Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the privilege to address you on the floor of the House on the House of Representatives. It is always a privilege. And this time in our history reflects I think one of the most pivotal times that we've…
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the privilege to address you on the floor of the House on the House of Representatives. It is always a privilege.
And this time in our history reflects I think one of the most pivotal times that we've had. We are at war for one thing, and it is a pivotal moment within that war. And we are watching terrorists from overseas that have attacked the United States. And as we are watching our national security on that hand and as we are debating how we proceed to victory over al Qaeda and those terrorists on that end, at the same time our southern border is being flooded with just masses of illegal immigrants on a nightly basis. And to give, Mr. Speaker, some perspective on the scope of that problem, we have this testimony before the Immigration Subcommittee, of which I am the ranking member, and I sat intensively through hearings and engaged in questions and actually testified myself for the better part of 5 years at this point, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, the testimony that we get from the Border Patrol, as far as the Border Patrol representatives for the profession and the Government, identifies that 2 years ago on the southern border, our Border Patrol and other immigration officers interdicted 1,155,000, I believe, illegal immigrants attempting to come across our border. Last year, it was 1,188,000. The number increases.
Now, one might argue that the effectiveness of our Border Patrol is reflected in the increase in the number of interdictions from about 1,155,000 to 1,188,000. But, Mr. Speaker, I would submit also that that could very well be a reflection of increased numbers coming across our border. It is not possible to identify whether the Border Patrol is more effective or whether they simply have a larger mass of people.
But in any case, when questioned before Committee in testimony before Congress as to what percentage of the illegal border crossers they were interdicting, the number fell between 25 percent and 33 percent. I believe the quote in the testimony was, ``We think we catch between a fourth and a third of those who attempt to cross.'' Now, that is not a very good record when you consider that there are 1,188,000 illegals, and that could potentially represent a third of those that tried or a fourth of those who tried.
So, I simply take that math and put that number at 25 percent, which is the lower part of the number, and then round it up to put it into a perspective in between the 25 and 33 percent. If you take that number and do the calculation, you come to about 4.6 million, let me see, about 4.6 million attempts. If you look at the interdiction numbers it amounts to and round it down, 4 million coming across our southern border on an annual basis, and that divides out to be about 11,000 a night coming across our southern border; 11,000, Mr. Speaker, every night on average. I say ``night,'' because during the day, the activity slows down. It doesn't stop. But at night it speeds up.
I have gone down and sat on the border in the dark, and without night vision goggles and without the aid that we have of our security personnel down there, but I just sat there and listened, sitting next to that cattle fence, that is not a very good cattle fence, about 5 barbed wires and steel posts that are stretched out to where the wires are separated in the middle so that the illegal traffic can simply bend down and step over through the fence.
I sat there and listened maybe 3 hours at a crack with a retired Border Patrol officer. I could see the shadows filtering through. I could hear the cars coming down on the Mexican side of the border. I could hear one of them dragging its muffler rattling as it drove down there. I could hear it stop by a big mesquite tree. I could hear the doors open. You hear people get out. You hear them drop their packs on the ground and the doors close kind of quietly, but the doors close. You can hear them pick things up in a hushed whisper and talk. Then they line up in single file, and they walk through the mesquite brush in the desert that 100 or 150 yards on down to our border and then file through the fence single file and go on up through the brush into the United States.
Some of them, I will concede, are coming here because they would like to find a job and they would like to find a better life. Some of them will send money back to their family. Some of them, that pack they drop on the ground and pick up again is the pack of illegal drugs that they will be carrying into the United States and delivering to a predetermined location, perhaps 25 miles up into the United States across the desert along the highway where a vehicle is scheduled to pull off on a turnoff and have those packs of illegal drugs tossed into the back of that truck. Maybe some of the illegals get in the truck and go on up into the United States. Some of them turn around, walk back across the desert that 20 or 25 miles and go down and get another load.
This goes on every single night on our southern border, Mr. Speaker, every single night. That isn't all the drugs that come across our border, but that is one of the methods that they use. If we put a vehicle barrier in place, in some places we have them, that amounts to a 5-by-5 steel tubing that is welded on our steel posts, and these are a 5-by-5 steel piling that are set in the ground, and a 5-by-5 steel tubing that is welded on there at about bumper height of a vehicle, that vehicle barrier will slow down and actually stop vehicles from driving across the border, but it doesn't stop individuals from walking right through there and carrying their packs of illegal drugs.
The number that is most commonly represented by the Drug Enforcement Agency is $65 billion worth of illegal drugs coming across our southern border on an annual basis. That $65 billion is, I believe, a street value. I don't know what it is worth at the border specifically. In fact, they don't know either. They have got some representations of the breakdown of who gets what share of the profit as it flows through the illegal drug cartels. But $65 billion worth on the street is no small number.
