Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, it is with pleasure that I address the House this evening for the purpose of continuing the discussion that has been ongoing here about jobs; about what it is in this economy, in this new world economy, this new world order that is creating the dilemma for many people and creating concern on the part of many folks out there, creating fear about their own jobs, if they still have them, and certainly encouraging the depression of those folks who have lost their jobs and have not been able to find others.

This is a perplexing and challenging issue. Undeniably so. And the tendency, the desire, I think, for a lot of people is to immediately, especially in our position, any elected position in America, when we recognize there is this kind of a problem and that people are hurting, the natural response is to say, what can I do about this? How can I change the situation? What can the government do to create a better situation for those folks who are hurting? And this is enormously perplexing when we are talking about this brave new world of a global economy that we do not entirely understand.

For well over 100 years, we thought we really had this thing pegged. We thought we knew what it took to create a prosperous society and a vibrant economy, and it boiled down to two words: Free trade. And we listened to and read the works of economists that all adhered to an economist in the 18th century by the name of David Ricardo. He coined the phrase ``comparative advantage.'' He said, look, when two countries are competing to produce a particular product, one may have an advantage over the other and we should concentrate on producing whatever it is in that country that they have the advantage to produce because of their climate, the geography, and the natural resources in that country.

He used two examples: He said, let us look at Portugal and England. Portugal could produce wine and textiles, but in fact would have to put a lot more effort into producing textiles. England could produce textiles and wine, but would have to put a lot more effort into producing wine. So, therefore, Portugal should produce wine, England should produce textiles, and, therefore, the comparative advantage would accrue to each one of those countries. Each one of them would be doing what they do best and, therefore, each one of them would prosper and they would not be wasting their resources doing things they cannot do very well.

That is the theory we have been operating under for now well over 100 years. And I believe that it had great merit and that it can work well. But we have added a new dimension to this whole discussion, and it is the dimension of labor. That was not an issue in Ricardo's day. Labor was not all that mobile. You could not move work to worker anywhere in the world. So labor was a constant in Ricardo's day and, therefore, you just dealt with what natural resources and the climate and the geography dealt you.

Today, of course, we know that because of technology we are no longer able to rely on just what nature has given us in terms of resources. We also have to deal with the fact that labor is another one of those commodities that can be traded and for which there is a competitive advantage for some countries. But today that advantage will

accrue to one country over another. It is not a win-win situation any more. It is not that one country can produce X, the other Y. Each of them will do that. Today, the economy is such that if you can provide cheaper labor, you win. The country that cannot deal with that loses. It is not a win-win game. That is the situation we face.

American labor has become ever more productive, ever more efficient, and has been able to stay relatively competitive with the rest of the world, enough so that we have been able to maintain the standard of living that is far above the rest of the world for quite some time. How long this will be, we do not know. The answer to the question is that we do not know exactly what we can do to make sure that American jobs and American workers are saved.

We can erect barriers, that is true. A law can be passed tomorrow in this body and passed in the other body, signed by the President, that will erect trade barriers. Will that protect American jobs? Well, it really cannot do that any more because there is no way to actually control the flow. Technology allows us to export work to worker anywhere in the world, and there are really very few ways that you can actually, in fact we may not have any way in which we can actually stop that phenomenon. I am certainly willing to look at any proposal that is designed to slow that down, that is designed to protect American workers and American jobs. I would like to do it.

There is this, as I say, natural desire on the part of most of us here to get up and say, here is what we have to do and it will solve all of our problems. I believe the last speaker said we should stop trying to bust the unions. Well, let me tell you, Mr. Speaker, that will not solve all of our problems.

If in fact we are also talking about the creation of some sort of tariff to stop the exportation of certain commodities or to in fact increase the cost of certain commodities being brought into the United States, I do not think that will solve the problem.

We are at a comparative disadvantage because our workers make more money than workers in most other countries of the world. And I am willing to admit that this is a dilemma for which I do not have a solution, but I am also willing to state that there is something we can do that neither my friends on the other side of the aisle or even my friends and colleagues on my side of the aisle are very willing to deal with, and yet it seems to me to be the most logical way of addressing this situation of the exportation of American jobs and stagnant wages that result from the fact that we can no longer compete in that particular environment.

What I suggest, Mr. Speaker, is that we begin to enforce the law, the law that actually determines how many people can come into this country. And that if someone comes into this country without our permission, they are eligible for deportation. And if someone hires someone who has come into this country illegally, they in turn can in fact be fined. And if they do it often enough, they can go to jail.

There are estimates that range from between 9 million and 18 million people in this country who are here illegally. Most of them appear to be working, and we are told they are working in jobs no American will take. Well, I would like to test that theory, that they are coming to take jobs that no American will take. And here is one way we can test that theory, Mr. Speaker. We can look at what is happening on the border today.

Now, we all know that the job increases in this most recent recovery have been minimal. Some people refer to it as a jobless recovery. Whatever, the number of jobs we have created in the United States in the last couple of years is relatively low, relatively few. And we have an unemployment rate now of about 5.6 percent. We have a chronic unemployment that may go even higher. That is to say, that includes people who have long since ceased looking for jobs. So there are, again, estimates ranging from 8 million to 18 million people in this country unemployed.

We know, right now, that there are not many jobs available out there. I mean that is pretty much a given. Well, let me tell you what happened on our borders since October 1 of last year in only one sector, the Tucson sector. According to Rob Daniels, the border patrol public information officer of the Tucson sector of the border patrol, there have been more than 200,000 illegal aliens apprehended in that sector alone this year. This is an increase of almost 50 percent since last year, and much of it as a result of the fact the President made a speech in which he put out the hope of an amnesty. Although he would not call it that, of course that is exactly what it is, and most of the world saw it for what it is, including the people that are coming across the border illegally.

