that we do not have the resolve to continue this fight and win this fight and leave a new legacy that puts aside the old legacies of Vietnam, the legacies of Mogadishu and the legacies of Lebanon? It is up to us.

As I think about a meeting I had with General Casey in Baghdad last August, he said to me, the enemy cannot win if the politicians stay in the fight. We discussed on the way back did he mean Iraqi politicians or American politicians, and I concluded that he meant both. It is essential that both the Iraqi politicians and the American politicians stay in the fight. It is our job to do that.

I stood in a mess hall in Iraq more than a year ago. There was a soldier, a Captain Richards. He shook my hand and looked into my eyes and said, I am proud to fight for my country and serve my country, but why do I have to fight the United States news media, too?

My answer is, you should not have to fight the news media. That is my job. It is my job, and it is the job of the Members of Congress to make sure that the truth comes out and we stand up for the people who are defending our freedom. Use the freedom of speech to defend freedom, not the freedom of speech to undermine freedom.

I have more illustrations, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, this is the gentleman who has been in the news lately, Zawahiri. He heard the message from Vietnam that came from the senior Senator from Massachusetts. When the senior Senator said Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam, here is the words that came out of the mouth of Zawahiri: ``The collapse of American power in Vietnam, they ran and left.''

We think that does send a message to all of our future enemies when we pull out of an operation, an operation that, when that happened, it cost perhaps as many as 3 million lives in Southeast Asia when the power structure collapsed, and it happened because we lost the will in this country.

This operation in Iraq is nothing like Vietnam, not in its severity, not in its casualties. It does not have any jungles or mountains. It is a barren desert. There is no place for the enemy to hide. Zarqawi said that in his letter that he wrote a year ago last April. There is no place to hide, and the Iraqis that are willing to take them in are as rare as red sulfur. I do not know how rare red sulfur is in Iraq, but I think it is on the order of as rare as hen's teeth.

Another message, Muqtada al-Sadr. He has been in the news also a lot lately. I saw this image and heard this voice as I sat in a hotel room in Kuwait waiting to go into Iraq the next day. I was watching al- Jazeera TV. That is always a good thing to do when you are in a foreign country, turn on the TV and see the images that they portray. You can get a sense of what people are focusing on, even if you cannot understand the language. This was in Arabic audio, but the crawler underneath was in English.

As I watched that mouth go up and down, this is what I heard: If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way as they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu.

Sound familiar? I think so. I think Muqtada al-Sadr is getting his lessons the same way. He is listening to the American left. He is being encouraged by the voices that are quasi leaders in this Congress, both in the House and the Senate, the people who keep predicting defeat and saying before the operation begins that we cannot win.

Some people from the United States House of Representatives went to Iraq to surrender before the operations ever began. Yet our military went in there and in record time went in and invaded and liberated and occupied the largest city ever in the history of the world. They traveled across more miles of desert than anybody had before. And that is the most powerful message. He is listening to the voice that comes out.

We need to understand when we are talking here we need to talk about our resolve and staying the course, finishing the job, and sticking with our military.

And what does our military say? When I visit them in the hospital or visit them in Iraq or when they come back home, they want to finish this fight. Those that are wounded want to get better and go back and get into the fight. They feel a little guilty sometimes that they might have been able to avoid getting injured, and they want to get back in the fight and rejoin their troops. That is the patriotic American way. We need to stand and defend that.

We have another voice here that I think we need to hear. It is another voice of the defeatist left, the chairman of the Democrat Party, Howard Dean. ``The idea that we are going to win in Iraq is just plain wrong.'' That was December, 2005.

What kind of message does that echo through the hovels in Iraq where the insurgents live and plan and plot to attack Americans? Does that make them think that the United States has lost its resolve? If they are reading the quotes from Bui Tin and General Japp and Ho Chi Minh, don't they think that the lack of will in the United States today would be comparable to the lack of will during the Vietnam War?