That value in illegal drugs consumed by Americans destroys untold numbers of lives, an incalculable amount of human potential, and an innumerable number of children suffer because their father or mother or both are hooked on illegal drugs, methamphetamines, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, you name it, that comes across that border. Especially the methamphetamine that comes up into my part of the country, up the NAFTA Highway, as I heard some of my colleagues talking earlier, and the pain and the suffering and the death that has been dealt out by those illegal drugs, but pushed by $65 billion worth, the street value in the United States.
First, Mr. Speaker, I want to make the statement that we have a responsibility here in the United States to address the illegal drug consumption in this country. As long as we have the kind of demand that demands $65 billion worth of illegal drugs on the streets, in noses and in the veins and in the systems of our American drug abusers, illegal drug abusers, there is always going to be somebody that seeks to meet that demand.
Right now, the most efficient system that is set up, the most competitive system that is set up, the system that has the distribution wired in, is the illegal drug lords that control our southern border and the families that control their segments, the drug cartel families that control the segments of our southern border.
Mr. Speaker, we can't solve this problem by addressing the border
alone. We have to solve this problem by reducing and eliminating the demand here in the United States for illegal drugs. I am not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I want to go on record, Mr. Speaker, and let you and let the rest of the body know that there are three ways that we can address illegal drugs.
One of them is through interdiction. We currently do that. We try to stop all the drug pushers we can. We try to take all the drugs out of their hands we can. We try to take them off the street. We put them in prison. We put mandatory sentences on some of them, and some of them have faced those mandatory sentences. We are doing a lot of what we can do with interdiction.
The only other two places we can address the drugs is rehab, and we have invested some money in rehab and we have gotten some pretty good results from those who have hit bottom, from those, Mr. Speaker, who want to. But the rehabilitation isn't going to solve the problem with the demand.
So the third place is how do you reduce and eliminate the demand, and I will submit that the way to address this, if we want to dry up the demand of illegal drugs in the United States, we are going to have to provide random testing in the workplace and also in the educational field and also in the welfare rolls.
Now, we have a drug testing law in Iowa that I worked intensively to get passed and drafted a lot of the components and worked those pieces through. I spent 2 years doing not exclusively that, but focusing a lot of my time getting that legislation passed, Mr. Speaker.
What it provides for is preemployment testing, post-accident testing, reasonable suspicion testing and random testing. If you have those four categories of drug testing and you provide that for that in the workplace, in our educational institutions so our students are being tested, and in our welfare rolls, you will be able to, and we could as a society, if we determined we wanted to dramatically reduce the demand for illegal drugs, if we would put a drug testing system in place, we could dramatically reduce the demand.
By doing so in the workplace under those four methods that I said, preemployment, post-accident, reasonable suspicion and random testing, we can provide and essentially guarantee a drug-free workplace.
I first brought my focus on this when as in the contracting business I had a Federal contract. The Federal contract required me to sign a document that I would guarantee a drug-free workplace. Now, I take those contracts seriously. When I sign my name to something, I intend to follow through. That is my commitment and that has been my record.
But it disturbed me that Iowa law didn't allow me to truly guarantee a drug-free workplace. I could watch out for it, I could check for it as much as I could, I could educate my employees, but I couldn't legally test my employees. So I did what I could to meet a drug-free workplace. I think I provided a drug-free workplace, but I don't know that. But it set me down the path of working on the drug testing side of it.
We essentially don't have a conversation going on in America about how to eliminate drug abuse in America. That conversation doesn't exist in a meaningful fashion. We talk about all kinds of things, but $65 billion worth of illegal drugs representing 95 percent of the overall drug consumption in America coming across our southern border and the attendant violence that comes with that and the drug cartels that comes with that, the smuggling of drugs and people and human slaves that are put into the sex slavery business, and that violence and the crime that is naturally associated with illegal drugs, we are not addressing the demand.
We are not particularly concerned about the abuse of drugs in the workplace. And I believe we have got to raise that issue. I believe that we need to bring the focus of America's society on dramatically reducing the demand for illegal drugs in this society so that we can provide a lot better culture for our children to grow up in than perhaps we grew up in. That is not being addressed, Mr. Speaker, and I want to raise this issue.
But on the other side of this, the flip side of this issue is U.S. demand, $65 billion coming across our southern border representing 90 percent of the illegal drugs. The other side is on that side of the border, they are delivering that amount of drugs to us.
