Floor Statements

Mr. Chairman, I rise today in support of Congressman Poe's amendment to open the outer continual shelf (OCS) to oil and gas exploration. Opening the OCS to exploration would expand America's energy pie. The Gulf of Mexico OCS has been producing oil and natural gas since the 1950s. Virtually all of the oil and natural gas produced from the OCS is from the Central and Western sections of the Gulf of Mexico. The 1.5 million barrels per day of oil from the Central and Western Gulf of Mexico OCS is equivalent to our imports from Saudi Arabia. Imagine if we expanded OCS production and could cut out Saudi Arabian imports altogether. No more subsidies for radical Islamists who are intent on harming Americans.

Currently 4.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas is produced annually from the Central and Western Gulf of Mexico. To put that impressive number into perspective, the undiscovered resources on the federal OCS, that could be recovered with today's technology, is estimated at 420 trillion cubic feet, almost 100 percent more than current production.

While the Central and Western sections of the Gulf of Mexico OCS have been the workhorse of oil and natural gas production, Mineral Management Service and the Department of Energy forecast that, without expanded access beyond the Central and Western Gulf of Mexico, the growth in deepwater production will not be able to offset declines in shallow water production for more than a few years.

U.S. energy policy has not sufficiently emphasized the importance of developing domestic oil and natural gas supplies which are essential to our economic growth and to our energy security. Supporting Congressman Poe's amendment is the right first step in the domestic production of energy.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States Congress. Our work here today, like it is every day, is exceptionally important. There are a number of subjects that are on the minds and the hearts of the American people, and one of those subjects is what I intend to focus on, Mr. Speaker.

That subject is going to be the subject that brought the President to Arizona yesterday, along with Air Force One that had a pretty substantial congressional delegation from Arizona on board it.

They visited down there around the Yuma area. I would hope there were some local people that had objections to the position that has been taken by the White House with regard to the guest worker, temporary worker, and I hope they had an opportunity to speak to White House personnel as well as our Commander in Chief.

I find myself occasionally addressing that White House from this microphone or other microphones, not as often directly as I think it should be. I am wondering sometimes if the message is actually heard.

But I have made several trips down to the border myself. I have made at least one trip which was essentially a red carpet trip, maybe similar to the one that took place yesterday with Air Force One. It is impossible as a President of the United States Commander in Chief to go into a location like that and be able to actually observe and experience the full, unvarnished events that are driving the issues at the border. It is not something that any President would be able to do unless he wore a disguise and went on his own because the security has to be so tight. Events have to be planned, strategized. There has to be security that has to be built in. It cannot be spontaneous.

For those reasons, Mr. Speaker, and more, the trip for the President yesterday could not have been a trip that was rooted in fact-finding, but a trip that was rooted in sending a message to the American people that the President is committed to border security and border patrol. We know without doubt that he is committed to guest worker, temporary worker and a path to citizenship as we listened to his speech last Monday night.

As we address this subject matter, I have the privilege of exchanging some words with my good friend and colleague who I have known--grown to know and respect for his input to this process and the character that he brings to the floor, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Missouri. As I listen to the subject matter, I am interested in all of them. I point out first the subject matter that you brought up, what we call birthright citizenship. It says in the Constitution that any person born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof shall be a United States citizen.

I have not done a thorough, scholarly analysis of that, but rudimentary analysis boils down to this: The language was written into the Constitution with

the idea in mind that Native Americans would not necessarily be citizens because they are not necessarily subject to the jurisdiction of the United States--being a separate nation. That is an issue that Native Americans can answer more succinctly than I can answer. But I understood that was the root of that exception clause in there, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.

Yet today we have a practice of granting birthright citizenship, anyone born on U.S. soil is a United States citizen by practice, not necessarily by Constitution. Some would argue we would need to amend the Constitution to end birthright citizenship. I would argue that our most efficient path to that would be to pass a statutory change that would make it clear that it is not the intent of Congress and our interpretation of the Constitution would be to end birthright citizenship and confer that upon someone who was born in the United States if one of their parents is a citizen. That is the position I would take.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I have given considerable thought to this and have done some research and a fair amount of writing on this subject matter. We have an upper class in America that has gotten richer and richer, and I am for that. I am for success. Some of those people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and they are at the economic pinnacle in this country and in the world. A person like Bill Gates, for example, is a fine and shining example of somebody who had an idea, some creativity and some business skills to put that all together, and he put some good people together. He and Steven Jobs both have done an amazing thing in this era, and they have gotten very wealthy, but they have also created a lot of jobs. And the trickle-down of that wealth has been wonderful for America, as well as how the technology that they have produced has made us all more efficient and improved the quality of our lives as well as our production.

Entrepreneurship is growing. There are many more people at the upper echelons of our economic society than there was a generation or two ago. As I watch that happen, I think that is a good thing for America. But I would point out that the strength for America has been in the breadth for a prosperous middle class that began to grow in a dramatic way during World War II when Rosie the Riveter went off to work. The middle class grew. We had 1.2 percent unemployment rate back during those years.

As the paycheck came back into the household, and I should also credit Henry Ford because when he put his automobile into production, he wanted to make sure that the people he hired had enough money to buy one of his cars, so he paid them a good wage. That was competitive and that spread across this Nation. So the prosperity of the middle class grew, and it grew from the early part of the 20th century and it grew dramatically in the second half of the 20th century. As it did, the greatness of America grew with it.

You could maybe be a high school dropout but if you were a good worker, you could punch a clock at the local factory and take home a paycheck that was adequate enough that you could buy a modest home and raise your family with dignity and pride and values. That middle class got broader and broader up until perhaps 10 years ago when we began to see it shrink. There was pressure on the middle class from the upper class. That is really not a bad thing, to have people moving from the middle class to the upper class. I applaud that.

But the other pressure comes from the lower side of this when many of the elitists in America figured out that with the click of a mouse, they could transfer capital around the world.

The impediments to business transactions diminished with the computer technology that was developed by Steven Jobs and Bill Gates and many, many others. As that happened, they began to feel the frustration that they couldn't transfer cheap labor as efficiently as they could transfer capital. So with that frustration, and business will always work on the most important issue, they began to transfer cheap labor. They wanted cheap labor in the United States because that is where the factories were. As they brought that cheap labor in, the wealthy got wealthier off that margin of profit they were making, and they had a competitive advantage against those who did not hire illegal labor. The Federal Government did not enforce that and so the wealth that came began to also put into people's minds that they had an entitlement to hiring cheap labor to work in their factories doing, quote, ``the work that Americans won't do.''

And I reject that concept. And at the same time, they wanted cheap servants to take care of their mansions and trim their lawns and nails. As this happened, this servant class which has been created by the elitists, the new ruling class, the servant class has grown and the elitist class has grown, and this has been at the price of the middle class. It has been at the price of the middle class so that an undereducated, American-born citizen that does not go off to college does not have nearly the opportunities that they had 10 or 20 years ago. Cheap labor has taken that away.

Mr. Akin, I thank you for your contributing to this debate in the fashion that you have and your willingness to be flexible in the manner that you delivered it. I really do appreciate that.

I would like to just take a couple of minutes and address the issue of English as the official language, which was part of the subject matter that you raised, and it is something that I have worked on for what is my 10th legislative year that I have promoted establishing English as the official language of the United States. And I spent 6 years actually working to establish that in Iowa to help paint our piece of the American map the color of English, so to speak. And that was a 6-year endeavor. It was far more difficult to accomplish than you would realize from talking to the American people, who out there are almost universal in their support of establishing English as the official language of the United States.

And those numbers are something like, which I saw some today, Democrats, about 82 percent support English as the official language; and Republicans, about 92 percent support English as the official language of the United States. I did not see what the Independents think, but one would think being a little more independent minded they might want it even more than Democrats or Republicans, but I am confident they are in that similar zone between 82 and 92 percent. There are not many issues in America that we can find that kind of an agreement on, but official English is one of them.

And as I brought legislation here to the House and I ended up with 150 different cosponsors on the legislation that would establish English as the official language, I have been trying to find an avenue to bring it through committee and bring it out here.

But what happened in the United States Senate yesterday was Senator Inhofe's bringing an amendment to the immigration bill that was before the Senate yesterday and remains before the Senate today and presumably for several more days before such time that it might be ready for final passage; and he was able to successfully introduce his amendment that would establish English as the official language of the United States and bring it to a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.

Now, we all think in this House that we are the quick reaction group, that we are the ones that are the most in touch with the feel and the mood of the American people. That is how our Founding Fathers envisioned it. They wanted us to be responsive, and that is why they required that we go back for reelection every 2 years. And generally we are substantially more responsive. We feel the mood of the American people. We hear from them. We have to go back and look them in the eye and explain to them what we have done on their behalf and how we have conducted ourselves in office, and they explain to us what they want us to do. And I continually hear from them, they want English as the official language of the United States.

So, happily, yesterday the Senate heard them and they moved and with, I believe the number was, 63 votes, passed English as the official language of the United States.

Now, it is interesting that the President has called for immigrants to learn English and, in fact, to demonstrate a proficiency in English in both reading and writing, essentially the same standard, as I interpret him, that is provided in the citizenship requirements, which are statutory and something that we require of everyone who is naturalized. So with the President advocating for the learning of English for newly arriving immigrants, both legal and illegal, and the Senate's passing legislation that establishes English as the official language of the United States, we sit here now in this House playing catch-up rather than being the leaders.

And I always want us to be the leaders in this Congress, Mr. Speaker. I want us to be the ones that are out there on the vanguard, out on the front, the tip of the spear, so to speak. We need to be the ones that initiate spending by the Constitution. It is our job to initiate the appropriations bills, and we need to be initiating the policy. But we have an opportunity now to link onto the initiation of good policy that was introduced by Senator Inhofe yesterday and introduced several days before, actually, debated to conclusion and voted upon yesterday with 63 votes. It is common sense.

And not only is it common sense; I did some research once to determine why does this make such simple sense to me and why does it make such simple sense to the American people. And I thought, well, I wonder how many countries have an official language. So I got out an almanac and I looked up the location where they have the flags of all the countries in the world. So there I found the names of the countries in the world, and I got out the only research that I had. This was several years ago, before the Internet, and I had the World Book Encyclopedia.

So I thumbed through there and I started with the first country, and I looked up every single country in the World Book Encyclopedia because there they have a list that shows the official language of each country as you look it up. I looked up every country that you could find in the almanac, looked up their official language, and I found that every single country according to that study, in the world, except the United States of America, had at least one official language. And for many of the countries, and it would be surprising, English is their official language. So I thought, well, there is one other sovereignty out there that I had not really checked on, and because of some issues that I had heard that were raised, I thought I should check out the official language of the Vatican. So I looked up the Vatican.

They are a sovereign state, yes. They have their independence within that part of Rome and that part of Italy. But the Vatican actually has two official languages. One is Latin and some of us grew up around Latin. And the other one is Italian. So if it is good enough for the Vatican to have an official language or two, it is good enough for the United States to have one. And throughout all of history, God recognized this, and I do not need to repeat the story of the Tower of Babel, but God recognized this when he scattered people to the four winds by confusing their tongues.

But a common language, a language that would be the same language for all

of us to speak, is the single most powerful unifying force known to all humanity. If you want to be unified as a nation, you need to speak all one language. And if we do that, we can work together, we can cooperate together, we can identify ourselves as Americans. There is a camaraderie involved there. There is a bonding agent involved in that language. And to be able to go anywhere in America and pick up a newspaper or go to a public meeting or walk into a business place and communicate in a single language is a very, very good thing for the future of this Nation.

And it is important for us to establish an official language. And I would tell you that if we had another language here that had the kind of penetration and usage that English has, I would be for that. If it were Swahili and 90-some percent of us spoke Swahili, I would be saying Swahili needs to be our official language. It is not the point of what the language is. It is the point of having one language that is official that binds you all together.

Now, the bill that I have and the bill that is in the Senate, as I understand it, does not preclude at any point utilization of other languages. It does not disparage any other languages. In fact, my bill, I believe, has language in it that says one shall not disparage any other language.

We think it is a good thing, and I think it is a good thing, for people to have multiple language skills. Those that are proficient in a number of different languages have an ability then to do business in other countries. And with the communications that we have today with the Internet and with the telephone prices being what they are with voice-over Internet, those who have more language skills have more business opportunities. That is a very good thing. Knowing that we need diplomats and diplomats that can go to foreign countries and be able to step in and understand the cultures of these foreign countries, it is important to encourage and promote the teaching and learning of languages in such a global country as the United States is, where we have people in every country of the world.

There is no country that has a more effective and more diversified diplomatic mission than the United States of America, and we need to draw for those missions from people that are trained in languages, and we need to exchange with other countries so that we can train our young people in languages.

But all of those things notwithstanding, Mr. Speaker, we must establish an official language for a number of good, logical, rational reasons. And among those reasons are, for example, if we do not have an official language, if we have two people that come together and they write up a contract on a business deal and one of those contracts is in German and the other one is in Japanese, and they say, Here, I have my German version and you have your Japanese version, let us sign these. You can keep the one that is your language and I will keep the one that is in my language. And those two people get into a disagreement and they go to court.

Now we bring those documents before the court, and the court has to rule on which one is the one we are going to go by, the Japanese version or the German version. And if so, is it an appropriate interpretation of one or the other. And often we come up with disagreements on interpretations, and that is why we need to have one official language. That would be the English language, one that everything is anchored back to, one that everything that is interpreted is interpreted from.

So as we watch what is happening here, we will see the Voting Rights Act come up on this floor sometime relatively soon, Mr. Speaker. And in that is the reauthorization of the bilingual ballots. And I have taken a stand, and I will continue to take the stand, that there is no reason in the United States of America to produce a bilingual ballot for anybody. This is not something that was part of the Voting Rights Act. There are not people that were being disenfranchised because they did not have ballots in different languages. In fact, because we print them in different languages, people are being disenfranchised. The bilingual ballot provision should be stricken from this bill.

There are only two reasons by which you could even ask for a ballot in a language other than English. And one of them is if you are a naturalized citizen to the United States and you did not speak, read, or write English. You could say, I came over from France and I only speak French, so I want a French ballot, and I am a naturalized citizen. You have to be a citizen to vote in America. And I would say to those people, whatever they might be from, naturalized in the United States of America, welcome. Welcome here. We are glad we have you as a fellow American. But I am sorry, we are not going to give you a ballot in French or any other language because you have to demonstrate proficiency in English in order to gain citizenship in the United States. And if you have somehow duped the system, I do not want to reward you by giving you a ballot and making us jump through hoops and come up with an interpretation that may or not be an accurate one. That is one example.

So a naturalized citizen already had to demonstrate proficiency in English. Therefore, there is no reason for them to ask for a ballot in a language other than English.

So the only other scenario would be if there is a birthright citizenship that Mr. Akin raised a little bit ago. Someone is born in the United States. That makes them automatically an American citizen, at least by practice today. Not by Constitution, but by practice. And if that individual, by the time they are 18 years old, has not learned enough English to read a ballot that essentially has titles and names on it, for the Fifth Congressional District, Steve King, and my name is going to be the same whether it is in Spanish or French or English; so it is simply the title that you have to learn, if that situation where someone who is born in this country can get to be the age of 18 or more and not understand enough English to read a ballot, which I think I could learn to do, in at least anything but the Asian ballots, in a matter of a few hours, then I do not believe they understand the culture well enough in America to give them the authority to begin to contribute to establishing who will be the next leader of the free world, Mr. Speaker.

It would have only taken 527 different votes, half of them changing their minds in Florida, to give us Al Gore for President instead of George W. Bush. And how many of those instances does it take for people who are requiring a ballot in different languages, who have not learned the culture of the United States, and who were born here? So under no circumstances would I grant a pass, but I would encourage people to learn English, and that is the way we can do that. We do not need to be enablers. We do not need to be handing people ballots in languages when they did not request them, and we do that under today's bilingual ballot system.

We need to tie that all together, Mr. Speaker, and we need to have this single most unifying characteristic known to all humanity: a common language, an official language. The American people want it. The American people demand it. The Senate has reacted. The President has spoken favorably about learning English, although he has not endorsed the bill, to my knowledge. We need to bring it here to the floor of the United States Congress.

That would help bond us together as a people. And, Mr. Speaker, we are sorely in need of being bonded together as a people. We are so sorely in need that I am watching Republicans that are running scared, afraid that somehow they are going to alienate an ever-growing segment of the population of the United States. I think there is a lot more that qualifies people and a lot more to celebrate in people than necessarily their national origin.

I will argue this, Mr. Speaker, that we are all created in God's image. He draws no distinction between his creation. He blesses us all equally. We are born in different places in the world, citizens of different countries, but created in His image regardless of our ethnicity, our national origin, our skin color, whatever the case may be.

For us to draw distinctions between perceived differences in people based upon those things is an insult to God, because he draws no distinctions between his creation. He has created us

all equally. We are all created in his image. He doesn't draw distinctions, and neither do I, Mr. Speaker. In fact, I applaud everyone who can pull them up by their bootstraps. The spirit of humanity, the competitive nature, the need to take care of your family and the desire to do so.

But I also applaud patriotism. I applaud the things that made this Nation great. We very seldom talk about the things that have made this Nation great, but I submit in a short order this Nation derives its strength from a number of things, and that is the United States of America, of which Iowa is a vital constituent part, is the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world, and we derive our strength from Judeo- Christian values, free enterprise capitalism and western civilization.

When you anchor those things together, when our ancestors and the predecessors to us in this country came over across mostly the Atlantic Ocean and settled on the East Coast, where we stand today, they gave their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to building a nation that believed in manifest destiny, and that was a nation that had low, and in many cases no taxes; in many cases low, and in many cases no regulation.

One could invest their capital and sweat equity in work and watch it grow. You had to work hard at it and be smart, and surely there were fetters along the way, there always are. That is part of the system. Some will succeed and some will fail. If we were guaranteed success in everything we do, then it wouldn't be any fun and we really wouldn't try. We would sit back and let it come to us.

But because there is failure, there is also something to measure on the other side for success. And that success allowed for the manifest destiny, for the settlement of this North American continent, for the Transcontinental Railroad to be built and the golden spike driven, tied the two continents together, and this continent was settled in the blink of an historical eye because of free enterprise capitalism, low and almost no taxation, low and almost no regulation.

Free enterprise capitalism and manifest destiny, on the back of western civilization, which gave us the understanding of science and technology, it was a foundation for this dynamic economy that came and this robust American experience that was the characterization of this great American experiment, which still is a robust Nation, still the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world, with the unchallenged dynamic economy that is rooted in free enterprise capitalism, that has grown from western civilization and the science and technology that goes clear back to ancient Greece. We learned from that, we built upon that, the Age of Reason to the Age of Enlightenment, to the North American continent to the United States of America.

But what has been so good about us is that we would have become, I believe, the most imperialistic, power hungry conquering Nation in the world if we hadn't been limiting our appetites for imperialism and conquest because of our religious values and our religious beliefs, our sense of humility, our sense of duty, a sense of being blessed by God with this Nation, and the governing aspects of holding back and giving to the rest of the world rather than taking from the rest of the world. That is what is different about the United States of America, and that short background that I have given is the biggest reason why people want to come here.

We sometimes have people leave the United States to go live somewhere else in the world, but they are few and small in numbers compared to the people that will do about anything to come to the United States to live here. In fact, we have seen plenty of that.

We have the most generous legal immigration policy in the world, both in terms of sheer numbers and as a percentage of our population. We have been extraordinarily liberal with our immigration policies, and yet every Nation must establish their immigration policies.

There has been a backlash to that in Europe. You will see in countries like Denmark, where they have started to shut down their immigration. The Netherlands, they have shut down to some degree, they started again to shut down their immigration. We saw what happened in France with thousands of cars that were burned. That is the results of essentially having more of an open borders policy, and you will see them tightening that down.

We did that in this country too in 1924 when we saw that the massive legal immigration that was coming into the United States that started in the last quarter of the 19th century and ended in the first quarter of the 20th century, the wisdom of the Members of this Congress in this very Chamber, Mr. Speaker, took the position that we needed to allow a rest time, a time out, so-to-speak, a break, so that there could be assimilation take place and that newly arrived immigrants could be assimilated into the American civilization, to the American economy, to the American culture and the American way of life.

Had we not done that, we wouldn't have this distinct character and quality that we have. We wouldn't have had this robust Nation, this sense of togetherness and patriotism that allowed us to fight and win World War II and essentially emerge from that conflict as the world's only surviving industry. The world's only surviving superpower was the United States of America, up on the world stage because we got assimilation right, we got free enterprise capitalism right, we got our values right, our faith in God and the qualities of that foundation that grew from old English common law and their faith that came with that, tied into our Declaration and Constitution and fused into the culture of America, and we have that dynamic, the Protestant work ethic some say.

But we emerged from World War II this dynamic Nation. And we held down the immigration throughout World War II and throughout the fifties, all the way up until 1965, and we did that because we wanted to allow for assimilation. We had a high birth rate. I am a product of the baby-boomer generation, as most of us in this Congress are, Mr. Speaker.

Then as the laws were changed in 1965, they put in place a thing that allows for the thing we now call chain migration. The chain migration, once you come into the United States, presumably legally, with the exception of the `86 amnesty and the six subsequent amnesties to that which we passed, you come into this country during chain migration, then if you become a citizen, even as a green card holder, you can bring in your spouse and your dependent children. When you become a citizen, then you can bring in your parents, your spouse, your dependent children and I believe your siblings.

But this allows for an uncontrolled immigration that is no longer controlled by statute, no longer controlled by Congress, it is controlled by the people who want to come to the United States, not by the people in the United States and not by the people in this Congress. At least we haven't intervened.

Yet we find ourselves today watching 11,000 people every single day pour across our southern border. I have gone down less than 2 weeks ago and sat in the dark on the border and listened as I heard the cars come up, and this is the Arizona-Mexico border, and sat and listened as I heard the cars come up across the desert with their lights out, about an a three-quarter, and I could hear the cars. I could hear one of them dragging a muffler, driving around the brush. They came to the same location each time, a larger mesquite tree, stop. You could hear the doors open, you could hear people get out, you could hear a little chatter. The doors would close, they would talk a little bit more and then hush. And then they would infiltrate through the trees and across the fence and into the United States.

I sat there and listened to load after load after load after load in one spot that I had, I will call him a guide pick, to take me down there to get a feel for what it is like.

Now, I don't know that they were bringing illegal drugs across the border, but I am very confident they were coming down there for the purposes of crossing the border. And all they had to do was take a five strand barbed wire fence and just cross through the spots that had already been stretched in the same places where the tracks already were and walk into the United States.

So some places we actually have a human barrier, a steel wall that is

maybe 20 feet high and actually in some cases, mostly, it is not that high. We installed it in a way that there are horizontal ribs, so they are like little steps to climb up. But those are short little sections.

Then we have some longer sections where we have vehicle barriers, and the vehicle barriers were a negotiation between the environmentalists, who wanted to make sure that you could get, well, let me see, I know for sure one of the species would be a desert pronghorn, so it could get down and walk underneath the barrier that is there. They did not want to upset the ecology.

Never mind all the damage that is being done to our natural resources. If the Members of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, could see the litter that is scattered over our national parks and the parts of our parks that are off limits to American citizens because they have been taken over by drug smugglers and illegals.

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is one of those places where they simply said we can't do this anymore, we are going to mark this off so that we will keep the Americans out of here. It is too dangerous, essentially owned by smugglers and coyotes, and I don't mean the fury kind, I people mean the people smugglers that are there.

I have been to those places when I had some security, and it is a tragedy that we can set aside American property, set it aside for illegals who have invaded that part of our world and not let American citizens go there because it is occupied.

In fact the regions down there, many of them, are occupied. The peaks that are good vantage points along the drug smuggling routes are occupied. There are lookouts there. I could take you to any number of them, several dozen lookout locations where there are two men on top of a mountain, 24/7, with AK-47s, with infrared technology, with fine optical equipment, with solar panels to keep the batteries recharged, and they are being resupplied on a regular basis.

They sit up there with their radios that have encrypted messages in them so we can't hear them talk, and they are listening with their scanners to everything that our Border Patrol says. They know where our people are all the time. We don't apparently know that they are there, or for some reason we don't go pick them up off of these peaks.

I would not let the sun rise on a single pair of them if I were in command of this operation. I would have them off of there every single time. If I had to mount a raid every morning, we would go up there and lift them off or we would do it in the night with our infrared technology.

But we cannot allow the Mexican drug dealers to occupy the military positions in the United States, as much as 25 miles into the United States of America, for the purposes of smuggling, according to our Federal Government statistics, $60 billion worth of illegal drugs into the United States every year.

Ninety percent of the illegal drugs in America come across the southern border. Ninety percent, Mr. Speaker. That is $60 billion. There is $20 billion worth of wages, most of those wages earned by people that are in the United States illegally, that get sent back to Mexico. There is another $10 billion that goes to other Central American countries.

But the economic force on that border is $60 billion worth of drugs being sold, pushed into the United States. Now, the demand here is another subject entirely and it is something I am more than happy to address with my colleagues.

But I will address specifically the narrow part of this, which is drugs coming into the United States, $60 billion going to the other side of the border, $20 billion in wages matching that, $80 billion for Mexico alone, add another $10 billion to the Central American countries, there is $90 billion worth of pressure on our southern border, $90 billion.

And the cost in American lives is staggering. The loss of American lives to the people who came across the border illegally is in multiples of the deaths of September 11. That easily documentable. Twenty-eight percent of the inmates in our prisons in America, city, county, State and Federal, are criminal aliens; 28 percent. And they don't comprise anywhere near that percentage of the population. Perhaps 5 percent of the population are alien in one form or another.

But 28 percent of our prisons are occupied by criminal aliens. They aren't in the jail because they broke an immigration law. That hardly exists at all. They are there because they have committed murder, rape, assault, dealing in drugs, theft, grand larceny. That is costing us $6 billion a year in order to incarcerate the criminal aliens in America; $6 billion with a B, and that is a low number, Mr. Speaker.

We are spending another $6 billion to guard our southern border, the 2,000 miles down there; $6 billion. That comes out to be $3 million a mile.