It is not the same war, the same time or the same people. If we pulled out of Iraq and let that nation break down into chaos, the consequences for this country, the consequences for freedom, the consequences that we would have to face in this global war on terror would be catastrophic. I do not think a reasonable person can really contemplate the idea of pulling out or backing off to the horizon and disengaging and only going in when there is a real, real crisis, or the idea that we should provide for separating Iraq into three different geographical areas.

Where did that come from, Senator? That discussion should have been taken place long ago. To sit back and throw a Monday morning quarterback recommendation out there throws more instability into the Middle East and makes it harder for our diplomats, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and harder for our President to try to lend a sense of calm and support.

The Iraqis are committed to one Iraq. I have asked the same question about what would happen if Iraq were divided. I asked that question quietly of people that know. And every time I ask that question, I get an answer: Don't talk about it; don't think about it, don't try it. We are Iraqis and we are Iraqis first; and we are Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis after that. I am going to stand with one Iraq. That is the organization that is there. We have to stick with that. Anything else undermines it.

Mr. Speaker, that is the situation in Iraq. We can stand together on this, and we will. Our troops are not going to blink. Our leadership is not going to blink.

Our Secretary of Defense has done an outstanding job. He is reorganizing our military right in the middle of combat operations. They are reorganizing it into brigade combat teams.

Some of generals who have been critical of our Secretary of Defense are the ones who are not supporting a reorganization of the military, especially the Army. They are some of those traditional ways diehards.

Of all of the thousands of generals that we have, we have found six that disagree with the Secretary of Defense. That is hardly a movement. That is hardly something that I think should cause us to rearrange our entire military thinking. But you can always find a dissenter. You can always find a critic. Time will help us fix this.

There are three phases of the operations in Iraq. There is a military security phase. Hopefully, we are reaching the end of that, where we hand that over to the Iraqis. It will require our presence and advisers there for a long time, but they will get a handle on the violence.

The second phase in the political phase. Now with a new prime minister and a government that is in the process of being properly formed, this will be the first government in Iraqi. Of all of the elections that they have had there and all of the people who have been involved, from our CPA and Paul Bremer, this is the first government that has been formed to govern, not simply to be an interim government to get to a constitution and then to be able to get to an election.

So progress can be made every day as soon as they are squared away and in shape.

The next phase is the economic solution in Iraq. And they have so much more opportunity than Afghanistan. But the oil that is so rich there, up around Kirkuk and down around Basra, and the natural resources in this country are tremendous. And so I am hopeful that the Iraqi will realize that they own those natural resources. They are theirs. The United States has taken the pledge that we are not in there for the oil, except that we are going to want to buy some oil from them. But they need to have capital invested so they can sink more wells, put in more pipelines, build more refineries, upgrade the refineries that they have and be able to get oil flowing out of that country and cash flowing in.

And I might point out, Mr. Speaker, that it might not be too bad an idea to build enough refineries there that they could refine some oil that might come from Iran. Those folks over there, they are busy processing uranium so that they can have nuclear power in Iran, supposedly to produce electricity. And at the same time, they are not refining their oil, to the point where they have to import gas to burn in Iran; a very odd thing to think that you don't have refineries to refine all the crude oil that you have, but you have to go out and have nuclear reactors to generate electricity in Iran when you have got plenty of oil, plenty of fuel and yet you are not refining it. If it is science that they want, they are going after, I think, the wrong science.

But no one really believes them, Mr. Speaker. They have made plenty of noises about going down the path of establishing nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, and they have made a lot of threatening noises, and they have threatened to annihilate Israel. And they have said if the United States does anything evil, they are going to attack Israel. They don't define evil, except they define us as evil. And so the odds of being able to resolve the issue with Iran gets slimmer and slimmer each day.