They are producing many of them in Mexico and Central America and the northern part of South America. Also there is heroin and other drugs coming in from China that flow into Mexico. And that distribution network is the magnet that draws those illegal drugs into Mexico. The marijuana that comes in, the methamphetamines that are manufactured there. The pseudoephedrines that come in from China to Mexico to be processed into methamphetamine, that spells a society that doesn't have the rule of law.
I will argue that we are deficient in our own rule of law here because we are not reducing the demand in the United States. But they are pouring across the southern border. And as much rhetoric as we have had about people that want to come here for a better life, we need to have a lot of rhetoric about what has happened to the lives of the people who have been sucked into this drug smuggling, who have been sucked into the drug consumption and become drug addicts? What about the lives of the American people who have been sacrificed on this alter of permissiveness that we don't have the will to shut down the abuse of illegal drugs in American and we don't have the will to shut down the flow of those illegal drugs across the border?
As I watch that and I look at the violence, and here two years ago, Mr. Speaker, actually it was more than 3 years ago, I commissioned a GAO study, a Government Accountability Study, and asking this question, and that is, we saw the testimony of how many people didn't make it across the desert to come into the United States illegally. That number has grown in the years that I have been in this Congress from perhaps a little more than 200, to now over 450, and perhaps as many as 500 people dying coming across the southern border.
That is a human tragedy. It is an agonizing human tragedy. The images of that easily come to mind to the American people, because we have seen a lot of news on it, we have seen film on it, we have seen pictures.
The other side of that tragedy is of those that make it across the border, those 11,000 a night that try, the 66 to 75 percent of those that make it, or more, and I will add that when I talk to the Border Patrol officers on the border and I ask them what percentage of effectiveness do you have, what percentage of them are you catching that are trying to come across the border, 25 percent, 33 percent? They laugh at me. They say, no, that number is more like 10 percent.
That is the most consistent number I get when I am speaking confidentially with the people that are boots on the ground, facing this enemy to our society, eye-to-eye, face-to-face. Perhaps 10 percent. I get numbers that go down as low as 3 percent. But it is the testimony here that is the highest that I hear, that perhaps a quarter to a third of those are interdicted.
But of those that come across the border and get across the border, and we are losing 450 or 500 trying to come into the United States that don't make it across the desert, how many Americans die at the hands of those who do make it across the border? Those involved in the crime, and there is plenty of it, do commit crimes against American citizens.
The measure of that crime falls into this category: 27 percent of the inmates in our Federal penitentiaries are criminal aliens. Some of them came into the United States legally and overstayed their visa. But most of them came into the United States illegally and committed crimes. That is 27 percent.
If you look at the State penitentiaries, the same Government Accountability Office report has in there that they are only funding 25 percent through SCAAP, the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, that funds our States, our counties, our local prisons, reimburses them for the trouble of having to incarcerate criminal aliens here in the United States because the United States isn't able to control our borders, and the burden of enforcing that crime falls upon the local governments and the cities, increasingly. But the Federal Government is to reimburse them for incarcerating the inmates.
In the GAO study, it shows that we are only reimbursing for 25 percent of the cost of the incarceration of criminal aliens in the local prisons, State and local. When you do the math, that 25 percent comes to about $22,000 a year by their numbers. That is a pretty typical number for the cost of incarcerating someone in a penitentiary.
So if they are paying 25 percent and it is costing $22,000 a year for those that we do pay for, it is not $88,000 a year, so the only other conclusion one can draw is, at least in our State penitentiaries, that at least 25 percent of the inmates are criminal aliens.
Now one comes to the conclusion that more than 25 percent of the inmates that are in our Federal and State penitentiaries are criminal aliens. They commit crimes against Americans. If they are committing crimes against Americans in the proportion that they are represented in our penitentiaries, that means more than 25 percent of the murders, more than 25 percent of the assaults, more than 25 percent of the rapes and more than 25 percent of the grand larceny, and the list goes on and on and on.
We have few in our Federal penitentiaries that are in there just because they violated immigration law. They may be there under that charge, but if they are and that is the charge that they are under, it is most likely that they simply could not make another charge stick and the prosecutors chose to use immigration charges rather than something else.
But just think, we are sitting here now with 16,400 murders a year in America. And if a fourth of those are attributable to criminal aliens, you are at 4,000 Americans a year. We crossed that sad threshold of those killed in action in Iraq, total, in addition to those killed in accidents in Iraq, over 3,000, a while back, Mr. Speaker.
But that number compared to the number of over 3,000 a year, in fact the almost 4,000 a year that die at the hands of criminal aliens here in the United States, and that is every single year. So, each year, we have had more Americans die at the hands of criminal aliens in this country than we have cumulative total of all of the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines that have been killed in Iraq since the operations began in March of 2003. We have more Americans dying at the hands of criminal aliens on the streets and the roads and in the back alleys and homes of America each year than died on September 11, 2001. This total accumulates over and over again.