So I had this thought. Me being a capitalist, and I have spoken favorably of capitalism here, what would it be like if you would give me $3 million and say pick your mile, Steve King, and go down and guard that. And you have got $3 million to work with for that mile.

I believe that I could set that mile up real easily so that there wouldn't be one soul get across my mile. I would bond it and I would guarantee it and I would make a ton of money doing it, and I would end up the first year a millionaire. Easy enough. $3 million a mile.

Why don't we open up a contract and allow entrepreneurs in America to bid these contracts and say pick out your section of the border that you want to defend and we want to take the best deal we can.

We are spending $3 million a mile. If you can come in here and protect a border for $1 million a mile, that saves $2 million a mile. That is a lot of capital to have left over.

If the Minutemen want to come in and bid that thing and sit in lawn chairs next to each other for a mile, let them bid that mile that way. Then we could count the footsteps, the tracks in the dust of those that get by. We will make them bonded, and for every one that gets by, we will dock their paycheck for that, because they did not do their job on that, and we will pay a unit price. Free enterprise capitalism. And whatever we dock out of the contract for those that get past that mile, we will give that money to the Border Patrol to chase them down.

We can set this structure up easily. And I can tell you what I would do. I would want to bid a lot of these miles. I would want at least 1,000 of them if they would let me do it. Maybe I could only get a mile. Maybe I could only get a demo, Mr. Speaker. But I happen to have, by happenstance, a demo next to me on what I think we can do with this border.

Mr. Speaker, this represents the desert. Pick your place. New Mexico. That is not the Rio Grande, so I do not presume it is Texas. I have to be a little gentle in this chamber when I talk about Texas. I do love Texas, and maybe one day maybe they will adopt me, not as a favored son, but just as a fellow colleague.

However, New Mexico, Arizona, parts of California, it is a desert. And it has got sand there. And now it has got a few rocks. But this would represent just the old flat desert. Now imagine a little brush growing back and forth here. So we go in there and we decide we are going to build a wall.

I do not want people going across my section, because I do not want my contract docked. I want all the money that I have contracted to earn.

So I go in here and I set a trencher in there on that end and I trench this on out. I cut myself a groove, at least 4 feet deep, a toe wall down through the middle. That is the hole we would have. I know there are rocks there. And we can kick some of those out, and some of them we are going to have to stop and go down and maybe drill and put some foundation rods in.

But we have this trench across the desert. Now, we have got a company up there that is a neighbor to me. And they can go in, and I talked to them the other day. I said, could you make me a machine that would slip-form a footing with a 4-foot deep trench and with the capabilities of going 6 foot deep, but also have it so I can have a 4-foot wide trench, 4-foot deep, 6 inches wide down below, but 4 foot wide up on top for 8 inches so that we can have a foundation to put in a 12-foot high concrete precast wall.

Now, here is what we have. This is the footing for the wall that I have designed, Mr. Speaker. And it is pretty simple. This is a 4-foot deep trench, 6 inches wide. Fits right in this trench. That is the trench. You go down, trench that out and pour that full of concrete with a slip-form. And that slip-form also lays the width of this footing, this side here is going to be another 2 feet on this side, and on that side, with a notch in the middle so we can put our precast concrete in there.

Now, as we run along with this trencher in this trench, and go right with the trencher integral with it, we come with a slip-form machine, and we pour this concrete footing. And it fits in the ground just like this, Mr. Speaker.

Now we have got a foundation for our wall. And that foundation will hold up to precast concrete. And it is at least 4-foot deep. And we can make it 6 foot or deeper if we choose to do that. That is actually a pretty cheap piece. That is a matter of the cost of the digging and the machine and laying the concrete. And you put some steel in here so it ties together. We let that cure for a couple a days, then we come along with these precast concrete panels.

They look like this. They are 12 feet high, they are 10 feet wide. And we simply set these precast concrete panels in this foundation with a crane or an excavator. And they go in just like this. And my little old construction company could do this. Now I am really out of the business, it is my son's construction company. I do not have any doubt they can throw these precast concrete panels together and drop them into this footing, they can pour the footing too, along with a lot of other skills that they have developed over the years.

But this is how you build this wall. Pick them up with a crane or the excavator, swing them in place, drop them down like this, sits right in there, put a little expansion in here so it does not buckle on you in that hot Texas sun, and keep throwing this wall together.

Now, we can build a mile of this a day, Mr. Speaker, with the operation that I have spent my life working with. And that is just a little old company. Think what you could do if you were somebody that was a little bigger, maybe like Haliburton or Bechtel or something like that.

But here we have now, in this little bit of time while I stood here, built this nice wall. It is 12 feet high, these are 10-foot wide panels. It is 6 inches thick. It has got steel in it. It has got reinforcement in it. We have got little eyes tied on top here. And that is not really a coincidence, Mr. Speaker, and the reason that it is not is because, you know, there are some folks that actually could find a way to get over the top of this wall.

And our military has determined that a safe and efficient way to keep people from going across those kind of places is if you just go in here and you put a little concertina wire right there. Okay. Concertina wire right on top. And you string that along. Now this is not going to be too fancy, because I am not going to take your time up with a lot of artwork here. But you are going to get the idea when I get done, that this is not all that complicated. Then I am going to tell you what it costs.

All right. I am going to leave that just lay. You get the idea. We have a little wire here on top. We can do that three rolls on top, if you like, it does not have to be one. And it will be easily affixed so that it stays.

We can also put infrared sensors up here, vibration sensors, and motion sensors, inside or outside of the wall. We can monitor this thing. We can put lights on the inside of it. One thing they cannot do is shoot through a concrete wall so good. And so the optical equipment that we put on the inside would be protected from the kind of rifle shots that generally come from the Mexican side of the border shooting out the cameras we have down there now.

Now, build this wall, Mr. Speaker. And the reason is because there is no amount of Border Patrol people that you can put down there, and no amount of National Guard people you can put down there that are going to keep the hoards of people from infiltrating across 2,000 miles of border.

If you think you are going to do that, you might as well go to the barn with a fly swatter and swat flies and think you are going to finish you job. You are not. You have got to do something that will actually stop the flow of human traffic.

And I will say this wall itself will be 90 percent effective. And then you have got to support it. You have got to support it with border patrol people and you have got to drag the wall and track people, and cut that sign and chase them down and catch them.

And over time they will decide it is not worth trying. And they will do something else with their time, Mr. Speaker. So now I have built a wall here pretty fast for you. And you are wondering, this probably costs a lot of money. Well, the reason that I brought this to the attention of the Congress is because it does not cost very much money.

We are spending $6 billion over the 2,000 miles of our southern border, $3 million a mile. The President has asked for another $1.9 billion to be able to start hiring more border patrol and fund 6,000 National Guard troops additionally.

That takes him up actually over $8 billion for our southern border, over $4 million a mile. This wall to these dimensions that I have drawn here can be put up, and I would bid it and I would bond it today, for $500,000 a mile. 500,000, $1 out of the $6 we are spending today, or $1 out of the $8 they will spend tomorrow under the President's proposal.

Mr. Speaker, it will do far more than 6,000 National Guard troops. Far, far more. It will be effective. It will be efficient. And it will send the right message.

Now, I am okay with putting a little website on the other side here in Spanish that tells how to come to the United States legally. I think we ought to do that on every single panel. Here is where you go to see the consulate to sign up for citizenship. I would cast it right in the concrete, just like it says, here is the boundary of the United States on those concrete pylons down there on the border from horizon to horizon.

I would put it right in there. Here is where you go. Hit this website. And then we have established now something that is due, the symbolism of a wall that says, you cannot come here. We are a sovereign Nation. We will establish our own immigration laws.

We are not going to allow people from other countries who have shown disrespect for our laws to establish immigration laws in the United States of America. That is our job here in this Congress, Mr. Speaker.

It seems as though as bright as they have been in the Senate in a few times in the last few days, it is not necessarily the way that they see that over there. And I am concerned. But we can build this cheaply, $500,000 a mile, instead of wasting all of that money that we are spending swatting flies in the barn, as I said, Mr. Speaker.

So this sends a message. It sends a message to Mexico. And it says, clean up your act. Clean up the corruption in your country. Give your people an opportunity. Look around the world and see where it is successful. Emulate those people that are successful. Adopt the policies that you covet. If you want to come to the United States and you want to live with the prosperity that we have here, you also have to learn the reasons for the prosperity of the United States, it is not just because we are a few hundred miles north.

It is not because we are any different as human beings than anyone else. We are created in God's image, as I said. The difference is, we have far less corruption in the United States. We do not have in existence a patronage system like you have in Mexico.

You can learn from us. You can adopt us. But the people of Mexico have got to rise up and change their country. And the very people that will be the change and the salvation in Mexico, are the ones that are coming here.

So one of the good things that can happen is, this free education that is being provided to the children that are in this country illegally gives them the background and the skills to one day go back to their home country and help grow that economy. And when that day comes, when that day comes, then we can say, we can say then to the leadership in Mexico and points on south, Mr. Fox, Vincente Fox, General Fox, because I think he commands a lot of troops that he is sending up this way, you need to clean up your act, you

need to get prosperity in your country. And when you do so, Mr. Fox, then and only then can we tear down this wall.

Clean up your country, Mr. Fox, so we can then tear down this wall and we can live together in peace and harmony. And I would happily go down there and pull these panels off and stack them in piles and wait for the next corrupt government to show up in Mexico, Mr. Speaker, and put the wall back up when that time came.

We are fighting a corrupt government in Mexico that is sending us $60 billion worth of illegal drugs, wiring at least $20 billion down south of real earned wages, which I do not really begrudge that so much, and another $10 billion to other parts.

But this policy that is over in the United States Senate today, this Hagel-Martinez policy, you can ask them how many people do they authorize into the United States? Is it 11 million? Is it 12 million? What is your number?

And they might concede 11 or 12 million. But I guarantee you they will not give you the real numbers. Robert Rector's study at the Heritage Foundation rolled out a number based upon language that was very conservatively founded. And that number was 103 to 193 million people legalized into the United States, not at the choice of Americans, but at the choice of the people from the other countries that want to come here.

And then they passed the Bingaman amendment, a Bingaman-Feingold amendment that capped the guest workers, took them from 325 and open- ended growth each year down to a 200,000 per year cap.

Then that number, when you only calculate that each of them would bring in 1.2 members of their family, then that number is only, only, only, Mr. Speaker, 66.1 million. Not 11 million, 12, million, 66.1 million people.

Ironically, when we go back to the beginning of the records of legal immigration in the United States of America, we only have records back to 1820. And we take those up to the year 2000. What is the number of people who have come into the United States legally in all of history?

66.1 million people. The very number that is authorized by Hagel- Martinez, if you low-ball it and each of them only brings in 1.2 people as their chain migration number for spouse, families, children. If you take it up to four, which is the number that is used by the United States Citizenship Immigration Services, four per every authorized guest worker, I will say illegal given amnesty, then that 66 million goes to 88 million.

And Lord knows when it stops. So I have to submit this question. And that is to the people that are advocating for open borders, is there such a thing as too much immigration? And, you know, you cannot get them to say yes to that question. They will not say yes, because they know the next question is, then how much is too much?

They will not put a number on that, because they do not want to discuss the numbers that they are legalizing and authorizing now. I will submit that there is such a thing as too much immigration. And 11 or 12 million is too much. We have our doors open to more than 1 million a year, the most generous of any place in the world. We have 66 also, well, this is actually a number that is not quite correlative, 60.1 million nonworking Americans between the ages of 16 and 65.

Now what country in their right mind, when they looked around and said we need the labor, and in fact if we do need the labor, would they go to a foreign country and bring in people that were illiterate and unskilled to do the work for people that have 60.1 million people that were sitting around not working?

And we would pay a good chunk of them not to work as American citizens and bring in other people to do our work for us. How rational is that? And they argue that there is work that Americans will not do? What is the most difficult, hot, dirty and dangerous job in all the world? I would say it is rooting terrorists out of Fallujah.

And what do we pay a young marine in 130-degree heat with a flack jacket on, his life on the line for you and me? $8.09 an hour if he gets in a 40-hour week. But it is more like a 70-hour week, so he is down to about $2.75.

There is no job Americans will not do, Mr. Speaker. And Americans will do the hot, dirty and dangerous work. We can seal this border. We can end birthright citizenship. And we can shut off the jobs magnet. We need to do all of that. Then and only then can we have a legitimate debate on whether or not we ought to have guest workers.

Mr. Chairman, I wish to take time to highlight a watershed-related project at Storm Lake, IA, in my district. As background, Storm Lake's depth and water quality have been deteriorating since the last dredging in the early 1960s. Storm Lake is among 156 water bodies to make the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencies list of ``imperiled'' streams and lakes because of siltation. Removing silt and radically improving water quality will prevent massive fish kills. Storm Lake is well known for being a conducive environment to Walleye breeding. The Department of Natural Resources has come to depend on this Walleye population to assist in feeding other lakes and tributaries within the State of Iowa.

The Storm Lake community has implemented practices by both business and residents in an effort to ensure that the current dredging of Storm Lake will last for several generations to come. Finally, local agricultural land owners on or near the Storm Lake watershed have incorporated farming practices that help curb or reduce the amount of runoff into the Storm Lake Watershed. I believe this comprehensive approach to water resource management by the Storm Lake community is to be commended.

Funds will be used to dredge 700,000 cubic yards of spoil from the lake. Through decades of ground erosion and silt freely entering Storm Lake the lake levels have diminished. In order to remove the silt and prevent the continued inflow of silt, a Lake Restoration Program was needed to dredge a large portion of the lake and to develop watershed protection practices. Therefore the Iowa Department of Natural Resources believes this dredging and

watershed work plays a vital role in the water quality and restoration of the lake. Buena Vista County, the city of Storm Lake, and the city of Lakeside view the dredging project as an essential component in the overall economic development of the area. Dredging will create positive environmental effects while increasing the natural habitat for native fish and marine organisms.

Mr. Chairman, I look forward to working with Chairman Taylor for the inclusion of funding in the final conference report.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at midnight), the House adjourned until today, Friday, May 19, 2006, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address you and the House of Representatives.

As you all know, I have been to Iraq a number of times, and our troops over there in the early stages of this theater and in the overall global war on terror, and it is also known, that we did not send over there humvees that were armored because that was not something that was anticipated was the IEDs. As they began to materialize and manifest themselves, this Nation and our military and all branches of the services that were exposed, they aggressively moved down the path of armoring our equipment.

As I was there, I saw the retrofitting of humvees, the retrofitting of trucks, the retrofitting of the equipment that was going out on to the streets and the roads of Iraq. Given the nature of the logistics of the difficulty, I saw people that mobilized, put their equipment in shape, and it was not very long before nothing that went outside the wire was left unarmored.

So the argument that we did not have enough bulletproof vests or we did not have enough armor, that is true early in the war. It is not true today, and we have provided resource after resource to our people in the Middle East and our people in this global war on terror.

It needs to be noted, Mr. Speaker, that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has been in the front of this. They have done everything they can to accelerate the development, the manufacturing, the delivery and I will say the installation of the armor on our humvees, on our mobile vehicles and the bulletproof vests and the equipment for our military. There has never been a military in history that was so well-armored as our military, Mr. Speaker, and I do think it does a disservice to the efforts of all to bring up the issue and make the allegation that that is not enough over there.

Those would be isolated cases, if they are anything, but isolated. I would hope that that information comes to me so I can look into it with my colleagues who just left the floor. I wish they were here to respond to that, Mr. Speaker.

But I came here to talk about the issue that the President has raised today when he made his trip down to the southwest border, the Arizona- Mexico border, Mr. Speaker. Air Force One left Andrews Air Force Base early this morning, headed out along that way, landed and they did some stops along the southwest border of Arizona and Mexico and then turn around, came back here into Washington, D.C.

I have got a clip here from ABC News that says, Bush says border fencing makes sense, Mr. Speaker, and I have made that statement for a long time. I will contend that it does make sense. It makes a lot of sense, and I am here, Mr. Speaker, to endorse that statement and that philosophy. I may want a little bit more fence and I may want it a little more solid than the President wants, but philosophically, we are in key on this border fence.

A week ago, last weekend, so about 10, 11 days ago, I spent 4 days on the ground on the border between Arizona and Mexico. I did not go on a formal CODEL. I did not go on a formal, appointed trip. I went down there on an unannounced trip because even though I appreciate the hospitality that comes from the border patrol and the National Guard and the other entities down there that are defending our border and the work that they do and the way that they have welcomed me and given me the guided tour in the past times I have been down on the border, this time I chose to go down on the

border in a less announced fashion, less formal fashion, to be able to go in and simply show up at our ports of entry, show up at our border patrol operations and be there to see simultaneously, and I will say spontaneously, what is going on.

This last trip I learned more down there than I have any previous trip, and the reasons are because it was essentially a surprise trip, a spontaneous trip down to the border. I have spoken about this on the floor in the past, Mr. Speaker, but I just quickly reiterate that in my time there I went to a place down on the border at Naco, Arizona. There they used to have illegal traffic where vehicles just drove across the border because there was no barrier. Sometimes they would be hauling illegals, sometimes they would be hauling illegal drugs, and sometimes they would be hauling illegal drugs and illegals into the United States.

The violence down there was getting to be intolerable, and the traffic was essentially relentless. They finally built a fence, Mr. Speaker, and I will call it a wall. It is a steel one, with corrugated, heavy duty steel with horizontal corrugations in it. Once that fence went in place, it cut down on a fair amount of illegal traffic. From the links of the fence that was built high enough that people cannot climb over it, with a screen to extend it above and solid enough down into the ground that I will say I did not see any signs that anyone had gone underneath it, extended from there on were vehicle barriers that would keep vehicles from driving across the border but would not keep a human being from walking underneath the vehicle barrier and coming into the United States. After a mile or two of that, it simply went off into a fence, and then some places there was not even a fence and not even a marker that one could tell exactly where the border was.

But it was an improvement, Mr. Speaker, and I saw where people had crossed the border there, and it is a consistent process. There are tracks that go continually. You do not have to be, I will say, a guide or a hunter to be able to see that, and I am a hunter, but it is easy enough to go along that border and pick the places where they are coming through the fence, crossing the border, doing so without much impediment and doing so with impunity, Mr. Speaker, at that location at Naco, Arizona.

And then I moved along and went on down to the Tohona O'odham Reservation, and while I was there, there was a drug smuggler that had been stopped by them. Underneath a box in the false bed of a pick-up, there was 18 bails of marijuana, roughly 10 pounds or a little more per bail, at least 180 pounds of marijuana hidden underneath the bed of that pick-up truck. It was pretty good body work that was done on the south side of the border for the marijuana that came in from there into the north side of the border. So I was there to see that apprehension and the confiscation of those drugs, which I hope end up in a prosecution and conviction of the person, whom I believe is guilty.

That individual had tattoos from his waist up to his neck. He had a 13 tattooed inside his arm. I am pretty sure it was an indication he was MS-13, Mara Salvatrucha 13, the most violent and dangerous gang that has been known in the Western hemisphere.

This individual was hauling marijuana into the United States, and they told me that, even though they had caught him, perhaps he was a decoy with 180 to 200 pounds of marijuana that they had sacrificed in order to run a larger load through when everyone converged on him.

There are mountains down there that have lookouts on the mountains and two men per lookout with infrared optics and for the daytime, high quality, clear, daytime optics and automatic weapons, AK-47s, well- supplied, solar panels to recharge their radios, their radios that send out encrypted audio so they can talk to each other and we cannot listen to them, but they have scanners so they can listen to us, Mr. Speaker. That is going on where they observe all of the travel routes along the entire border. Anyplace they want to smuggle drugs, they know where the border patrol is, where the law enforcement officers are, and they are able to talk from hilltop to hilltop, mountaintop to mountaintop, line of sight to line of sight, and be able to communicate with their entire network and operation. There are at least 45 mountaintops covering that whole area.

That is the kind of position that would be taken if there were a military invasion, Mr. Speaker. They are taking it in order to control transportation routes so that they can run their drugs up into the United States.

And the drugs that come into the United States from the southern border are, according to our Federal Government's announcement, 90 percent of the illegal drugs in America come across our southern border with Mexico. Ninety percent, Mr. Speaker, at a value of $60 billion a year. That is $60 billion, with a B, a year in illegal drugs coming across into the United States from our southern border. Those are illegal drugs brought in here by illegal entries and drug smugglers.

But just the illegals seeking entry into the United States, in 2004, the Border Patrol stopped 1,159,000. Turned them back, to use the President's phrase. For 2005, that calculates out to be 1,188,000 turned back across the southern border into Mexico. Something like 155,000 other than Mexicans came into the United States, many of those, in the past, have been caught and released. We are working to change that policy. We haven't succeeded totally in changing that policy, but I do believe we have a real commitment to eliminating the catch and release policy with the OTMs, the ``other than Mexicans.''

Many of the Mexicans that are caught, and 80 to 85 percent of the illegal entries into the United States across our southern border are Mexicans, those 80 to 85 percent, when they are caught, they are, I will say, presumably and likely, and I hope 100 percent of them are, at least fingerprinted, photographed, identified and then they are put on a bus, taken to a port of entry where they are let out of the bus and they walk back through the turnstile, so to speak, back into Mexico. Sometimes we transport them further down south, closer to where their home territory is, in hopes that they won't be back quite so quickly.

I have asked the Border Patrol to produce the numbers for me so we can crunch the database and find out of that 1,188,000 how many of them had crossed the border before. How many times are we catching them, sending them back, releasing them into their own country and then catching them again. At least 30 percent of that, according to the Border Patrol, are people that have been caught before. So that is 30 percent of the 1,188,000 were caught at least twice in the same year. So we really haven't turned back 1,188,000. We have turned back 70 percent of 1,188,000, but the other 30 percent we have done so twice, and perhaps some of them more than that.

More details to come as the days and weeks unfold, Mr. Speaker, and as I seek to pry into this information and bring a better perspective to the American people.

President Bush says border fencing makes sense. I say border fencing makes sense. In the time we have between now and the end of this period, I want to demonstrate how much sense one can make with a border fence; but I first want to allude to a study that was done by a Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation who, for weeks, has been poring through statistics in trying to understand what the bills before the United States Senate really say and what they mean and how many people that might be that could be granted amnesty according to the Hagel- Martinez bill that was being debated before the United States Senate today.

That study came out, on Monday it was released, and it had a low of not 11 million, not 12 million, but the low was 103 million people legalized into the United States under Hagel-Martinez. That was the low. The high, if you presume the 20 percent growth and guest worker that was essentially uncapped, that would take it to 193 million. Well, there is a Bingaman and Feingold amendment that capped the guest workers, took the 325,000 annual cap down to 200,000. Then, when I apply that math to this spreadsheet, I come up with a number, Mr. Speaker, of 66,100,000 that would be legalized to bring into the United States, even after the Bingaman-Feingold amendment. That is 66,100,000.

That is if you assume that those that come into the United States would, by the chain migration rule, where they can bring in their spouse and their children, and when they access citizenship they can bring in their parents, their spouse, their children, and their siblings, that each one of them would only bring in 1.2 people. So I don't know anyone that would only have 1.2 or that small a number they would want to bring into the United States. I presume that number would be significantly larger than that.

So we checked with the USCIS, the United States Citizenship Immigration Services, and these are the people that speak for the President. Their number was not 1.2 for every legalized amnestied alien that would be given a path to citizenship here in the United States. Their number was four people for every one. So I plugged that into the spreadsheet, Mr. Speaker, and this 66,100,000 became 88 million and a little more. That is 88 million people with the legislation in the United States Senate today.

We are debating this subject as if it were 11 million or 12 million people that would be given amnesty and legalized, and we are really in that number somewhere between 66 million and 88 million, and perhaps more. Now, I submit this question, the question that is seldom asked and not very often answered by those who are for a guest worker plan: American people, is there such a thing as too much immigration? Is there such a thing as too much?

And the follow-up question is: If there is, then how much is too much? Is 11 million too much, or 5 million, or 1 million, or 12 million, or 13 million, or 20 million, or 66 million, or 88 million, or 103 million? How many are too many?

How many of them will fundamentally forever alter the United States and put a burden on our services that we can never recover from? What is that number? How many does it take before they can no longer be assimilated, Mr. Speaker?

Those are legitimate questions that need to be asked and answered, and I would submit those questions to the President of the United States. He is leading this debate, and he has an obligation to stand up before the American people and answer some questions.

Mr. President, how much is too much? Is there such a thing as too much? And if the answer is yes, then how much is too much? How many are too many? Please give us a number. And, Mr. President, how many do you think are granted a path to citizenship and permanent residency in the United States under Hagel-Martinez? How many do you think, Mr. President?

I believe that number is at least 66 million. My number is 66.1 million; and I would submit that if one would go back to 1789 and the ratification of the Constitution, the earliest records we have, and actually the earliest solid records we have are in 1820, and add up every single person that has been brought into the United States legally, through Ellis Island and through shipping manifests and every way we can add those up, the records and the data that are available today, totaling from 1820, when the first records begin, up until 2000, when my last records are available, that number, Mr. Speaker, in all the history of America, is 66,100,000 total allowed into the United States under an immigration policy. Hagel-Martinez matches the total for the history of America almost exactly, a minimum of 66,100,000.

Now, Mr. Speaker, how do we stop this? How do we seal up our border? And I have submitted many times that we need to seal the border, end birthright citizenship, shut off the jobs magnet, and apply attrition. So that when people can no longer get jobs in the United States because employers will have to pay sanctions, then they will decide they will go back home. When they do that, many of them will go back home with an American education and a new free enterprise ideal, and they will be able to help their home country grow. Mexico needs it.

It is a crying shame what is going on down there. The levels of corruption and the inability of a government to provide a functioning society in the midst of all the natural resources they have is a crying shame. But we can't fix it by taking on the poverty of the world. We cannot export American values, and we will not be able to maintain them unless we can seal our border.

And, Mr. Speaker, I will submit that it is not that hard to do. The President asked for another $1.9 billion for our southern border. Now, no one is saying what we are already spending on that southern border, but I can tell you it is more than $6 billion spent on our southern border. So the President has asked for another $1.9 billion. That will take us to more than $8 billion. That is $8 billion for less than 2,000 miles, which is easily $4 million a mile.

