Floor Statements

Obviously, the Department of Homeland Security has been in the paper a lot lately.

I want to remind people of these facts:

We are already letting in about 800,000 people every year legally in this country, which is at an all-time high by a mile. One-sixth of the people in this country are born in another country, which is also at an all-time high. We are already letting in one-half million people every year on work visas. Perhaps that should be higher, but you add up these final last three numbers, Mr. Speaker, and it tells us we are not in desperate need of letting more people in this country.

There are people who only want to kick out people who have a criminal record. First of all, it would be very unfair to the people who obeyed the law to come here.

Secondly, it means we may be letting in hardworking people, but people who don't share our values.

Third, it means we are driving up housing costs.

Fourth, it means America will become more crowded. I am old enough to remember when all good environmentalists did not want a lot of immigrants here because they wanted a more natural state.

In any event, these are things we should remember when discussing immigration.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to one more time congratulate President Trump on a great speech last night. He is a great orator. I think of the six speeches I have heard him give in this Chamber. That was the best one yet.

He did a great job of recounting the successes he has had in immigration, the successes he has had in healthcare, the successes he has had using the tax code to help out parents with children, which is, I think, the one area in life in which having a decent revenue stream is most important.

However, he did lay out what is going to be a future conflict within the Republican Party, and it is important that our conservatives are aware of it.

President Trump is conscious of the fact that as revenue comes in from the tariffs, there are people who are going to want to spend it and people who are going to want to lower other taxes. It is important that all true Republicans weigh in and double their efforts to make sure that we do not use any of these increased tariffs to increase the role of government in people's lives.

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I will assure the Chair that I will not be speaking for 60 minutes. I will be kind of amazed if I get to 25.

We now go on a work period back in the district for a little over a week. I think there are certain topics that haven't been talked about enough in this Chamber, and hopefully they will be talked about a little bit more when we return.

The first anecdote, which is symptomatic--it is huge problems for America, I would argue the greatest immediate concern for America--is shown by an incident that happened in Minneapolis.

A little while ago, an ICE agent doing his job had his finger bitten off by one of these radical protesters who seem to have descended in Minneapolis. What happened afterwards, though, as horrific as that is, was even worse.

First of all, you would think if you bit off somebody's finger, you would be in a lot of trouble with the law. Minneapolis is in some place called Hennepin County, and you would have felt the Hennepin County law enforcement, the district attorney, would have dealt very seriously with the person who bit off the finger of an ICE agent.

In fact, Minneapolis--which is kind of like, I guess, New York West or Los Angeles East, they did not see anything worth prosecuting when you bite off the finger of an ICE agent.

Then we went to the Federal law enforcement, and they convened a grand jury to indict the person who bit off the finger of an ICE agent, which you think would be relatively automatic. Nobody argued that this person didn't bite off the finger of an ICE agent, which by the way will not be able to be sewn back on.

Instead, when they brought it before a grand jury, which was somewhere between 16 and 22 people, they would not indict. They were, in fact, hostile to the ICE agent and wondered what he was doing in Minnesota.

The person who bit off the finger of an ICE agent will not suffer any penalty at all that we can determine.

Now, this is not only an incredible injustice to the ICE agent who lost his finger, it is a danger sign for America. Every country has immigration laws. When I talk to people in my district, even people who think we ought to let more people in this country, they don't think we should have no immigration laws. Nevertheless, this is where we stand.

As I repeated before, right now we naturalize about 800,000 people every year in this country. 800,000 people are sworn in as new citizens if you take a 4-year rolling average.

That is higher than any time in our country. It is about six times what we were letting in when I was a child. We right now are in a position in which about one out of six people in America is foreign born, which is the highest it has been for at least the last 130 years.

We have nothing to apologize for. We are not being xenophobic. We are not saying we are going to let nobody in this country, but obviously we have to have some restrictions or we would wind up with tens of millions more people in the country.

However, despite our generosity in letting more people here, we have significant areas of the country governed by elected people who will do all they can to wage war on the rest of us and not enforce our immigration laws.

This is the most egregious example of the problem. Can you imagine a grand jury whose attitude is we don't care if an ICE agent gets their finger bitten off? That is what we have in Minnesota.

Like I said, while it is outrageous in its own right for this individual, it is a danger sign for the future of America when you have significant areas of the United States which are actively working to have no immigration laws at all.

This happened in Minnesota. I think it could have happened in Washington State. It could have happened in California. It could have happened in New York. We have to find a way to get Americans back on the straight and narrow as far as respecting our law enforcement.

One of the reasons why they lost control in Minneapolis in the first place is that local law enforcement would not assist ICE.

I have talked to sheriffs in my own district, and whenever any Federal agency is engaged in an action in any county that they are aware of, the local law enforcement is prepared to assist them.

That is, if the FBI is around, if ICE is around, if the Secret Service is around, if Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are around, the local sheriffs always say: What can we do to help you? Maybe it is to secure a perimeter, maybe it is to transport somebody who has broken the law, but maybe it is just to have a squad car visible to let local people know that some serious law enforcement work is going on.

Whatever it is, the sheriffs of the State of Wisconsin are always there. It is automatic that they assist their brothers in law enforcement. The sheriffs I talked to couldn't even think of an example in which local law enforcement complained privately about having to help the Feds, but in Minnesota--and it is not surprising it happened in Minnesota and not in Missouri and not Indiana--at the request of elected officials, a mayor and a Governor, local law enforcement had to stand down and watch as riots took place, property damage, and even more injury to the Federal employees.