In addition to that number, there also is a slightly larger number of Americans who die at the hands of criminal aliens who have committed negligent homicide, generally in the form of drunk driving, although not always. If you add these numbers up, my numbers show 12 Americans a day murdered at the hands of criminal aliens, and 13 die every day at the hands of criminal aliens who have committed negligent homicide, generally victims of drunk drivers. And I am not counting the criminal aliens who have been killed because of their own drunk driving, Mr. Speaker.
So you add that number up, and it comes to 25 a day, 25 Americans a day. If the news media focused on that instead of some of their other priorities, I think we would have come to a conclusion on this illegal immigration issue that we are facing. But what is coming across that border and the violence that flows with it, and again, I will stipulate that most are good people. When they are our neighbors we like them. And when they go to work, we like them. And when they go to church, we like them. And when they raise their children and educate their children and when they assimilate into the American culture, we love everybody that comes to America to do that. We love those who come here legally. Those who come illegally subvert the rule of law.
But the violence that is part of the society that they come from is significant. I have to talk a little bit about the levels of violence here in the United States compared to the countries that many of our immigrants come from.
That is, our violent death rate here in the United States is 4.28 per 100,000. And the violent death rate in Mexico is 13.2 per 100,000. That is actually one of the safer countries in South and Central America. I was in Sao Paolo, Brazil, a little over a year ago. They told us to be careful where we go because in that city, they have over 10,000 murders a year.
I don't know the violent death rate in Brazil, but I do know what it is in Honduras. It is nine times that of the United States. In El Salvador, they don't publish the violent death rate, and one can only presume what it might be and why they don't.
But in Colombia, the violent death rate in Colombia is 15.4 times higher than the violent death rate here in the United States.
So it stands to reason that if you draw young men, some of whom are involved in the illegal drug trade, from a society that is far more violent than that of the United States, anywhere from 3 times to 15 times more violent, you are going to see more violent crimes. You are going to see more murders, assaults and rapes. There are going to be more victims in the United States and more deaths. One couldn't expect anything else.
That doesn't mean that we indict an entire country and all of their nationals because some of the citizens are violent. But that means we have more crime here because we are drawing a young men concentration from a more violent society, and a significant portion of those who are involved coming into the United States are those who are dealing in illegal drugs because the demand here for $65 billion worth of illegal drugs draws that in from those countries, and necessarily it has to come across our southern border.
Mr. Speaker, I hope I have laid the foundation for my passionate belief that we need to reinforce our southern border by building a double fence/wall on our southern border because I don't believe that a virtual fence is going to deter $65 billion worth of illegal drugs.
I have an understanding how powerful a magnet a $65 billion illegal drug market magnet is that draws those drugs into the United States with that kind of powerful profit incentive. They are going to be pushing against our southern border.
When you go down there, and I sit there at night, and it is five barbed-wire strands, five strands of barbed wire, kind of a poor cattle fence, and they are going through one after another. And I can't quite count them all because it is pitch black, and I can only see the shadows, and I can hear the footsteps and the fence creak. And I can put my ear down to the post and listen to the fence stretch as they go through and kind of count.
That is just one place, one location, one night, Mr. Speaker. But 11,000 a night on average every night. The numbers of people pouring across and the illegal drugs that are a part of that, America's economy is paying a tremendous price. Our society is paying a tremendous price. The potential, the human potential of our young people is slowly being undermined and destroyed by the illegal drugs that are coming in.
But the force of those drugs cannot be eliminated simply because we want to put in a virtual fence. We want to argue that we are going to put in ground-based radar and we are going to fly the unmanned aerial vehicles over the top. We will put some cameras in place, but some of that doesn't work in bad weather. Sometimes you can't get down there in bad weather to enforce.
Each time I asked the Border Patrol, does it help to build a double fence/wall, their answer is generally, nothing you can do will reduce the need for the number of boots on the ground. That is an interesting response, Mr. Speaker.
How is it that if we build physical barriers on the border, follow through and complete the commitment of the congressional mandate that the President signed, the Secure Fence Act, and build 854 miles of a double fence and roads, and tie that together with the technology that is necessary to supplement those physical barriers, how is it, if we build those barriers, we need more boots on the grounds, not less?
I am going to say, good physical barriers reduce the numbers of Border Patrol that we need. I am suggesting that we reduce those numbers; I am suggesting that we can invest our money more efficiently on the southern border than we are. And the wisdom of a double fence and wall on that southern border, if analyzed economically, holds up, and it holds up this way.