Now, how many Americans couldn't take on a mile of that border and guarantee nobody is going to get across it if we just paid them $4 million? I will submit what I would do. I would take this desert that I have here, this cardboard box is essentially a desert, and I would build a wall, a concrete wall. I would go in here and, Mr. Speaker, this gap in here represents a trench that I would dig down right along about 100 feet north of our border so that we had some room to work on both sides of it, and we could put a fence right on the border.

This would represent the desert. I would dig the trench, and then I would slip form and pour a concrete footing. And this example would be this, about 4 feet, or we could go 6 feet deep easily, and about 2 feet on either side of the wall a notch that can receive precast concrete panels. I would slip form that and I would dig the trench, and I would pour this concrete right in here, right behind my machine.

And here would stand, then, the foundation for a precast concrete wall. A very simple project to go through. Once this is established in this location, then we bring in the precast concrete panels. And these precast concrete panels look like this. They are 12 feet high, 10 feet wide, and they way 9,000 pounds each. You pick them up with a crane and set them here in this foundation.

Just this simple, Mr. Speaker. Install it like an erector set. You put these panels together. I have spent my life in the construction business, and I can tell you that it is not that hard to do. Except I have to have the rings on top so I can put the wire up there. They go together this simply, Mr. Speaker. Not quite this fast, but pretty quickly. And I can tell you that the small crews we have had in my construction business could build a mile of this a day easily. You can add a lot more manpower and a lot more machines to move this a lot more quickly.

But as you can see, I would build a wall that is 12 feet high, and these are 10 foot wide panels. It has a footing underneath it that is 4 feet deep. We can go 6 feet deep cheaply and easily. And we can put on top of it then a nice little, it might be too hard to do here, but we can put our wire on top of this wall. I have a little bit of wire, but it is a little too hard to put together here. Maybe another time I will string this along and set it on top to demonstrate what that looks like.

We can also, with a wall like this, we can put on infrared cameras, we can put on vibration sensors, we can put on motion sensors; but what it does is it makes it very difficult to cross this wall. It makes it difficult to dig underneath, it is difficult to climb over the top, and it slows people down. It is a barrier that causes them to go somewhere else, Mr. Speaker.

Now, this might seem like it is pretty expensive, but the administration has submitted a request that will take us up to $4 million a mile, $8 billion for 2,000 miles of wall, and I can build this for less than $500,000 a mile. The administration proposes to spend enough money that we could pave an interstate, four lanes down through there at least every year, maybe even twice a year, the full length of the border for the cost that we are spending to have people driving around in Humvees, sitting on ridge tops and trying to chase people down that are pouring across a border that is 2,000 miles long.

And it gets dark down there in the night, like it does anywhere, and that is when the activity begins. That is when the illegal smugglers start to move. That is when the illegals come in and the illegal drugs come in. They don't come through a barrier like this very easily, Mr. Speaker. With $500,000 a mile, which would be $1 billion for the entire span from San Diego to Brownsville.

That is one out of every $8 we would spend on our southern border to build

this kind of a barrier that I will submit will stop 90 percent of the traffic. And we could even go further and we could put out an RFP and let the private sector bid these miles for security. It is that easy and that simple, and we are dug into an idea that we are going to continue to hire more personnel, grow the size of the Border Patrol, and put our military on the border.

And I will support all those things, if that is the best we have to work with. But this makes far more sense. We can cut the number of Border Patrol we are using now on the border, and we can increase the efficiency of our enforcement. And this wall is an easy wall to dismantle as well. We can take it down just about as easily as we can put it together. In fact, maybe a little more easily.

What it says to Mexico is, you haven't been taking care of your people. You haven't taken care of your government. You have a corrupt form of government. Clean up your act. Clean up your act so people will stay in Mexico, and so they want to go to Mexico. Mr. Fox, fix your country so we can tear down this wall.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at midnight), the House adjourned until today, Friday, May 19, 2006, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding and for his work on this budget.

Mr. Chairman, I support this budget because it is the most conservative, fiscally responsible budget that we have. It is not quite as conservative or fiscally responsible as I would like. I would like to put a balanced budget out here every year, and I would like to take the pain every year, and we would slow this government down. We should be able to do that in this Congress. This is as close as we can get and pull together the maximum amount of votes. It sends a message to the American people that we have people here that live by this budget the same way that you live by your family budget.

And I am going to stand with this Study Committee budget for a couple of other reasons. One is it allows some drilling in ANWR that can allow for some resources so we can do something to grow the size of the energy pie; and it repeals the Davis-Bacon wage scale, which is an outrageous Federal requirement on the wages that we have, so that we can let supply and demand set the marketplace.

Those are all good standards that have been put out here by the Study Committee budget, and I applaud them for the work that they have done. And I look forward to the time when we see a balanced budget come to the floor of this Congress from the Budget Committee.

Mr. Speaker, as always I profoundly appreciate the privilege to address you, Mr. Speaker, and to stand on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, make remarks for a period of time about issues that are so pertinent to our day. The future and the history of this country, many times, has been turned right here on this spot, Mr. Speaker, and we would like to believe that we are reflecting the will and the wishes of the American people but adding the level of knowledge and judgment has been endorsed by us, endorsed in us by the voters and the United States of America and the 435 congressional districts, Mr. Speaker.

And I would point out as I listened to the discussion here in the previous hour that the word Republican, Mr. Speaker, is not a profane term. No matter how one says it, I am proud to be a Republican. I am proud to stand up for the values of fiscal responsibility and personal responsibility and limited government and lower taxes and lower regulation, a strong national defense, a vision that goes beyond the horizon for a strong energy policy that will expand the size of the energy pie and drill in ANWR and drill in the Outer Continental Shelf of Florida especially, so that we can get some natural gas into this country and some gasoline and some diesel fuel out of ANWR and out of our Outer Continental Shelf and expand our ethanol and expand our biodiesel and our wind energy, our renewable energies and clean-burning coal and expand our nuclear generating capability, along with a number of other, hydrogen, for example, a number of other energy alternatives.

All of these things are Republican principles, and all of these principles are blocked by people on the other side of the aisle who say the word ``Republican'' as if it were a four-letter word, Mr. Speaker.

And, furthermore, they say the word ``democracy'' as if the United States of America were a democracy. Our Founding Fathers knew better than that, Mr. Speaker. In fact, at one time there was a display down at the National Archives that demonstrated the pure democracy that they had in the Greek city-states perhaps 3,000 years ago. Our Founding Fathers studied that pure democracy, and they saw where they blackballed the demagogues and banished them from the city-state for 7 years because they had such an effective, rhetorical skill that they would sometimes lead the city-state and the masses that would follow that rhetorical skill in the wrong direction. That was for the diminishment of the greater good of the city-states in Greece.

That is why the Founding Fathers did not set up for us a democracy, Mr. Speaker, but they set up a constitutional Republic, a representative form of government. And our job here, we owe our constituents and we owe all Americans because we swear an allegiance to the Constitution, we owe all Americans our best judgment; and sometimes that best judgment might not be the best thing for our particular district but the best thing for the United States of America. It is not a matter of whether we take the poll of the public and vote the way the polls are. If we wanted to do that, if we wanted to have a pure democracy, it would be far easier today in the Internet era than it was during the days of the city-states when the Greeks had to bring all of their of age males, the people who got the chance to vote in those days, into their coliseum or their city center where they would debate the issues of the day and the majority vote won. So they would introduce a motion, and if a majority vote prevailed, then that was the policy of the day until it changed.

There were no guarantees or protections for minorities, for example. There were no constitutional protections like our Constitution. Our Bill of Rights, in particular, is drafted to protect the rights of the minority against the will of the majority and, in fact, to protect the rights of the majority against the whims of a court. All of those protections are in our Constitution. But continually I hear the word ``democracy,'' ``democracy,'' ``democracy,'' as if that were somehow such a high and shining ideal, that that solved all of nature's ills and cured everything that there was on the globe. Truthfully, our Founding Fathers came to the conclusion sometime well before 1789 that a democracy would not succeed in this country and, understanding human nature, a democracy just simply could not succeed; so they crafted out of whole cloth a constitutional Republic: a balanced three branches of government, checks and balances on each one. Not three equal branches of government, but three that were balanced with the natural tension between the judicial branch of government, the legislative branch of government where we stand, Mr. Speaker, and also the executive branch of government where the White House stands.

That is what we have. We have a constitutional Republic, a representative form of government. And our job is to be as informed as we can be; to be in tune with the events of the day; look into the future and anticipate what the future might bring; prepare this country for the future as much as our vision can allow; receive all the input across America; sort the good ideas from the bad, the wheat and the chaff, so to speak; and implement the policies that are best for America and debate them here on this floor.

That is the challenge that the Constitution lays out for us, and that is the challenge that our Founding Fathers envisioned: a deliberative body and a constitutional Republic, a representative form of government. Not a democracy.

And we have Republicans and we have Democrats that have divided themselves in this country in a two-party system, which our Founding Fathers did not envision. But when you look at the structure of the legislative branch, it is inevitable that we have a two-party system because we have a winner-take-all system. That means that the majority in the House and the majority in the Senate select the committee chairs and they make their appointments to the committees in greater numbers, sometimes by one or two, sometimes by a little more than that, in each of our committees so that the majority party has majority control of each of the committees.

If the public is unhappy with the direction that that is going, then it is their ability to go to the voting booth and elect people from the other party who would then come in power, as the power changed here in 1994 because the people at that time were fed up with the kind of policies that were rejected in the elections of 1994 when the Republicans took over the majority here in the House of Representatives.

That is the system that we have, Mr. Speaker. I am proud of the system we have. It is the best in the world. It is far superior, I believe, to any kind of a pure democracy and superior to a parliamentary form of government because we have a guaranteed protection of rights, and those are limited in their scope and the government's powers are limited, although sometimes we go beyond our constitutional authority.

Well, today, Mr. Speaker, brings us to a point, a point within this great national debate, an issue that was envisioned again by our founders, and we have a constitutional responsibility here in the Congress to establish an immigration policy. Our founders envisioned it, it is referenced, and it is our duty to have this debate and to shape a policy that is good for America.

We are having a national debate, finally, and this national debate is a national debate that was, as I recall, called for by Pat Buchanan in 1996, Mr. Speaker, when he said we must have a national debate on immigration. He knew then and I knew then that this issue was getting out of control and out of hand. It was only 10 years since Simpson- Mazzoli, the 1986 amnesty legislation that was signed into law by President Reagan. And it was designed to provide amnesty and it was an admission of amnesty then, they did not try to redefine the word ``amnesty,'' to about a little more than 1 million people, 1.2 million, perhaps 1.3 million people. And the trade-off for amnesty for a little over 1 million people was enforcement, employer sanctions, strict enforcement of laws that required employers, and I was one at that time, Mr. Speaker, to fill out the I-9 forms,

check the identification of the applicants for jobs in my company, and verify who they were and carefully dotted the I's and crossed the T's of the regulations, because I was sure that there would be a Federal agent who would walk into my office, demand to see the I-9 forms for all of my applicants, make sure they were in order and make sure that I had taken a look at their Social Security number and their driver's license, at a minimum, and verified who they were.

Well, I filed all those records, Mr. Speaker, and I carefully followed the law. And here we are, 20 years later, and no one has come along to check my I-9 forms. And I have to say I believe that would be consistent with the vast, vast majority of the employers in America who have followed the law but slowly begin to realize, month by month, year by year, that there was not going to be enforcement. And as we see illegal workers flow into our communities and take up jobs all around us, we begin to realize there was not anyone enforcing against those companies either.

And as a company, if you look at your competition and they are hiring cheap, illegal labor, labor that they may not have to have Workers Comp on, probably do not have health insurance on, probably do not provide for a retirement benefit, maybe do not pay overtime to, maybe pay them off the books, sometimes on the books, all of those competitive advantages and be able to bring people to work, work them when you need them, and simply discard them when you do not need them, more like a machine than a worker; that kind of workforce in the hands of your competition makes it very difficult to hire people who are legal to work in the United States, green card holders, American citizens, lawful residents, people who have lawful presence in the United States, and pay them the wages necessary and the benefits necessary.

We for years and years provided health insurance and mostly retirement benefits and year-around work in a seasonal business so that we had high-quality employees. And we have been able to compete for now going on what must be 31 years that we have been in business, and in that period of time we have been able to keep people on year round and be able to have long-term employees, but compete against those people who have discount employees.

And we had testimony in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, to that effect and people who have lost their business because of that kind of competition, who refused to break the law, refused to hire illegals, and saw their competitiveness diminish on them to where they could not function any longer. And that is the kind of thing that is happening across America.

Well, the scope of this is far bigger and far worse than I described. And so that 1 million people that turned into 3 million people that received amnesty in 1986, we know that the counterfeiters kicked into gear when the amnesty was passed and signed by President Reagan, Simpson-Mazzoli in 1986, that is why it went from 1 million to 3 million, because a large percentage of that extra 2 million that got added on there were people who came into the United States, rushed in here illegally, and then had to have counterfeit documents to demonstrate that they had already been here, like maybe a heating bill or a light bill or a gas bill or a telephone bill, some kind of a document showing that they had been here, maybe a paycheck or two or four or five.

Those kinds of records were generated by the counterfeit industry back then so that people that just came into the country after Simpson- Mazzoli was signed could find themselves on the path to citizenship, to receive the amnesty. And the people that worked with that paperwork very well know this, Mr. Speaker. It is something that I have not heard come out in the testimony and the discussion and the debate. The people who are for guest worker/temporary worker will do or say almost anything except respond to the facts at hand. That is one of the facts. And if the people who are advocating for guest worker/temporary worker are right and there are only 12 million people here, then I will submit that you will see that number at least double and probably triple before they get finished processing all of the counterfeit documents for the people who allege that they were here longer than 2 years so that they can get the path to citizenship.

Those are the circumstances we are dealing with. And the strategy of the people who are coming into the United States know that we have actually had seven amnesties since 1986. The most famous was Simpson- Mazzoli. There are six others that were listed throughout that period of time. Sometimes we missed some people with amnesty and maybe they were not adept enough to bring their counterfeit documents to the front; so we had to go ahead and pass another amnesty for this 400,000, another amnesty for these 300,000; and pretty soon we have logged seven amnesties since 1986 and including 1986, Simpson-Mazzoli.

This Congress, the Senate, is poised to pass the eighth amnesty in 20 years. And the numbers in this country have grown and grown and grown and no one really knows how many. But we have testimony from the Border Patrol, and I agree with this number, and the President made it in his speech last night, that they turned back more than 6 million illegal crossers at the border since he came into office 5\1/2\ years ago.

The numbers that I know are numbers for 2004. The Border Patrol intercepted on our southern border 1.159 million and presumably turned back 1.159 million. They only adjudicated for deportation 1,640. That would be a fact.

For 2005 the statistical number is 1.188 million that were intercepted at the border, collared at the border, I say, and turned back. I do not know the number that actually were adjudicated for deportation.

But the Border Patrol also testified, Mr. Speaker, that they stopped one-fourth to one-third of the illegal entrants into the United States. One-fourth to one-third; 1 out of 4, 1 out of 3, as the best that they can hope for. So if 4 million come across the border, which would be the statistical number, 4 million, and we turned back 1 million, that means each year the population of illegals in this country grew by 3 million. And, yes, some of them turned around and went back and some of them died and some of them became citizens through some fashion; so maybe that number of growing illegals is not quite 3 million. Maybe it is not even quite 2 million, but I do not believe it is less than 2 million myself, and I do not know that it is only 4 million that came across the border.

I was down on the border a week ago last weekend, Mr. Speaker, and I spent 4 days on the ground down there, in the Tucson sector mostly, but overall, the Arizona-Mexico border. And I asked a question consistently of the people who work that border, and these would be officers who have been there for a period of time. They had hands-on experience. And I took the testimony that I received here in the Judiciary Committee, in the Immigration Subcommittee, the testimony of the Border Patrol's stopping one-fourth to one-third, that being 1.2 million in a year, and also the President's statement that in his administration they have turned back more than 6 million. I pointed out the 25 percent interception rate, perhaps the 33 percent interception rate. And of the people who have hands-on experience on the border, no one would agree to that number. No one would say, ``I think that is an appropriate number.'' They all had a number lower than that. The most consistent number that they gave me in their judgment was we stopped perhaps 10 percent. Ten percent.

Now, I am not sure I can calculate how we could have 10 million come across the border and only stop 1 million out of 10 million.

So maybe some of those people come back over and over again and keep trying. We are re-catching a lot of the same people, and they try until they get here.

One thing I don't accept is the idea that a high percentage of them go back to Mexico, for example, because those who walk across 5 or 10 or 20 miles of Mexican desert to get to the border, who walk across 10 or 20 or 25 or even 30 miles of American desert to get to the highway, where they can get picked up and get a ride, it is so difficult to come in and the journey is so arduous, it might require three to six

days on the ground in the desert with little water and a little bit of food and having to travel mostly at night, that kind of arduous travel into the United States isn't going to be taken lightly, especially if they pay a coyote $1,500 to come into the United States.

You can't afford to come back and forth a lot, if that is your path into the United States. So I think a significant percentage of those who come into the United States will stay here, for those who succeed in traveling into the United States.

The numbers that are here are so astonishingly large, and the American people are so, I don't want to say ill informed, they have not had access to empirical studies that show what would happen to the immigration numbers in America if the modern version of Simpson- Mazzoli, amnesty plus the path to citizenship that was advocated by the President last night, if that should become something that would be policy.

So I submit as I picked up the paper this morning, Mr. Speaker, and began to review some of the language that is in here, and after I had listened to the speech last night, I was aware there was a study being done by Mr. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, a very careful, conservative study that kept low assumptions and tried to keep low numbers so it would be credible and believable by the American people, rather than high numbers that might be somewhat suspicious. These are low, careful numbers in this study.

This study, and it is in the headlines of the Washington Times, it says the bill, and this would be the Hagel-Martinez bill from the other body, the bill would permit as many as 193 million more aliens in the next 20 years, by 2026.

Mr. Speaker, I will repeat that: the bill permits up to 193 million, that is million with an M, more aliens in the next 20 years, until 2026.

Now, this 193 million would be 60 percent of the current U.S. population over the next 20 years. According to Mr. Rector, the magnitude of changes entailed in this bill are largely unknown, but they rival the impact of the creation of Social Security or the creation of the Medicare program. Mr. Rector is a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation that conducted this study.

He also backed down a little bit from that and said that is the high number. But if we go to the low number, the lower number of his prediction, he said it is more likely that about 103 million new immigrants actually would arrive in the next 20 years. 103 million.

It just so happens that the population of Mexico, Mr. Speaker, is 104 million, or it was until maybe the last couple of weeks when the population got diminished substantially again. We are taking in from across that border some Central Americans, the vast majority are Mexicans, we are taking across that border 11,000 a day. That adds up to 77,000 a week, roughly a little bit smaller than the population of Sioux City, Iowa, which pours across our southern border every single week. And we don't seem to be outraged by the magnitude of that kind of a migration, to use a nice term for it. An invasion, to use a more accurate term for it.

We saw people marching in the streets, Mr. Speaker, and particularly in the streets of Los Angeles, half a million or maybe more than that in the streets. Some of the people that were there just got across the border illegally the night before, and they picked up the flag of another nation and joined hundreds of thousands of their former fellow countrymen and marched in the streets and demonstrated because they want to be made citizens of the United States of America. Even though they have defied our laws and they defy our majority rule, they demand that we provide for them citizenship and all of the benefits that go along with it, the welfare benefits and the vast welfare state that we have would grow dramatically if we went down that path and granted that citizenship.

But there is the image of more than half a million people with flags from their home countries, mostly Mexican flags, pouring into the streets of Los Angeles, demonstrating in the streets Los Angeles.

Then what I hear from the liberals in America, Mr. Speaker, I hear them say, well, why would you be offended because someone flies a flag from their home country, they are proud of their home country?

It is true we fly Irish flags on St. Patrick's Day. In the small town where I live of Kiron, they fly the Swedish flag on the flagpole from time to time. It is true we do celebrate our heritage from our other countries. Those are appropriate things to do in this country, provided that our allegiance is to Old Glory and to the United States of America and the flag of a foreign country is simply a flag that demonstrates heritage.

But when you fly a flag of a foreign nation like a Mexican flag above the American flag on the same flagpole, and the American flag upside down, that is not a message of celebrating your heritage if you come from that country. That is an insult to the United States of America. The upside-down American flag is a sign of distress, and in fact I think there is distress in this country if we tolerate things like that without objection, if we move on and think there is nothing wrong and stick our heads in the sand while 11,000 people every day pour across our border.

This is the magnitude of immigration, far greater than anything we have ever seen in the history of the country. I am doing the research now, Mr. Speaker, and I expect to come back to this floor, perhaps sometimes this week, with the totals for all the numbers of legal immigration in all of the history of America.

I am willing to speculate here tonight that the total for all of the legal immigration, those that came through Ellis Island, those who came through other ports such as San Francisco or Seattle, those who came to the United States in a legal fashion without violating American laws and accessed a path to citizenship, and those who have built this country with those born in this country and teamed up and worn the uniform and fought under that American flag, those people that are the heritage of this country but came across here legally, I believe are far outnumbered by even the lowest number that is presented by this study that is printed here in the Washington Times today, far outnumbered by the 103 million, which will be the lowest number projected under the only empirical study that we have to work with, Mr. Speaker; 103 million people in 20 years. The population of Mexico in 20 years.

This bill, Hagel-Martinez, advocates for adopting all people from Central America, including Mexico, into the United States. It is the same thing as annexing everything down to the Panama Canal minus the natural resources. This is moving the Rio Grande down to the Panama Canal without taking the natural resources, but moving all the people up here into the United States so that they can, yes, go to work here; yes, contribute to our economy; but also access the welfare benefits, which will cost significantly more to fund them than the amount of the economy that they generate.

Now, someone out there is thinking that is not true, because I have heard them say in the public arena for months and months and perhaps for the last couple of years that all immigrants that come into the country, legal and illegal, grow our economy, and so therefore we can't get along without them because they are the reason our economy is growing.

I will submit there is a difference between highly educated, technically skilled immigrants who come in here on an H-1B program, who are going to step in here and make $75,000 a year, Mr. Speaker, and someone who comes in here who is illiterate in their own language and doesn't have a high school education.

But I submit that those Americans who are high school dropouts put more pressure on our welfare than those who have graduated from high school. High school graduates put more pressure on our welfare system than those who have a college education or college degree.

A significant majority of illegals who come into the United States are illiterate in their own language. They don't have a high school degree. Those that do have, there are only 7 percent that have a diploma. More than that have a high school education, but at least 60 percent do not. Statistically,

there is no way to avoid the facts that people that match those demographics are going to put more pressure on the welfare roles here in the United States. The demographics of the illegal immigrants coming into the country show that there is 45 percent out-of-wedlock childbirth. That is another guarantee for poverty.

So if you are underemployed and your children are not being born in wedlock, the pressure on this society to fund your well-being, to be able to provide the welfare benefits is tremendous.

There was a study that was done by the former Secretary of Education who laid out something that is just an empirical fact. If you want to solve the pathology of America, a solution to that is get an education, get married, stay married, get a job, keep the job. That solves most of the pathologies of America. Statistically it is an easy thing to sort out.

But if we are going to bring into this country 103 million to 193 million people, with the majority of them without a high school education, the majority of them not literate in their own language, Mr. Speaker, the burden on us is going to be great; and it is going to cost us at least $50 billion a year.

The study goes on, Mr. Speaker, and I am going to pick up where I left off, and that is the balance of this study shows that the Senate is ignoring the scope and the impact of the bill. It goes on and says the impact this bill will have over the next 20 years is monumental. It has not been thought through. That is the Hagel-Martinez bill. It says the population would grow exponentially, because the millions of new citizens would be permitted to bring along their extended families.

The bill includes escalating caps which would raise the number of immigrants allowed as more people seek to enter the United States. These escalating caps essentially go up as the request for more and more H-1Bs or temporary workers or agriculture workers raises the number, and the cap that grows out of this takes us out to this.

Even the chain migration that comes from family members, when one accesses citizenship or even green card holder access, then they can bring in their parents. Certainly if they are married, they can bring in their spouse, their dependent children. Then those people then extend that out and then they offer the opening to go to their family members and their extended family members. This chain migration continues on and on.

I have stood on this floor and submitted that everybody that comes into this country on average would have about four family members at a minimum they would want to ask into the United States once they access this path to citizenship, and those four family members I thought was a rather conservative estimate. This study, Mr. Speaker, only claims six- tenths of a family member total with regard to the chain migration. That formula that is here I believe is significantly understated. This number will be much greater.

So this 103 million people over the next 20 years, I will submit, by 2026 will be larger than that, because chain migration, in my opinion, and I am not critical of the Rector study except to say I think it is very conservative and I think the numbers will be quite great, we are really talking about emptying out Central America into the United States and a population that is perhaps as much as two-thirds, at least more than 60 percent of the population of the United States of America, increase that much again. We can see in 20 years a population growth here in America that would take this 300 million on up to 500 million, and by the next generation we are well on our way to 1 billion people here in America.

Now I am not saying that we cannot feed them. I am not saying we could not build the infrastructure. But what I will say, Mr. Speaker, is we need to have our eyes wide open. And America needs to have a debate on this cost.

But the numbers aside, the pressure aside, the $50 billion a year and the escalating number, the cost to the taxpayers to fund the deficits that are created by the pressure on the public services and on the welfare roles, all of that aside, to me the central point is this, America is a Nation of laws.

It was founded and people will say it is a Nation built by immigrants. Well, every Nation is built by immigrants. I think that it is a redundant point, except we have got more richness from our immigrants here than maybe any country in the world. But we are founded on the rule of law, Mr. Speaker.

That is the principle that I wish to take. And the advocacy last night in that address from the Oval Office was an advocacy for a path to citizenship for people who have broken the laws in the United States, and those who have broken the earliest and the longest and the most often would be the ones rewarded first.

At the same time, Mr. Speaker, I hear, well, we have to make people go to the back of the line. We cannot put them to the front of the line and reward them with citizenship when other people have followed the law.

But there is not a way to do this under Hagel-Martinez without people going to the front of the line. They are already in the front of the line. They are already in the country. They already have roots down. They already have jobs. And some of them already have families.