This place has to find a way to persuade our citizens that we are a great country and our laws have to be enforced. As long as we keep heading down this path of not enforcing the laws or allowing States to be so degenerate that they do not want to help Federal law enforcement, it will ultimately be the end of the country.

I want to talk about another area of which I will say in this case what other countries are doing affects the United States, and will also head us toward being the type of country we wouldn't want to live in.

That is with regard to a committee hearing we had this week on the First Amendment and how it affects internet platforms, but it is really a greater topic than just that.

This week, we had a hearing in the Judiciary Committee in which we talked about restrictions on free speech in Europe. Usually, when I think of Europe, I think of Europe as being kind of like the United States, right? You take an airline to London or Paris or Rome, and you expect the same freedoms and prosperity you do in the United States.

In this hearing, we heard of a woman who is a member of the Finnish Parliament. She was charged with a crime and has had to go through a great deal of legal work to not be penalized yet because she quoted the Bible in Finland.

The Finnish Government had apparently decided, particularly what I guess this body would call a controversial part of Romans, that because she quoted it, she should be penalized for that.

We also heard from an Irish comedian who told jokes about transgenderism in Great Britain, and he was arrested. He has since fled to the United States, to a country in which you can still tell jokes about transgenderism so far. You can still tell jokes about illegal immigration and not go to jail.

Now, we were supposed to care about this, and we do care about it because it affects our platforms. Insofar as the European governments put restrictions on X or put restrictions on Instagram, it affects Americans, as well, and that is true. What I thought was even more significant is, this is what is happening in Europe.

In Europe, they have lost the right to free speech, which is just shocking to me. Frequently, bad things that happen in this country happen in Europe first. You have to remember that under the last administration, under the Biden administration, they had proposed a Disinformation Governance Board.

Think about that. That is something out of Orwell. Joe Biden, who was the President of the United States, elected in a free election, proposed a Disinformation Governance Board, apparently to identify speech that he didn't like and have the Federal Government do something to restrict that speech.

I will guarantee you they would have been restricting free speech when it came to immigration policies. They would have been for restricting free speech if it intervened with the type of ideas they wanted to instill in kindergarten or first grade or second grade students with regard to human growth and development programs.

In any event, the totalitarians are at the gates. They are taking over Western Europe, and the United States is

next. They have taken over Western Europe, from what we heard about what is going on in Great Britain, Germany, and Finland.

If you look at the Disinformation Governance Board, right now, there were enough Republicans, enough free speech news outlets, probably even enough Democrats to prevent the Disinformation Governance Board from going forward. If you look at the elections since then, the type of radical Democrats who are replacing the handful of commonsense Democrats who are still left, I am afraid that in 3 or 4 years, our country will have a Disinformation Governance Board.

What is going on in this country that we are restricting free speech and hate law enforcement, at least immigration law enforcement, so much that you can bite off a finger of an ICE agent and nothing will happen to you? I believe what it is, is a psychological problem. It is something that a few conservatives in the areas of psychology and psychiatry have to identify. I will refer to it as ``Thunberg syndrome.'' You may remember the little girl who, about 10 years ago, became famous in Sweden for pushing the global warming hoax.

This little girl was in a Western country, a well-off family, somebody who hypothetically should have been happy, right? According to her father, Greta Thunberg was unhappy, despite all her material wealth. I think that is true of a lot of people, sadly. They are spoiled people with time on their hands in the West.

She became happy by spending all her time pushing this global warming stuff. Do you know why it made her happy? Because she had a purpose in life, and everybody, to be happy, needs a purpose in life. This little girl, who presumably had enough money, didn't need a job--her parents took care of her--was, not surprisingly, unhappy, depressed, so that was her cause.

Eventually, she took up other causes. When the horrific Hamas invaded Israel and killed over 1,000 Israelis, she decided to take up that cause and decided to be hostile toward Israel and in favor of the terrorists. It is not surprising why. She hated the West. She hated herself.

In the Israel-Hamas war, if you want to call it that, Hamas and what you would call Palestine, they were, as many Third World countries are, corrupt, and being corrupt, they were poor.

The leadership would transfer the money they got from Europe to Qatar or to Paris. Therefore, seeing a corrupt, unhappy region in Gaza and a region, by the way, of bored people because they were living off of welfare largely, in a choice between that and a well-run, Western, honest country like Israel, Greta Thunberg got more joy out of engaging in protests or whatever these people do to try to help the Hamas group that brutally killed a thousand people.

Our country has to identify Thunberg syndrome and see what we can do to prevent it from taking over our country. Because just as Greta Thunberg suffers from this psychological problem, I believe the person who bit off the finger of the ICE agent and most of these protesters in Minneapolis also suffer from Thunberg syndrome, in which they hate America, in which they want us to adopt policies that will guarantee the destruction of America.

They are now clearly a majority in the wildly wealthy city of Minneapolis. These people are also a majority in many wildly wealthy cities in California and in New York City. Unless we find a way to deal with their psychological problems, it will be the end of the U.S.