More than 60,000 people have been detained this month alone in the Tucson sector, representing a stunning increase of over 85 percent over March of 2003. Those numbers are expected to rise, as April and May are typically the peak months for intending border crossers seeking to make the trip through the desert before forbidding summer conditions set in.

Now, I present these figures because I think they are important for us to understand if we really and truly are talking about trying to do something important for the American worker. In the last 6 months, 200,000 people in one sector were detained. And let me say this, Mr. Speaker. Everyone who is involved with this issue will tell you that for every single person we detain, at least three get through. That is a very conservative figure.

So in the Tucson sector, if you use that figure of three coming through for every one we are able to catch, 600,000 people made it into the country from one sector in 6 months. Now, think about what this means for the entire border, both north and south, and our ports of entry, both land, sea and air, and it certainly could be as many as a million people came across our borders without our permission in the last 6 months.

But let us say for a moment that those are just simply exaggerated figures, somehow, some way, we have been able to actually stop more people from coming into the country than is the general rule and that maybe only one or two get by for every one that gets interdicted. That still means about 500,000 people came across the border illegally along with about another 500,000 who came into this country legally from our very liberal immigration policy. So in the last 6 months, the most conservative estimate possible for the number of people who came into this country both legally and illegally has got to approach a million people.

I ask you, Mr. Speaker, if a million people came in here in 6 months, what are they doing here? What jobs are they doing? Are they taking only those jobs that Americans will not take? Do you mean to tell me that in the last 6 months we have created a million jobs that have gone begging? And that employers are out there saying, oh, my goodness, I have all of these jobs and I just can't get an American citizen to take them, so I'm going to employ the million people both legal and illegal aliens who have come across the border in the last 6 months? No, Mr. Speaker. No, they are not taking jobs that are simply out there that American citizens will not take, they are taking jobs somebody else has and they are taking them because they will work for less. It is a simple proposition. These numbers are incredible. Most people cannot believe it when I tell them that these are the numbers that are actually provided by the border patrol themselves. This is not my wild guesstimation of how many people are coming into this country illegally. So if, in fact, there are already these folks in this body that are so intent on doing something to increase the number of jobs available to Americans, I suggest that they look carefully at immigration. This is something that, of course, my friends on the other side of the aisle will never, ever, ever bring up. In one hour of all of the problems that were identified by my colleague on the other side of the aisle here, you never once heard anybody talk about the fact, in particular talk about the fact that immigration may be one of the problems we face when trying to create jobs for Americans. Never said it. Why? Because, of course, the issue is incredibly political. My friends on that side of the aisle know that massive immigration into this country both legal and illegal accrues

to their political benefit. It will mean voters for the Democratic Party. They know it. It is the historical truth. On my side of the aisle, you will not hear a discussion of this issue, either, because we look at it as being a source of cheap labor. So between the two of us here, between the two parties, it is very difficult to get an honest discussion of this issue and what it means for America. The President said in that speech that he gave a month and a half ago or two months ago, I want to match every willing worker with every willing employer. It is a high sounding goal. But let us think about what that really means, if it is true, if he really wants to do that. Every willing worker with every willing employer. Mr. Speaker, there are billions, with a B, there are billions of willing workers in the world anxious, desiring a job that pays them more than they are getting wherever they are but far less than is being paid to the person in this country who is doing that job. So do we really mean that we are willing to abandon the border? If so, let us say it if that is the truth of the matter. If in fact that is our purpose and our policy, to eliminate the whole complex process of immigration, erase the border and allow people to simply come here to take the jobs that some employer is willing to provide, and I assure you that every employer is looking for, and there is nothing wrong with it. This is not some nefarious purpose on the part of employers. They are looking for a way to cut their costs. That is a part of the process we call free enterprise capitalism and a process to which I adhere and a philosophy to which I adhere. So they are looking to cut their costs. Believe me when I tell you that if somebody presents themselves to you who has got all the skills necessary to do the job but they will do it for less than the person you have got working there, you are probably going to hire them. They may only be there for a short time, until the next person comes in the door and said, you know what, I'll do it for even less. This is something that has happened, of course. We know this has happened in our manufacturing economy. This is one of the things that has really and truly been problematic in the United States. It has happened to our low-skill, low-wage jobs. There is so much competition for those jobs, so many people seeking them, that it has had the effect of depressing the wage rates for all the folks who are making very little money. They have not seen an increase in their salary because there are so many people here who are willing to take those jobs, those low-skill, low- wage jobs. Something new is happening, a new dimension here, because now we are figuring out a way to export or import, either way, export the jobs to a place that will have workers who will do the job, will work for less or import the worker to come here and do the job for less. We are doing it for high tech industries. H1B is the visa category for people who have special skills and who come to the United States with a higher degree than the person who is coming here to do menial labor. These are mostly people in the high tech industry and they are skilled and they are capable and they will work for less. So we hire them or we outsource the jobs that are here. Employers have manipulated the visa category to bring these folks in even though they do not fit the requirements of H1B or even L1 visas. They are bringing them in by the hundreds of thousands. We now have probably 2 million people in this country with those two visa categories, H1B and L1, high tech workers who have displaced American workers. Why? Because, of course, we have succumbed to the siren song of cheap labor and we have agreed to essentially abandon our borders.

It is amazing to me to see what I see and hear what I hear and read what I read about what goes on every day on our borders, to read statistics like those I just gave you, with over a quarter of a million people having been interdicted at the border in one single sector, the Tucson sector, in 6 months and far more than that having made it past our border patrol and are here in the country illegally. We have, I believe it is approaching 20 million people here illegally. They are all working or at least most of them are in jobs, of course, that Americans will not take.