And the advocacy last night was, give them a path to citizenship. Yes, make them learn English and demonstrate good citizenship, pay their taxes, and then the reward for that is going to be this precious reward of citizenship.

And then help us choose the next leader of the free world. Send some people to Congress here who have capitalized on contempt for the rule of law, Mr. Speaker. That is the path that is being chosen by the White House.

That is the path that appears to be chosen by the United States Senate. It is an erroneous path. It is a path that is not thought out. And the cost to this society, again Mr. Speaker, is tremendous.

I advocate for this. There is no requirement that when we do enforcement, as the House passed under H.R. 4437, we can do enforcement without guest worker. We can do enforcement without temporary worker. In fact, we must do enforcement before we can have a legitimate debate on guest worker or temporary worker. That is our duty and that is our responsibility.

We take an oath to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law here on this floor. We passed that legislation off the floor. And that is the first responsibility of the President of the United States, is to enforce our laws, protect our Nation and enforce our laws.

In this case the two things are tied together. But guest worker and enforcement of our laws are not linked together, Mr. Speaker. They are separate subject matters. We can do enforcement without doing guest worker.

And the President argues to the opposite. In fact I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that if you simply want to have guest worker or temporary worker, if you designate anyone who wants to come to the United States as Hagel-Martinez does essentially, anyone who is not a felon, anyone who is not objectionable and does not have a record, that they would have a path to come to the United States.

That is simply opening up our borders to everybody but a few undesirables. If you do that, then you do not need to have border control, Mr. Speaker, because you have already allowed everyone into the United States who wants to come, and they do not even have to hurry, they can come in their own good time, because now we will put it into statute that we are going to have an open door and a red carpet.

And that the people who lined up the right way were really wasting their time, they should have rushed to the United States, come across the border, gotten themselves a job and simply waited for amnesty number eight over the last 20 years, so that in the next 20 years we can have 103 or 193 million people here in the United States, at a cost of least $50 billion extra a year, an expansion of our welfare state, and one of the most significant transformations of America that this country has ever seen.

Now there are other things that matter. And it matters, culture matters, and values matter. And I think for the most part, those who are coming across from our southern border are consistent with the American culture and American values, they are Christians, for the most part they are Catholic.

They think a lot of families, even though the illegitimacy rate is high, they are tightly bonded together as families and they work together as families. Those are rich qualities. They go to church as families. And they work together as families.

Their commitment to assimilation is not questioned. I would question that after seeing the streets of Los Angeles. But we need to reach out to that, and we need to promote assimilation to the people who are here legally.

But the people who are here illegally need to go home, they need to go home and grow the country that they came from, solve the problems there. You know, Mexico seems to think it would be an insult to them, and they will say that it is, if we would build a wall from San Diego to Brownsville and seal off the border. And it would be, I am going to say, 90 percent effective if it is patrolled right.

And I have drawn up a design for a wall like that, Mr. Speaker. But Mexico says, no, we would be offended by that, in fact we do not like the idea that the National Guard would be coming down to the border, because that sends the wrong message, you are talking about militarizing the border.

But meanwhile, Mexico pushes their young people into the United States, tells them, come here, go into the United States, enter the United States illegally, stay there, get a job, send your money back home, do not learn the language, do not assimilate into the culture, effect the policy of the United States vis-a-vis Mexico in favor of Mexico.

That was a stated policy by the former minister for Mexicans living in the United States named Juan Hernandez, who now is a high profile individual apparently here in the United States, and claims to be an American citizen, I expect he is.

But that was the Mexican policy, unload your excess young people into the United States, and go tell them, do not build an allegiance with the country who has welcomed you, but keep your allegiance with the country that you left, send your money back down there and vote in the United States, and speak up in the United States and vote on a bilingual ballot, I would add.

Also, Mr. Speaker, there is no excuse for producing multi-lingual ballots of any kind here in America. There is a requirement when you are a naturalized citizen that you demonstrate proficiency in English. And so therefore if you come into this country legally and you acquire citizenship, which is a requirement for voting in America, you will have been required to demonstrate proficiency and literacy in English.

That means then that you can go into a voting booth and vote in any voting booth in America on an English language ballot, not another language ballot. And the only other scenario by which one might be sitting in the United States and eligible to vote and not have command of the English language would be if they were born here in the United States, they had birthright citizenship, which I reject that idea, but it is our practice today, someone with birthright citizenship, and by the time they get to be 18 and register to vote, they go into the voting booth and they had not had enough exposure to English to be able to understand a simple ballot, and so we would give someone who was born in America, an American citizen, lived in an ethnic enclave, never learned English, and give them that interpreter in the voting booth so we can find a way to coddle them and be an enabler, just like an enabler for an alcoholic, hand them a bottle of booze so they do not cure themselves.

But why do not we give them an incentive then, if they are not learning English in their enclave, let them learn English when it is time to go to vote. They could take pride in that. They could assimilate into the society. They can be far more successful, make more money and contribute more to this society and live a richer, fuller life.

But we have a bilingual provision in the Voting Rights Act. That was wrong on its original premise. It is wrong in the language that is there today. It will be wrong when it comes to the floor of this House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker. It needs to be amended. And I intend to seek to try to amend that legislation, that being another piece of this overall puzzle, Mr. Speaker.

But what I am for is, I am for building a wall from San Diego to Brownsville, 12-feet high, concrete wall, precast panels, dropped into a footing that has got a notch in it and a cut-off wall so it is hard to dig underneath, the kind of stability that it needs, something that will look like the barrier that the Israelis built to defend themselves and protect themselves from the bombers that were coming over from the West Bank.

That barrier has been 95 percent effective, even though people are determined to come across to kill people. We can do something very similar to that for less money than the Israelis are spending.

Now but the scope of the dollars that we are spending on our southern border are astonishing, Mr. Speaker. I would submit that the authorization request for the Border Patrol, for the air and marine division, for ICE, for the Customs border protection division all together that will be allocated for our southern border, and this would not include significant resources and assets that come from the National Park Service and other agencies down there that have jurisdiction in the area, that request is over $6 billion for the 2,000 miles of our southwest border, over $6 billion.

Now when you divide that out, it is a little less than that, say a 2,000-mile border just for round numbers. You come back with a cost- per-mile, Mr. Speaker, of $3,181,336 per mile. $3,181,000 per mile to defend our southern border, to stop 10 percent, maybe 25 percent, probably not 33 percent of the illegal traffic.

So we have got maybe 25 percent effectiveness for a price of $6 billion. So when we quadruple that then to go to $24 billion to defend our southern border at 2,000 miles. Would that get 100 percent control of the border? I say not. Not without a physical barrier that is effective.

And so for $3 million a mile, $3,181,000 a mile, I wondered what would happen if we applied the free enterprise solution to this task? What would happen if we simply put out a request for proposals and offered companies that had insurance, that had professional credentials, that could bond the job, to bid a section of the border under an open, competitive, low-bid contract that met standards?

And if there were companies out there that wanted to be in control of security in the border between San Diego and Tijuana, let them bid for that for an appropriate price and see if that competitive bidding will come up with some more creative ways and some more effective ways to control our border.

Me, I would be interested in, had I been back in the private sector where I spent 31 years in the construction business, all together about 35 years in the construction business, 31 years in the construction business actively owning and operating.

But I would be interested in the stretch across the desert where you did not have intense, I will say intense urban areas to deal with, that stretch across the desert, some of it does not have a marker at all.

If you go down into New Mexico, there is a concrete pylon that stands on the horizon. And you look across that horizon, you go to that one, you look at the next horizon, and you can see the next one, and the next one. As far as you can see with these high-powered big old brass transits that they had back in those days when they laid that out.

Mr. Speaker, I imagine that was about 1848 or so when they laid out the border between Mexico and the United States, horizon to horizon, concrete pylons that high, poured, set on the border.

Mr. Speaker, that is the only marker. And so when people walk across the desert, they do not know where the United States is and where Mexico happens to be. I would want to bid that stretch of the desert. But I do not think they want to pay me $3 million to protect that stretch of the desert.

But you know for $1 million a mile, I could do quite a job. So could many American companies enter into a contract and say, I want to bid this 100 miles of border, and I will bid you X dollars per mile. And I have got insurance. I have got bonding. I will perform.

And if anybody gets across here, we will have the Border Patrol count the

footprints of those that get across and dock it from my contract so that there is a penalty if I am not efficient.

Now, we do could do that, and we could control this border in a year. We could have the contractual structures all in place. Some of those people will say I want to build a wall. I want to build a wall to keep people out. And I want to bid this accordingly.

Mr. Speaker, I drew up a little diagram for a wall that I think would be effective. And I did this, Mr. Speaker, because we have a little trouble dealing with concepts. And so this wall that I propose works something like this.

I would go in and build a concrete footing, and this concrete footing would be perhaps 2 foot over, 8 inches down, put you a notch in there like that, and that would be the footing. This would be about 4 foot deep in here. This would be about 8 inches of footing all together.

This would be 6 inches wide in there. And then I would put on a precast concrete panel that would be about 12 feet high. It would drop down into this notch and go up like this.

Now this, Mr. Speaker, is a very rudimentary drawing of the kind of concrete wall that I would construct, and this kind of wall is very simple, and it would be cheap to make. You could trench this and you could slip-form that with a machine. And then this represents a 6-inch- thick wall from a cross-section end, just like if you were going to slice a loaf of bread and look at it from the end. Twelve feet high, I would put wire on top, a little constantine wire on top, perhaps 4 feet of that sticking up there, 12 feet of concrete sticking up out of this footing. These could be precast panels, you could set those in, it wouldn't be hard to make a mile a day of that with a small crew. It would go very quickly once the footing was poured.

This kind of a wall, allowing a little bit for sensors and some of the bells and whistles that one would have, this kind of a wall can be built for about $500,000 a mile, when we are spending $3 million a mile, Mr. Speaker, for our Border Patrol to drive back and forth and watching maybe 75 or more percent of those illegal border crossers get through. This kind of a wall, if patrolled, if managed, if maintained would cut down on illegal crossings by, I am going to say, at least 90 percent. And if it is well manned, it can go very close to 100 percent.

Now, people say walls don't work. Then why do we put fences around prisons? Why is there a fence around the White House? How many people got across the wall in Berlin? How successful was that? Extraordinarily successful, I would say, Mr. Speaker. And then those who say that the Berlin Wall was an offense to humanity, I would agree to that. But the Berlin Wall was a wall that was built to keep people in. This wall would be a wall that would be built to keep people out, and that is a 180-degree philosophical difference. It should not be offensive to people who live in freedom to have to protect their freedom by building a wall. That is the most cost effective thing we can do. For every $6 that goes down to the southern border to fund our Border Patrol down there for 2007, for every $6, if we would just take one of the $6, we can construct this kind of a structure for 2,000 miles along our southern border, and you know that it would make the Border Patrol far more effective and that they would be able then to be able to utilize their time chasing people down and actually catching people and deporting them instead of being flooded by this mass of humanity that comes pouring across the border every single day.

It would make the Border Patrol more effective, and it would honor their work. It would save lives, Mr. Speaker.

I visited the location where a young forest ranger park officer named Chris Eggle was killed in the line of duty 3\1/2\ years ago just across the border. There was a drug smuggler, they were under the Mexican police who were in hot pursuit of a drug smuggler who drove across the border where there wasn't a barrier, and his vehicle broke down on the U.S. side of the border where the Mexican person, the Mexican police officers continued in their pursuit at least to the border, and Chris Eggle came in with his partner, closed in on the suspect, and the suspect let off four automatic rounds of an AK-47 and Chris Eggle was killed on that location.

I visited that location, Mr. Speaker. If we had had even a vehicle barrier fence which exists there today in the Oregon Cactus National Monument, Oregon Pipe Cactus National Monument, that vehicle barrier would have saved Chris's life. This kind of a barrier would have easily saved his life.

Every major city in America has at least one police officer who has been killed in the line of duty by an illegal here in the United States of America. That is over 70 police officers who have been killed in the line of duty by illegals. All of their lives would have been saved if we had enforced our border as I propose, Mr. Speaker. And that is just the police officers.

The numbers of those who die at the hands of those who should have been apprehended and deported escalate day by day by day. Twenty-eight percent of the inmates in our prisons in the United States between our city, our county, our State, and our Federal penitentiaries, 28 percent, Mr. Speaker, are criminal aliens. They didn't all come into the United States illegally, but they were unlawfully present here when they became criminal aliens and sent off to prison. That is the percentage of crime that is being created that could be prevented if we enforced our laws.

And that is why 13 people every day die at the hands of negligent homicide, generally a drunk driver who is unlawfully present in the United States. Twelve people every day die at the hands of a first- degree murderer, second-degree murderer, or manslaughter violently at the hands of someone who is unlawfully present in the United States, a criminal alien here in the United States. That is 25 people a day.

This is slow-motion terrorism taking place in the United States. I am not implying that everyone who comes across this border is a criminal, or, I will say, wishes the American people ill will, Mr. Speaker. I will apply that everyone who comes, I won't just imply, I will state that every one who comes into the United States illegally is a criminal. They are guilty of a criminal misdemeanor for illegally entering the United States, and I find it ironic to see the demonstrators in the street carrying signs that say, ``I am not a criminal.'' Well, does the other sign say, ``I am an illegal alien, but I am not a criminal''? You can't have that in the United States of America. If you are in the United States illegally, then you are guilty of a criminal misdemeanor that is punishable by 6 months in the penitentiary and then deportation. That is the law here in the United States. Denying it with a poster in the streets doesn't make it not so. It is the law, regardless of whether H.R. 4437 passes which makes it a felony to enter into the United States.

The reason for that is so that the law breakers will be entered into the NCIC computer database, the National Crime Information Center computer information database and we can keep better track on them. Sometimes because it is a misdemeanor, they don't get booked, they don't get printed, and their prints don't go into the records so that they can be searched and scanned. Sometimes we don't know whether it is catch and release for two or three violations or whether it is seven or whether it is 20 different violations, because it is not always recorded the way it needs to be. And sometimes they are not booked at all. Sometimes they are simply released because of the urgency of the moment.

The drugs that come into this country, Mr. Speaker, it is an astonishing number. The Federal Government keeps track of these things, and their number is at 90 percent of the illegal drugs in America come across the border of Mexico. That is the Federal Government's fact. And it is not one that they very much relish repeating, but it is the Federal Government's fact: 90 percent of the illegal drugs, amounting to, amounting to $60 billion, that is with a B, $60 billion worth of illegal drugs.

And you match that up with the slow-motion terrorism that comes with the loss of 25 American lives every day at the hands of criminal aliens. Far more have lost their lives at the hands of criminal aliens than were victims of

September 11. And you couple that with $20 billion that is wired into Mexico every year from the wages of many of those who are illegally working here and another $10 billion that goes to the Central American countries, $30 billion of wages wired south and $60 billion worth of drugs hauled north, and you have got a $90 billion economic problem. You have got a $90 billion drain on the gross domestic product of the United States of America, and it is a $90 billion injection into the economy of Mexico.

And people wonder why Vicente Fox doesn't step in and do something about the meth labs that are in northern Mexico, the marijuana smuggling and the marijuana harvest that is taking place, about the thousands of pounds of drugs that pour into the United States, one report, 2 million pounds of illegal drugs in a year. Two million pounds.

And I watched down there, Mr. Speaker, as we took 18 bales of marijuana, each about 10 pounds or more, out from underneath the bed of a pickup. Eighteen bales of marijuana smuggled into the United States. And the officers who made the interdiction said sometimes 200 pounds, and this was maybe 180 pounds, maybe as much as 200 pounds, sometimes 200 pounds is a decoy; it is simply a decoy, Mr. Speaker, and the effort to run the gauntlet with 180 to 200 pounds of marijuana would just distract the officers so that they can get by with a 2,000- or 2,600-pound load in another vehicle going through the gap that was created while they were distracted picking up the 200-pound load. That is a lot of drugs, Mr. Speaker, and a lot of damage here in the United States of America.

And I don't make excuses for the drug users here. There is a demand here that draws those drugs into the United States. We need to deal with that, too, Mr. Speaker. But meanwhile, we can raise the cost of the transaction; we can make it a lot harder to get those drugs across the southern border.

If we could shut off this southern border and just simply allow legal entrants into the United States at our ports of entry, if we could do that, then at least in theory, and if we could do it overnight, we could cut off 90 percent of the illegal drugs in America. That means some people will not get their drugs, some people won't go on drugs, some people will wean themselves off. Every time that happens, there is another life that has been improved, another standard of living that has been improved. Sometimes a life has been saved. Sometimes a little boy or a little girl gets a new pair of tennis shoes instead of their daddy or mommy buying drugs. Sometimes that daddy or mommy gets off drugs and spends their time raising their children and loving their children and nurturing them in the fashion that God intended, Mr. Speaker. Every time we can make an improvement in that drug equation, we are improving the lives of children in America somewhere sometime.

And so I would submit that we need to enforce this border. We need to build a wall similar to this design that I have with a 4-foot wide footing, a 6-inch wide notch in that footing, probably have to brace it right there and right there. I didn't draw that in. And then at least a 4-foot deep cutoff wall, and then drop in a 12-foot high pre-cast concrete panel, 12-foot high, 10 feet long would be my guess.

So that, as we lay those panels out, every time you set a panel you build another 10 feet of wall. We could do this for less than $500,000 a mile, a half-a-million-dollar a mile, for one out of every $6 that is spent protecting our border today before the increases that will be necessary for 6,000 more National Guard troops on our border. This is a capital investment that could be amortized over 40 years or more, and it doesn't cost that every year. It is only one-sixth of budget. That is a one-time expenditure and then a small maintenance fee, and we could easily fund the maintenance fee by requiring fewer personnel down on the border because this would be so much more effective.

So I would submit, Mr. Speaker, we need to have enforcement first and enforcement only until enforcement established, and the American people will agree that the administration has made a real commitment to uphold the laws of the United States of America including our immigration laws. Seal the border, end birthright citizenship because that is another magnet: 300,000 to 350,000 babies born in America that in the practice of birthright citizenship can start the chain migration to bring their families in.

The misconception idea that somehow all family reunions have to take place north of the Rio Grande instead of south of the Rio Grande, I don't know how that ever got started into our verbiage and accepted as an institutional commitment by the United States of America. Seal the border, end birthright citizenship, shut off the jobs magnet. That means sanction employers, require them to use the basic pilot program, the instant-check program so that they check their employees. And I don't mean just the perspective employees or those they have just hired, but check every employee so we can process that through and let those go who are not lawfully present and can't legally work here in the United States, and pass the New IDEA bill, the new Illegal Deduction Elimination Act, IDEA, I-D-E-A, Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. That lets the IRS enforce the law.

When they do a normal audit, which they do on many of the larger companies every single year, they would run the employees' Social Security numbers that are on the 941 form through the instant-check program on the Internet. Punch those Social Security numbers in there, and it will go out to the Social Security Administration database and the Department of Homeland Security's database, NCIC again, and identify if that number, that Social Security number and the other identifiers that would be entered with it would identify someone legal to work in the United States.

If an employer uses that method, they would get safe harbor, Mr. Speaker, and the IRS would not bother them. But if they didn't use the instant-check Internet-based program, or if they did use it and ignored the results and hired them anyway, then the IRS would deny the deductibility of those wages. So the business expense that would be wages, say $10 an hour, would be denied. Now that is no longer an expense; that goes over into the profit column presumably, and that $10 an hour that was a write-off or an expense becomes taxable income. And if they are a corporation in a 34 percent bracket, that is a $10 an hour wage, then the 34 percent tax on it plus the interest plus the penalty kicks that fee up to about $6 an hour added to the $10, and your $10 an hour worker becomes a $16 an hour illegal worker, and the notice goes off to the Department of Homeland Security that we have an employer here that is violating the law, step in and sanction that employer also with the fines that are appropriate for the violations that are in place.

We can shut off this jobs magnet, Mr. Speaker. And if we do that, attrition, the time when people make a decision to go back home, they can go back home with the skills they have learned here, they can go back home with the free education that we provided for tens of thousands of children, an educated nation south of us that can be renovated by the new blood that comes from us saying we are going to be a nation of laws, Mr. Speaker.

We must be a Nation of laws. We must defend our borders. We must defend our sovereignty, and if we do not do that, we will not have a country. The American people know that, Mr. Speaker, and I wish that the people over in the other body and the advocates for this thing called a guest worker or temporary worker knew that.

When you grant citizenship to someone, they are no longer a temporary worker. Citizens do not go home. We do not have temporary citizens, and we must not have 103 million to 193 million new residents here in the United States, unless the American people debate that and say that is what they want. If the American people want to open up their doors to that kind of numbers of people, then they should step up and say so.

Until that, Mr. Speaker, I am going to stand on the rule of law, defending our borders, enforcing our laws, and perhaps if that enforcement can take place for 3 to 5 years, we can have then a legitimate debate on those who would be left in this country and how to deal with them in an appropriate fashion.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your indulgence.

Offered By: Mr. King of Iowa

Amendment No. 1. At the end of the bill (before the short

title), insert the following new section:

Sec. 753. Not later than 180 days after the date of the

enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Agriculture shall

submit to Congress a report on the National Animal

Identification Plan, including the lessons learned and the

effectiveness of the pilot programs funded in fiscal year

2007, an analysis of the economic impact of the proposed

National Animal Identification System on the livestock

industry, and the expected cost of implementing the National

Animal Identification System.

Offered By: Mr. King of Iowa

Amendment No. 2: Page 21, line 4, insert before the period

at the end the following: ``: Provided further, That

$1,000,000 of this appropriation shall not be available until

the Secretary of Agriculture submits to the Committees on

Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the

Senate, the Committee on Agriculture of the House of

Representatives, and the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition,

and Forestry of the Senate a report on the National Animal

Identification Plan, including the lessons learned and the

effectiveness of the pilot programs funded in fiscal year

2007, an analysis of the economic impact of the proposed

National Animal Identification System on the livestock

industry, and the expected cost of implementing the National

Animal Identification System''.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address you, Mr. Speaker, and this House Chamber. I do rise in support, and I wish to associate with the remarks of the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee) who brought up that Mother's Day is coming up, and we need to honor our mothers. They are the source of a lot of the good things about the world. They are the things that civilize us men, I would point out.

And I certainly give my greetings to all mothers and look forward to the day that we formally celebrate that glorious day. A source of compassion and understanding and nurturement, all of the things I will never be in my life are wrapped up in motherhood.

Mr. Speaker, I did come here to speak about a different subject matter, Mr. Speaker. Before I get to the subject of Iraq and the broader war on terror, I feel compelled to address the issue of the National Security Administration and their data mining operations that came to light today in a publication.

I am alarmed in the verbal messages that come around this Chamber, alarmed that there could be that kind of an operation going on in this country.

Before I react, though, Mr. Speaker, I think it is imperative and incumbent upon all of us to step back, to take a good look at the facts, and not run forward with an uninformed response. I concur with the first instincts of the gentlemen from New Mexico and also the gentleman from Washington that spoke on the issue of the data mining of the National Security Administration.

I serve on the Judiciary Committee where we had at least 12 and perhaps 13 hearings on the PATRIOT Act, renewed the PATRIOT Act. We put some insurances in the PATRIOT Act. In a couple of the sections, we set them up with a sunset so that we will be able to go back and review those issues in a shorter period of time to make sure that we are protecting the rights and the privacy of Americans.

Mr. Speaker, when I look at this issue and again, from the sense of alarm that there would be that kind of a potential intrusion into the private lives of Americans. And I would dig a little bit deeper and say this data mining, with the little bit of information that we have at this point, does not look into the details of Americans, and no one is alleging that it does except for the remarks made here in this Chamber, Mr. Speaker.

And it does not, according to the administration, collect any names of anyone, it does not collect any addresses, it does not listen to any telephone calls. None of those things, according to the administration's response at least, and worthy of verification I would add, takes place unless the FISA court is aware of that and unless it happens to be a communication from a domestic call within the United States from or to a caller in a foreign country, and even then the interest would be in al-Qaeda, as the President made clear.

So data mining is a little bit different. It is clear that, you know, it depends on how you define the invasion of privacy. And the allegation was made here, Mr. Speaker, that the administration, and through the NSA's

data mining, that the privacy was invaded. That is a direct quote from the gentlemen from New Mexico.

Well, the definition of the privacy, I think, needs to be clearer before America comes to the conclusion as to whether that privacy was invaded. Now, if it has not been, if no phone calls have been listened to, if none have been recorded, if there were no names, and if there were no addresses that were recorded, if it were just the telephone numbers, and if the telephone numbers were data mined and run through a database to sort out, to see if those numbers also were the numbers that were known phone numbers of suspected terrorists, if that was the indicator that would cause the National Security Administration then to go to the FISA court and ask for a warrant, to perhaps listen in on some of these phone calls, it might have been discovered through the data mining process. That is how I understand this to be.

This is how the administration defends their actions. This is how I hope the facts emerge as we listen more closely to this situation. But I am concerned, Mr. Speaker. I think it is important for Congress to take a real close look at this. And I will be one of the people who will be making these requests to take a close look at it.

Mr. Speaker, I am not willing to go out here and make the allegation that there is a tremendous invasion of the privacy of millions of Americans until I know that factually that is the case.

The administration would need, in order to get a FISA court warrant, probable cause, as the gentlemen from New Mexico stated. And the gathering of information beyond simply an indexing of a phone number that might link to known al-Qaeda phone numbers or suspected al-Qaeda phone numbers, as the administration's position on all of the fervor they have gone with this.

So let's take a deep breath, America. Let's count to 10, America. Let's get the facts in front of us. Let's get a sense of what is actually going on before such time as we would leap to a conclusion.

But I want to announce that I am focused on this and I am concerned about this. And I also would point out that in a hearing before the Judiciary Committee, the Attorney General, General Gonzalez, was asked the question as to whether there were any telephone conversations that were being listened into, domestic calls within the United States without a FISA warrant or without a warrant of any kind.

That answer that he gave that day I recall not to have been a very concise, precise or clear answer. And I intend to look up the Congressional Record to determine that answer that was given by Attorney General Gonzalez and see how that comports with this story that came out in the news today of which we will be looking more carefully into.