What we know is we cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran. The threat and the risk of that, the destabilization in the Middle East, not just what it does to the oil supply, but having a nuclear missile aimed at Tel Aviv, realizing that they would take Tel Aviv out in a heartbeat if they could, and that capability would destroy the only democracy in the Middle East, and we know that Israel can't tolerate that, and we know that we do not want to have Iran threatening the rest of the world with missiles that will reach out there at 2,500 kilometers. And it won't take long for them to get larger missiles that can go further yet.

So we have to turn pressure on Iran. And in the end, they must understand that they will not have a nuclear weapon, and they will not have a delivery capability, and we will have to make sure that they do not by using every means at our disposal before the military option is required.

Those are two of the situations here, Mr. Speaker. And then as some other things flow through my mind, and I look at the situation here in the United States, we are quite a country. And we have had a lot of people pour into the streets of America over the last several weeks. It has been rather astonishing to watch the foreign flags unfurled in the streets, the American flags flown upside down, the Mexican flag flying on top of the flag pole at a high school in California with an upside- down American flag right underneath there.

It is interesting to watch the second wave of demonstrations, when they seemed to take the coaching a little bit better and put on white shirts and flew more American flags. Of course the foreign flags were also in their midst although in significantly fewer numbers.

And then on May 1, the International Workers Day, the day where the socialists and communists around the world take to the streets to march and demonstrate, that was the day that it appeared that the movement for advocating for illegal aliens in America apparently was co-opted by the socialist communist movement in the world. Some of the descendents of the Workers World Party, the Communist party front, I will say, here in the United States and also ANSWER, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, those organizations, socialist organizations at best, more akin to Marxist organizations, are bringing people to the streets to demonstrate in the United States.

What a concept, Mr. Speaker, to get people to walk off their jobs, to walk out of their schools and plug the streets and refuse to do business with anybody that is, I will say, a non-Hispanic American, and then argue that this is a day for all immigrants, when they are seeking to punish their employers and punish the merchants that they would normally do business with and by walking out the schools, somehow figure that they are punishing the schools instead of the students. Not a very rational approach. And I dubbed it Biting the Hand That Feeds You Day. Because the punishment, if there was any, was to be delivered to the people that were most inclined to be supportive of illegals in this country.

And so, perhaps a million, 1.1 million, 1.3 million people took to the streets on Monday of this week to send a message all across America that they are demanding that they get a path to citizenship and hopefully a fast path to citizenship.

And I would argue, Mr. Speaker, that, you know, they came into this country and did so illegally. They argue that they are not criminals. But in fact, it is a crime to enter the United States today. Passing the law that makes it a felony makes it a penalty greater than, it is 6 months in jail and deportation if you enter the United States illegally today. And if the House Resolution 4437 should pass the Senate with the President's signature on it, it would make it a felony. That would be a year and a day penalty instead of 6 months. But regardless, it is still a crime to enter the United States. It is a crime to go to work in the United States illegally. And it isn't that they are not criminals. They break the law every day they go to work.

But I fault, Mr. Speaker, not just the illegals. In fact, I put it in this opposite order. I fault the government of the United States, the Federal Government. For the last 20 years, the enforcement effort has diminished incrementally year by year for the last 20 years. And the Federal Government has the first responsibility to defend our shores, defend our borders, defend our national security. But they let the situation get out of hand to the point where there are 3 to 4 million illegals who poured across our southern border within the last year. The Border Patrol stopped 1,159,000. That would be for 2004. For 2005, that number would be about 1,188,000. Now, they adjudicated for deportation in 2004, 1,640 was all. And some of those out of that 1.2 million or so that they did stop, some of those were taken to the border and sent back through the turnstile. Some were released on their own recognizance because it wasn't a logistically feasible thing to do to send them back.

Well, some of them come back the next day. Some of them come back within hours of the time that they are sent back to their home country.

This number keeps growing and it keeps ballooning, Mr. Speaker, and we must do something. And I think Democrats and Republicans agree that we need to control our borders.

As Congressman Gingrey says, when you are in an emergency room in a hospital and you get a patient that comes in and they are bleeding all over the place, you don't stop and debate about what you are going to do, how you are going to clean up the mess; you stop the bleeding first and you stabilize the patient. And that is what we sought to do here in this House with H.R. 4437.