Prior to coming down here today, I attended a little program put on by Stephen Miller, who is a brilliant economist, talking about how the economy is growing in the U.S., and we should all be so happy.

As a Republican, I should think, well, that is good news because it means it is more likely that I am going to be reelected next year in November, and my colleagues are going to be reelected in November. I wasn't quite as happy as I should be because I think who wins these elections is not just determined by whether the Republicans do a good job of having a strong economy.

In fact, we have done a very good job of improving the economy, but what scares me is not that. What scares me is the well-off, unhappy people who, despite the fact that they got a raise next year, despite the fact that their 401(k) went up, are going to be unhappy because they suffer from Thunberg syndrome. They are too spoiled, and as a result, they are going to vote for the party that is in favor of immigration.

It even has prominent members who want to get rid of ICE, which is just as absurd as saying prominent members who want to get rid of the police department.

I am afraid that that message of no enforcement of immigration laws and restricting the First Amendment so you can't be critical of immigration or can't be critical of weighing in on what we teach young children about sexual activity, that those people, for whatever reason, in favor of abortion till birth--which is so grotesque that the people I deal with back home don't even believe the Democrats are for that because it is so preposterous, but they are. I am afraid that people like that are going to carry the day in the November election.

Mr. Speaker, what we are dealing with are not traditional things. We are doing a great job in the economy. What I am afraid of is the increasing number of spoiled Americans who have become like Greta Thunberg--anti-Westerners, anti-American people--who want elected officials who share their view.

By the way, since we did touch upon the economy, I want to point out something recently that was pointed out to me by Steve Miller. In the most recent jobs report, there were some jobs we got more of and some jobs we got less of.

There was a significant increase in private-sector jobs. Private- sector jobs are very important because private-sector jobs lead to wealth. I, of course, right now have a government job. During this time period, the number of government jobs fell; with private-sector jobs up 172,000 and government jobs down 42,000.

Maybe many Americans don't realize that when we hire more IRS agents, that is supposed to be a good thing and the sign of a strong economy. That is the way they compute them. If we hire more bureaucrats to look at a computer screen and do nothing in the Department of Defense, that is also supposed to be a sign of a booming economy because we have more jobs.

In fact, the difference between the--one of many differences between the Trump administration and the Biden administration is the Biden administration, when they improved employment, they had the government hire more people. They said: Look, this is great. We have the government hire more people.

When the Republicans took over, we did not consider hiring or laying off more people staring at computer screens, doing very little, that were identified by DOGE. Those were the areas where employment went down. Areas where employment went up were areas like, in particular, manufacturing in which we were producing more things that people use and making people wealthier.

Remember in the future, America, that when you hear statistics about employment going up or down, you should ask what type of employment is going up or down. Is it like Donald Trump wants, and the vast majority of Americans want, in which the number of people involved in manufacturing or service industries that make us a wealthier country are going up?

Do we want to have the type of figures--which kind of, I think, misled the American people--in which we hire more people for the IRS, we hire more people for the Department of Commerce, or we hire more people for the Department of Agriculture? None of these are making us wealthier, but they do generate statistics in which we say: Aha, more people have jobs.

Mr. Speaker, one more time before I leave here, I beg my leadership to do something about what I still believe is the number one problem in this country. That is the fact that we have many programs, most of which originated in the 1960s, which are designed to incentivize families to form without a father in the family. There are people who always wanted this.

Karl Marx always wanted it. There are all sorts of people in academia who read Karl Marx and think he had something worthwhile to say.

It is something Kate Millett, the founder of women's studies classes, which are all over our universities--there are relatively few majors, but there are a lot of people who take one of those classes as an elective. These people are anti-man. They don't want men in the family.

It is not surprising with people following this group that there is-- they would consider it successful to pass more and more programs that a family with a mother and father at home would not be eligible for. If they somehow get the man out of the home, they are eligible for it.

We are all familiar with these programs. One program is food stamps, what used to be called food stamps. We also have low-income housing where you may get an apartment that other people would have to pay $1,200 for and you get nothing.

Earned income tax credit can easily be, if you don't work too hard, getting $7,000 or $8,000 and getting nothing if you are married to a person with an income.

There are Pell grants. As one young gal about 22 years old told me, she and her husband got married before they had a child; but she knew lots of friends who weren't getting married because they got free college.

Daycare is another program in which you can pay to have someone take care of your kids while at work if you don't get married to the other spouse.

We have talked a lot about the Medicaid program. Again, we use the program for healthcare and poor people to try to penalize those foolish people who get married first.

It is easy. It varies from couple to couple how much they lose if they get married. I think it is safe to say it is very easy to come up with hypotheticals of $25,000 or more--a $25,000 penalty in this country from getting married and frequently keeping the men out of the family.

Mr. Speaker, I have known about this for some time. In case anybody wants to look at this a little bit more, they can look at books written by George Gilder in the late 1970s, which at the time were bestsellers and everybody talked about during the beginning of the Reagan administration. Unfortunately, nobody ever did anything about it.

He looked at what at the time was referred to as ``a ghetto'' in Albany, New York. He followed around a young couple, and the gal had just gotten pregnant. At that time, given George Gilder's upbringing, he thought that would be cause for concern for the couple. They would have to get married right away. They would have to work harder to support the child.