I do not know, Mr. Speaker, how it is in your district, but I will tell you how it is in mine. I have people who are unemployed, high tech workers who are driving cabs at night. I have people who will take jobs of any kind in order to keep a roof over their heads and who are right now unable to find those jobs. Or if they find a job, it is, of course, working for much less money than the job they had. So their standard of living is decreased. That is, of course, what we face. That is, perhaps, an inevitability. Maybe there is absolutely nothing we can do about it because of this new world economy. How harsh that sounds. But it may be the case that we cannot stop it, we cannot stop the exportation of jobs. But should we not attempt to control our own borders? Because we only have two choices: Either we do that or we eliminate the border, we can erase the border, pretend they do not exist, allow people to come in and however they get here, they are now residents of the nation. That is an option. It is one I think that many people in their heart of hearts around here accept and in fact desire. There are folks in this body who believe that borders are simply anachronisms, they really should not be there, they do not matter anymore, they are not important and they only serve to obstruct the flow of goods and services and people. And that really the whole idea of the nation state, some concept of sovereignty, is all offered up on the altar of free trade.

I do not know, Mr. Speaker. I cannot tell you that I have a magic bullet here, but I can tell you that there is no way I am going to accept this situation without railing against it and without suggesting something that we can do, and that something is to actually control our own borders. Mr. Speaker, it is fascinating. The Wall Street Journal used to write an editorial every Fourth of July that said that borders were no longer meaningful and that we should erase them. They stopped writing that editorial after 9/11 but it is not because they have changed their mind, it is just because they are afraid to say such a thing subsequent to such a national tragedy perpetrated by people, of course, all of whom were here as aliens and most of whom, by the way, in some way or another had violated our laws and could have and should have been deported. So they do not talk about it anymore but they still believe it and so do Members of our own body, believe that that is in fact the way of the world, that national boundaries will not matter, that pretty soon the United States, Mexico and Canada will all together join in some sort of grand alliance similar to the EU, kind of hold hands and sing ``Cumbayah'' and that the only thing that will matter at that time, the only thing that will determine how profitable it is to live where you live and how good a job you may have, the only thing that will determine that are markets.

Let me suggest that there is another reason why we should try to control the border even if you do not believe that we should get involved with trying to protect the American jobs that are sacrificed to open borders, even if for some reason that just goes against your grain and that you are willing to allow American jobs to be sacrificed to those people who are willing to come and do them for less. And, remember, I say that there are billions willing to do that. There is no job here that we can create that someone out there cannot compete for. If we import the labor on one hand to do the jobs that are necessary here from the service economy, those kinds of jobs that only can be done here, a waiter or a waitress, building homes, whatever, if those jobs we bring in people who will work for less and the other jobs that do not require you to be physically here in the United States to do, we export, then of course there has to be some sort of ramification to that. There is something that is going to happen to the United States of America as a result of this phenomenon. I suggest that at the minimum it will be stagnant wage rates but almost assuredly it will be declining wage rates. Or maybe we can live with that. Maybe it is going to have to happen. No one wants to get up in front of their constituents and say, get ready, your wage rates are going to go down, your standard of living is going to be reduced because we are committed to the concept of free trade and that includes the free trade of labor.

In fact, we have asked the Congressional Research Service to actually try to identify to us those countries that are actually dealing with us on a free trade basis. That is to say that we will import the products that they produce and they will import the products that we produce without any trade restrictions.

I have yet to find a country like that. We are the ultimate free traders in the world. That is for sure. We offer far more in terms of an allure to come here and bring their products than we are able to do and that any other country is willing to offer us.

China is a great example. Since we opened trade with China, our balance of trade, or the imbalance of trade, I should say, has skyrocketed.

The same thing happened with Mexico. Mr. Speaker, before NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, we had an actual surplus, a trade surplus with Mexico, about $9 billion. Since NAFTA, we have gone to about $60 billion in the red, a trade deficit with Mexico. We have relatively few countries right now in the world with whom we have a positive trade balance, and most countries with which we trade do not trade on an even basis, on a level playing field. But we are committed to free trade, regardless of what it does to the American wage earner. And as I say, maybe, just maybe, we cannot do anything about that. But I think there is something. I would like to at least try because even if it is not something that the free trade adherence will go for, maybe if they are somehow concerned about the trade implications of actually controlling our own borders, think about the other implications. Think about the costs to American taxpayers of massive immigration, both legal and illegal.

Mr. Speaker, we hear all the time about the importation of cheap labor and how important it is, but I assure the Members that cheap labor is only cheap to the employer. It is not cheap to the citizen taxpayer who has to pay for the housing, the health care, the educational services, the incarceration rates. All of these things become very expensive to the taxpayers of the country, but they are passed on to them. They are not paid for by the corporation that brings them in or the business that hires that person; so what do they care, essentially?

But this concept of cheap labor has all kinds of other implications. The concept of open borders, borders that really do not matter, borders through which half a million people, minimally half a million people, could come through without our permission in one sector, called the Tucson sector, in 6 months. That kind of a border provides us with all kinds of more severe problems, even more severe than the economic catastrophe that is inherent with this concept of open borders.

As I say, it is a cost to the American taxpayer, but it is also something else, Mr. Speaker. And this gets a little more, I guess the word I am looking for is esoteric perhaps, but nonetheless I think it is a very important discussion we have to have because even if the Members disagree with everything I have said about the economy and the impact of cheap labor, the impact of open borders on the economy, even if they think it is just great to allow people to come into this country and undercut someone who is presently working here, underbid them for the job, even if they think that is okay, let me suggest to them that there are other problems that I would like them to deal with. And one of these things is the problem that I believe is enormously important for us to talk about, although uncomfortable, certainly, to discuss, and this is the problem with the effect of massive immigration, both legal and illegal, when it sort of meshes with what I call the cult of multiculturalism that permeates our society. Radical multiculturalism. Not just the philosophy or the attitude that we should appreciate our differences and the acknowledgment that those differences have made us richer in many ways as a Nation. That is not radical multiculturalism. Radical multiculturalism is the philosophy that says that in order to appreciate anybody else, one must degrade one's own culture and that one could never ever suggest that what we have here, that the product of western civilization we call the United States of America, is superior to anyplace else in the world because of course all cultures are relative to the multiculturalist radical. There is no difference. It is the ultimate ``I am okay, you're okay'' view of the world. And we have spent an enormous amount of time and money telling our children in our schools that this is the case, that they cannot be attached to anything that we had in our day, when I was in school, called the American experience because, of course, the multiculturalist radicals would say it is just a reflection of a society and a civilization that was nothing but greedy and degraded and corrupt, and that when Columbus came here to the New World, he began what was eventually to become the destruction of paradise.