Stop the bleeding, stabilize the patient, get control of our laws, enforce them, and then begin a debate on what to do about how to get the patient rehabilitated again, after we get this patient stabilized. We can't do both of these things at once, Mr. Speaker. But we do need to do some things to pull this country together.

Mr. Speaker, again, it is important for us to bring some stability to this immigration issue. It is a national security issue. This is a national security issue as much as the global war on terror is a national security issue. And the statistics that I have looked at tell me that we have a slow-motion terrorist attack going on in the United States that comes across our southern border.

Now, some will say that if I point out the crimes of anyone coming into the United States, that somehow I am labeling everyone who illegally comes into the United States as a violent criminal. And of course, we know that is not true.

About 11,000 illegals cross our southern border every day. If they were all murderers, we would double our murder rate practically just with 1 day's supply. No, that is not the case. But the crimes that are committed by those who enter this country illegally are in significantly greater numbers than the crimes that are committed by American citizens, to the extent that 28 percent of the inmates in our prisons in the United States are criminal aliens, 28 percent. And that includes our city, our county, our State and our Federal penitentiaries. And they vary only 1 or 2 percent above or below, but they average 28 percent. And it costs us $6 billion a year to provide for the incarceration of the criminal aliens, and that is just the Federal dollars to speak of. And once we reach down into the cities, into the counties, there are other numbers out there that would grow that greater and greater. It is a minimum of $6 billion. And these numbers that I have come from, their SCAAP funding, the State Criminal Alien Assistance Plan. And all States don't apply for SCAAP funding. So we know that these numbers are low numbers, not high numbers. But it is certain that there are more. I am just not certain how many more. But I can stand on 28 percent.

Now, that means then that criminal aliens are committing 28 percent of the crimes in the United States. And so that means 28 percent of the murders, 28 percent of the rapes, 28 percent of the violence and the assaults and battery, first- and second-degree murder and also manslaughter attacks are committed by criminal aliens.

Now, I think that is one of the reasons that I believe the illegal population in America is greater than those numbers that we are seeing. And I can't imagine how, if 3 to 4 million come into the United States, and we may be direct, we tell over a million, 1.2 million, go home, but we don't have any verification that they actually go home or stay home. Some we do verify they went home, but we can't verify that any of them stayed home; this population is growing.

The Border Patrol would say that there is another 2 to 3 million that get by that don't get stopped every year compared to the million that get stopped. So if this number in the United States is 3 million or more extra every year, some will die, yes, and some will go back home. That is true. And some will become citizens by hook or by crook, but there will still be a significant increase in the United States. And I think that number increases substantially, perhaps 2.5, maybe even as much as 3 million a year. That would take us on up to 20 million or more in this country, not 11 or 12 million. That is a more reasonable number. And if you think that the numbers could be 20 million or more, then it is easier to understand how you could have 28 percent of our criminal aliens in the penitentiaries. So this problem is a lot larger than most people think. And it comes down to this: If we had enforced our borders, if we hadn't allowed any illegals to come into the United States, if we would have enforced our domestic laws so when people violated immigration laws internally, domestically; if we did those things, then we wouldn't have illegal aliens in America to commit the crimes. And that would equate and extrapolate down to 12 fewer murders every day, 13 fewer people that die at the hands of negligent homicide, primarily the victims of drunk drivers, at least 8 little girls that are victims of sex crimes on a daily basis, and that number could be well higher than that because the average predator, perpetrator commits and is convicted on at least 3.6 victims. And that is the ones we find out about. There are many others that are not reported. In fact, they statistically say that there might be only 10 percent that are actually reported. These numbers are small numbers. They are the conservative side of the numbers, not the larger side of the numbers.