Just looking at calling patterns of phone numbers, I am not certain that that does rise to the level of invasion of privacy. America will decide that, Mr. Speaker. And we will draw some conclusions ourselves when we get the facts together.

But I would add also, that the White House would not confirm or deny the existence of such a program. I will not draw a conclusion either, Mr. Speaker, as to what that might indicate. But I would point out that perhaps the architect of this plan, the person who was in charge at NSA during the period of time that this data mining was initiated and developed, and certainly during the time of its activity, if indeed it did take place, was General Michael Hayden, General Michael Hayden who has been appointed to be the next Director of the CIA.

And we know that there is friction between the CIA and the White House, and that there is political ideology conflicts going on between the CIA and the White House, and that the appointment of General Hayden, an outsider, a military officer, to come into the CIA to be the Director of the CIA and hopefully to clean up some of the activities within the CIA that have undermined the foreign policy of the President of the United States of America, might just be the reason why there was such a timely leak of this information.

Mr. Speaker, I pose that question to America as perhaps being more important or at least a question that needs to be raised to a high level of importance, alongside the importance of the privacy of the American people.

We will get to the bottom of this, Mr. Speaker. And I will join others in asking these questions and asking for the factual information so that we can draw a conclusion here in the Congress, and that the conclusion in this Congress by right and ought to reflect the conclusions of the well-informed American public. That is the path that we need to go down, Mr. Speaker.

I thank you for your indulgence. I shift then over to the subject matter that I came here to talk about on this floor, and that is the subject of the effort of our great, dedicated, well-trained, well- disciplined, well-performing and well-equipped military of the United States of America.

The effort that they are giving worldwide, globally in this global effort on terror, this global effort that was enjoined against our will on September 11, 2001. And the President went to Ground Zero in New York with a bullhorn and made it clear that we were going to take on this enemy wherever they might be.

And he said, if you are harboring terrorists, you are a terrorist, if you are aiding and abetting terrorists, you are a terrorist. If you are on the side of the terrorists, you are against the side of freedom, and we will identify our enemies as such.

And within months, the Commander in Chief dispatched troops into Afghanistan, a nation of 25 million people, a nation that had never had a free election on that soil ever in the history of the world. A nation that the Khyber Pass was renowned as being a place where you could never send military through there without them being ambushed and shot down, that no nation in the world, including the very powerful Soviet Union, could ever invade and occupy for any period of time a nation like Afghanistan.

And that a military, we were advised that a military effort in Afghanistan would be a failure. And I remember the voices of the people over on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, and they advised America that it would be a defeated effort to presume to go into Afghanistan since all nations throughout all of history had failed in that country because of the rough terrain, because of the tribalism, because of a tenacity of the people there to always reject any outsiders, no matter what kind of good will might come to Afghanistan.

But the Taliban had taken over Afghanistan. And they had been harboring terrorists. They had been harboring al-Qaeda, and they had allowed al-Qaeda to get established on Afghanistan and on the border with Pakistan.

And this al-Qaeda was the worst venom in a very venomous regime there. The Taliban had taken over essentially all of Afghanistan. They has been blowing up the religious symbols and statutes in Afghanistan, trying to wipe out anything that challenged them. They rejected Buddhism, they rejected Christianity.

Afghanistan was one of the few countries in the world, Mr. Speaker, where the life expectancy of the women in Afghanistan was less than the life expectancy of the men, even though the men were the ones that were continually in combat taking on the bullets and the bombs and the missiles and the artillery.

Still, they were so brutal with their women in Afghanistan that their life expectancy was less than that of the men. And the children did not fare much better, Mr. Speaker. Girls could not go to school. The lack of freedom, the lack of an economy had devolved down into barely a survival mode, with a Draconian Islamic cleric regime in place called the Taliban, one of the darkest regimes ever in the history of the world.

But our Commander in Chief saw differently. He got good advice from his military advisers. He took the advice of the military advisers, accepted that. In a period of within a couple of months of September 11, dispatched our troops into Afghanistan, where they joined up with the Northern Alliance.

In a matter of months they swept through Afghanistan, wiped out the Taliban and enabled a free government to be established there. And free elections were held on that soil for the first time ever in the history of the world. That provided the 25 million Afghanis the gratitude of the coalition forces and the United States military. No small feat.

And as that fantastic feat unfolded, the critics from the other side of this aisle, and the liberals throughout America, slowly were muzzled by the success of the operations in Afghanistan. Slowly muzzled, Mr. Speaker, because they came to the realization that it was such a resounding success in all facets of it, from the military perspective, from the security perspective, from establishing a free government having successful elections, and establishing an economy that is now starting to grow and become stable in Afghanistan, from building infrastructure, sewer, water, wells, roads, schools, girls going to school, women voting. The freedom that you see in the eyes of people that are looking out through a burka that had never had the chance to do that before, was an astonishing success that again had not taken place on that place in the globe ever in the history of the world, thanks to the bravery and the courage of our Commander in Chief.

His vision, his courage, his ability to discern the advice that came from his Secretary of Defense, from his military staff, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to be able to discern that advice, select the best advice and then act upon that and send an appropriate number of troops with appropriate tactical support with appropriate equipment to be able to initiate and carry out and complete a successful operation in Afghanistan.

And I would point out, Mr. Speaker, that his critics have been muzzled on that issue, even though logistically, population-wise, the degree of difficulty in Afghanistan is greater than the degree the difficulty in Iraq from a military perspective.

The critics have been muzzled because of the resounding success. Slowly their voices have been squelched one after another after another. I point out, Mr. Speaker, that the logistics and the population in Iraq, substantially easier from the military's perspective than the war in Afghanistan, the critics said the same things before the beginning of the operation.

They have not quite been muzzled yet, but one of the people that is helping in that cause is here to join us this evening. That is the gentlewoman from Tennessee who stands up for freedom and free enterprise and our American military, and is there every time they need her and many times comes without even bothering to call, stands up for America on the floor and in committee, and in every facet of her life.

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to share some time here on the floor. I am proud to yield to the gentlewoman from Tennessee (Mrs. Blackburn).

I thank the gentlewoman from Tennessee for her presentation here, Mr. Speaker. It is always with great gratitude that I have the privilege to share some floor time and address this Chamber.

Mr. Speaker, picking up on the remarks made by the gentlewoman from Tennessee (Mrs. Blackburn), several things pop to mind as I listened to her discussion. One of them is passing the DOD authorization bill here a little more than an hour ago. It is encouraging to see that we come together with that kind of unity in supporting our military here. A few dissenters I would say, but the core of this Chamber does support our military, and that was evident today.

I would also like to compliment Chairman Hunter, who did an excellent job of putting the bill together. He brought into play a number of interests and was able to work this out in a fashion that I think demonstrates the unity of the American people as voiced through the United States Congress.

One of the elements in that bill that we did not discuss is a directive in the bill that will ensure that the military chaplains can pray reflective of their faith, reflective of their consciences; and that they will not be told by the ACLU or any other anti-faith group out there that may want to interfere with their relationship between God and our soldiers as reflected between them by our chaplains.

When this bill gets to the President's desk, our chaplains will be protected to operate and to pray consistent with their faith, consistent with their consciences, consistent with their duty as they always have until this more enlightened era, as some might call it, when they began to interfere with the faith relationships. We put our soldiers on the battlefield and we ask them to put their lives on the line for us. The least we can do is let them worship in the fashion that they would prefer.

That is one of those constitutional guarantees. We can go overboard in trying to make sure we sanitize our religion to the point where no one is offended. In fact, I think that is a major mistake in the approach to many of the issues that we have, the idea that somehow we can move through this society and make progress without offending anyone. No, there are people who are grievance experts in America and around the world who will be offended no matter what you do. And if you keep backing up and backing up, they just bring their line of offense to follow you back to some point where you get your back against the wall when you cannot retreat anymore and they will still be offended when you cannot back up anymore.

Then what do you do? It is pretty difficult to step back and plant your foot and fight, Mr. Speaker. I submit that we have to draw a line consistent with our moral values, our religious values, our constitutional values and stand up for those principles that we hold dear, but also stand up for the principles that have made the United States of America a great Nation.

Some of those principles of course are on the line right now around the globe. They are on the line in Afghanistan where the President committed troops in the fall of 2001, and successfully I might add. The critics have been muzzled. And yet before Mrs. Blackburn took to the floor I had taken this, Mr. Speaker, up to the point where we made the decision in this Congress to endorse the President's authority to go into military operations in Iraq, and I point out the similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan: 25 million people in each of those two countries; both of them being Arab countries, Muslim countries. And some might argue about the Arab-ness about the Afghanis, but Muslim countries certainly. Those similarities. Fair amounts of desert in each. Far more mountains in Afghanistan than there are in Iraq, but similar-size countries, countries without large economies, countries that had not made a lot of progress in the last 35 or more years.

One country was ruled by the Taliban and the other was ruled by Saddam Hussein. Who is to say which is worse. The Taliban did random violence and intimidation and pushed that country back into the Stone Age, sometimes one person at a time, small groups at a time. They turned their soccer fields into execution fields where they executed women in front of a crowd.

It is a brutal thing going on in Afghanistan, but the brutality in Iraq was not quite so obvious. It was not submitted to us so much on the media because those things took place behind the scenes, but Saddam Hussein, the tyrant that he was and tyrant that he is, was committing atrocities against his own people.

The rate of those atrocities can be calculated a number of different ways. The lowest number that I come up with is that he was killing his own people at a rate of something just less than 100 a day. The highest number that I come up with is that he was killing his own people something over 200 per day, but however it is calculated, and if you want to figure the lowest average versus the highest average, and these are numbers that come off the Web pages designed to show how many Iraqis have suffered, it is not a pro-administration Web page by any means, but it is the only numbers we really have about the levels of Iraqi civilians that have died since the liberation of Iraq that began in March of 2003.

By any measure, Mr. Speaker, when one measures the loss of American life, plus the loss of Iraqi troops who are on our side fighting for their freedom, plus the loss of civilian Iraqis, however one measures those fatalities, those killed in action, those casualties that resulted in death, and then one calculates the loss of Iraqi lives under Saddam, that loss of Iraqi life under Saddam was far greater than the loss in lives during any operation or any period of time that one wants to select as broader than a few minutes during the whole period of the operation during 3 years in Iraq.

Saddam's killing of his own people, add up all of those numbers and subtract the lives that have been sacrificed in Iraq that have gotten them to this point of freedom, and there are still, by any measure, at least 100,000 Iraqis who are alive today because of coalition forces, because of our American military, because of the effort of the Iraqi people to step up and defend themselves.

This effort that is ongoing in Iraq is more than the function of our daily casualties, more than the function of the daily casualties of Iraqi military and Iraqi civilians. What we see are bombing in the street. We see the news media that is there. It is as if Al Jazeera gets called whenever there is going to be a bomb detonated and they can be there to turn on their movie cameras and record the videos of what is going on for the level of violence in Iraq.

Now, I think it is too high, and I pray that we can get this violence reduced and get Americans out of the line of fire so they are not taking on the casualties. I also pray that the Iraqis who are taking more casualties than Americans are and other coalition forces will be able to quell this violence, but however we measure this, the loss of American lives, plus the loss of Iraqi military, lives of people that are allied with us, plus the loss of innocent civilian lives that we see on television every day as the bombs detonate, still result in a massive net saving of Iraqi lives because Saddam Hussein was so brutal to his own people.

There are not mass graves that are now filling with bodies in Iraq like they were during the Saddam regime. Those things have stopped. The level of violence that is there in Iraq and Iraqi civilians are taking this violence and

those killed are far greater than Iraqi military who are taking more casualties than the American soldiers who are taking more casualties than the balance of the coalition forces. That is how that rank order of loss goes, tragic as it is.

But if we look at the real circumstances in Iraq, and we ask the question, how can anybody live in that country with daily constant bombings and people being killed every day in the course of going to the barber or going to the store or walking down the street or driving through the intersection or going to school or getting on a bus or lining up to volunteer for the police force or for the Iraqi military or even for the rarest of occasions, I am allowing even going to vote, how can they tolerate that level of violence in their country?

Well, what is the level of violence in Iraq? And so I looked up those numbers, and it turns out that the annual fatalities due to that kind of violence, due to violent deaths in Iraq, the same way we measure violent death in the United States, by a form of murder, first and second degree murder and manslaughter, that kind of violence in Iraq is a rate of just a little over 27 per 100,000 people. So you can multiply that across the 25 plus million people that are there and come up with that number, now 27 for 100,000 people.

How does that compare then being an average civilian Iraqi compared to other places in the world where a civilian has a risk of dying a violent death on any given day? I looked up the statistics for Washington, D.C. I live here part time and part time in Iowa. My wife lives here part time and part time in Iowa. It turns out the risk to me, more important than to me, the risk to my wife Marilyn for being on the streets in Washington, D.C., is almost twice as high here as a civilian in Washington, D.C., as it is to be an average civilian in Iraq. Twenty-seven times per 100,000 in Iraq as civilians due to violent death, and the number here in Washington, D.C., is 45 per 100,000 here, not quite twice as high but significantly higher than Iraq.

So what would it be in some other places around the country? Well, let us see. Detroit, not one of the safer cities but a little safer than Washington, D.C. That number is 41 per 100,000 compared to 27 per 100,000 in Iraq. So it is significantly safer to be an average citizen in Iraq than it is is to be an average citizen in Detroit, Michigan.

If we took a look at where would be the most dangerous place in America, that would be down in New Orleans before Katrina. Before Katrina in New Orleans, the violent loss of life there was 54 per 100,000, and I will say that is statistically twice as dangerous to be a citizen in New Orleans as far as taking the risk of violent death, murder, manslaughter, than it is to be hit by a bomb or a murderer over in Iraq itself.

So that puts it into perspective for us on how dangerous it is in Iraq. I have been both places within the last few months, and I think it is important for us to take a look statistically because what we do not have is the news media sensationalizing the violence in New Orleans or the violence in Washington, D.C., or the violence in Detroit. That is the difference, Mr. Speaker. We do not have the news media sensationalizing. So America gets this sense that it is an intolerable level of violence in Iraq and that it cannot be quelled.

Some Members of this Congress declare, as the junior senator declared from Iowa, that there is a civil war going on in Iraq, and I would submit that if there is a civil war going on in Iraq, if that were to happen, we would know it. It is not what is going on there today. A civil war would be defined as when the uniformed military of Iraq, the 254,000 strong now that are in the field taking the fight to the insurgents and to the enemy, when they choose up sides and start to shoot at each other, Mr. Speaker, there will be a message that there might be a war that has begun in Iraq. Until that happens, they are not choosing up sides.

We have Sunni and Shi'as and Kurds all wearing the same uniform, all defending the same flag, all defending the new free Iraq, all defending the new government that has been established there, the new government that has now finally been formed and been put in place with a cabinet that soon will be approved perhaps by the parliament, and they will be launched upon the political solution of this.

But the violence in Iraq is nowhere near the level that the news media would have us believe, but it is very much sensationalized.

And how does it compare, the violence of an average citizen in Iraq, to maybe a Nation like Colombia or Honduras? Well, it is significantly more dangerous to go to either one of those two countries than it is to go to Iraq. The murder level in Honduras is nine times that of the United States. So it is significantly safer to be a regular citizen in Iraq, again, than it would to be a regular citizen in places like Colombia or Honduras or let alone Swaziland where that country has the highest murder rate in the world at 88 per 100,000 people. So to go visit Swaziland and walk around on the streets in a country like that, you can divide 27 into 88 about as well as I can, Mr. Speaker. It is not quite four times as dangerous, but 3.5, 3.6 times more dangerous to go visit Swaziland. Reading the news media, you could do a Google search and have difficulty finding such a statistic.

I would submit also, Mr. Speaker, that we had some choices. The President had some choices, and engaging in the liberation of Afghanistan was an excellent choice because it took the habitat that bred the Taliban and supported al Qaeda, that habitat that bred terror, erased that habitat, cleaned it up and established a new habitat there. If you want to think about this from an environmentalist perspective, there was an environment that bred the kind of terror that came to visit us on September 11 and had attacked us for 20 years and attacked many of the countries around the world and continues to do so at a far lesser scale than it would be otherwise.

The habitat that was there bred terror. The habitat that replaces it breeds freedom. That is the Bush doctrine. That is the vision that was put in place within 2 months of September 11 when our military was ordered into Afghanistan, when the people over on this side said it cannot be done, that our troops would be bogged down, but it has been a resounding success.

That same approach, with that same philosophy, the Bush doctrine of erasing the habitat that breeds terror and replacing it with a habitat that is a free habitat that grows freedom was brought to bear in Iraq, and I will point out that many of the same advisers that had advised President Bush in Afghanistan advised President Bush in Iraq. Some of the same tactics that were used in Afghanistan were used in Iraq, but the same thought process, the same evaluation, the same willingness to take risk, measure risk, make sure that we had the resources that were necessary to complete the operation was all considered.

To argue that the President did not listen to the right people in Iraq, none of the people that argued against the President's decision- making are willing to endorse that he listened to the right people for going into Afghanistan. They simply do not talk about that operation, as if the global war on terror only has one front, only has one battlefield, and only had one conclusion or one way to conclude it and one way to do so, and that in retrospect for them would be send a half a million troops in there, not 150,000 or 167,000 or 168,000 troops in there to do this operation.

The President sent enough troops to do the job that was in front of them. He used the best information he had at the time. He knew who to listen to before he went into Afghanistan. He listened to a lot of the same people going into Iraq. Tommy Franks has not stepped forward and said, oops, I wish I had another 350,000 troops. I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that another 350,000 troops in Iraq would have taken so long to mobilize, and the cost of mobilization and the difficulty of doing such a thing would also put more of our troops in harm's way.

I would point out that if one looks back statistically, that if you are going to stand up a military, when you put young men and women in the same place where you have machines that move fast and are heavy and instruments that are designed to deal death and destruction, as our military is designed to do, there will be accidents and you will lose people due to accident that are not combat fatalities.

In fact, one out of every five fatalities in Iraq has been a noncombat fatality, the result of an accident, but those accidents take place whether it is a civilian on the streets of America or whether it is a military wearing the uniform on a base somewhere where we never hear about that accident. If we add up the loss of American lives as a price to be ready, because those accidents that take place in training they take place on the base, the in-uniform accidents, if we add them up for the period of time between Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom, there were 5,000 Americans who gave their life to this country for our freedom as a price to be ready to take on the enemy. We mourn them as well as we mourn the soldiers who we lost in combat. They all paid the price for freedom, and we need to take advantage of this freedom and exercise this freedom and defend this freedom here the same way they defended it overseas for us.

But those loss of lives are still hard when it is a family that gives up a son or a daughter due to a price to be ready as opposed to the price to be engaged in combat. All need to be honored, all need to be respected, and of course, we add an extra level of honor to those who went into the line of fire for our freedom.

But the price remains as a price paid to be readied. There has been a price paid due to accidents in Iraq, as well as loss of life due to combat, but there is freedom there in Iraq. They held three elections in the year 2005, all successful, and they said it could not be done. They said that the violence would be so great that we could not open the polling booths and allow Iraqis to come to the polls and vote, but they did, Mr. Speaker, and each election the number of Iraqis went up, not down.

The smiling Iraqis with the purple fingers coming out of polling places, those numbers got greater and greater. As that happened, we were transitioning from the military security phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom to the political phase. And now we are into this political phase full blown, full bore. The Iraqi people have established their prime minister, their president and their speaker of their new parliament along with names that have been presented to their cabinet. That cabinet is endorsed by a majority of the parliament. They will be up and running.

When they are seated at the United Nations, they will be the most sovereign and most representative Arab nation in the world, the Nation that reflects the will of their own people far greater than any others.

We often think of the United Nations as an organization that is the democracy for the world. It is a voice of all of these nations, and the ambassadors from the countries represent the voices of the citizens of the country that they come from. That is not the truth. The truth is that there are some democratic countries that come to the United Nations, that appoint an ambassador to go to the United Nations to speak the will of the people. That is some of the countries.

Then there are the other countries that are significantly different. These are the ones that come from the dictators and tyrants who do not allow their own people to have a voice, but they send their ambassador to the United Nations and they have a voice there, a voice equally weighted to the voice of the ambassadors who actually represent a free people.

Mr. Speaker, I would submit that the Iraqi ambassador soon to be named to the United Nations will be a voice of a free Arab people, and that is a significant improvement, a significant change from the way it was in the past 3\1/2\ years ago. And, in fact, that ambassador will stand out in the United Nations hopefully as a beacon of freedom to the Arab people. And hopefully this freedom that is emerging in Iraq as we speak will be the freedom that becomes contagious and emanates across the borders to the other countries of the Middle East in such a fashion that they will stand up and say I want my freedom, too. I will celebrate when that day comes, but that would be the next phase of the Bush doctrine. That phase where the President understands that the clarion call of freedom calls all people, and that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation.

It may not be in this year or this decade or in this generation. It may not be in my lifetime, but it is inevitable that the yearning for freedom will bring every country to a level of freedom over time. I believe, as they say in the Arab world, it is God's will that we arrive at that point.

The alternative that the President had, given the challenges in front of him after September 11 was we could have looked at this from a law enforcement perspective, as did the previous administration. But the President chose to take the battle to the enemy in Afghanistan with a model for that country almost a mirror image of Iraq. If an approach to Afghanistan was wise, and the same approach to Iraq was not wise, I wish the people on the other side of the aisle and the critics of that effort would stand and tell me those distinctions. I can give distinctions, but it is Monday morning quarterbacking now. We must complete this task.

If we should pull out of Iraq, if that should happen, the effects on the future of the United States of America and the free world and the global war on terror would be catastrophic in their magnitude. The message that would be sent to the rest of the world would be that the United States does not stick with its commitment to go in and liberate. The message that came from Muqtada al-Sadr, when I was there on one of my visits a couple of years ago when he said if we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way that they left Mogadishu and the same way that they left Lebanon. That is what I heard in live real-time out of the voice of Muqtada al-Sadr.

In fact, I took the trouble to put it in a poster, Mr. Speaker. I would point out that I heard this as I was visiting in Kuwait City watching Al Jazeera TV. He made the statement that if we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, and the same way they left Mogadishu.

That message gets through to our enemy. They understand that the United States, if we do not stick to a mission, a subsequent military and American civilians will pay the price for not sticking to that mission for a generation or more after the fact.

There are those who add to this argument and who add fuel to this fire. Here would be an example. This is the senior Senator from Massachusetts who said that this was a war made up in Texas, this whole thing was a fraud, and Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam, which is really my point.

This message out of the mouth of this senior Senator from Massachusetts went through the satellite versions of television and within seconds, in fact at the speed of light, can emerge on the other end in the Middle East directly into the ears of Muqtada al-Sadr and Zawahiri and Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden, and you name the leaders over there who are committed to killing people who are not like them. They believe that is the path to their salvation. They are encouraged by these kinds of messages. It cost the lives of American soldiers.

We must stand together and complete this task. If we fail to do so, our only alternative will be to retreat back to the shores of the United States of America, fortify everything that we have that we want to protect, that we hold dear, guard every bus stop, guard every school and hospital, and guard every restaurant. They do that in Israel. If you go down the streets of Israel, the military are required when they are out on the street to carry their gun. They guard everything, and still their women and children, their families are blown to bits by terrorists who are committed to killing them for some religious reason I will never understand. That is our alternative here in America if we do not complete this task in Iraq.

Some of the things that we have done to provide stability in Iraq are demonstrated on this poster. The yellow spots here and the green dots, those are initiated and I believe they are completed operations of construction projects. Yes, the green is completed operations. The yellow are projects that are in progress.

As I traveled around, I was down in Basra in the south and on up to Kirkuk

in the north, and I have been around the Mosul area as well, these projects are all things that American taxpayer dollars have invested to upgrade the infrastructure that is there. That includes water, sewers, hospitals, roads, all kind of structure that are designed to add some stability to the country of Iraq that in the last 38 years, aside from coalition forces and the dollars that have been committed into the country since the liberation, had not made significant progress.

Now there is progress being made in the country. There is more progress that needs to be made before our troops can come home victorious, to quote the gentlewoman from Tennessee some moments ago.

I will submit that we have to stick with this task. We do not have an alternative except to succeed, and we are on the path of success. It is a long, hard slog, as the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Rumsfeld, has pointed out. He has been realistic and upfront and candid in his positions that he has taken. I think he has taken on a yeoman's task to reorganize our military at the same time we are involved in a conflict overseas. But the alternative is not acceptable, and that would be not to reorganize our military at a time when we need to be lighter, quicker, faster and still stronger than we were before.

I have met with the Secretary of the Army who has laid out this plan for me, and I am impressed with the level of organization and level of discipline that they have provided. And I am impressed that Secretary Rumsfeld has gone down this path and has seen the vision and directed that it take place in the reorganization of our military.

I am not surprised though, Mr. Speaker, that some of the generals who were steeped in the old way of thinking and who maybe have a little different approach might be a little disgruntled. We have about six generals that have spoken up. That means there are some 9,000 who have not spoken against the Secretary of Defense. I think it was untimely of them to do so. It did not help this cause for them. I think that if they had stepped back and taken a look at it from the perspective of the long-term best interest of America, they might not have taken these issues to the public because their voice echoes across through satellite TV, picked up by Al Jazeera, spread through the ears of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and Zarqawi and Zawahiri and al-Sadr who is maybe on the side of the government of Iraq and doing business there. It does not help to send the message of dissent.

If you have a message of dissent, take it to the White House. They will close the door on the Roosevelt Room or perhaps in the Oval Office and you can have your say and it will be considered. But to have your say and say it to our enemy at the same time you might convey that disagreement to the President of the United States through the media is not a constructive way to fight a war. If this goes on, it will be one of the reasons why democracies have a difficult time in succeeding.

I point out that the country I live in is a constitutional republic, and I am glad it is. I look forward to the day our military comes home victorious. I do not know how soon that might be. But I would point out that the previous administration sent troops to Kosovo and gave a time frame at which time they would be deployed back to the United States, and that time frame was 1 year. It has been well over 10 years since those troops were deployed to Kosovo, and we still have troops there.

I am not raising an issue about that except to say we cannot give a drop-dead deadline for our troops to leave Iraq. That empowers the enemy and allows the enemy to prepare for the day when they can emerge from their holes in the ground, having accumulated their military supplies, and then descend upon the less-equipped people that are there defending the country.