This is what we tell children. This is in our textbooks, and this is what is rotting the core of American culture. And we are doing it to ourselves, and it is not the fact that immigrants are coming here and perpetrating it. They are simply coming into this new environment. This is dangerous, I think, to our society.

When we tell our children there is nothing of value, there is nothing worth their sacrifice, there is no set of ideas or ideals around which we can all gather, that all cultures are the same, that all is relative, when we do that, we are at great risk.

We have example after example. If the people go to our website, www.house.gov, that is g-o-v, /Tancredo, T-a-n-c-r-e-d-o, and go to a site that we call ``Our Heritage, Our Hope,'' or our immigration site, either one, they will get a great deal of information, Mr. Speaker. And I hope that everyone would do that because there are literally hundreds of examples of this cult of multiculturalism that I am talking about. Let me give the Members just a few.

``At Los Angeles Roosevelt High School, an 11th grade teacher told a nationally syndicated radio program that she `hates' the textbooks she's been told to use and the State-mandated history curriculum because they `ignore students of Mexican ancestry.' Because the students don't see themselves in the curriculum,' the teacher has chosen to `modify' the curriculum by replacing it with activities like `mural walks,' intended to `open the students' eyes,' '' she says, `` `to their `indigenous culture.' A friend the teacher invited to help with the `mural walk' went on to tell the students that `Your education has been one big lie after another.' '' And that essentially there is nothing they should as a student attach themselves to in terms of this American experience. It is white. It is Anglo-Saxon. It is not theirs and that they should never ever attach themselves to it.

``In the textbook called Across the Centuries that is used for seventh grade history, the book defines the word `jihad' as `to do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil.' '' Because, of course, we would not want to say that another interpretation of ``jihad'' is a holy war against Christendom because, oh, my heavens, what that sets up in the mind of the reader, even though that is exactly what the term implies: a holy war.

We try to euphemise it. We try to change the definition so as not to possibly create the impression on the part of a student that someone might hold a view like the people who hold this view actually have, and that is this: that their purpose, their reason to be, is to exterminate us. That is the truth of the matter, that for millions and millions of Muslims around the world, their one purpose is to exterminate any semblance of western civilization. It is a threat to them.

I had a book given to me not too long ago. It was an actual diary of an Imam who went on, I believe, to become a suicide bomber. In his diary he explains that is what all good faithful Muslims have to do, because, he said, We cannot live in the same world with the west. Western democracies have created a world in which people live the good life here on earth, and that is a world in which we cannot exist because in our world, the only thing to which we look forward is the afterlife. This is just a temporary status, and we are moving on to something greater, and if we allow western democracies, western civilization, to survive, it will essentially turn the heads of all of our people, turn their heads away from the

joys of the afterlife to the joys of this life. So, therefore, we have to set ourselves on a path of destroying western civilization.

This is what they are committed to, many millions of Muslims are. Many millions of Muslims would not take up that particular sword, at least not physically. They may do so mentally. One wonders how many people of that faith, even though they would not themselves commit an act of violence, how many in their heart of hearts, when one of those acts of violence is committed, think it is okay, that it is good, they deserve it.

Nonetheless, in our classrooms we refuse to even tell our students about this. We refuse to actually define the word ``jihad'' for its real meaning.

``In a Prentice Hall textbook used by students in Palm Beach County high schools titled `A World Conflict,' the first 5 pages of the World War II chapter cover such topics as women in the Armed Forces, racial segregation in the war, black Americans in the home front, Japanese Americans being interned, and women in the war effort.'' Although 292,000 Americans died in that conflict, most white male soldiers are represented far less in photos and words than all others.

``A Washington State teacher substituted the word `Christmas' with the word `winter' in a carol to be sung at a school program so as not to appear to be favoring one faith over another.''

Let us see. Oh, a school in New Mexico, this is just fascinating, a school district in New Mexico introduced a textbook called ``500 years of Chicano History and Pictures,'' and this book states that it was written ``in response to the Bicentennial celebration of the 1776 American Revolution and its lies.''

It stated its purpose is to ``celebrate a resistance to being colonized and absorbed by racist empire builders.''

The book describes defenders of the Alamo as ``slave owners, land speculators and Indian killers.''

Davy Crockett, they said was a cannibal, and the 1847 ``War on Mexico'' was an invasion.

The chapter headings include ``Death to the Invader,'' ``U.S. Conquest and Betrayal,'' ``We Are Now a U.S. Colony,'' ``Occupied America,'' and ``They Stole the Land.''

Nicholas DeGenova, an assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University, told students he wanted to see ``a million Mogadishus,'' which is a reference to an operation in Somalia in 1993 in which U.S. Army personnel were pinned down in a fierce firefight. Eighteen Americans were killed, 84 wounded.

DeGenova added, ``The only true heroes are those who find ways to help defeat the U.S. military.''

He is an assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University. Administrators at Columbia University have expressed regret, saying they were appalled by his statements, but took no action to dismiss DeGenova, who was still teaching.

Royal Oak Intermediate School in Covina, California, students in Len Cesene's 7th grade history class, fasted last week to celebrate the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. His letter to parents explained that ``in an attempt to promote a greater understanding and empathy toward the Muslim religion and toward other cultures, I am encouraging students to participate in an extra credit assignment. Students may choose to fast for 1, 2 or 3 days. During those days, students may only drink water during daylight hours.''