This is a slow-rolling, slow-motion terrorist attack on the United States costing us billions of dollars and, in fact, thousands of lives, and we have an obligation to protect the American people, and that means seal and protect our borders. And if we are able to do that, down the road a few years, once it is established, we could have a legitimate discussion about whether we could have a guest worker plan, whether we could open the greencards. But today we haven't demonstrated that there is going to be enforcement. And without that demonstration of enforcement, I am not willing to go a step further and to insist that there will be enforcement.

But in this country, Mr. Speaker, we need to have cultural continuity. We need to pull together as a people. We need to pull together under our civilization, under a common cause, a common sense of history, a common language. And a common language is essential to any country.

In fact, I went through the World Book Encyclopedia. I went to the almanac and looked up all the flags of all the countries in the world, set it down beside the World Book Encyclopedia, looked them all up to see what is the official language. Every country that is registered in the almanac with a flag, what is their official language? Every single country in America has at least one official language, except the United States of America. We do not have an official language. We just have a common language called English. All the rest of the countries saw the wisdom of binding and tying any country together with a common language.

The Israelis, when they established their country in 1948, and I believe that anniversary was just yesterday or the day before, they established it from 1948 until 1954. In 1954, they established Hebrew as their official language, and they did so because they needed a common language to bind them together, a common form of communications currency, if you will, Mr. Speaker.

So people have understood that throughout the ages. That is something that has been known since Biblical times, how powerful a common language is.

Mr. Speaker, I propose that we move that kind of legislation and that we establish an official language here in the United States and do so for the purposes of pulling our people together.

We are being fractured by worshipping at the alter of multiculturalism. When that first came forward and I dealt with it, however many years ago, 30 years ago, perhaps, or more, when I first began to hear the term multiculturalism diversity, I really actually thought, fine, this sounds good, gives us an opportunity to recognize other cultures, other civilizations. People have things to be proud of. It is constructive. It is positive. And I went my merry way as kind of an endorser of multiculturalism and diversity.

As the years unfolded, Mr. Speaker, I came to a different conclusion. I came to the conclusion that identity politics were tearing America apart. Our rights come from God, and they are guaranteed to individuals, not to groups. God blesses us all equally and creates us all in His image; and He does not draw distinctions between us based upon skin color, ethnicity, or any other characteristics that we might want to be part of. And yet we insist upon dividing ourselves up and calling it ``diversity.'' And I think ``diversity'' really stands for ``division.''

So I did a little experiment. I went on the Web page at home, Iowa State University, typed in ``multiculturalism'' and looked up the student organizations that are there. It is quite an interesting list, all identity

politics. It starts with African Students Association, and there are 50 of them, and it ends with Zeitgeist. And in the middle of that you will see the Identifying as M.E., the Multi-Ethnics. That is one of my favorites. They could not come up with a label, so they called themselves Multi-Ethnics.

But you have Amnesty International, Asian Pacific American Awareness Coalition, Benefiting the Education of Latinas in Leadership Academics and Sisterhood, Black Graduate Student Association; and before you can get there, you need to be part of the Black Student Alliance, the Brazilian-Portuguese Association, the French Club, the Iowa State Ukrainian Club, the Japanese Association, the Kenya Students Association, Latino Heritage Month. The list goes on and on and on, Mr. Speaker, 50 strong, identity politics, all of them viewing themselves as somehow disenfranchised, not having the same kind of access or the same kind of privileges or opportunities or rights maybe as someone else. Except for those that identify themselves as the Identifying as M.E., which stands for Multi-Ethnic. So they finally found one that was generic.

Perhaps I fit in there also, Mr. Speaker. But I thought, well, that is Iowa State and they are a Midwestern fairly conservative institution.

So what about Berkeley? So we typed in Berkeley and did a little search on student organizations there. The University of California, Berkeley, they came up with 118 of these identity politics groups on campus there.

We are using up our resources supporting organizations that are designed to identify the differences in us, not the commonalities, designed to divide us, not to pull us together, Mr. Speaker. And it is in the end going to pull us apart, pull us irrevocably apart, if we do not pull ourselves together and provide for some cultural continuity.