That idea that has taken place in a resolution over in the other body, joined in by the junior Senator from Iowa, is the wrong idea at the wrong place at the wrong time. The right idea and the right message is we will be there, Iraq, as long as you need us. We are going to encourage you to get out of the nest and fly. You are doing a good job so far under difficult circumstances and your fighting spirit is there. The judicial branch is there. Saddam Hussein needs to be tried. You need to get done with the trial. You need to accumulate a record for the Iraqi people so they understand the history that is going on within the country of Iraq. The era of Saddam Hussein must be recorded. When it is recorded, it will be fine with me if justice is served and an appropriate punishment should he be found guilty is made consistent with Iraqi law. And I am advised that there is only one penalty that is provided for an individual who might be found guilty of crimes against humanity and that punishment is death. I believe that is too gentle a penalty for someone who may have committed crimes of that magnitude, but it is the one that they have and it is all that we would have in this country as well.

Mr. Speaker, I urge this body to stand with our military, to stand with their mission, make the point that you cannot be for our military and against their mission. We cannot ask people to put their lives on the line and say you should not be doing this, I am against your mission, but I support you. I will send you some warm socks and an MRE and something cold to drink. I am for you, troops, but you shouldn't be there. That is wrong.

If you are not for the mission, you are not for the troops. You cannot ask them to put their lives on the line for you and be opposed to their mission. They are one and the same. You support the troops and you support their mission all together, not separately. You do not get to choose one or the other. It is a fallacy in the argument.

I stand with the troops and the mission. I am committed to seeing this thing through to the end. We owe that to our brave soldiers and Marines who have given their lives for the freedom of the Iraqi people, for the safety and security of the American people, that have taken the fight to the enemy globally overseas, who all of them volunteered to go over there. All of them volunteered to face the enemy. They knew they were taking a risk. God bless them for it, Mr. Speaker, and God bless our soldiers and our Marines in their effort, and God bless the United States of America.

Mr. Speaker, as always, I very much appreciate the privilege to address you, Mr. Speaker, and in so doing addressing this great United States of America House of Representatives.

I am a bit breathless because I hustled over here to arrive at the appointed time; and I thank my colleagues, hopefully, they filibustered a few minutes on my behalf as good friends likely would.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to speak to you about a few issues about border control especially on the southern border and primarily on the southern border. I have long spoken about the policy that I think we need to have with regard to the immigration policy across the Nation, about domestic enforcement and shutting off the jobs magnet, and also about the need to stop the bleeding at our southern border.

And so I had gone down to the border about a year ago and spent a long weekend down there, at least 3 days on the ground and in the air, as a guest of the Border Patrol and some of the other agencies that operate the security along the border. And I was given a very good tour and a few rides in helicopters at night and also in the daytime, shining the night sun down along our border to identify where there might be illegals that have come across or future illegals preparing to come across. And I stopped and visited some of the stations and their equipment and talked to the men. I was impressed with the quality of the team people that they had assembled, the equipment they had assembled, and the tactics they had. Yet in that full long weekend, I did not actually see activity which would indicate to a reasonable person that there was not activity to be seen.

In spite all of those hours in the air and the hours on the ground and the night vision equipment, I did not again see any illegal activities, although I got many reports of the success of the interdiction of our border patrol and our other agencies.

Well, as I listen to the debate here in the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker, and the testimony that comes before the immigration subcommittee which I sit upon, and I sit in those hearings two, three, even four times a week and we will have four, sometimes eight witnesses giving us credible data and good well-informed information on this issue from both sides of the issue, Mr. Speaker, and always the years, the cumulative information has built in me after those years of sitting on the immigration subcommittee, I began to think that I have a pretty decent broad background on the subject. And yet there was a gap, Mr. Speaker, there was a gap in that subject because I had not gone down and spent time on the border more or less unguided, more or less outside the scope of the Border Patrol, but gone ahead and gone down to the border and looked under all the stones and met with the people that were actually more likely to be more frank with me.

So that was my mission this past weekend where I spent perhaps as much as 4 days on the ground in Arizona. And the goal was to meet with the people that are enforcing our laws down there, the ones that are out in the night and those people who have seen this bleeding, this hemorrhaging at our border firsthand, that can describe to me the scope of the bleeding in our southern border.

Mr. Speaker, I am here to say tonight that it is astonishing. It is far worse than I had imagined and my imagination was fairly strong. My predictions and the numbers that I put out were fairly aggressive, at least viewed by some of my critics. But there is nothing I saw down on the border over the weekend, Mr. Speaker, that would cause me to believe that I have overstated the numbers of people who are illegally crossing our border or the amount of drugs, illegal drugs, that are coming across our border, or the amount of violence that is visited because of the drug problem both south of the border, north of the border, and the violence that goes throughout the drug culture in America and the collateral damage to the victims that may not be associate with that at all, but happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and are victims of murder, victims of negligent homicide generally in the form of a car accident where the driver who was at fault was under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

So what I did, Mr. Speaker, was go down to visit in a region, starting out on Friday, in a region south of Tucson, south and a little bit east of Tucson. I first met with a special agent who briefed me on a lot of information that had been coming by this individual on a consistent basis. And then I went to Bisbee, Arizona, where I went on down then to the border there to Naco, Arizona, right on the border with Mexico. That is a location that has seen a fair amount of violence and a lot of concentration of illegal traffic going along the border. They finally decided to establish and build a fence, Mr. Speaker.

I was guided to that location by a retired Border Patrol officer and a rancher from that region, both with a passion of patriotism for America, both that have a memory of growing up in an America and that part of Arizona that was a different kind of country than it is today. It was then a place that they could feel safe in their streets and safe in their homes and walk the streets and not lock their homes. And today that region has been flooded with just thousands and tens of thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of illegals, many of them carrying illegal drugs through that region.

And cars drive across the border where sometimes there had been an existing fence that was built originally to contain livestock, that fence has essentially been systematically broken down, and vehicles with drugs and illegals in them would drive right through the gaps in the fence, sometimes drive through the fence, and take off across the desert or cut across over to a highway and get up on the highway. And once they were on the highway, for a little ways they were gone, they were free, they were in America, not ever to be captured again, not ever to be accountable again unless they were just simply victims of bad luck.

They realized the magnitude of this problem at Naco, Arizona, and went in and built a fence through there, Mr. Speaker. It is built out of interlocking steel that sometimes can be 10 feet high or higher and then above that in some cases they have welded a kind of wire mesh that goes up another 4 to 6 feet. And when they originally built the fence, people said it would not work. It cannot work. People will go over it. They will go through. They will go under it, or they will go around it. In fact, they do go around it, Mr. Speaker.

At one point they picked up a cutting torch and cut a hole through it and made their own gate in that solid steel fence, and that was a pathway by

which people and drugs traveled into the United States, and some went back through that gate. And the patrol went there and welded the gate shut, and as they kept some maintenance up on the fence, the other side essentially gave up on trying to breech the fence.

Now, the illegal traffic goes around the end as one reason, rather than trying to find a way through a barrier that is a good solid barrier that has been very, very effective.

The Border Patrol officer whom I was there with and the rancher whom I was there with said look at this, and they described the problem they used to have about the thousands of people pouring across there. They said: We do not have that problem anymore. This community is safer than it was. It is more secure than it was. There is far less illegal traffic going through here. There is far less crime of all kinds, far less violence, and far fewer illegal drugs in this community because we built a barrier that kept the elements out that were eroding our quality of life in Naco, Arizona.

That was an interesting trip, and they took me out along the border where that fence essentially stops and diminishes in some locations. There is nothing there, not even a way to define where the border is between the United States and Mexico, but simply open places where illegals can walk across the border and one location just in a dry river bed or they would not be seen by night vision. They were protected by the shrubbery and vegetation. They could simply walk down from Mexico into the United States unimpeded, unobstructed, unobserved and become shadow people here in the United States doing whatever they do.

They were strong advocates of the border barrier and one that is solidly built and one that can be efficient and is becoming a tool that could very much support our law enforcement and let them focus their energy on plans that could be more effective than riding herd on a broad length of an unprotected border. It is ridiculous to think that we could ever hire enough people to sit along the border, especially at night, and watch people come across and then catch them rather than put in a fence that would not allow them to come across in the first place.

That was Naco, Arizona, and again, I learned a lot about the culture and the level of corruption on the south side of the border. It was an interesting conversation.

From there, I went down then to the reservation and was a guest of a number of the Shadow Wolves who are part of the Customs and Border Patrol. Actually, today, they are a part of the Border Patrol. They have been shifted to that, but it is on the Tohono O'odham Reservation, and on the reservation the Native Americans control that land. They have support of the Border Patrol, but they have had an organization there called the Shadow Wolves. They are Federal employees and their responsibility is to guard the border and interdict illegal drugs and illegal aliens. They are focusing on illegal drugs. Their peak recruitment, the top numbers there, Mr. Speaker; were 22, and when they were 22 strong, in fact, that does not sound like a very large group given the size of the reservation and given the miles of border that they have to protect, and I believe that number is 76 miles of border protected and controlled by 22 Shadow Wolves, members of the Tohono O'odham tribe on the reservation; but those 22, in the period of a year, I have got to dig up the statistics so I will be able to release those and publish those, Mr. Speaker, but the information I received, that they had interdicted more illegal drugs in a 12-month period of time with 22 of their Shadow Wolves than all 2,000 Border Patrol agents did in that entire sector for the same period of time.

That is an extraordinary example of effectiveness and efficiency, Mr. Speaker; and it is the kind of thing that we here in this Congress need to endorse and support and encourage and fund and authorize and protect and encourage and enhance, do all of things that we can do to identify the best among us, to encourage them, to grow that culture off beyond the bounds of the reservation, take that same culture of efficiency and enforcement on to the other reservations, whether Native American tribes that control land on our national boundaries with our neighbors, and the level of success that has been there has not been rewarded. It has not been encouraged. It has not been enhanced by the Border Patrol who seems to want to be seeking to undermine their efforts and absorb them into the broader Border Patrol, in which case, if they did that, the Shadow Wolves would lose their identity.

These people have an extraordinary amount of character and courage and conviction and pride in what they do; but like anyone, if they do not see a reward for that, if they do not see some kind of encouragement, if they do not understand that here in Congress we are supporting them, eventually they will be assimilated into the Border Patrol and their level of efficiency will be assimilated into the broader overall level of efficiency in the Border Patrol.

Now, I do not mean to imply that the Border Patrol is not efficient or that they may not have the kind of personnel that I would like to see. In fact, they have some very extraordinarily, brave, noble, hardworking officers, and many of them. The structure has become big and it has become difficult to be efficient. So I am not here to discourage them. I am here to encourage them, and I often shake their hands and thank them for what they do because they are the last line of defense along our border to protect us from the incursions of millions that take place in this country every single night, Mr. Speaker.

But what I saw from the Shadow Wolves was not only some of the history in their legacy and their efficiency and effectiveness, but I went out in the field with them and watched the way that they follow the border. When they see that there has been a border crossing there, they will pick up that sound, that track if you will, and they will follow that track down and hunt down the illegals. Sometimes they are carrying backpacks of illegal drugs. Sometimes they are just people entering the United States illegally, but they will find that track and get on a trot and follow that track and trace them to where they are, pick them up and detain them and then process them in a fashion in accordance with law.

Again, their effort has been extraordinary in some of the things that they showed and taught me, too much to go in depth here, Mr. Speaker, on the floor of the House of Representatives, but quite a lot of extraordinary skill that appears to me would be very constructive if it could be passed along to other agencies out there, particularly the broader Border Patrol.

But the culture is there as well as more important the skills to protect the culture of the Shadow Wolves. It is extraordinary. I was impressed with what they do, and I intend to support and encourage and enhance them. I will be looking for a way legislatively to demonstrate my commitment to their commitment to protect our border and defend us against the illegal incursions into the United States and the thousands and thousands of pounds of illegal drugs that come across our border every single day, many of them still pouring through the Tohono O'odham Reservation and in spite of the best efforts of the now-shrunken Shadow Wolves, down from 22 to 16 to cover those 76 miles of border fence. So, again, I have been extraordinarily impressed, but they have done their job.

From there, I traveled outside the reservation and went over then to the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and met with some people there, some national parks people and Department of the Interior forest rangers. Seventy-five percent of their work, which they signed up to do, would be to protect our natural resources, preserve our parks, enhance our parks, let Mother Nature be enhanced there so that the visiting public could come into these locations, like the Cabeza Prieta National Refuge, and be able to appreciate Mother Nature in its purest form.

That is why our forest rangers and our park officers got into the business, because they appreciate wildlife. They appreciate our plant life. They appreciate how the species of nature have balanced in these regions and how they have grown, and they try to enhance that.

They find that 75 percent of their time, their Border Patrol officers even, 75 percent of their time is spent protecting the border, 75 percent of the

time keeping illegals and illegal drugs out of the park, not a successful effort I might add, and perhaps a futile effort, but an effort that needs to be attempted nonetheless.

With dozens and dozens of abandoned vehicles sitting out across the national wildlife refuge, vehicles that have blazed a trail through there and hundreds of miles of roads have been carved through that national wildlife refuge because that was the most expeditious route for smugglers to drive their suburbans and their 4-wheel drive pickups and you name your vehicle, there, and there will be somebody else behind you, and the next night another and another and another. That formerly pristine desert turns into sometimes a 200-foot wide path after it has been pounded in the desert with traffic enough times it turns into what they call moon dust, just loose dust that lays there in ruts in a way that you can get stuck in that dust, 200 feet wide perhaps.

Before, this was a few less than 10 years ago, in fact, starting about 1998, was when these border incursions began and when they began to create these roads and these trails and tear up our natural resources. The people that are dying in an attempt to get across the desert have gone from a couple of years ago or 3 years ago 150, 175 a year, now across our southern border, as many as 450 a year do not make it across the desert when they seek to walk into the United States. They die of hypothermia, they die of exposure, they die of dehydration, more dehydration than anything else. The desert is not very forgiving, and some of them are not very well prepared. They are not very well- guided, and that human tragedy is exacerbated by the damage to our natural resources which I had a, I will say, less than enhanced appreciation for.

Mr. Speaker, I really learned to respect and appreciate the work that is done by our Department of the Interior, as well as the value of the resources that they are seeking to protect. A case in point I think illustrates this better than anything else would be a rare species of a bat, a long nose bat, and this is an endangered species. It only lives and reproduces in four caves, and those caves are all down in that region.

One of those caves was a cave that was frequented consistently by the illegals who would go up into the region, and then their guide and their track would take them to this cave where the baby bats were born. They began taking a stop off and temporary residence in the cave to the point where they scared the bats off and they would not come back in.

The long nose bat, the lesser long nose bat, left the cave, would not come back to reproduce, and so our National Park Service looked at that situation, said we have to protect this resource; and if this happens in the other three caves, there will be no place for these bats to reproduce, who knows if they will become extinct.

So they put up a wrought iron fence around the opening to this cave, cost $75,000, and there is other labor that was not tallied in, put the wrought iron fence around the cave, and it was built in way to keep the illegals out of the cave. Fortunately, the lesser long nose bats returned to the cave, and they are in there now living there and reproducing, but think about it for a moment if you would, Mr. Speaker, the effect of building a fence just around the entrance of the cave that provided a deterrent that allowed the bats to come back and live there again and reproduce and fly out, and they are really essential. They are essential then to the pollination of certain cactus out there in the desert, without which the cactus would not survive. It has a whole set of chain reactions.

I am submitting that we build a fence on the border because it is a lot cheaper to do than it is to build a fence around everything that is threatened from the illegals and the drug trade that comes from our southern border.

That was the lesson there at the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, that being a second stop or actually a third stop along the way; and then from there I went on over to Organ Pipe National Cactus Monument. Organ Pipe is another national monument location, and that is the location where the National Park Service officer, his name was Chris Eggle, was killed in a shootout with drug lords near the Mexican border in the park property.

I went there with his father, Bob. I visited the location where the shooting took place, where he stood, where the shooter laid, where he fell, where there is a monument there today that was built and placed by his father, Bob, and his mother, Bonnie. Well, they brought stones from their farm in Michigan down to place around the monument, and there is a cross and a picture and a place to remember where this happened, where it happened that Chris was killed by a drug lord or at least an employee of a drug lord who had driven across the Mexican border where there was no barrier. When he was being under hot pursuit by the Mexican police and his vehicle broke down and collapsed and stopped across the border into the United States and Chris Eggle and his partner were called in on that scene, as they split up and converged on the location where the drug smuggler was, Chris was ambushed with an AK-47 that had been brought into the United States, illegal, of course, on a vehicle that was illegal, with drugs that were illegal, across a border that was undefined, let alone defined with a barrier.

Had there been a vehicle barrier there, had there been a fence there, Chris Eggle would be alive today. He is not.

There is a memorial there at the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument that memorializes him as well. I talked to many of his coworkers that were there. His spirit is alive and his spirit is strong today. The happy Chris Eggle is the one that is remembered. Although he is not with us, his spirit is with us and his sacrifice is something we need to remember.

He is not the only one. He is not the first one. I pray he will be the last one, but I saw nothing down there that would indicate to me, Mr. Speaker, that he will be the last one.

That tragedy taught them something at Organ Pipe after the tragedy of Chris' death at the hands of the drug runner whom the Mexicans were chasing into the United States; and by the way, that drug runner was subsequently shot and killed by the Mexican police department. He was in the United States and shot from their side of the border. That is not an issue with me, but as a matter of full disclosure, I point that out, Mr. Speaker. The lesson learned from that was to close the border, at least shut off the vehicle traffic.

So they have built a vehicle barrier along Organ Pipe and it is most of the way along the Organ Pipe National Monument. It is perhaps 32 miles altogether. As I look at that and travel along the side of that border, it is built so that steel posts full of concrete set in the ground, and then it has got horizontal barriers, about two of those, one about eye height and one about halfway up, designed so that vehicles can't drive through it, but the desert pronghorn can run through it and jackrabbits can run through it and any kind of wildlife can go back and forth through there.

They had trouble with cattle moving in from Mexico, so they stretched a couple of barbed wires in there to keep the cattle on the Mexican side. Of course those barbed wires were cut because the people who were jumping the border thought it was an obstruction to have to climb over one barbed wire, so they cut the fence.

We drove through and picked a place where the illegal traffic was going across and they were demonstrating how that tracking takes place as they did with the Shadow Wolves on their reservation. What I saw in a number of places, it got to where you could pick it out easily, every night, traffic coming into the national monument and paths that are beaten so smooth, one of the officers said, Well, one day we'll shut off this illegal traffic and it will be a nice path for citizens to come down here and visit our park, because it is already smoothed out, it is kind of graded out by all the foot traffic.

In fact, in one of those locations, Mr. Speaker, the traffic goes across the fence and right by a sign and the sign says, Do not enter into the United States.

This is a dangerous place. The sun is hot. You can die in the desert. There

isn't water for you. There are snakes. There are scorpions. It's dangerous. Turn back. Cynically, the path goes right by the sign. The sign is in Spanish. If they can read, they can read that. But in a way, I think it is cynically they go by that sign just to send us a message.

Fifty-eight percent of Mexicans believe they have a right to come to the United States. Mr. Speaker, they are utterly wrong, but we need to convey that message to them so that they can understand that the United States needs to be committed to enforcing our borders.

The incidents that happened down there illustrate what I saw. First, the argument, as I asked the officers, retired Border Patrol or current officers who were at the point of retiring or quitting and giving up, those were the kind of people that would talk to me. They were the people that would open up to me.

One of them was an officer at a station. No one would talk to me because the orders were, You don't speak to a Member of Congress. You don't talk to anybody from government. Your job is to do your job, but not to tell anyone what that job is, what the statistics are in your area. So they sent me to an individual there who is near retirement and that individual was willing to speak.

In fact, numbers of those individuals were willing to speak with me, some ready to quit, some ready to retire, some retired. They would talk to me straight up and open. They didn't care about the consequences for that. They care about this country. They care about our border security and our border control and they understand that you can't be a nation if you don't have a border. You can't call it a border if you don't defend your border, Mr. Speaker.

I hear the testimony here in Congress as the Border Patrol testifies before the Immigration Subcommittee, and consistently it is, we stop 25 to 33-1/3 percent of the illegals that are traveling across our border. I have used that number consistently in my remarks across this country and I ask that question of the people that are down there in the line, on the line, defending our national security, and I would say, What percentage do you stop? Where do you stand?

They would hesitate in their answer, and I would say, 25 to 33 percent? Do you stop a fourth? Do you stop a third? How many do you stop? They would laugh and give me a number. One of them burst out in hysterical laughter when I submitted that they could be successful in stopping 25 percent of the illegal traffic. He responded back to me, No, it's more like 3 percent of the illegal traffic, of the illegals coming into the United States do we stop and perhaps 5 percent of the illegal drugs. It's not 25 percent. It's not 33 percent. In fact, it's not 10 percent.

But of the informed answers that I got down there, and I asked it at every stop, the informed answers that I got, I never got an informed answer above 10 percent, of anybody that was involved in actual protection of the border and processing people that were coming through that border. Ten percent.

Now, think about it for a moment, 10 percent, Mr. Speaker. Last year, we apprehended about 1,188,000 illegal entrants into the United States on our southern border, on that 2,000-mile run. 1,188,000. If that number is correct on 10 percent, if you move that decimal point one over, that is 11,880,000 attempts to cross the border. You can take perhaps a couple of million off that if you wanted to be generous and take it down to 10 million succeeded. I don't think actually 10 million succeeded coming into the United States, but I do think the number is far higher than the numbers that we are working with in the media today.

We have used the number here, 11 million illegals in America. We used the number for 3 years while 4 million people a year at least were coming across the border, maybe a lot more than that. And over 3 years the number didn't accumulate, but about 500,000 a year, even less. So after 3 years we finally raised the number to 12 million, but no one now pays attention to that. We are still back stuck in that 11 million mode of illegals in America.

Mr. Speaker, that number is far higher than 11 million.

Maybe we are successful in stopping 10 percent. Maybe the individual who advised me that 3 percent of illegals and 5 percent of the illegal drugs, maybe he was off by a factor of, oh, let's say two. Maybe it is 6 percent of the illegals and 10 percent of the illegal drugs. However you measure this, it is astonishing in its magnitude in the cost to this country. In fact, we are headed down a path, it won't be very much longer that everyone who wants to come to the United States will be here. The message was sent January 6, 2004, when our esteemed commander in chief gave a speech, it is called in America, ``the amnesty speech.'' It was the one that said, here is the policy that we want to have, it is one of a guest worker/temporary worker as the only solution.

If you have too many illegals in America, I suppose the quickest and cheapest and the most guaranteed solution one could have, Mr. Speaker, is simply legalize them all, give them all amnesty, give them a path to citizenship, voila, no problem. We have fixed the problem because we have legalized them all by a version of amnesty.

The American people, Mr. Speaker, reject amnesty in this country. They understand that we have to have a rule of law, that citizenship must be precious, that you must respect the rule of law. There is more to being an American than having somebody stamp automatic citizenship on your green card or on your matricular consular card.

There is more to being an American than that, Mr. Speaker. Being an American is rooted in and based upon a common culture, an understanding and a common sense of experience and history, of reverence and respect for our borders, for the sovereignty of the United States of America, for the destiny of this country, for the assimilation that has made us so great, that have been able to take immigrants in from all over the world, bring them into this great giant melting pot of America, give them this opportunity and let them reach out and earn and succeed in this opportunity for success.

The legal immigrants in America have performed extraordinarily well. In fact, the vigor that they bring to our society and our economy surpasses much of the vigor that we find in the native-born Americans that are here.

All of us in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, support a rational immigration policy that is designed to enhance the economic, social and cultural well-being of America. But if we have an open borders policy and the people that advocate for an open borders policy are really advocating for an unlimited amount of immigration, everyone who might want to come here to the United States could come here; and if all 6 billion people on the planet want to arrive here in the same year, that is fine with them.

They don't take a stand that there is such a thing as too much immigration, even too much illegal immigration. They will not stand in the way of one of them. They will not stand up and say, The best thing you can do for your country is to stay in your country, grow its economy, be part of the solution, bring reform to the governments of places like Mexico and points south, places that are so utterly corrupt that the economy is strangled, places that are so corrupt that there has to be protection paid at every stop along the way, that you can't get a birth certification when you are born in a country unless you happen to be born into a family that has the connections and maybe is willing to pay the kind of funds to pay off the Madrina network that is there so that you can get your birth certificate and somebody identify who you are and be able to move around in this society or that society.

The level of corruption is astonishing. It runs deep. I would add to this that in spite of all the statistics that I could tell you, in fact, I will go to some of those statistics in a moment, Mr. Speaker, but first I would like to recount a few incidents that really bring home the circumstances and reality.

As I was there on the Tohono O'Odham reservation with the Shadow Wolves, there was a drug smuggler who was pulled over and stopped. We were out in the desert tracking some illegals and getting a feel for how that worked and excellently being guided. While this was on, there was a call to an emergency and a number of the Shadow Wolves mobilized and they called in a Black Hawk helicopter that was there to aerially observe a vehicle that

was escaping from the ground people. They followed the vehicle and got it trapped up into a dead-end road and the driver took off and ran and they followed him and finally apprehended him.

They brought him and the pickup, the small truck as I would say to some of my other friends in America, Mr. Speaker, into the compound there where the Shadow Wolves headquarters is and looked the vehicle over. It looked like it had been reworked, that they had taken it through a body shop and created a false floor underneath the bed of that pickup. The bed itself had a plastic liner in it so you couldn't see the bodywork that had been done. We looked that over and they pointed out to me how that work was done. It was done in a chop-shop in Mexico.

Once they got the clearance to go ahead and search the truck, they went in with the jaws of life and peeled the bed of that vehicle up and apart. In there we carried out 18 large bales of marijuana, about 10 pounds or more per bale, at least 180 pounds of marijuana lying underneath that 6- to 8-inch false floor of that vehicle. The alleged perpetrator, and I did lay eyes on him and evaluated him, I guess, for my own perspective, he had a 13 tattooed on his arm, many other tattoos all over his chest and arms. It was clear to the people there that he was MS-13, Mara Salxatrucha 13, the most dangerous gang that we have ever seen in this continent.