It was to George Gilder's surprise and shock that, as he followed this young couple around, they were thrilled that the woman got pregnant out of wedlock because it allowed them to go from government office to government office to get free food, to get what at the time was called the free AFDC check, to get free rent, and to get free medical care. They had it made in the shade.

Great, Mary is pregnant. We are not going to get married. We are just going to stop working now because of that.

Of course, what happened is over time Americans' behavior changed. We went from in the 1950s, before Lyndon Johnson was President, and in which about 4 percent of the children were born without a mother and father at home, to a steady increase for about 30 years to over 40 percent.

There are so many wonderful single parents out there. I know people who have done a great job of raising children as a single parent. Of course, we do have programs to help people who are widows or widowers in Social Security. That is not, I think, what is normally meant by a single parent.

Overall, when we go down this path, we have more and more people in a difficult situation who can be overwhelmed by this. It can hurt their children. I think studies will show various measures of success or failure, and it is much more difficult with a single-parent lifestyle. Something that is not publicized enough is it is horrible for the men.

George Gilder would tell us, if you look at a single-parent situation, the person who is penalized the most isn't the children or the single mom. The person who is penalized the most is the single man because his natural purpose in life is to support a family. The government has taken away his natural purpose in life. He, therefore, does not have a purpose in life.

In areas of high poverty, I think this is why we see so many single men having unhappy lives. If you pick up the paper and find out who is getting murdered, it is usually single men. If you look and see who is dying of drug overdoses, it is usually single men. Those who are not doing well education-wise are single men.

Of course, the reason the single men are doing so poorly is because of the great society programs which are designed to make those single men worthless. This is another reason why this body ought to take up these welfare programs.

Not only do we want what is best in the next generation for the children and not only do we want what is best in the next generation for the mothers, but we just treat the single fathers very poorly. We don't give them a purpose in life. As a result, so many are unhappy. So many wind up dying from murder, dying of drug overdoses, and just, in general, leading unhappy lives.

Mr. Speaker, these are some of the things that I hope we begin to take up next week. I hope our leadership team realizes that, while we are doing a good job on the economy, and we are growing private-sector jobs, and we are not having an artificial economic boom by hiring a bunch of IRS agents and calling it a welfare country, I hope we take up some of these other issues.

I hope our conservative opinion makers take up these other issues and educate the public that for America to become a great country again, we have to do something with all these unhappy Americans suffering from Greta Thunberg syndrome because they don't have a purpose in life and so they adapt the purpose of anti-Western, anti-American behavior.

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

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the Clerk be directed to make changes in the engrossment of H.R. 5616 that I have placed at the desk.

Mr. Speaker, if you were paying attention since we last met, more and more politicos or officials are weighing in on who should be deported to our southern border.

I want to emphasize that the American people have to stand up and say that if you are coming here illegally, you should be deported. There are some people I think are apparently for limited amnesty or no immigration laws at all and say we should only be deporting people who have broken the law. Obviously, that would mean that if the only law you have broken is coming here in the first place, probably 98 or 99 percent of the 8 million people who entered under Joe Biden would be able to stay.

I implore ICE to deport people who are here illegally. If they want to single out somebody in addition to the worst of the worst on criminal behavior, they can go after people getting public benefits, which is also illegal, and they should be removed immediately.

Mr. Speaker, in any event, we should enforce our laws.

Mr. Speaker, Congress is leaving and won't be back until next week. If it is like every other weekend, a lot of what you see on television is going to be incidents going on in Minnesota affected by the immigration situation.

I remind my colleagues and the American people that we are a Nation of immigrants, but every year we naturalize about 800,000 new folks. That is about five times what it was when I was a child. Mr. Speaker, 16 percent of the people in our country were not born in America. That is the highest it has been since before 1890.

We have nothing to apologize for that we are not letting enough people in this country. However, sadly, there are too many elected officials who, in essence, want to get rid of the immigration laws. We saw this in the 2016 election in which way too many Democrats promised free medical care for people who come here.

In any event, we are very generous to immigrants. We cannot have unlimited immigration.

Mr. Speaker, this is a weekend chosen to be the week that Roe v. Wade went into effect in 1973 and that we mourn the deaths of the millions of Americans whose lives were cut short by abortion.

It is particularly sad that recently the abortion rate in this country has been going up. That is a stain on our country and, quite frankly, a stain on the churches that are failing to educate our young people on the importance of keeping every life going.

It is interesting that, in Wisconsin, abortion was illegal from around 1850 until Roe v. Wade went into effect. At that time, there were no ultrasounds. Medical care was a fraction of what it is today. Despite the fact that medical care was worse than it is today, everybody knew that abortion was horrific, ultrasound or not. I don't believe there was a strong effort made until Roe v. Wade to legalize abortion in the State of Wisconsin until the Supreme Court did it.

We have to ask ourselves, the people: What has happened? What has happened to young Americans? Right now, to be honest, politically, to run pro-life in the State of Wisconsin, or at least in many States around the country, is a negative.

When I first got involved in public life, I think the majority of people were broadly considered pro-life. Now the opposite is true.

Why is that? Who do we blame for the fact that acceptance of abortion has gone up over the last 9 or 10 years?

I am going to suggest the churches have to be more vocal and do a better job of educating people about this issue.

Like I said, in today's world with ultrasounds, in today's world with such great medical care that it would be virtually impossible to have serious consequences after having an abortion, it should be easier than ever to make people pro-life. Unfortunately, that is not so.