Imagine what would happen if he tried to suggest that students do something to adhere to Lent, let us say, a Christian religious holiday, not a holiday, but a time that Christians recognize for fasting. What if he tried to say that is what he wanted his children to do? What kind of an outcry would there be? Nobody said a word about the fact that he was trying to make the kids more sort of sensitive. That is okay.

A Federal judge in Brooklyn interpreted a New York City policy on holiday displays in public schools allow for the display of the Jewish Menorah and the Muslim Crescent, but not the display of the Christian Nativity Scene. The judge based his decision on the notion that the Muslim Crescent and Jewish Menorah are secular symbols, while the questioned Nativity Scene is not.

Really, we have just tons and tons of examples, and, again, I just suggest that perhaps the best thing to do, Mr. Speaker, is to have folks go to the web site, House.Gov/Tancredo. Look at ``Our Heritage, Our Hope.'' We will have these for you.

One more I do want to bring to your attention, because this one really was intriguing to me. Remember now, I bring this up, I am talking about this particular part of our culture, this multi-culturist phenomena, this multi-culturist cult that has control of a large part of our school system, certainly, and the textbook developers and the media and on and on and on.

I bring this up in the context of a discussion of immigration, because I believe that these two issues are interwoven and you cannot really discuss one without the other, and as we increase the number of people here, both legally and illegally, and as we encourage those folks who come here to be anything but part of the American experience, whatever that may be anymore in anybody's mind, as we encourage them to stay separate, as we tell them they should not learn English, that we will teach them in their language in the public schools, that they should keep that language, that they should keep their culture, and they should even keep their political affiliations and connections to the country of origin, that this cult of multi-culturalism then is enhanced by this policy on the part of our government. And here is the kind of thing that does happen.

In California, Victorville, California, there was a Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum on Highway 15 in the High Mojave desert. I saw this clip, somebody had put it on my desk and I was thinking, why is this significant? Why did somebody give me this clip from the Los Angeles Times about the fact that the Roy Rogers Museum had been moved from Victorville, California, to Branson, Missouri.

It picked up and moved because of a transformation in the cultural nature of the region, as new immigrants who settled in California are not absorbing the cultural history of the region or the country.

The guy who was writing a newspaper story about this went into a bar and met a lady by the name of Rosalina Sondoval-Marin. She was having a beer at the El Chubasco Bar on historic Route 66, and the newspaper reporter said, ``I am doing a story about the fact that the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum is moving after having been here for, I don't know, decades and decades and decades. What do you think about that?''

And Ms. Sondoval-Marin said, ``There is a revolution going on here, and it don't include no Roy Rogers or Bob Hope.''

I thought that was a fascinating observation really, and an indication of in fact something that is going on here. It is a revolution. It is true. It is a cultural revolution, and we aid and abet those people who are desirous of separating themselves from the rest of American society, creating a balkanized America, by encouraging bilingual education in schools and encouraging the cult of multi- culturalism that permeates our society. So it is that combination. It is the combination of massive immigration with this multi-culturalist cult that is the most dangerous thing we face.

Now, Mr. Speaker, this has nothing to do with race or ethnicity, it has not got anything to do with country of origin. This is something that would happen to any country, no matter where it was on the globe, if it practiced this kind of divisive sort of philosophic approach toward immigration.

I was recently in a school in my district, and it is a brand new school, it has only been there a short time, and it is in one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, by way, a county in which I do not live, I hasten to say, but it is part of my district. And a beautiful school, and very bright kids coming from parents that are well-to-do, who have given them all kinds of advantages, and they certainly have all the economic and educational advantages they could ask for.

They came into an auditorium where I was to address them for a while, and we talked for, I don't know, half an hour, maybe an hour. And then they were sending up their questions. One of them sent a question up to me and it

said, ``What do you think is the most serious problem that we face as the Nation here?''

I said, ``Well, I am going to ask you a question, and perhaps then I will be able to answer yours.'' I said, ``How many people in this room,'' by the way, there were about 200 kids, and I said, ``How many people in this auditorium right now will agree with the following statement: I live in the greatest country on the face of the Earth?''

It was so interesting to see this. There was all kinds of shifting about and discomfort. You could see it. And finally maybe two dozen kids out of 200 raised their hand. Two dozen kids out of 200 said, yes, I think this is the best country on the face of the Earth.

I hasten to add, I think there were many more in that room that wanted to say that. I do not mean to suggest that people, all of these kids, disliked or hated America. I will say that it is apparent to me as a teacher, I taught for many years, I have seen that look on faces before in my classroom when you ask a question and the kid has this sort of look like, well, if I put my hand up, he might call on me. I better not do it, because I am not sure I could defend the proposition.

That is what was happening. Even though they may have felt that they were living in the best country in the world, they also knew they could not defend it if I asked them to, if I had challenged them. They were looking at the sides of the walls where their teachers were standing along the wall in this auditorium, and looking at them, and it was a very peculiar situation. It was uncomfortable for them.

I do not know how uncomfortable it was for most of the teachers, and I did not even notice whether they raised their hands. I do not think any of them did. But maybe they did not think the question was addressed to them. I am not sure.

But it was nonetheless fascinating to me. And what I believe has happened, and what I would love to test, I mean, I would love every Member, Mr. Speaker, next time they go and speak to a high school in their district, at the appropriate time, ask that question and see what happens. It is illuminating. It is illustrative. It is a fascinating thing to watch. Because what you see are people who are intellectually unarmed to defend the proposition that they live in the best country in the world, because they have been taught over and over and over again by all kinds of textbooks and all kinds of teachers that they cannot ever say a thing like that, because it would indicate some actual existence of, you know, good and evil; better and best; good and bad.