We are spending $8 billion on the 2,000 mile southern border from San
Diego to Brownsville. That is $8 billion every year, and that money goes to pay Border Patrol, buy Humvees, depreciate the Humvees and support them, and pay for the retirement benefits, training and equipment and helicopters, fuel, gas for our Humvees, the whole network that is necessary to keep the Border Patrol up and running. That is where the $8 billion goes. That is $4 million per mile.
Now, me being a contractor who spent my life building things and pricing things and sometimes designing construction projects, I bring this down to unit price. I have to calculate things in unit price.
Mr. Speaker, what would I do? Say, for example, I live in the country in Iowa on a gravel road and the four corners come together right by my house. If I had a border on my west road that ran from my house, a mile west right down the middle of that gravel road, I don't care how far it went east or west, but if it was my job to contain that one mile, and if Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security came to me and said, Steve, we think you ought to control this border, would you bid that for us? It is costing us $4 million a mile and two-thirds or three-quarters of everybody who is trying to get across the border goes across and goes off into the United States. Can you give us a price to give us more efficiency, a lot more than a fourth to a third efficiency? Give us something close to 100 percent efficiency.
So if you are a stopping a fourth of the people at $4 million a mile, one would think, to get 100 percent of them, if we spent $16 million a mile, maybe just maybe that linear equation would work out. I don't think it will, but that is one way of thinking about it.
So I would look at it and say, Mr. Secretary, $4 million a mile, how about giving me a 10-year contract, and I can control the illegal traffic on this border.
Now I have $40 million to work with; $4 million for that mile, 1 year, times 10 years, a 10-year contract, $40 million. I would look at that and think, I am going to hire myself a bunch of Border Patrol and buy myself a bunch of Humvees, and I am going to drive them up and down that road and hope that they come across the people coming across the border at night. I wouldn't do that.
I would have some people to guard the borders, yes; some people to be quick reaction responders, I certainly would. But I would look at that and say, if I make an early capital investment, if I built a wall on that border and a fence inside there a hundred feet, maybe another chain link fence inside that, I would set up some cameras and sensors, and it would be monitor-able from inside an air-conditioned office. Then I would have some Border Patrol to deploy if I needed them.
But for $1.3 million, I could build this wall that I am about to build. And for the balance of another million dollars a mile, I could put in another fence and we could have a solid wall, double fencing, and we could have probably an access road to run along there, and we could shut off more than 90 percent of the illegal traffic, more than 95 percent of the illegal traffic. In fact, I believe that we could tighten that down so tight there wouldn't be anybody coming across.
I say that because, not only does it make sense, I have seen the effectiveness of it. I went to Israel, and I took a look at the fence they have constructed in Israel. They were being bombed on a regular basis by suicide bombers from the West Bank.
They'd blow themselves up and blow up some women and children and men, too, didn't matter to them so long as they could take somebody with them. And so for the Israelis to protect themselves from those kind of attacks, they put a fence in place. And some places it's doubled; some places it's a little more than that. There are some watch towers and guard towers. They have some wire on top. They have sensors. Some of the sensors that they have are classified so they don't let the enemy understand how to defeat it.
But the fence structure that they put in place in Israel has been nearly 100 percent effective, and so I hear people here in this Congress will say, why do you want to build a fence and how tall do you want it to be? And I say, well, I'd put mine up 12 feet tall here, and then I'd put a wire mesh fence inside that's taller yet. Oh, 12 feet tall; if you do that, somebody's just going to build a 12-foot ladder and they'll climb over the top.
That is what you call a red herring, Mr. Speaker, and in fact, there have been very, very rare anyone could defeat the fence in Israel, and however tall you make the fence, yes, you can make a longer ladder. But there's always another way to defeat the people who think that's the easy way. It's one of the reasons to make it double because we can interdict them in between. And the sensors pick up the efforts, but if you don't slow them down, they charge across the border and scatter out across the desert. You can chase some of them down, but you cannot chase them all down, Mr. Speaker. And so fences and walls are effective. They have been proven to be effective, and they're cost- effective as well.
So let me just submit that that $40 million contract for that 1 mile for 10 years, the $4 million a year, for less than $3 million I can put in a concrete wall and a wire fence and I can put in sensors. And then I'd sit back and monitor that mile from my office with little warning devices on it and I'd have somebody on 24 hours a day. I'd have people on call and maybe somebody patrolling it in intermittent cycles, but we'd shut that mile down, and we could shut that mile down for an early capital investment of less than $3 million. And you'd only have $37 million left over for the balance of the 10 years to pay yourself a minimum number of border patrol and somebody to monitor the sensor devices that you have.
We can put this together, but what we're doing is burning up a tremendous amount of taxpayer dollars at $8 billion a year to get a fourth to a third efficiency when we can get 95, 96, 98 percent efficiency by investing in a structure instead.