So what I will do today is I will challenge the churches and anybody out there listening, members of a church, the laity, the priests, the ministers, to do what they can to educate the childbearing women in your church or of childbearing age of the horrors of abortion and the importance for everybody to do what they can to prevent these precious lives from being cut short.

Mr. Speaker, we will take about 1\1/2\ weeks off now, as we go back to our districts, meet our constituents, and do our factory tours.

Prior to leaving, I think it is important one more time to address what I think is the most significant issue this Congress and next Congress and that this President and the next President is going to have to deal with. How we address this issue will determine whether America fundamentally changes or not. That issue is immigration.

We see it on the TV every night. We see the obnoxiousness going on in a church in Minneapolis. We see the horror and unfortunate death of a woman who was protesting. There are demonstrations all around the country.

First of all, let's define the current situation. Right now in America, every year about 800,000 people are naturalized. We don't talk about that enough. We spend all the time talking about people who are sneaking into this country. We don't talk about the fact that over 800,000 people every year become new citizens.

In addition to that 800,000 new citizens, 500,000 people come here on work visas. Another 500,000 come here on student visas. People being what they are, many of these people on visas stay in the United States anyway.

In addition to that, the United States is one of the few countries in the world in which we have birthright citizenship. We have new citizens. If a woman from China flies into San Diego, has a child, and comes back, the way we are interpreting the law right now--which, of course, is wrong--but the way we interpret it is that child becomes a U.S. citizen.

When you look at all the ways you can become citizens, it is not surprising that today over 15 percent of the people in the United States of America were born abroad. That is an all-time high. As we analyze what we have to do on this situation, we ought to remember: If we do nothing, we are already at an all-time high in the number of people who are in the United States who were not born here.

As far as the over 800,000 who were naturalized, that is about four times what it was when I was a child in the 1960s. Again, we have nobody to apologize to as we are not letting people into the country. There are four times as many people being let into the country as when I was a child.

We just got done with President Joe Biden, and, of course, we don't keep track of the exact numbers, but he was allowing about 8 to 10 million people into the country. In addition to all of these other people, 8 to 10 million people were being allowed into the country, crossing our southern border illegally.

What do we do about this situation as we are being flooded with people from other countries?

First of all, we have to worry that the people coming here are not what John Adams said should be required to come here. They are not necessarily a moral and religious people. They may not respect our Constitution. When they eventually participate in our elections, will they vote for the limited government that our forefathers felt that we needed, a limited government that is required?

Most countries built on elections wind up collapsing, and they collapsed because people go to the polls and just say: What can my government do for me? I will quote John Kennedy here as far as what he felt we needed in this country. He said: ``Ask not what your country will do for you--ask what you can do for your country.''

Those are the type of people we need at the polling booth. Unfortunately, over time--and I am including carpet welfare in this as much as anything--we have more and more citizens when they vote saying: What will you give me? Are you going to give me more food? Are you going to give me free medical care? Are you going to give me free daycare?

In other words, what they do is they want the government to give them more money that they didn't earn on their own. That would be the end of America if these are the type of immigrants we are getting in.

I also want to point out that when we look at the people coming here, some of our inflammatory people talk about racism. I hate it when they talk about racism, but I do want to point out that, now, when you look at people who are naturalized who come in here, I want to rattle off the ten most common countries that citizens become naturalized from: One, Mexico; two, India; three, Philippines; four, Dominican Republic; five, Cuba; six, Vietnam; seven, China; eight, El Salvador; nine, Jamaica; and ten, Colombia.

Do you notice anything about those ten countries? Not one of those countries are sending us immigrants who are primarily European in nature. I should maybe qualify that. For whatever reason, the diversity bureaucrats have decided to tell us that people, say, from Cuba or the Dominican Republic are not European.

I have always felt it was odd the way they define this. You can have a family who moves here from Spain to Cuba, hangs around Cuba for 80 years. They come to the United States, and they are not considered primarily European even though their ancestry is in Europe.

In any event, the way we consider things now, none of the top ten are primarily European. As far as people saying that we have this horribly racist country, I think it would be odd for a racist country to let the ten most common nationalities to come here, all what our leftwing friends would call people of color.

In any event, we have to ask ourselves: How do we handle this huge influx of people coming into the country? If people come here and lie and say that they are coming here for asylum, it seems to me that the only alternative is to remove them, or we have no immigration law, right?

If the word gets out that you come to the United States and, as long as you don't break laws, as long as you are not an armed robber, as long as you are not a drug dealer, you can stay here forever, everybody will come here. That is like having no immigration law at all.

In any event, right now, we have the bizarre situation in which people are deciding that we don't have to enforce our current immigration laws. We have people like--I am from Wisconsin--the Governor of Illinois and the Governor of Minnesota, in essence, saying that we do not want ICE in our States. Same thing with the ridiculous mayor of Minnesota.

What would happen if the word got out that, if you come illegally into the United States, all you have to do is find your way into Illinois or Minnesota or perhaps New York or California, and the immigration laws will not be enforced?

I will tell you what would happen. What would happen is, in a given period of time, I think we would find ourselves--I am sure it would be easy to find 100 million Chinese who would come here; 100 million people from

India could come here; or 100 million people from Africa would come here. America would permanently change. It would change very quickly if we respected the preposterous positions of the Governor of Minnesota.