We do not have that, and we cannot have it, and we cannot think of it. We cannot think of ourselves as being special, and no matter what other cultures might do and what they might think about the human condition, we cannot condemn them, we cannot say anything bad about them, for fear of offending the multi-culturist police that haunt our schools and our lives in many ways.

I fear this is the most dangerous thing. The answer to the question those kids asked me then is this is what I believe is the most severe problem we face in America, this abandonment of the ideas and ideals of western civilization that actually came together to create this incredible country.

There are things about which we can be so proud. There are things that are uniquely western and that we have every reason to be proud of. We are the instigator. We brought the concept of the rule of law to the world. Western civilization provided that. It was an outgrowth of the Greeks, the Romans and eventually through the English, the Magna Carta and our own Constitution.

It is a wonderful, wonderful tour of history to see how that string is drawn through the pages of history and how we come to this position and how we were started as a Nation, unique among all nations of the Earth. We were started on the basis of ideas. Ideas. Not because a potentate, a king or anybody else drew some lines and called it a country. We started because of ideas, ideas of great value and ideas that we must transmit to our children and to immigrants coming to this country.

There must be something, some set of ideas around which we can all gather, something that means we are different and special and holds us together, because there is nothing really other than that. We are people from all kinds of different backgrounds and cultures and countries and histories and languages and all of that sort of thing.

So the one thing that we should try to have to bring all of these disparate factions together is a set of ideas. And yes, they are ideas promulgated out of western civilization, and we should never, ever, ever be ashamed of it. We should extol those ideas to ourselves, to our children, and to immigrants, because it will determine the fate of the Nation.

Mr. Speaker, as Members of Congress and friends of Taiwan get ready to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Taiwan Relations Act, I rise to express my continued support for friendship between America and the Republic of China on Taiwan. Despite the regrettable fact that our two nations no longer enjoy formal diplomatic relations, the U.S. and the Republic of China on Taiwan have remained strong allies for the better part of a century.

Much of this strong relationship is based on the Taiwan Relations Act, which has been instrumental in maintaining peace, security and stability in the Taiwan Strait and the Western Pacific since its enactment in 1979. Over the last quarter century, the Republic of China on Taiwan has built a strong economy and a healthy, vibrant and fully functioning multi-party democracy, conducting free elections at all levels, including the recent and razor-thin reelection of incumbent President Chen Shui-Bian.

The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act viewed Taiwan's membership in international organizations as conducive to Taiwan's stability and economic prosperity. Over the years, the U.S. has continued to support the participation of Taiwan in international affairs, its accession to the World Trade Organization and the ROC's ongoing efforts to become an observer in the World Health Organization. I believe Taiwan's active participation and contributions to these and all international organizations will be beneficial not just to the people of Taiwan but to the international community at large.

Mr. Speaker, the last 25 years under the framework of the TRA have been positive for both the Republic of China on Taiwan and the United States. The Taiwan Relations Act has helped to maintain stability and security for the people of the United States, the people of Taiwan and for those in neighboring countries.

Maintaining and enhancing the close strategic, commercial and military cooperation between the United States and the Republic of China on Taiwan have been of critical importance for the last 25 years and will remain so in the future, in large part thanks to the TRA.

Mr. Speaker, the values of Western civilization are being tested in Kosovo

today. Since Wednesday, March 24, 30 Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries dating as far back as the 12th century have been burned to the ground by Kosovar Albanians, as have numerous ethnic Serb villages. Dozen of Serbs have been murdered or are missing. Despite the presence of 18,000 international troops, tyranny and terror has returned to Kosovo.

These acts of terror are designed to eradicate the remaining physical and cultural presence of the Serbian people in Kosovo, and therefore of the Christian presence in the region. No other explanation of these sickening events is credible. Spontaneous reactions of embittered communities never manifest themselves like this.

Derek Chappell, the U.N.'s Kosovo Mission spokesman said of the recent attacks against Serbs, ``It was planned in advance.'' Another U.N. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, stated that ``This is planned, coordinated, one-way violence from the Albanians against the Serbs. It is spreading and has been brewing for the past week . . . Wherever there is a Serbian population, there is Albanian action against them.''

Recent violent reactions by hooligans in Serbia that resulted in the torching of two mosques--one in Belgrade and another in the second largest city of Nis--were tragic and cannot be justified. The reaction of the Belgrade authorities in condemning these acts and arresting the perpetrators was swift and efficient. Hundreds of rioters were arrested and the situation is under control. Acting Secretary Armitage also praised on March 19 the quick action of Belgrade authorities in quelling violence against Muslim religious sites and properties in Serbia, and thanked the Serbian Government for effectively strengthening measures to protect diplomatic missions and minority cultural sites.

Why are similar measures not being taken in response to the violence against the Kosovar Serbs and their Orthodox churches and monasteries?

Just as we did in Bosnia, we should make aid, assistance, positive diplomatic relations, and loan guarantees conditional upon an improvement in the human rights situation. In particular, we must make it absolutely clear to the leadership of the Kosovar Albanians that we expect them to investigate these and previous crimes against Kosovo's Serb minority and arrest and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes. Since 1999, not a single homicide against a Kosovar Serb has even gone to trial. This cannot stand.

Additionally, we must double our efforts to create secure conditions for the successful and permanent return of a critical mass of Kosovo Serbs. We must make it clear to the Albanian leadership that their abuse of the U.N.-created interim institutions of Kosovo cannot continue. A free people committed to the principles of democracy and representative government, human rights standards and the principle of religious freedom, cannot translate that into tyranny of the majority.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the House.

It is appropriate, I suppose, that we continue with the discussion we are having about jobs. It is an interesting one, it is a challenging one. It is certainly an issue that will be with us for quite some time, certainly during the next several months as we approach the election.

We know that there is a great deal of anxiety in the Nation, there is a great deal of concern about the degree to which the exportation of jobs from the United States, the outsourcing, as it is referred to, has affected our economy, has affected the unemployment statistics and affected Americans in ways that are quite alarming sometimes.