Now, if we do that, we put a barrier in place that's very, very difficult to defeat, not impossible but difficult, and so the drug smugglers that are trying to get here, they are going to decide they don't want to try to go through there. They're likely to try by air again or by sea or some other method. In any case, we'll dramatically reduce the amount of illegal drugs on the streets of America, at least for a time, until they find another way to defeat us.
We have our choice. We can either work to defeat the illegal drug smugglers and try to keep those drugs off the street or we can capitulate. I'm not willing to capitulate, and I'm not hearing anybody in this Congress stand up and say that they want to legalize the illegal drugs.
And so I think we need to fight them, and I think this is the place to draw the line. This is the battle line, and it's on our southern border. I've talked to the Mexican senators about it. I believe they understand, and they're doing some things on their side to help out.
That's one of the battles that we have. We have a number of other battles, Mr. Speaker, and so it takes us, though, to this idea that legalize illegal drugs and then you don't have an illegal drug problem. That makes sense, doesn't it? But I'm not willing to go there, and we aren't in this Congress either. But the President and the open borders lobby have taken the stand that they think that we can't control our border, our southern border in particular, unless we legalize the 12 to 20 million people who come in here illegally.
Now, I continually ask the question of the representatives from the administration as they march forward before the Immigration Subcommittee, explain this to me, how is it that you can't enforce the law until we give amnesty to 12 to 20 million? How is it that if we do grant this amnesty or grant a legal status to 12 to 20 million people, how is America safer? If you want to bring people out of the shadows, and never mind they came here to live in the shadows, that's a function of sneaking into the United States and getting jobs illegally. When they were in hiding, that's living in the shadows. When you try to bring them out of the shadows, why would they come out? What kind of people would come out of the shadows? It would be those that are guaranteed amnesty. Those undesirables are not going to come out
of the shadows, Mr. Speaker. They're going to stay back there and they're going to run their drug trade and they're going to push their wives and their kids to go to work, and they're going to sit back and work in the black market. They're not going to come forward. We will not get people to come forward that are afraid that they will not be granted some kind of amnesty.
But the President's idea on this and the open border lobby's idea on this is somehow, if we grant amnesty to the 12 to 20 million people, then we can focus our law enforcement resources on the bad apples, a huge human haystack of humanity, 4 million strong pouring across our southern border every year. And in that haystack of humanity are the needles called terrorists and criminals, drug dealers, undesirable elements, people that no society wants in them. And if we legalize that huge human haystack of humanity, somehow it makes it easier to find the needles that are in it.
But I'll submit, Mr. Speaker, that those needles are not going to come out into the open unless they can be guaranteed some legal path, and those who will be legalized, and I reject that concept of destroying the rule of law and legalizing people that have broken our laws, but those who would be legalized would then get themselves a card where they could travel back and forth across the border at will.
Now, I would ask, does the administration and the open borders lobby expect to see more or less border crossings if you legalize people that are here illegally? Are they going to go back and forth more? Are they going to go back and forth less? I'll submit they'll go back and forth more because they have their illegal passage that they do now; they will still have that option. Of course, they will have the option of the card that says now you can go back and forth at will.
So we'll have more crossings across the border rather than less. When you have more crossings across the border, there are more opportunities to bring contraband across the border, more opportunities for terrorists to smuggle through, more opportunities for criminals to take advantage of the situation.
And so I can't believe that there's a rationale in this argument that if you legalize 12 to 20 million people, if you legalize them, somehow America is safer. They're not any different people than they were before. They're the same people. They're just travelling back and forth more than they were. They're still hiding the drug smugglers within them. The crime will still take place, and the rationale that you won't have as much illegal smuggling going on or we can solve a big portion of the illegal problem, the rationale is the same rationale that says legalize illegal drugs, then you don't have an illegal drug problem. Legalize illegal aliens, then you don't have an illegal alien problem.
That's as far as the rationale goes, but it surely does not solve the law enforcement problem, and no one in the administration can explain that to me, at least to the point where I could understand it, and I honestly tried, Mr. Speaker.
So the rule of law is at stake. To grant amnesty is to grant a pardon to immigration law-breakers and reward them with the objective of their crime. That's the fairest, most balanced definition of amnesty. It's one that holds up against the criticism.
The rule of law is the most essential element of American exceptionalism. If we didn't have the rule of law in America who would come here? They're leaving the other countries because they don't have the rule of law and they don't have the right to property and they can't be treated equally under the law and are not equal under the eyes of the law.