In order to preserve our country, we have to limit the number of new citizens at 800,000, or maybe even less.

It is scary that we have so many citizens who are so blind that they can't see that we are losing our country. If we allow unlimited immigration in the country, that is exactly what would happen.

I should also point out that things are different than they were 60 years ago. When I was a child and they showed pictures of countries abroad, you would see starving children. You would look at their stomachs.

Nowadays, the amount of poverty in the Third World is a fraction of what it used to be. In some of the poorer countries of the world, we have the same problem as we do with the poor of this country. They are obese.

Okay. It amazes me sometimes when you look at the TV and they are showing other countries around the globe, how they have high-rise buildings in the background. I am sure they are not as wealthy as, say, New York City, but they clearly are not poor as we thought of poor 60 years ago. These people frequently have more than enough money.

So the question is what to do, and that is why I think it is the biggest problem that we have in America. If people like the Governor of Minnesota or the Governor of Illinois or the Governor of California get their way, the America that we are used to is going to disappear, and it will be replaced by people who may not be protecting our country or keeping the current law or the current Constitution or the attitude of less government going.

We are almost certainly going to get people who turn America into the countries they came from, countries in which there is socialism, in which you have socialists; countries in which elections become contests of who are you going to give to more? America will become not only poorer, but America will become much less free.

We must enforce our immigration laws. It is going to be messy in some cases, particularly because we have horrible mayors and horrible Governors who want to ignore our laws. They want to fundamentally change America, but our President, whoever that President is, has to have the courage and the moral steel to stand up to these people and remove people who don't belong here.

Anybody who feels guilty about that, again, I remind you: 800,000 people a year, almost all what liberals refer to as people of color, are coming here already. We have nothing to apologize for if we hold the number of people here to those numbers.

There are some people who feel that we need more people here for our farms, more people here for our hotels, more people here for our factories. If that is true, Congress can expand the number of work visas that are available, but it doesn't mean we open up the floodgates of the southern border and whoever can come here should be able to come here.

Part of the problem as well, in addition to bad mayors and bad Governors, is bad clergy. I think they are apparently not familiar what is in the Bible as far as respecting the law. Every country around the world has immigration laws. They have laws that have to be respected. Unfortunately, we have some clergy who, I guess, were bored preaching about the Gospel, bored preaching about God, and they have decided to adopt the leftwing orthodoxies of let everybody come here. They, of course, have a lot to answer to as well.

I challenge Americans at the polls, when you look and see what issues your Congressman or, even more, your mayors or Governors are running on, are you going to vote for people who are going to keep our America great, not people who are going to say no immigrants whatsoever--like I said, nationalizing 800,000 a year. Are you going to elect people who are not going to be foolish people who let an unlimited number of people come here? Because if we do that, America, the America that we grew up in, is going to be gone for our children. It is going to be gone for our grandchildren.

In any event, that is, I think, the most important issue today because if we don't win on that issue, our country is done.

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

Mr. Speaker, immigration is in the news again, and I don't feel the Republicans have done a good enough job of explaining what is going on here.

During the Biden administration--people are going to argue--somewhere between 8 million and 10 million people were allowed in this country who were not coming here legally.

Obviously, if we are going to have immigration laws, in the future, we have to make it clear that people who broke the laws in the past are not allowed in the country.

What is going on is that we have riots in Minnesota, and important Democratic officials who are saying something is wrong here.

Let us not forget: Every year in this country, 850,000 people are naturalized. They are sworn in as new citizens. We are at an all-time record of the number of foreign-born people in this country. The United States has nothing to apologize for about the number of people being allowed in this country, as we try to remove people.

Right now, in Minnesota, the Governor and mayor aren't even in favor of ICE removing criminals, and we should be removing other people who came here.

In any event, remember in America, we naturalize 850,000 people every year.

Mr. Speaker, yesterday in this building, we had a panel put together to address the situation of the lack of two-parent homes in America and the degree to which it is caused by huge marriage penalties in our welfare system.

The panel consisted of Matt Dickerson of the Economic Policy Innovation Center, Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project, Jamie Gillespie from the White House, Robert Rector from The Heritage Foundation, together with three Congressmen.

The purpose of the program was to provide a framework to deal with the antimarriage bias in American welfare programs. The panel was put together at the request of 16 organizations and other concerned citizens who work with nonprofits.

In addition to The Heritage Foundation and the American Principles Project, Center for Urban Renewal and Education, Advancing American Freedom, AdvanceUSA, Concerned Women for American Legislative Action Committee, the Coalition for Jewish Values, the Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, Eagle Forum, Family Watch International, Faith and Family Foundation, Independent Women's Forum, Students for Life Action, the Family Policy Alliance, and the Faith and Liberty in the Nation's Capital organization all were present.

I, quite frankly, since I have been here, haven't seen such a groundswell of so many conservative nonprofit groups to come together to address such a problem. Yet, this isn't surprising. The number of children born into families without a mother or father at home, missing one, is very high. When I was a child, that number was around 4 percent to 5 percent. It is now around 42 percent.

These groups have gotten together to call on President Trump, Speaker Johnson, and Majority Leader Thune to do something about this. It is not unusual that a single woman, if she marries the father of her child, would lose over $25,000 in benefits.