We wonder about exactly how it is that we can treat this issue. Number one, is it for real? The outsourcing of jobs has sometimes been described as a good thing from an economic standpoint. I heard my colleagues on the other side of the aisle talk about that and suggest that someone was being disingenuous in that description.

Well, Madam Speaker, I do not know whether or not the outsourcing of jobs from the United States does in fact cause a net loss in jobs. I have a sneaky feeling it may. I am concerned about the possibility that it does.

We recognize that there is a phenomena, a world economy that challenges us as never before in terms of trying to figure out how exactly to address the issue of jobs, how to protect them.

In the past, and for the last actually 150 or so years, a lot of people have been wedded to the concept of free trade as described by various economists, from Ricardo and Adam Smith, and we adhere, most of us, to the concept that free trade is good in the long run and produces in fact a more viable economy. That has been the mantra many people have chanted.

I do not hear, even from the other side, however, a resolution to this. I do not hear anybody saying, well, we should not have free trade, that we should establish some sort of economic barrier to free trade, we should establish tariffs.

They can and do rail about the fact that we are maybe losing jobs in this new economy, in this new-world economy, and that it is, of course, therefore the President's fault. No one has in fact, that I know of, come up with a plan that would suggest a protectionist policy be implemented, that in fact we should begin to look at things like tariffs to protect American jobs. That is a hard case to make, and it is one alternative, of course, to the present course of free trade.

We can begin to restrict America's trade policies. We can begin to erect barriers. We can begin to say to other countries that if they do not react in what we would call a fair way to our trade policies that we will in fact impose some sort of penalty, we will raise a tariff barrier.

We can in fact even adopt policies, tax law, that would be designed to prevent companies from or punish companies for offshoring jobs, for moving jobs from the United States to other countries.

Those are policy options. Now, would they stop the offshoring of jobs? Would people then say, okay, because I have to pay an extra tax for doing that, I will not adopt this particular procedure? Well, I do not know. In some cases, it may work; in other cases, it may not.

Because, in reality, the competitive world in which we live is one that does not care whether or not jobs are lost in any particular country. It does not matter. The economy does not have a conscience. The world economy does not look at a net loss of jobs in country A and a net increase in jobs in country B and say, there is something immoral about that. It just says, that is the way it has to work.

This is difficult for any Member of Congress, for any Member, any elected person in the United States to have to deal with, because our natural tendency is to say, here is what we will do to solve that problem. We will stop this. We will not allow jobs to be exported from the United States. We will do things that absolutely ensure that we will always have a very high standard of living and that our jobs will be protected. That is what we would like to do. But, of course, the problem is how to do that.

I assure my colleagues, nothing we heard tonight from the other side is a solution. Nothing. It is simply a series of complaints; and it is demagoguery to stand up on this floor or anywhere else and simply rail against the ``loss of jobs'' unless one is willing to come forward and say, here is what we will do to stop that. We will begin to impose protectionist measures. We will say to other countries that we will not allow your goods into our country because you are subsidizing them in your country, and it is unfair. We will punish corporations for sending jobs offshore.

Now, we can do that, we can say that, and we can even actually pass laws to accomplish those goals. But will they stop this phenomenon? Can we do anything to reverse what appears to be an inevitable change in the economic status of America and of America's workers?

I do not come to this floor to tell my colleagues that I have an economic model we can impose that I know will achieve the goal of keeping jobs in America and keeping our standard of living high. But I do have a suggestion that I believe we can look to and that all of us should be able to say, this may work. It is both logical and it is, in fact, the responsible thing to do.

But we will never hear, Madam Speaker, we will never hear our opponents, ever, suggest what I am going to suggest as a way of protecting American jobs, because their purpose is not to protect American jobs. Their purpose is to make political points. Their purpose is to make Americans, who are fearful of their own jobs and those who have lost jobs, vote for them, as opposed to the President or Republicans, just out of the fear. But there is never a solution that they propose, and certainly not the one that I am going to suggest tonight.

Madam Speaker, in this country today there are between 13 million and 15 million people who are here illegally. That is to say, they have come across the border of the United States without our permission. For the most part, they have come for the purpose of taking jobs. We hear this all the time, even from people on our side of the aisle, that the people who are coming here illegally are coming here simply to take the jobs that no one else will take.

Well, I do not know how it is in the districts of my colleagues or anywhere else in the country, but I will tell my colleagues that in my district there are many people who are out of work and who are looking for any job. They will take a job in the high-tech sector from which they were fired because someone came in to work for less money, or their job was outsourced, or they will take a job, many people, who do not have the kinds of skills that would allow them to even think about a job in the high-tech industry, they will take a job as roofers or as drywall hangers or as bricklayers or as, yes, even, believe it or not, people who would clean our houses or cut our lawns. They are people who are in desperate need of a job.

But we are importing millions of people to take those jobs. Why? Because they will take them for less money

than the previous person was willing to take. It is a constant series of someone undercutting the person who was there for their job.

Now, this importation of cheap labor has an effect on our economy. And, yes, it is true that some commodities are less expensive and that we can probably get our lawns cut, our laundry done, our houses cleaned, and any one of a variety of other things for less money because there are so many people here who are willing to work for very little, and they have displaced the person who was doing that job for a little more. So to that extent it benefits a certain segment of our society. In the long run, however, I think it is a detriment to all of us.

So if we really wanted to address the issue of jobs, why would we not say that one way to do it is to, in fact, limit the number of people who are coming into this country illegally, why would we not say that we are going to defend our borders, stop the importation of cheap labor illegally into this country and even reverse the flow by levying fines against people, which is the law, of course. The law today allows us to levy fines against people who have hired people who are here illegally. And if we do that, we will, in fact, be able to reverse this flow.