But the rule of law says that everyone, every man and every woman, is equal under the eyes of the law, and that if you're going to be held accountable for a crime, you're innocent until proven guilty; and justice for a poor man is the same as justice for a rich man. That's the rule of law. And that's one of the essential pillars and the most essential pillar of American exceptionalism.
But I don't know how many of those who are beneficiaries of the 1986 amnesty plan I've talked to who say I'm for this amnesty, you need to grant a path to citizenship for people who came here illegally, and I ask them why, and they say, well, it was good for me; it was good for me, it was good for my family.
But just that fact alone is surely not justification enough to tear the rule of law asunder and throw it over the side, Mr. Speaker. This rule of law is a precious commodity, a precious pillar of American exceptionalism, and if it's destroyed, we will never reach a glorious destiny in this country.
It's essential that we preserve the rule of law, and if we grant amnesty to 12 to 20 million or more, that will attract another 12 to 20 million, but regardless, the family, the friends, the progeny of the recipients of amnesty will be strong advocates for amnesty in coming years. If they get a path to citizenship, they will run for office. They will advocate for it. They will support candidates who advocate for amnesty, and they will continue to destroy this rule of law. America will never be the Nation that we have been again and never become the Nation that we can become because we will have almost knowingly and willfully sacrificed the rule of law on the alter of open borders because some businesses want cheap labor and they see an advantage in that. And some people want cheap labor and cheap votes, cheap votes on the left side, cheap labor more on the right than on the left but it's on both sides, and you put that coalition together, and the squeeze that comes on American society and culture is the squeeze on the middle class. That's another pillar of American exceptionalism is the middle class.
We have been building this Nation on an ever broadening and an ever more prosperous middle class. An opportunity if you're an uneducated person with some ambition, maybe you get out of high school and you decide I don't want to go to college, it's not for me, but I want to go punch a clock and work my way up at the factory or at the meat plant or whatever it is, I want to make a good enough living that if I don't even move up the ladder, if I don't ever do that, I can still buy a modest home and I can still raise my family and send my kids off to school with expectation of a better life. That's been a foundation of the American dream, an ever broadening and ever more prosperous middle class.
Today, cheap labor has destroyed the opportunities for the undereducated, the high school graduate or the high school dropout that's an American citizen. They can no longer go punch a clock and feed their family and pay for a modest home because wages have been driven down so cheap. The people that are at the top of the scale believe that they will never have to compete and neither will their children ever have to compete with the cheap labor that's been poured into this country. They will live in gated communities, and they will send their children off to Ivy League schools and they believe they'll always have that foundation and that capital base to make their gated communities, and the guarded society will be the destiny for all of their progeny.
But the middle class can't hope for that. The middle class has been diminished in its numbers, and it is a percentage of society, and the relative prosperity has been diminished significantly. And the unemployment among the underskilled Americans has grown in direct proportion to the amount of unskilled labor that's coming here illegally to take on the jobs.
Mr. Speaker, I'm for the rule of law. I'm for the middle class in America. I'm for opportunity for everyone, no matter what their education level is. We simply have to have a policy here in the United States that favors Americans. And the rationale that says that we are going to be a Nation that is somehow or another the relief valve for all the poverty in the world needs to take into account that there's a limit to the number of people that can live in the United States.
And those who advocate for open borders, I ask the question, how many are too many? Where would you draw the line? They will never engage in that debate because they know they lose the minute they try to put a number down. They will say that it should be on supply and demand, this economy. And so if there's a demand for more labor, we ought to bring in more labor.
If we're going to be the relief valve for poverty in the world, Mr. Speaker,
there are at least 4.6 billion people on the planet with a lower standard of living than the citizens in Mexico, at least 4.6 billion. Are we going to open our gates up at our ports of entry and bring the people in, any willing traveler, might be the way the President would phrase it? And the answer to that should be no.
We can have compassion in a lot of ways, and one of them is to promote the American way of life around the globe. Be proud of who we are, be proud of our culture, be proud of our civilization, be proud of our history, be proud of the sacrifice of our Fore Fathers, be proud of the sacrifice of our current generation that's so proudly defended us around the world in the last 5 years.
But we needed to preserve our destiny. We need to reject amnesty, Mr. Speaker, and so I think that it's essential that we build the wall and we hold together the rule of law and we preserve the middle class and remember who we're about and what we are as a people.
By popular demand, I have occasionally demonstrated the construction of a wall so the people can understand, Mr. Speaker, how it can be done. I sat down and created a design for a concrete wall because I believe that it's harder to breach a concrete wall than it is a steel fence, and I think it's cost-effective.
But I want to describe what I have designed here.
Whenever we build for a fence or a wall, we need to have a foundation underneath it. There will be people that will try to dig underneath it, so I designed a slip-form concrete form.