By the way, when I talk about going from 4 percent without a mother and father at home to over 40 percent, at the time it was 4 percent, we didn't even have abortions. Think about that. Then, in the interim, we had abortions, and still the number of children born into homes without a father at home went up by a factor of more than 10.

There are over 70 government programs available to a single parent with low income, but you lose the benefits of these programs if you marry the other parent who has a decent income of, let's say, $50,000 a year.

I realize that there are great American families of all backgrounds. I, like all of us, know single parents who have done a fantastic job of raising their children. I commend them for that, but I think, also, everyone would agree that it is easier on both the parents and the children if you have two parents there. In essence, bribing a young couple not to get married is not the way to go about doing things.

Programs like food stamps; low-income housing; earned income tax credit; Women, Infants, and Children; Medicaid; Pell grants; and government daycare all are generous programs. You would lose those benefits if you had another parent in the house with an income.

Of course, this changes behavior, as well. I remember talking about this topic about 15 years ago at a Tea Party event in Wisconsin. I talked about Pell grants, which is a program of free college tuition or free scholarships for low-income kids. I was addressing, like I said, a Tea Party group, and like most Tea Party groups, it is usually older men who agreed with me.

Yet, there was a young gal who was tending bar where we had the meeting, and I asked her what she thought about the speech and what she thought about Pell grants, which were, like I said, a grant conditioned upon having low income.

She said that her and her husband got married before they had children, but she told me none of her friends were getting married. They got free college.

I have heard that from other people. That is just one of these programs, Pell grants, which, intentionally or unintentionally, is designed to discourage marriage. Like I said, I rattled off about eight programs. There are about 70 programs that you could lose if you worked your way out of poverty or married somebody who wasn't in poverty.

Usually, what you have to do is you have to keep your income below $16,000 or $17,000, and if you talk to employers who hire people who are making in the $10 to $15-an-hour range, they will always give you anecdotes of their employees who don't want to work extra hours, or they will lose their benefits.

They don't want a raise because they will lose their benefits. This is because in America right now we discourage work, and we actually discourage savings as well, and we discourage marriage as well.

Just yesterday, I heard of another couple. They just had their second child, but they weren't getting married. I didn't dig into it, but I know what is going on when you have people like that not getting married. They realize they don't want to lose their benefits.

Now, the fact that all of these government programs are set up to discourage marriage, is this an accident? Believe it or not, no, I don't think it is entirely an accident, because there are very powerful intellectuals on the left who wanted to get rid of families.

We know Karl Marx himself felt that in order to have a dream universe, you had to get rid of the family.

A woman by the name of Kate Millett, who was around in the 1960s and I think could be described as the mother of women's studies classes, also was adamant that we should try to get men out of the household. I don't think it is a coincidence that she was at the peak of her power in the 1960s when a lot of these programs went into effect.

Now, this problem should have been addressed years ago. It is kind of a well-worn anecdote, but I will say it again. Patrick Monahan, a Democrat U.S. Senator, in the late 1960s put together a study, and he warned the degree to which we had these programs contributing to the breakdown in marriage, but nobody paid attention Patrick Monahan.

Another man who did a lot of work in this area was George Gilder who wrote a couple of books, ``Men in Marriage,'' ``Visible Man,'' ``Wealth in Poverty.'' He first looked into this problem, as some people do, in a ghetto in Albany, New York. He could remember the time right before that when it was a considered real crisis if a woman got pregnant out of wedlock. However, to his surprise, even in the 1970s, it was a cause for enjoyment or a cause to celebrate for the young couple because when the girlfriend got pregnant, she was able to make the rounds and get a free apartment, get free food, get free medical care and, at the time, get free cash from a program called Aid to Families With Dependent Children. Now we have cash from a program called TANF.

In any event, Gilder was a little bit surprised, but wrote books on the matter saying: Hey, wait a minute here. It shouldn't be a cause for celebration when someone gets pregnant out of wedlock. It should be a cause for a little bit of panic and what are we going to do now; but it wasn't in the late 1970s as George Gilder documented.

Here we are today. We did do a little bit of looking at the welfare programs in the 1990s under Bill Clinton, but we didn't go anywhere near far enough.

By the way, George Gilder made another observation. When we talk about the welfare state, it obviously affects the children, it obviously affects the single women, and it affects the men. But according to Gilder, of the three groups, the one who is harmed the most by our welfare system is the men. Of course, the women are hurt a little in that financially it can be a little bit of a struggle. The statistics will show again and again it harms the children, but we have created a society in which men have lost the purpose of raising children and being involved in the raising of their children, being involved in providing for their children. Therefore, in areas in which the welfare culture is widespread, we have a situation that the men are doing drugs, committing crimes because they have no purpose in life.

Here in Washington and other big cities, like Chicago and Milwaukee, they write articles about where is all this crime coming from. And if they would stop and look or talk to any policemen, they will tell you where the crime is coming from. The crime is coming from children from these broken families. If we didn't have these broken families, a lot of the men who are committing the crimes, the men that are just hanging out and doing drugs would have a purpose in life and be more likely to be productive.

I should point out, by the way, that this is a very important thing for the men; but sometimes people say that we need the welfare system because there are no men with decent jobs, and that is why we have to have the government step in.