That dangerous gang, of course, is smuggling drugs up into the United States. They had collared one of their members, one of their perpetrators who was then in that holding cell.

I was there to help unload the drugs from the pickup, there to observe this entire process. There recorded and there to burn it into my memory, Mr. Speaker, that we think of a large quantity of drugs where I come from, it might be, oh, perhaps a few pounds. Occasionally we get larger loads coming up through Iowa, of course. But when somebody says a lot of illegal drugs, we are thinking of a quantity substantially smaller than 180 pounds. They think of 180 pounds or 200 pounds of illegal marijuana as a decoy, a decoy that might be designed to draw the law enforcement down another path so that when the path clears, when all the law enforcement pounces on the decoy, then the larger loads can come through, the 1,000 pounds, the 2,600-pound loads, the full semi loads can start up the road.

It is a fact that on those drug routes, those highways that flow from the southern part of Arizona up into the rest of the United States, on those small mountains that are there, there are lookouts on every strategic point.

Those lookouts are manned by two people, and they are supplied regularly and they stay on that mountain for 2-week stretches at a time. They are well armed. They have good equipment. They have night vision goggles. Infrared equipment. For daylight they have top-notch optical equipment, and they have automatic weapons of all kinds, and they have good food and good support, and they sit up there. And they have good communications so that they can radio from mountaintop to mountaintop and be able to tell each other where our drug enforcement people, where our Border Patrol are, where the ICE people are, where the special agents are, where the Park Service people are, so that when the coast is clear, they can run their large load of drugs up through the corridors.

Now, this is an astonishing thing to be able to see that military positions in the United States are occupied by the drug lords and their troops, and that they are well equipped and well armed and well maintained and well supplied, and they are manned 24/7 by two people, and we are sitting down here on the floor of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, thinking we can get a handle on this some other way. But the numbers coming across the border, Mr. Speaker, are astonishing and the positions that are taken on those mountaintops where the lookouts are are shocking that we would tolerate that in this country, know they are there but not go up and take them out.

The volume of drugs, again, is something beyond my imagination before going down there. I had never seen such a pile of illegal drugs. Our Federal agencies report that 90 percent of the illegal drugs in the United States come across the Mexican border, and the value of those drugs is in the area of $60 billion a year. And we sit here in the United States of America, we tolerate such a thing, such a thing that we would let foreign interests, foreign economic interests, illegal interests violate our laws and enrich themselves with the wealth of a Nation.

And the drug addiction that is here in America, of course, feeds it, Mr. Speaker; and that is another subject for another time. That is something that we need to address.

That is one incident, the interdiction of about 180 pounds of marijuana by the Shadow Wolves during a later afternoon down on the Tohono O'odham Reservation.

But the following evening, as I was looking around, I went down to a place called Sasabe, and that again is on the border with Mexico. I visited a port of entry there that is manned by the Border Patrol. They didn't expect that I was coming. I didn't call in advance. I just drove down there and got out of the vehicle and began to talk to them. Good people. They are doing their job there, and they are doing it well as far as I can see.

As I began to have a conversation with them, there was an emergency call. There had been a drug deal that had gone bad on the other side of the border in the Mexican community just on the south side of that port of entry.

Usually, it is a shooting, Mr. Speaker, but this was a knifing. And the subject who was knifed had a large wound in his abdomen about 3\1/ 2\ inches wide, entered in below the ribs on the right side and up through and it did end up lacerating his liver. It didn't get his lung as far as I know.

But the word came that the ambulance was going to cross from Mexico into the United States. And they prepared for that. They called in a Medivac from the hospital in Tucson. And the Medivac, by the time it arrived, there had been two U.S. ambulances that had arrived. The Mexican ambulance didn't have any oxygen, didn't have bandages, had only surgical gloves on it was a paramedic that was with me lent himself right to the task and began to stabilize the patient. When the oxygen came, they put oxygen on the patient and held him stable until they could load him onto the helicopter and airlift him out to the Tucson hospital, all at the cost of the American taxpayer, Mr. Speaker. And the cost of this I will get compiled over time.

The ambulance that came across from Mexico simply parked on the United States side. Two ambulances came in, one from near Tucson, one from 24 miles away. One brought oxygen. The other was there for support. And all lent a hand to get him loaded on the helicopter and flew him up to University Hospital in Tucson where they do a great job, and they have the only trauma center in all of southern Arizona.

It was a real eye opener for me to see this individual who had been knifed in this fight, covered with tattoos and substantially pierced and inebriated with alcohol and cocaine, at his own admission, as part of the contributor, I think, to the violence on the other side.

And I am advised that that kind of incident wasn't just a fluke. And I kidded the Border Patrol officer, you staged this for me. Of course he didn't. He didn't know I was going to be there. But it happens about four times a quarter in that location alone, roughly 16 times a year. More shootings than stabbings, when we evacuate people out from Mexico into United States hospitals.

And so I followed up yesterday, Mr. Speaker, and visited the hospital and visited the patient. And he had been stabilized and his life had been saved. Without that extraordinary effort, it is likely he would not have survived the next few hours. But his life appears now that it has been saved, and I am grateful for that.

But I also met with the hospital administrators and they are eating millions of dollars of costs in funding the people who are generally illegals in the United States. They don't separate that cost from those that are evacuated from an injury or a wound that takes place on the Mexican side of the border.

But the American taxpayers fund this. The American ratepayers fund this. And the hospital swallows a fair amount of it. And there have been occasions where residents and American citizens of Tucson aren't able to be treated because all the beds are full, full of people who are illegally in the United States. And so that health care for the Tucson residents, the Americans occasionally will go to Phoenix, and then the family members that live in the city have to drive to Phoenix to visit their family. And just the travel time puts their lives at risk as well.

That's two incidents, Mr. Speaker. And I did follow up on those, and I will follow up on the information that comes from it.

I would add the third incident was I went down to the border last night, down to the San Miguel Gate on the reservation, sat in the dark for 3 hours and listened. And it wasn't difficult to hear the vehicles bring the illegals down near the border, drop them off and hear them talking, hear them hush up and then single file, go through the desert brush, cross the border into the United States and be off to points unknown.

I used to believe that it was the illegal traffic into the United States that was the biggest problem, and that illegal drugs was a problem that was part of that. And I am informed that when we put the barriers in there, the vehicle barriers, that since they can't drive across the border with illegal drugs any longer, Mr. Speaker, in some of the locations there are many places where they can, they simply put 50 pounds of marijuana in a backpack, on one young male Mexican or Central American, generally Mexicans, and each one takes a backpack of 50 pounds each. Maybe 10 of them at a time, maybe 25 at a time. They have caught as many as a hundred at a time, walking each with 50 pounds. And they can walk through 10 or 15 or more miles of desert on the Mexico side, 25 or more miles of desert on the U.S. side, and arrive up at a transportation predetermined location, and then drop off their illegal drugs there. And many of them turn around and walk back to Mexico where they pick up another load.

So the illegal crossings, many of those illegal crossings are people coming into the United States with illegal drugs, turning back around and walking back into Mexico to get another load of illegal drugs. Sometimes I wonder if we wouldn't be better off in this country if they would simply stay here and get a job, illegal or not, Mr. Speaker. And I don't advocate that, certainly.

So as I listened and was there while illegals were creeping across our border in the dead of the night, not even 24 hours ago, Mr. Speaker, and it is another dimension entirely, to see the drugs, the interdiction of the drugs, the violence on the border, the knifing, the blood, the lack of health care that is there, the incursions on our border, the volume that is backpacked up into the United States, the volume that is trucked into the United States, and to understand that if we can seal this border and seal it with confidence, we could shut off 90 percent of the illegal drugs that get by in the United States, at least until they find another route to go around.

But we can build an effective barrier. And as I submitted that to the people down there working on the border, consistently, they realize that if we build a good solid barrier, one that couldn't be cut through, one that couldn't be driven through, one that was solid and one that would make it easy for them to drive the trail and enforce it, that it could be the most effective tool that we could have.

It costs us $6 billion a year, Mr. Speaker, to incarcerate the illegals here in the United States. Twenty-eight percent of our prison population are criminal aliens.

That is our city, our county, our State and our Federal penitentiaries, 28 percent criminal aliens, $6 billion a year. We can build one tremendous barrier with $6 billion and a one-time expenditure.

Of course, we wouldn't get it all built in 1 year, so we could spread it out over 3 or 4 years, and we could concentrate on the areas that needed it the most. We must do that, stop the bleeding, stop the bleeding first. Shut off the leaky pipe, and then we can begin to have a legitimate debate in this country on what to do about the mess it has left.

But I submit that we shut off the jobs magnet, and we end birthright citizenship.

Another interesting little anecdote down in that same hospital was a Mexican national who was pregnant with multiple births. They took care of her prenatal care out of the hospital in Tucson, and they also set up the provider in Mexico so that they could have the equipment to arrange for and give her good care for multiple births.

Instead, she waited until she went into labor, waited close to the border, came into the United States, went into the hospital in Tucson and delivered five children there to the tune of six figures times X. Those children all have birthright citizenship. They all have now the right and the ability to bring in by chain migration their extended family members. Who knows what that costs, Mr. Speaker?

Our compassion knows no bounds, I understand; neither do the borders of the United States of the America, apparently. The United States Senate needs to pass the legislation 4437 that we passed in this House, send it to the President for his signature, establish enforcement, Mr. Speaker, and then we can have a legitimate discussion on whether or not we might want to have guest workers in this country.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to come to the

floor of this Congress, as always, an opportunity to say a few words to you and a few words to the American people at the same time.

We have completed a fair amount of our work here in this Congress this week, and some folks are on their way home and some are on their way to other points around the globe to get better informed about some of the locations so that we can do a better job of doing our jobs here. We will, many of us, gather information over the weekend, come back and speak up. And you will hear next week, Mr. Speaker, the voices from all across this Nation as it was envisioned by our Founding Fathers, that we represent the people from our districts, we listen to them.

They did not envision that we would be going home as many weekends as we do because they had not had the advent of air travel when they constructed this Constitution and envisioned this great deliberative body that we have the profound blessing to serve in.

But they did envision that we would be the ear that would listen to the people. And we owe them our best judgment. We owe them our due diligence. We owe them 100 percent of our responsibility to listen, learn, think, reason, rationalize, and establish the framework of a belief system, that the issues and the opinions of the people in our districts would ask for us to reflect of their character as well, and then bring the specifics here to this Congress and, with due diligence, try to shape a policy that can be agreed upon here by a majority vote, most of the time a majority vote in this Chamber, although sometimes we do have a suspension calendar that takes a two-thirds majority to pass.

This Nation, Mr. Speaker, is involved in a very intense national debate on what some will say is the issue of immigration, but those people are really trying to obfuscate the issue because the issue really is illegal immigration.

I have not heard debate in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, about legal immigration. In fact, we seem to be universal in our support of legal immigrants who come here to the United States. They do it the right way. They follow the legal channels, those people that want to come here for a better life, and understand that the welcome mat that has always been rolled out here in America is rolled out for legal immigrants today. We encourage them to come, and we encourage them to engage in American life and to throw themselves into it with all their heart and all their soul and to assimilate into this American way of being. And the more quickly it can happen, the more effective they can be. The more quickly they learn the English language, the more quickly and effectively they can access this economy and be a more productive member of this economy and this society, Mr. Speaker. And that is the way it has been since the beginning of this Nation, as people came here searching for their dream.

Some came as indentured servants. I think it would be my great, great, great, great, great grandfather, if I track it correctly. Five greats, Mr. Speaker, who came over here as an indentured servant in 1759. And he owed, I believe, 7 years of work in the stables that he had signed up to work in to pay for his passage and the privilege to be here on this continent, not really as an American at that point but as a subject of the British Crown. And not that many years later after that 1759 or perhaps it was 1757 year date, the United States of America issued the Declaration of Independence, and we at that point became a free Nation and he became a free person. Raised 17 children here. They started out in Baltimore, Maryland, and they grew and scattered out across this country all the way across America. And their legacy is there today: hard work, integrity, Christian values, and a sense of family and decency.

He was part of the original foundation of this great American culture that we have. The great American culture that has this belief that, yes, we believe in the foundational principles of our Constitution and the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that are in our Declaration, and we believe that those rights do come from God and they are in our Declaration of Independence. That is the guarantee as they pass through our Declaration. We have a sacred covenant with our Founding Fathers, who essentially codified those rights that are granted to us from God, put it in the Declaration, and transferred those rights over to the Constitution of the United States and set a standard for the world that had never been matched before, Mr. Speaker.

And so those standards began on the Mayflower. They began with the earliest settlers here in America. And the shape and the character of America took place, and they created in those years the beginnings of this great American culture, this great American civilization.

And I sometimes go before high school groups and middle school groups and I will ask them the question: Do you believe that the United States of America is the unchallenged greatest nation in the world?

Very few of them raise their hands and say, yes, I believe that, because they have been conditioned to believe that all cultures are equal, that there is a multiculturalism belief and a diversity belief that you do not set yourself up above anyone else.

And I will argue, Mr. Speaker, that we are not in the business of downgrading anyone or being critical of anyone. We are in the business of trying to upgrade ourselves. And if we are going to upgrade ourselves as an American civilization, then we have got to realize who we are, we have got to realize how we came about being these people we are, and we have got to then take a look at where do we stand on this spectrum of the different civilizations and cultures in the world, not just contemporarily around the globe, Mr. Speaker, but also throughout history. Where do we stand as a culture and are we a people that have risen to a point where we are the unchallenged greatest nation in the world?

We are the world's only superpower, and I think that is inarguable. But what about our character? What about our culture? What about our civilization? What has made us great?

And that question came to me, and it came to me about 10 years as I was serving in the Iowa senate and I happened to be reading through the Iowa code, and in there, there is a chapter on education. I read through that chapter, and I would not recommend just reading through any State code or the Federal code, for that matter. It is like reading the phone book of New York City. But I was doing that, and I came across a chapter on education. And in there it said each child in Iowa shall receive a nonsexist, multicultural, global education. Well, that all sounds really good. It sounds good to the ear today, and it sounded good to most ears back then in about 1997 when I first raised this issue.

But as I read that, it occurred to me that we had put into the law in the State of Iowa that we were going to teach political correctness to all of our children that went to our accredited schools in the State. That included our public schools and our accredited parochial schools, or religious schools, that each child shall receive a nonsexist, multicultural, global education.

Now, I am not advocating that we teach a non-global, non- multicultural sexist education. I am arguing that there is another viewpoint here not being exposed to our children. And it came to me last night as I sat at a table with five college students and began to discuss some of these issues with them. The ideas that I think are endemic in our civilization and culture, the ideas that made us great seem to be foreign to them.

The value system, not that they are not good people, they are good people and I really like this generation, but their education isn't grounded in the same things that my education was grounded in.

So as I looked at that section in that chapter of education in the code, multicultural, non-sexist global education, it occurred to me we didn't need to be impelling and compelling that to be taught to our children.

So what would I like them to be taught? I took out a bill draft form and I struck a line through there to strike out the ``multicultural non-sexist'' global, because I didn't want that to be a mandate. I wanted room there to teach other things as well. You can't teach multiculturalism and teach this American civilization in a way you understand them both if you are going to exclude one.

So I wanted to find a way that we could teach that perspective that was more objective than the one that was proscribed in the Iowa code. So I drafted a piece of legislation that today I call ``The God and Country Bill.'' And it says like this: Each child in Iowa, we strike that language out, each child in Iowa shall be taught that the United States of America, of which Iowa is a vital constituent part, is the unchallenged, greatest Nation in the world, and that we derive our strength from Christianity, free enterprise capitalism, and Western Civilization.

Now, Mr. Speaker, that might sound like an arrogant statement for a State code to have in it, but I put those words out there for a reason. I wanted to challenge people to come with maybe a competing idea. Instead, I filed the bill and they didn't come with a competing idea, they came with name calling. So I sat there at my desk and I wrote down each one of the names that they called me and typed them up and laminated them and put them in my desk, and I have those names to this day. And they are all printable names, but none of them are constructive and I won't put them into this Congressional Record.

But I would just state I will stand on that statement. I would maybe expand the statement that our first value is our Christian values, I might say our Judeo-Christian values, and that doesn't exclude the contributions of other religions, but what it does say is this is the predominant philosophy that shaped the American culture, is our Judeo- Christian values, the foundation of our beliefs that are in the Bible, in the Old and in the New Testament, and our belief that when we commit a sin against mankind, we should confess that sin and repent and ask forgiveness. That is part of our culture.

If we wrong our neighbor, what is the best thing to do? What if one of our children was playing baseball in the backyard and they hit the ball through the neighbor's window? We would send them over there and say, you need to go over there and confess that you broke the window, and you need to also ask forgiveness, and you have got to repent. So you say I broke your window, and repent, you say I am sorry. Then you say can I make it right with you. Will you forgive me.

That is a Christian value, Mr. Speaker. That is as clear an example as we can have of a Christian value. It is the core of the character of the American people today, and many of the things we do. We know what is right. What is right is in our culture. We don't always do what is right, but we know what is right. That foundation, the free enterprise capitalism foundation and the Western Civilization foundation.

But to explain this and to explain what kind of a nation we are and how we came about being this great Nation we are comes back to these core values of Judeo-Christianity, free enterprise capitalism, Western Civilization.

I would argue it this way, Mr. Speaker, that in the beginning of Western Civilization, you had during the Greek period of time, when they had the Age of Reason, and during the Age of Reason the Greeks took great pride in being able to rationalize their way through. They set up the hypothesis. They set up the theorem. They set up a means to be rational in a deductive reasoning approach so that they could begin to establish science and begin to establish technology. The Greeks took great pride in that.

They sat around and reasoned. Some of them sat around in their cloaks and reasoned all day long, and the philosophy that grew from that was the foundation of Western Civilization.

So civilization began to make progress because they weren't any longer just a group of people that were moving because they had an emotion that drove them or an irrational emotional button that was pushed. That was part of the Greek civilization, too.

And a little aside on this, Mr. Speaker, is that the Greeks did have as pure a form of democracy as the world had seen, at least at that time, and our Founding Fathers rejected that form of pure democracy. Because what they saw was in the Greek city states, where every man of age could vote, they gathered together in the coliseum, or in the city hall you might say today, and they debated the great issues over the day. And some of the great orators had the ability to sway massive numbers of people. And if they were so compelling in their oration that they could move people perhaps in a direction that wasn't good for the city state, of, say, Sparta, for example, or Athens, and so the people in those communities understood that they didn't always do the thing that was right because they were sometimes led by emotion.

So the Greeks being, in the Age of Reason, so rational, that they identified the folks that led them wrongly by emotion rather than rightly by reason and those people were identified as demagogues. And a demagogue who was leading a city state down the wrong path was occasionally put up for a vote, for a black ball. And if any of you have been involved in Greek life on campus, that black ball still exists today on campus. And if that demagogue received three black balls from three members of the community, they said we need you to leave, he would be banished from the city state for 7 years, couldn't come back, couldn't be there to give any great oratorical speeches, couldn't get them to charge like lemmings into the sea and do things that were irrational, not in the great Age of Reason of the beginnings of Western Civilization in the Greek city states. That is one of the little side notes that happens.

But the rationale that came from Western Civilization, the deductive reasoning that came from Western Civilization, grew from a real commitment to be logical, to be rational, and to also always build for an a greater good.

This Western Civilization then that flowed and grew out of Greece began to travel through the known world at that period of time, and it migrated its way over into Western Europe and arrived there at the Age of Enlightenment.

The Age of Enlightenment then, and I have to give the French some credit because they seem to be the center of the Age of Enlightenment, that is when technology took hold, building upon Western Civilization, on the Western Civilization foundation of the Age of Reason, was built the Age of Enlightenment. And that Age of Enlightenment was the foundation for the industrial era.

As the industrial era grew, so did the population over in the 13 original colonies here in the United States on this soil that we stand on today, Mr. Speaker.

We are the beneficiaries on this continent of two great movements in history, the Western Civilization and the Age of Enlightenment. Those two things coupled together, the Western Civilization that flowed through the Age of Enlightenment, the leg of this three-legged stool, found its way here on the new world, North American continent, where we had unfettered free enterprise capitalism, where you could come over here and invest a dollar, invest your sweat equity, you could have an idea, you could take a chance, you could go out and blaze a trail into the wilderness, and if you wanted to trade for furs or cut some timber or start a farm or trade with Native Americans or maybe get a job, as George Washington did, surveying some of this land, all of those opportunities were open in this new world.

And there wasn't a limitation on the potential, there was no restriction, there was no class system that restrained us. This land had, aside from the Native Americans, that did not really fight over the land, but believed that land ownership for the most part wasn't their province, the land had not been fought over as a piece of property like a commodity like Europe had been. So the legacy of that friction and resentment didn't exist either.

But what did exist here in this land that we stand on and in the 13 original colonies and then growing to the West in manifest destiny was a belief in Western Civilization, deductive reasoning, the Age of Enlightenment, free enterprise capitalism, many times no taxation, many times no regulation, unfettered free enterprise.

What a dynamic team to have, Mr. Speaker, Western Civilization coupled with the Age of Enlightenment at the beginning of the industrial age, coupled with this unfettered free enterprise capitalism with low taxes and low regulations, in fact no taxes and no regulation in many cases. Binded together, it was the most dynamic economy that the world had ever seen.

And the vision of manifest destiny began to blaze the trails out across the

west and settled this continent clear to the Pacific Ocean. As this country grew and we believed in manifest destiny and reached out, this dynamic organism of the United States of America would have become, in my opinion, one of the most aggressive, unrestrained, imperialistic nations ever in the history of the world if we weren't constrained by our Judeo-Christian values.

But the Judeo-Christian values functioned as a governor on us, a governor like on an engine that keeps it from racing too fast, running too many RPMs and blowing the engine up eventually. This governor was our moral values, our faith.

And this Nation that was founded on the faith, the Judeo-Christian and mostly the Christian faith, believed that we had a moral obligation to our fellow man. It believed that we needed to help ourselves up the ladder and help others up the ladder with us, the idea to reach out and lend a hand and teach a man to fish and each one of us to stand on our own two feet and reach out and help the others. A means to reach across to, in this case it would be to the aisle, reach across to your neighbor and offer them a helping hand, but demand from them the things that they could provide, their responsibilities for work, their responsibilities to contribute to this society.

We had some socialist experiments on this continent too and they didn't do too well. Some of those socialist experiments, in fact, all of them at one point or another, reached their end because in the end, we realized here in smaller experiments rather than going to large experiments like the Soviet Union or Communist China, that the sum total of the strength of a nation is, at least in part, the individual productivity of all of its people added up one person at a time. All of the productivity of us all together represents the strength of a nation, and people produce better and more productively if they are doing that for themselves.

And the people in this country are the most generous people anywhere on the globe, because they work hard, they earn what they have, but they are glad to share it with people in need. That is also our religious foundation, our Christian faith, our Judeo-Christian values that tie that altogether.

So I hope, Mr. Speaker, that I have described how this worked, this unfettered free enterprise capitalism that grew from Western Civilization in the science and the technology and the Age of Enlightenment and the industrial revolution era with this voracious appetite to grow and produce and explore manifest destiny, but controlled by the most powerful and profound moral values that come to any civilization in the history of the world, our Judeo-Christian faith, rooted in the Bible, reflected in our Declaration of Independence, and those values that show up in the Constitution, even though they aren't specifically listed within the Constitution.

So, this great Nation that we are a part of, this legacy, this history, needs to be taught to our young people. And the American people have to think about who we are. How did we get here? What are we formed from? What are we shaped from?

I have described some of that, Mr. Speaker, in the God and country bill, Judeo-Christian values, free enterprise capitalism, Western Civilization. This combination, coupled on this land, a land that didn't have a legacy of bloodshed for the land, joined together with these wonderful natural resources from sea to shining sea, that is America.

When I see the Statue of Liberty, I know it has been a beacon for people across the world. And as they see that statue and the image that is there, you will not find a country anywhere on the globe where you don't have significant numbers of people who want to come here, want to live here, want to make their future here in the United States. And that image is this image of freedom, this image of opportunity, that has existed for more than 200 years, and it continues to exist in different forms.

But sometimes we lose track of who we are. Sometimes we lose track of how we got here. We have an ongoing debate in this country continually of what is giving us strength, what has made us strong.

I, Mr. Speaker, have tried to define that so that it is an understandable analysis. Others will say well, no, we really aren't the greatest Nation in the world. We really have a lot of things we ought to apologize for, because we have been violent and we have sent our military around the world and we should feel guilty about that because we did it for selfish purposes. And then that is when the debate begins.

But I don't think we have anything to apologize for. Wherever we have gone in the world, we have left a peaceful legacy and we have left a positive legacy and we have been proud enough of who we are that we left a way of life there that has been beneficial to the people who have been visited by our soldiers and our Marine Corps.

And one of those examples would be in the Philippines. I recall a speech that was given here in Washington, D.C. a couple of years ago by the President of the Philippines, President Arroyo. And I do not think she knew that she was speaking to at least one Member of Congress in that scenario.

But she said to the group that was gathered in the hotel here in Washington, D.C., she said, thank you America. Thank you for sending the Marine Corps to the Philippines in 1898. Thank you for liberating us.

Thank you for teaching us your way of life. Thank you for sending the priests over there to teach us your religion. Thank you for sending 10,000 American teachers over to the Philippines to teach us all of the academics that you did, to teach us your way of life, and to teach us the English language.

Thank you for the English language, because today we speak English in the Philippines, as a result of the Spanish-American War, 1898, and today they have 1.6 million Filipinos who go anywhere in the world that they choose to go, they can get a job there, they can work there, and they send their money back to the Philippines, creating a significant portion of the gross domestic product.

Another example would be, last night I had the great privilege to sit down and have dinner with a group, a delegation from the Japanese legislature. We have an exchange program that has gone on here, and this is my fourth year to have the privilege to sit down with them.

It is interesting to me that I sat down for the first time I met Minister Ono here in this city. And at the time he was the Minister of Defense for Japan.

My father spent 2\1/2\ years in the South Pacific and came back home from there weighing 115 pounds; not on a very good ration, is the way he put it. It was quite interesting to me that I had the privilege more than 60 years later to sit down and have dinner with the Minister of Defense for Japan.