This would go in a trench. You would set a trencher in here with a specially made grading machine that would trim this out and pour this concrete footing with a notch in it, trench and pour the footing as you go, so the hole didn't have a chance to cave in. As we poured this we would just drive the machine along and it would be trenching and pouring concrete, so there would be a cured foundation for the wall that would be completed as the trench and slip-form machine moved on.
This is what it looks like from the end. This would be what it looks like from the top, the notch in the top, and that groove there, it will be obvious where I put that. So as that trench is moved along, and the foundation of this wall sets like this, then I would bring in precast concrete panels. These panels would be about 13\1/2\ feet tall, and they could be about any width, but proportionately it looks like 6 to 8 feet. We could go wider, we could go 10 feet.
Perhaps once this was cured, even the next day, come along with truckloads of precast concrete panels. They would sit on the truck like this, pick those up with a crane, swing them into place, set them down right into the notch of the foundation. Just this simple.
It would take a little bit longer, but not appreciably longer to throw this all together in this fashion. It would be constructed 12- foot high precast panel, slip-form concrete wall. It would look a lot like that. I would set that down within about 3 feet inside the border. I put some wire on top here, stabilize this thing and provide it as a deterrent.
With concrete, you can mount anything on top for sensors. You can do cameras, vibration, motion detectors, you could mount any kind of new technology on top of this concrete. It wouldn't be possible to take a cutting torch through here. If you brought a concrete saw in to cut a notch through it, the noise and the vibration would be transferred down the wall, and our sensor devices would likely pick it up, or we could deploy some Border Patrol to that location.
But as you could see, I would go inside also another 100 feet, and I would put a mesh fence up, even taller than this, so that there will be essentially a no man's land in between the wall and the fence.
There are a lot of designs that would work. This is only one design, but I designed this and put the structure of this together, and I can put the estimate together too. This can be installed for about $1.3 million a mile.
Now, somebody was complaining about the cost of this. What is it, gold plated? Well, you can build a four-lane Interstate for about $4 million a mile, but that's what we are paying the Border Patrol to watch the border right now.
Now, I appreciate the work that they do, and I respect the work that they do, and I support them. They need better tools to work with. This is one of them that can be helpful. This is one of the components, or a version of fence and wall is one of the components to the Secure Fence Act.
This Congress has mandated that that fence be built, and we appropriated money to it last week to the tune of $1 billion. The year before, we appropriated $1,187,565,000 just to round it out to even dollars. We appropriated about $2.2 billion to building the Secure Fence Act, and that includes money for technology, for virtual fence, as well as real fence.
We need to stop the flood at our southern border. We need to dramatically slow the flow of illegal drugs across that border. It will reduce the amount of crime perpetrated and committed against Americans. It will save lives. It will save at least hundreds of lives. It will probably save thousands of lives.
It will be cost effective, and it will send a message that America is a sovereign Nation that will protect its borders, and that we will direct traffic, human traffic and contraband, through the ports of entry. We will need to beef up our ports of entry. We need to have more Customs and Border Patrol people there, and more sophisticated devices there.
But if we can't stop the bleeding at our border, there is no amount of enforcement that we can do in the interior that will be effective. The best description I have heard is the description by Dr. Phil Gingrey, a Congressman from Georgia, who has worked the emergency room. His description is if you have a patient come in the emergency room when they are bleeding all over the place, and they are bleeding from multiple wounds, and they are bleeding all over the floor, the first thing you don't do is grab the mop and the bucket and start to clean it up. You stop the bleeding. That's what you do.
We have a tremendous amount of bleeding on our southern border. We have got to stop the bleeding, stabilize the patient, and then we can have a debate on how to clean up the mess. It is a tremendous mess here in the United States, because the Federal Government hasn't enforced the immigration laws to the level it needs to, and that has been an open permission slip that has been granted now to a number of the employers who have taken advantage of it. They have hired the cheap labor.
The third thing is birthright citizenship, automatic citizenship that is a magnet for 350,000 pregnant mothers every year who come here to have their children in the United States. It's not a constitutional right, it's a practice to grant them citizenship here because they are born in the United States. Those things work against our sovereignty. Those things work against the middle class, those things would be against the rule of law.
I am going to continue to advocate that we construct this double fence of wall on the southern border, that we complete it and we follow through on the congressional mandate, and we insist that the administration follow through. We need to do border enforcement first, employer enforcement second. When we get those things done, we will have stopped the bleeding and shut off birthright citizenship as the other bleed. Then we could have a debate in this Congress about how to clean up the mess, and it is one, one tremendous mess.
That's my advocacy, that's my policy, that's where I stand.
I appreciate the privilege to address you tonight.