I have an Indian immigrant friend of mine. It always amazes me how people who come here from other countries have observations that are not made by the native-born who are just used to it. As my Indian immigrant friend said: In America, the woman marries the government. In any event, while the woman is marrying the government, the man has nothing to do, and that is why we have many of these problems.

I, of course, have been in politics for a while now. I have attended a lot of committee hearings, and be it committee hearings on poverty, be it committee hearings on crime, be it committee hearings on drugs, be it committee hearings on depressants, be it committee hearings on people not doing well at school, they always look for how does this happen; but they never address the obvious reason why kids do less well in school or why kids end up committing crimes. They do it because of the total breakdown in the family.

In any event, both for the children and the men and the single women, we would be better off retracing our steps back to the great society years of 1965 and 1966 when, in my opinion, the worst President in our country's history decided to institute these programs and destroy the family. I am not sure that was the motive. I think perhaps the real motive was electoral.

Our forefathers, when they put together our founding documents, warned us that there were going to be some politicians who were going to try to make people dependent on the government in exchange for votes. I think that at the time was maybe the motivation for these horrible programs; but in any event, it is something that we have to address now.

Now, we are going to be doing a reconciliation bill, I hope, sometime in the next 6 months. Almost all of these programs are what are referred to as ``mandatory spending,'' so we can change these programs and do what we can to get rid of the perverse incentives.

I think some of the burden of these folks will have to be put on private organizations because it is a problem no doubt if people are able to get these programs without being confronted with moral choices or moral problems.

In a great book that I am reading, ``The Tragedy of American Compassion,'' the type of people who were involved in providing food for the poor when our country was founded were very keenly aware that programs which indiscriminately gave things to people were actually harmful to people, that you had to weigh in with them on their moral choices, on their work choices. It was, in fact, a negative to set up a program in which one did not look at moral choices that people are making.

In any event, after we have spent about 60 years after the Great Society, 60 years after Patrick Monahan warned us what would happen, it is time for this Congress to address this problem, get rid of the perverse incentives which discourage marriage and get America back to where we were before the Great Society when we had much stronger families, when crime was lower than it is today--I think you would have to say people came out of school better than today, and I think you would have to say the amount of antidepressants consumed was a tiny fraction of what we have today--and really Make America Great Again.

I implore President Trump's administration--we had a representative from his administration here yesterday. I implore them to put together a working group so that we can come up with solutions to this problem over the next few months.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 10 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, January 15, 2026, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, like many Americans, I caught a little of the TV over the weekend, which was dominated by the tragic events in Minneapolis.

However, there is one thing I felt had to be commented on because I think there is a lot of confusion as to who we should be removing in this country.

Right now in America, we have no shortage of people who are here from other countries. We are at an all-time high, even greater than the 1890s or 2010s in the number of people in this country who were not born here. That is over 15 percent. We are naturalizing about 850,000 people a year.

Nevertheless, there are Congressmen who keep getting confused and think the only people that should be removed from this country after Joe Biden left about 10 million people in the country illegally are people who committed serious crimes. That is ridiculous. Of the 10 million people that Joe Biden let in or 8 million people, whatever, obviously it is up to ICE to remove as many as possible and get back to historical norms.

Mr. Speaker, I attended a hearing today in the Judiciary Committee. There was some confusion in the committee about what we should be doing to enforce our immigration laws and who is at fault for the mess we have in Minneapolis.

There are some people who are apparently under the impression we should only enforce our immigration laws if the people who came here illegally commit another crime. If we think about it for 2 seconds, that is completely ridiculous.

Right now, every year in this country, about 850,000 new citizens are naturalized citizens. When I was a child, that was under 200,000. That is without taking into account people who become citizens because of birthright citizenship, which is not even intended under our Constitution.

We must not fall for the idea that all a person has to do is sneak across the border and hang around here and not commit a felony and, therefore, they come in here.

I feel so sorry for our great President Trump. He was left with such a mess when Joe Biden let in 10 million people, and he is now honor bound to remove them from this country. That is why we have a mess in Minneapolis.

Mr. Speaker, when we heard that Doug passed away, I asked several people the same question. They all agreed overwhelmingly: If something were to happen to this institution and only 10 of us survived and we had to build it up from scratch, Doug would be one of the 10 people we would want to start out with and maybe one of the top five or maybe even the top one, but everybody around here knows what a special guy Doug LaMalfa was.

I used to have a lot of discussion with him around this time back in the parlor, talking about the bills today, how to vote on this or that. As a politician, you can't resist it when you decide how to vote on something, what is the politically right thing to do, what politically will help me get reelected.

I never heard Doug talk that way. Doug always talked about the right policy, doing the right thing, and then selling it back home, which was one of the reasons why I think he was so special.

Another thing that was so special, in all the conversations I had with him, I never remember him saying anything negative about anybody. I say a lot of negative things about people, so I am really jealous of a guy like Doug LaMalfa who manages never to say anything bad about anybody.

One final thing, the other thing I know about Doug is we met every Thursday morning in a Bible study known as Capitol Ministries, which is really a Bible study for the erudite Christian, men of deep faith. I will tell you, Doug--a lot of people talk about it--was just such a good Christian. So in any event, a great Christian, a great Congressman, I will never forget Doug LaMalfa.

Mr. Speaker, I was in an important meeting. Had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 358.