So I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that we need to establish English as the official language of the United States. We need to stand up together and say, enough of this identity politics, enough of this division politics, enough of the idea that you cannot be an American unless somehow you are part of this beautiful multicultural mosaic with a particular identifier on you.

It was good enough for Teddy Roosevelt to be just an American. In fact, he insisted upon it, Mr. Speaker. And I insist upon it as well, that we must pull together in that fashion. And if we fail to stay in touch with our Constitution, with our history, with our commonalities, if we fail to pull together in the same harness, Mr. Speaker, then shame on us. This country will be weaker; and this country, in fact, may not survive the attacks that are upon it.

So, rather than go into the balance of the solutions for America, Mr. Speaker, I just would conclude with this, that they are doing great work in Iraq. We are committed there. We must follow through and finish the task, whatever it takes. We have the resolve to do that.

We are watching as millions pour across our Southern border, and we are establishing some policy here in this city over the next few weeks that will establish the destiny of America. If we do not have the will to establish our border and control our border, we cannot be a Nation, if we let people come into America illegally and then they are the ones that are establishing our immigration policy, not us here in this Congress.

The Constitution gives Congress the authority, Congress the responsibility, to establish immigration law. We need to do that. We need to do that after a national debate.

But we will hear story after story after story of how people have put down their roots and now we cannot ask them to go back. But I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that what we need to do is seal the border, build a fence to do that, build it as tight as we need to to make it effective. We need to end birthright citizenship that is creating these anchor babies.

We need to shut off the jobs magnet by applying employer sanctions, by passing my legislation, which is called New IDEA, H.R. 3095, which is the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act, that lets the IRS remove the deductibility of wages and benefits paid to illegals. When that happens, it will take the cost of a wage from, say, a $10 wage to an illegal, by the time the taxable component are factored in, take it on up to $16 an hour. That gives the American a chance to do the work or someone on a legal green card, rather than someone who is here illegally.

This is the United States of America, Mr. Speaker. We need to stand on defending our borders. We need to seal the border. We need to build a fence. We need to end birthright citizenship. We need to shut off the jobs magnet, pull ourselves together as a Nation in unity, and people will go back home when their job opportunities start to dry up here. We will not have to make that decision for them. The decision will be made. They got here on their own. They can go back on their own. It is not a matter of trying to deport 12 million or 22 million people.

But I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that if the Senate passes and this House should pass and the President should sign a guest worker program that might well have 22 million people who have a fast track to citizenship, they will also be able to invite in their immediate family. If each one of them invites just simply four of their immediate family in, a father, a spouse, and a couple of children, just four, that means 88 million new ones that are not calculated here. Add that to the 22 million or so that are here, and you have the entire population of Mexico brought into the United States in a single generation. If that is our intent, we ought to have the will to stand on the floor of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and say so, rather than do this in some kind of way that opens the gate and lets the American people find out about it after it is too late.

With that, I thank the Speaker for his indulgence.

Madam Speaker, today as we celebrate Iraqi Freedom Day, I want to raise a different subject, and that is that we will be bringing legislation to the floor of this House that will bring some enforcement to our immigration laws. It has been a long time coming. There has been a lot of good work done by a lot of people. I am hopeful that this legislation now will also include an amendment that I hope to propose, H.R. 3095, the New IDEA bill. New IDEA stands for the Illegal Deduction Elimination Act.

The IRS is more inclined, I believe, to enforce our immigration laws than DHS has proven to be. I would submit that they can go in and do their regular audits and check the Social Security numbers of the employees through the instant check program that will be renamed the employer verification system hopefully today or tomorrow and then give safe harbor to those employers that do that verification of their employees. Otherwise the expense that is a business expense that will be written off will have to be denied as a deduction so that it becomes taxable if it is a profitable business. That takes a $10 an hour illegal up to a $16 an hour and lets the legal person have a job instead of the illegal person.