If there was a hatchet there to be buried, it has been buried a long time ago. And there was a hatchet to be buried. And we are joined together now not as allies for strategic purposes, which we are, but we are trading partners and we are friends. And, yes, we have our disagreements, and so do brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and fathers and sons and mothers and daughters.

We have our disagreements, but we are trading partners and we are friends; we are good for each other's economy. They have a way of life. They have a constitutional system in Japan, and their result in the aftermath of World War II has been that they have become a modern nation with high productivity. They moved into the modern world.

They are a developed nation today; and no one questions a developed nation, because they have had a good work ethic, they have had a good constitution to work under, and they have a strong belief system, and much of this was structured by General MacArthur after World War II. Another American legacy.

I also point out, Mr. Speaker, that if you look around the world, and ask yourself, where has the English language traveled? And we can see nations, I mentioned a couple of them, and you might look also into India where the English language is prevalent there. You can look across in places in Europe where you sit down at the roundtable in Brussels where now 25 nations of the European Union sit.

The language of debate and discussion at the roundtable, and I have engaged in that debate and discussion, is

English. And the documents that are printed by the European Union are predominately English, although there are some exceptions. I think the French language usage there has gone from 57 percent down to about 7 percent of the documents now are in French.

But if you look at the history of the English-speaking peoples, as Winston Churchill did when he wrote his epic novel, ``The History of the English Speaking Peoples,'' as you read that document, it occurs to me, and I do not think he quite says it in the book, but the documentation does as you sum it up, as you read through, wherever the English language has gone, and it has been either Americans or the British people that have taken it around the world, but wherever the English language has been planted, there you will find freedom.

Without exception, I cannot come up with a single nation that speaks English then but does not have freedom, that does not have a representative form of government. And I think that the English language has become a precursor to freedom. In fact, I think that there is not really, some people will say you cannot understand the Bible unless you can understand it in Hebrew or you can understand it in Latin, or you can understand it in Greek, because there are different definitions and connotations that come from different languages.

I will say that I speculate that it might be difficult, in fact it could be impossible to thoroughly understand freedom if you do not understand the English language, because English is the language of freedom. It is the language that has taken freedom throughout the world.

It is the language that has identified these principles that we hold so dear in this Chamber, Mr. Speaker. And it is essential to this country that we bind ourselves together with one common language.

Also when I look around the globe, and I did this test some years ago, I went to an almanac and looked up the flags of all of the nations in the world. And identified all of the nations. Then I went to the ``World Book Encyclopedia,'' which is what I had available to me, and I looked up every one of those nations, because the ``World Book'' will give a list, but it will show what the official language is of each country; you have to look them up one at a time.

I looked up every country in the world. And I wrote down the language, or sometimes languages, the official languages of these countries. And of every country in the world, there by that analysis, every single nation had an official language and probably to this day does under that analysis.

Until I got to the United States of America. We do not have an official language here in the United States; we have a common language, English, but we do not have an official language.

But the rest of the world has understood this. The rest of the world has understood that the most powerful unifying force known to humanity throughout all of history is a common language, a common language that binds everyone together, a language that allows everyone to communicate together quickly and efficiently and precisely without miscommunication, without misunderstanding.

And if it happens your language is Spanish or if it happens to be Swahili, or if it happens to be French or German or whatever it might be, if that language is the language of your country, that is the language that ties you together.

And we have understood that here. And we promoted assimilation for that reason. And we have encouraged the learning of the English language. And the printing of the documents here has been, other than interpretations that run to other countries and for other reasons, has been in English. We have committed to that in this country, as a practice but not as a matter of law.

And I wonder why not. I wonder why it would be that all of the other nations in the world understand that the most powerful unifying force of any civilization is a common language, a common form of communications currency. I used to carry a euro around in my pocket, Mr. Speaker, a 5 euro bill.

Because that is a way to define how they thought they were going to pull together the European Union, print a currency. Well, if you can print a currency and everybody has to do business in that currency, you pull your center together because you identify by the currency that is coming out of your billfold.

And that is the direction that they have been working to go in the European Union is to establish the United States of Europe. They have had some setbacks of late. But yet that idea of tying people together on that common currency was a unifying philosophy.

It did not matter that today with computers you can do the exchange rate instantaneously; you can set up the automatic exchange with your credit card and never have to pay attention to the difference. What mattered was to have that currency, to be able to look at that, to be able to pass that on to the person you are doing business with, and that identifies you as someone from the European Union, whether you are from the Chec Republic or from Ireland or Italy or the Isle of Malta or whatever it might be.

They recognize that, and they tie themselves together in their debate with English as their debate language. But another example would be the Israelis. And they established their nation in 1948, and the U.N. endorsed them, and they fought a war to establish their freedom in 1948.

Their anniversary just came up this week; I believe it was Monday if I am not mistaken. And there, by 1948, and 1954, they concluded they needed to establish an official language of Israel. And so they deliberated, had their debates. They could have chosen English, they could have chosen Russian, they could have chosen German, they could have chosen French, they could have chosen Italian. They had people in that country that spoke all of the languages that we know of or that I know of at least that I can quote to you from this floor, Mr. Speaker.

But they came together and resurrected a language that had not been used as a conversational language or a business language, but only a language of prayer, for the last 2,000 years. They chose Hebrew as the official language of Israel.

And I asked the ambassador from Israel, why did do you that? What brought you to this conclusion? And he said to me, we looked at the United States. And in 1954 we saw the successful model that you were of having a common language that tied you all together, English being that common language. And we learned from that wonderful assimilation success that was established very well in the United States of America.

And we adopted Hebrew as our official language. But they had to resurrect the language, and they had to get it in print, and they had to start to use it, and they actually had to teach themselves how to use Hebrew in conversation and in business aside from the use of Hebrew in prayer.

And it has been a successful experiment. And as I meet with people over in Israel and ask them questions about how it works, when they bring in new immigrants from foreign countries, they bring them in to kind of an apartment complex camp that is there, and they teach them Hebrew.

If they are young enough and if they are literate in their own language, in 6 months they will have enough Hebrew that they can say, good job, now you are ready to go out into the world and make your living here in Israel.

And they send them out. If they come from a country where they are illiterate in their home language, they do not read or write in their home language, then they have great difficulty teaching them Hebrew. So they will teach them to read and write in their own language and then transfer them over into Hebrew.

That takes about 18 months. If you are 45 or 50 years old, you get 18 months to learn Hebrew, and you are out into the world, go ahead and make a go of it. People do that. They are successful. And it has been extraordinarily successful to tie the Israeli people together.

If you remember the raid on Entebbe, when things needed to happen fast and you needed to identify a fellow countryman, even if it is in the dark, if you yelled to somebody to get down in Hebrew, they are going to hit the deck, and it is likely going to save their life; and I believe it did under the circumstances.

So Israel learned from the United States' lesson. All of the other countries in the world had an official language. Israel chose one. They chose Hebrew. We have English here. If it happened to be some other language, I would be for that other language being our official language.

I received some disagreements from the Catholic Church in that we did not need to move forward with establishing an official language in the United States. And so I went ahead to my ``World Book Encyclopedia.'' And I looked up the Vatican. And I found out in the Vatican that there are two official languages there, Latin and Italian.

They seem to get along just fine with official languages in the Vatican. And we can get along better with an official language here in the United States.

I would submit that that is part of our debate, Mr. Speaker, and I believe that we should bring that forward and establish English as the official language of the United States of America to uncomplicate our future, to pull us together as a people, to reduce the divisions between us, to put incentives in place for people to learn English so that they have an opportunity to succeed in this society, and to send the message to the world that we are one people with one cause and one history, bound together by a common history, by a common experience, bound together by a common official language, that official language of English.

One of the reasons that we have not been able to accomplish this as a matter of policy here in this Congress is, in my belief, Mr. Speaker, that there has been this division that I mentioned in the early part of this discussion, the division that grows from multiculturalism and diversity, that grows from the idea that we cannot set our culture our civilization up above anyone else's.

Well, as I look around the world, there are societies that are in far worse condition than we are in. Why is everyone looking at us for help, for some type of salvation? Could it be that we have some dynamics here within this culture and this civilization that really do set us above and beyond? It does not mean we have to walk around with our noses in the air. It does not mean that we have to be the ugly American.

In fact, we have a greater responsibility and a greater duty to reach out to the rest of the world and try to teach them to fish and try to share with them our values, a rule of law, our Judeo-Christian values, that work ethic that we have, the way that we pull together and respect this rule of law, the foundation of our Constitution and the rights, the freedoms, the freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly.

The right to keep and bear arms in this country, and that right is such an essential right, it seems to be the only place in the world where it is sacrosanct. It must be and it must remain so.

Those values that bind us together to make us great as a people are the values that we can export to the rest of the world. We need to be proud of who we are in order to do that.

And if I look at the operations going on over in Iraq, and I see the configuration that has been recommended to them by the State Department, and I question whether we had confidence in who we are when we encouraged the Iraqis to establish the voting districts that they have there in Iraq. And so what we have are representatives there who are defined as representatives who are Kurds, representatives who are Shiias, representatives who are Sunnis, then there is a 25 percent requirement that 25 percent of all the candidates elected shall be female.

And so putting that configuration in there and not allowing just regions to be defined without regard to religion or ethnicity, or sex for that matter, and not allowing them to be defined that way sets up representatives. And they know that there are only six categories, if you are represented in the newly seated parliament of Iraq. I am grateful that we finally watched the Iraqis choose a prime minister.

And I am looking forward to Prime Minister Talabani pulling together that government and naming his cabinet. But they know that they represent, they are either a Kurd, a Kurdish female, a Sunni, or a Sunni female, or a Shiia, or a Shiia female. That is the six categories.

They know they are there to represent their ethnic group. And I have to believe that the women who are there know that they are there to represent women. And I would like to think that if they would have just simply carved up Iraq into representative districts without regard to religion, without regard to ethnicity, without regard to what sex, and let people run for office and guarantee them equal opportunity as individuals, like we do here in America, I have to believe that there would have been a different kind of mix in the parliament.

I know from my own experience that in the district that I represent there are people that are on the right and people that are on the left. I have sat down and talked with both of them, reasoned with both of them, compromised those disagreements that come, and come with a policy and come to this Congress as a voice for all the people in my district. So if there is a conflict that needs to be resolved, it is more likely to get resolved back in the 5th District of Iowa than it is to be brought here and create more disagreement here in this Congress.

If I simply were a representative of the conservative wing of the party representing the 5th District of Iowa, I would not have an ear then for the people on the other side of the aisle. If I were a representative of, say, for example, the Catholic church in the 5th District of Iowa, and that is the viewpoint that comes if you are a Shi'a or if you are a Sunni, then you know which wing of Islam that you come from. You are there to represent that wing of Islam.

So if I came here as a Catholic conservative and did not listen to anyone else and I had a full constituency base that was always chosen just to support me, my position is going to be more aggressive than it would be if I had to go home and meet all the groups and answer to all of the different divisions of viewpoints.

In Iraq, it is segregated now, and the voices in that parliament will be more partisan than they would have been otherwise. It will be more divisive than it would have been otherwise, because they configured them based upon religion, ethnicity and also sex rather than upon the geography that might have done a better job to put more moderation into their parliament.

We have our values here in this country, and we exported them to places like the Philippines and places like Japan, but I wonder if we had enough confidence in who we are as a people, Mr. Speaker, to export those values to places like Iraq or did we retreat from that? Did we lose our self-confidence? Are we afraid to teach the English language, the language of freedom, in Iraq? Are we afraid to bring our free enterprise capitalism there? Are we afraid to bring our Western civilization values and give Iraq an opportunity to learn from Americans?

I gave a speech to the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce late last summer. As I walked into the room, they were introducing me to give the speech; and it was a bit of a hurry. I said, hold it, because I wanted to be introduced through my interpreter first. They said, you do not have an interpreter, so we are going to introduce you. I said, well, I do not speak Arabic. They said, it is not necessary; all of the people here in the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce speak English.

They did, and I could tell, because they laughed at the right times, they responded at the right times, they applauded at the times I would say was appropriate.

Afterwards, they crowded around with their business cards. They could not get enough conversation with a Westerner, with an American with some business background who had come to Baghdad to wish them well and to help guide them. They were looking for advice, listening carefully.

We have a lot to give, a lot to offer, and they are a sponge to absorb it, and they will pick up a lot of these values.

The American Chamber of Commerce that is over there actively are doing great things. We just need more people to be involved in the people business. We need to be more proud of who we are, Mr. Speaker, and yet we have so little confidence in what has made us great that we cannot bring ourselves to do some of the simple things like enforce our immigration laws.

I have watched since 1986 when President Reagan signed the amnesty bill, and first they said it was maybe 1.3 million people. Now we hear they really amnestied about 3 million people or about 3.5 million people. And the argument was, well, we cannot find these 1.3 or maybe 3 million people. We cannot find them. We do not know what to do about it. We cannot get them out of the shadows and into a bus to go back to their home countries. So what we need to do is have stepped-up enforcement for those that will try to come afterwards, and we will just give them amnesty. That solves the problem.

President Reagan, in one of the few times he let me down, signed the amnesty bill in 1986 with a great big hard promise of enforcement.

I remember the fear of that enforcement. I was hiring employees at the time. I took their I-9 form and I watched them fill it out carefully and asked them for their identification, for their driver's license and Social Security card at least, as a minimum, and I put that on the copy machine. I scrutinized it. I put it on the copy machine, took a copy of the driver's license, Social Security number, asked them a series of questions about their origins and who they were and where they had come from and took that I-9 form, put that copy in there, and I carefully filed it with their job application form if we put them on and hired them. Because I was just sure that around the corner was an INS agent, Immigration and Naturalization Service agent, who would be there to audit my books to take a look at the nationalities of the employees that I hired in the construction business and to see if we had done everything exactly right.

I had fear of enforcement of the INS in 1986, and I still had it in 1987, 1988. Maybe by 1990, by then I had just about forgotten about the idea that there was a threat that there would be an INS audit because I had not heard of any out there.

Now there were some back in those days, but I will say, Mr. Speaker, that from 1986 when the amnesty bill was signed, and they called it amnesty, from that point on there was an accelerated enforcement. From that point on, that enforcement went down, diminishing over 20 years where we get to this point in 2006 up until just a few weeks ago, there was zero enforcement. No employers were sanctioned under penalty of law in 2004. There were some allegations there were three in 2005. I cannot identify which companies those are, and I am not sure whether it is truth or rumor. If it only averages 1.5 companies a year in a Nation of 283 million people, then I would submit that that is not enforcement at all.

So we are not enforcing employer sanctions, and we are not enforcing domestic enforcement. People can go out on the streets and not be questioned as to their lawful presence in the United States. We have city after city in America that are passing sanctuary policies that forbid their law officers from inquiring into the lawful presence of the people that they stop in traffic stops and accidents or that they incarcerate for other crimes. We have news of people in this country who are incarcerated in our prisons without any idea whether they are citizens or whether they are not. No one wants to ask the question.

We are so intimidated by somehow or another this civilization of guilt that because America is a nation of immigrants that we cannot have a rational immigration policy. But I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that America is a nation of immigrants. I would ask the question of Americans. Name a nation that is not a nation of immigrants.

In fact, as I had a discussion with a historian, a Japanese historian, last evening, he talked about how they have a better understanding of the migration that came into Japan and the ethnic groups that make up the very homogeneous Japanese people today, but they come from, some of them, different origins, and they have been blended together on that island as a homogeneous people, but still they are immigrants, some generations, many generations ago.

The same goes for here in the United States. The same goes for Native Americans who came across the Bering Strait, by most accounts, perhaps 12,000 years ago. They were immigrants then, Mr. Speaker, and they were here first, yes.

But I do not think anybody asked Christopher Columbus when he discovered America, did you just consider touching bases there on the continent and then pulling back out of there and decided to leaving the Western hemisphere to be, let us say, preserved for indigenous people or what was Western civilization to do with this huge twin land masses and resources that we have?

It defies logic to think that somehow Western civilization would have just pulled off, said, hands off, no, we found indigenous people here. They migrated here a time ahead of us. We are not going to challenge that or try to use the resources. We are just going to make it a big preserve for Native Americans to live here happily ever after.

That was not going to be the case. The forces of history defined this Nation, and the alternatives can be argued plus or minus along the way. The result might have been configured a little bit differently, but there was going to be population growth. There was going to be a modern civilization built here, and if it had to be built by somebody, who better than the descendants of Western Europe, who better than the people who believed in free enterprise capitalism, Western civilization and Judeo-Christian values so that we could build this great Nation out of these strengths? Who better, I would submit, Mr. Speaker?

So this great Nation has been built from those values, and we are a nation of immigrants, as all nations are nations of immigrants. We should be proud of who we are. We should be proud of our heritage. We should welcome people into this society in a legal fashion, and we should ask them, we should compel them to join in this great experience and this great experiment that we are by assimilating into this society and into civilization.

For to come here to America and move into an ethnic enclave and not learn the English language and not move out of that enclave into the broader society but simply to live there for generation after generation is not being an American at all. That is the transplant of the donor culture to the host culture in the form of an enclave, and it is not constructive to the broader society.

It does not mean you have to give up your culture. I mean, we know that. We appreciate the great variety of subcultures we have here in America, and it is an ever-growing and changing thing.

And I would say also, Mr. Speaker, that we have an extra blessing. The filter system that we have had here in America for immigrants is something we do not talk about very much. But, by and large, throughout history, the people who came to the United States legally came here and I think knew why they came here. They knew what they wanted to leave. They wanted to leave the tyranny of the Kaiser, for example; they wanted to access religious freedom; they wanted opportunity; they appreciated the privilege of freedom of speech, religion and the press, all of those values. And sometimes the poverty, sometimes the potato famine, sometimes the fear, sometimes the persecution of a family or the political persecution of a belief or a persecution of their religious beliefs, those reasons drove people, and poverty is another motivator, to come to the United States.

They took great chances to come to this country. They staked their claim on this soil. They built their future here. They were grateful for the hospitality, grateful for the opportunity, but they also were the vigor of the donor societies. The cream of the crop often came to the United States, and that vitality that we have is much the product of voluntary immigration, who sacrificed a lot and took great risks to come here.

We find ourselves today in a little bit different kind of scenario. We have rolled out a red carpet across our southern border, and we refuse to enforce our border on the south, and we have immigration laws. We ask people to respect our laws, but 58 percent of the people on the south side of the border believe they have a right to come to the United States. They believe they have a right to come here. And if they believe that, Mr. Speaker, then we are not doing a very good job of conveying our sovereignty.

We have become a Nation without a southern border. An average of 11,000

people a day pour across our southern border, and our border patrol manages to stop perhaps a fourth of them, maybe on a good day as many as a third of them, but they reported for 2004 that they stopped on our southern border 1,159,000. For 2005, that number comes out to somewhere in the area of this statistical extrapolation of 1,188,000.

Now, most of them were told to go back home, go to their home country. Many were taken down to the port of entry and said go back. Some, and I will say also many others, were caught and released on their own recognizance, released perhaps on a promise to go back to their home country, Mr. Speaker.

But that is no border enforcement. The last time I went to the border, I was advised that the catch-and-release plan meant we catch them up to seven times before we adjudicate anybody if they do not have some other crime. So we will stop that same person six times, and on the seventh time then we will forcibly put them under control and perhaps take them back to their home country.

I have gotten reports that as many as 20 times there will be a single individual that is caught and released, as much as 20 times. There is smuggling that goes across our border, this huge human haystack, 4 million strong, pouring across our southern border in a given year; and out of that 4 million, our administration's policy is we are going to sort the needle out of that haystack, and needles will be the criminals and the terrorists and the people that threaten our American safety and way of life.

So with good border control and with good surveillance and with a virtual fence that the administration talks about, we are going to somehow shine a spotlight on this huge haystack of 4 million humans, and in there we are going to try to pick out these needles that represent the drug dealers and the rapists and the murderers and the terrorists.

Well, I just can't imagine sorting out those needles out of a haystack while the hay is being picked out of my hair. That is what we are asking the Border Patrol to do, Mr. Speaker. It cannot work. It cannot be effective. We must shut off this human tide at the border, we must enforce our border, we must seal it up tight and then have ports of entry where we have good control and good surveillance in order to keep our trade open with Mexico, in order to have good relationships there.

Good fences make good neighbors. We can build a good fence on the border, and we can do so so that it is effective. When people say, no, fences don't work, I argue that fences don't work because, after all, we have seen pictures of people jumping over them and we have seen tunnels that have been tunneled underneath them, Mr. Speaker, but we also know people can fly over them in airplanes and go around them in boats. But if you can increase the transaction cost, if you raise the level of difficulty, you are going to find that there will be many people that won't try and fewer people will be successful.

Before barbwire was invented, cowboys rode their herds. They were out there making sure that they kind of kept the cattle turned in the same direction so they didn't get split up and taken out by predators and they didn't lose them in the process. So as the cattle moved across the range, they would go out and just ride herd and nudge them back in so they could keep a head count on them and keep them together.

Then somebody invented barbwire, and those cowboys that loved to ride their horses, they got down on their cowboy boots with post hole diggers and they set posts and they strung wire and they drove staples and they built fences. And not because they liked building fences better than herding cattle or better than they liked riding their horses. They built fences because it was efficient and effective. And then they rode the fence instead of riding the herd.

We can do the same thing on the southern border. We can get the Border Patrol to ride the fence instead of out there chasing around in the desert for 11,000 people a day scattered across in the night trying to bring them together.

We need to build a fence, Mr. Speaker; and we need to end birthright citizenship. This chain migration grows and cannot be controlled if we do not. There are 300,000 to 350,000 babies born in this country to mothers who are illegal in America, that do not have a lawful presence here. But we, by practice, grant them birthright citizenship; and the chain migration begins. That baby then, when it reaches age, can petition for mother and father and siblings to come into the United States.

Now let me submit that I believe that there are not 12 million illegals in this country, because I have been counting the noses of those coming across the southern border. I believe that number has been increasing by as many as 3 million a year for at least the last 3 years, but it is accelerating. So if we have been saying that it has been 11 million people for 3 years, but the number has been accelerating by 3 million a year for the last 3 years, we are at 20 million.

This thing has gone on longer than that. It has gone on longer than 3 years. The 11 million was never an accurate number. You cannot count people who live in the shadows. It is impossible to do so. But let us just say that population today is 11 million, plus 9 million, plus a couple million more, and I will take you up to about 22 million. That is the number I think is the right number of illegals that are here.

If the Senate passes their version of guest worker, this guest worker/temporary worker plan that has three levels of being illegal instead of right and wrong, if they do that and grant a path to citizenship, they are going to grant a path to citizenship to however many might be able to qualify under the standards they set. They are not going to put a quota in there and say, well, if you have been here 5 years or more and we think there are, oh, 3 million of you, we are going to give you a fast path to citizenship.

And what will they do if there are 6 million that show up and say I have been here 5 years or more? They will grant that fast track to citizenship for all those people whatsoever.

If it is 12 million that show up, they will grant that. If it is 22 million that show up, they will grant that. Because the legislation will simply set the criteria. They don't have the foggiest idea of what the numbers are.

Let us just pick my number for extrapolation purposes. Let us say 22 million people here illegally. Their first act was to break the law in the United States. The second act, when they went to work, they broke the law again. It isn't a matter of making criminals out of people that are here illegally because we want to make them felons and we voted to do so in this Congress. They are already criminals by virtue of committing a criminal misdemeanor by violating the immigration laws by coming into the United States illegally. The next act is to get a job, and that is also a crime.

So we have 22 million is my number. We grant them fast track amnesty to citizenship. Those 22 million access citizenship in, say, 5 to 6 years, or whatever it is the Senate might decide. And of course that doesn't mean we will agree in this House, Mr. Speaker, but if that happens, think of 22 million people lined up looking around at their family thinking, well, mom is down here with dad. I am going to invite them both to come and bring the chain migration for mom and dad. And I have my two sisters down here and my brother over here, and I left my 8 year old down in my home country.

I can add this all up, but I don't need to add all these extended families. I just say, try to imagine any one of them not having four family members that they would like to bring here to the United States under chain migration.

Now, take 22 million, multiply it times four, and you have 88 million additional entrants into the United States by virtue of the chain migration that comes from this fast track to citizenship that the Senate wants to give to America. So you add the 22 million to the 88 million and you have, Mr. Speaker, emptied Mexico. You have taken everybody that wants to come from there and brought them here. The people that will be left will be the people that are too senile to travel, too old to work, and people that will asking for a check to be sent down there to take care of them.

Some of them are living like that now, and some of the communities down there have been virtually emptied out of the working-age people. Senior citizens only sitting there waiting for the giant ATM America to zap a portion of the $20 billion that goes to Mexico or the overall $30 billion that goes to Mexico and Central and parts of South America. That is $30 billion out of the wages earned here that are wired down there, and some to be saved in banks for retirement, as they plan on returning back, and some to be spent to maintain the senior citizens that are there, the parents and the extended family members.

What does this do for Mexico if we set up a policy here that draws or magnetizes and attracts every willing person in Mexico and in Central America to come to the United States and empties out their communities and drains them of the flower of their youth and the productivity and the vitality of their Nation? What future then does that country have, particularly Mexico, with the vast natural resources, with the huge quantity of oil, much of it not developed to the extent it should be? This Nation would sit there on a massive supply of natural resources without the human energy, without the skills, without the education, without the technology to develop it.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Something, Mr. Speaker, will fill that vacuum. We have the Chinese that are in Central America today, and they are involved in drilling for oil offshore of Cuba, between Cuba and Florida. They are involved in the Panama Canal. They are looking, I am convinced, at potentially filling a vacuum that could be created.

I submit that we shut off the jobs magnet. I submit that, when we do so, there will be people making a decision to go back to their home country because that opportunity they came for is no longer here. If that happens, Mr. Speaker, we can send back to their home country a very skilled and educated group of people who can transform Mexico and take them into the 21st century.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 5 o'clock and 8 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, May 8, 2006, at 2 p.m.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Venezuela, I mentioned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have with me here a poster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

``Keenly.''

``Why did they pay keen attention?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have more illustrations, Mr. Speaker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With that, I thank the Speaker for his indulgence.