People who are here illegally, if they are not able to obtain jobs and the social service benefits that we so liberally provide, they will return to their country of origin. We do not have to ``round them up in cattle cars'' and send them out or anything of that nature. These are the pictures that our opponents try to portray all the time of this horrendous experience. But, in fact, we could simply enforce the law and secure the border and achieve the goal of reducing the number of people who are here illegally.

But those people who do not go home under those conditions should, in fact, be deported, because that is the law. We may not like the law. There are a number of people on the other side who, of course, despise the law, but it is the law, and it is something that we must deal with. We can try to ignore it. We can try to pretend these laws do not exist. We can try to pretend the laws about immigration are nothing more than the selections on a Chinese restaurant menu: We will take one order of this, two orders of that, no rice, and be particular about which laws we will, in fact, enforce and which laws we will not. But that is not the way our society is built.

Madam Speaker, we are supposed to be a nation based on the rule of law and the respect for the law; and the law says if you are here illegally, you should be deported. The law says that if you hire someone who is here illegally, you should be fined; and if you continue to do it, you could actually go to jail. That is the law. In this body where we make law, this is supposed to be the place where we have the ultimate respect for the law.

Yet the members of the other side and even members of our own party would rather ignore the law, would rather suggest it does not exist and that we will look the other way. Because, on the one side, they are concerned about the votes that they would be losing if we stopped the flow of immigration, both legal and illegal, or reduced it; and on our side, oftentimes because we are fearful that we will stop the flow of cheap labor. In any case, the borders remain porous, and the numbers begin to overwhelm us.

Let me point out something that I find absolutely incredible. First of all, let me say, Madam Speaker, that when I go down and visit the border and talk to our Border Patrol people, which I do often on both the southern and northern borders, one of the things I hear most often is an admonition from them, and it goes something like this: Congressman, when you go back up there, please, please tell your colleagues, do not talk about, do not ever mention the word ``amnesty'' for the people who are here illegally. Because they say every time that happens up there, meaning here, the flood we are trying to stop on the border becomes a tidal wave, naturally, of people who are coming to obtain this ``amnesty.'' If they can sneak in under the radar screen, if they can sneak in in time, they will get an amnesty. That is what they think. So the numbers become overwhelming.

Let me tell my colleagues what has happened in one sector, one portion of our border, the Tucson sector, which, of course, as my colleagues know, is just one spot along a 5,000-mile border, north and south. Since October 1 of last year, which is the beginning of our fiscal year, to date, about 6 months, the number of people interdicted, the number of people stopped at the Tucson sector in the last 6 months has reached 211,450. That was as of a few days ago. They are stopping about 3,000 or 4,000 a night. Almost a quarter of a million people by now in 6 months have been stopped at the Tucson sector, on the Tucson sector of the border.

Madam Speaker, for every single person that comes into this country, I mean every single person that we stop at the border, 2 or 3, 5 or 10, we do not know for sure how many, but certainly a minimum of let us say 2, for every one we get, 2 get by us, minimum. It is probably far more than that, but a minimum of 2. That means that in the last 6 months, a half a million people have entered this country illegally just in the Tucson sector, and successfully entered the country. Madam Speaker, a half a million people in 6 months in one sector. This is, by the way, a 46 percent increase from this time last year.

In the month of March, apprehensions, with at this point 3 days still remaining, are 62,946, the month of March. That is up 34,100 from last year, an increase of 85 percent. Madam Speaker, 3,067 when this report was done, which was 3 days ago, 3,067 were caught yesterday, according to the Border Patrol. By the way, April and May are typically the peak months ahead of a hot summer. Madam Speaker, a half a million people came into this country illegally in 6 months in one sector.

Where do they go? Now if, in fact, they are just coming for the jobs Americans will not take, which is what we hear all the time, right? What are the 500,000 jobs those people are going to take when they get here that are just waiting out there? Right? Because, of course, that is what we are told is the case, that there are millions and millions of jobs going begging. Madam Speaker, I ask my colleagues, in my colleagues' districts, are there thousands and thousands of jobs we cannot fill? I tell my colleagues it is not the case in my district.

I do not know of a district where want ads are going without response. Nobody wants the job. Thousands and thousands. 500,000 in the last 6 months. Where are they going? Where are they working? Are they, in fact, just taking jobs Americans do not want? Or are they, in fact, displacing American and/or immigrant labor who came here before them and doing so because they will work for less?

The President said in his speech that he wants to match every willing worker with every willing employer. But I ask the President to please think about that statement. I ask him to determine whether or not he really means that, matching every willing worker with every willing employer.

Well, I would suggest that there are billions of willing workers all over the world looking for the opportunity to come here and, in fact, undercut someone, underbid someone who is presently here for their job. Do we really believe that? If so, why do we even have immigration policy? If, in fact, our purpose is to simply let markets determine the flow of goods, services, and labor, why do we have immigration policies? Why do we say here is how many people can come into this country legally? Why do we not just say the border is meaningless, but if you get here, however you get here, you are here. You are a resident. You can apply for any job, you can obtain any benefit, you can even vote.

What is the purpose of a border if we are really and truly going to say whatever person is willing to work should be matched with any person willing to employ them? At that point in time it truly is a world economy, is it not? What sense does a border make under those conditions?

Why should we impose any restrictions? Why should we hand out visas? Because it does not matter, you see. If people are coming here to work and there are employers willing to hire them and they are willing to work for even less than that employer is paying at the present time, why should we

interfere? It is just markets. It is just the way of the market and the world economy.

Well, Madam Speaker, I do not know whether we can begin to control the flow of jobs offshore, being exported offshore. I do not know because technology today, of course, makes it incredibly difficult to control the flow of work to worker. And you can push, you can move work to worker anywhere in the world because of technology. It is true.

I do not know whether there is any law we can pass, which is one reason our friends on the other side do not suggest them, because they do not know either; and they are petrified to say something like we will actually impose a tariff. They will not say it because they are afraid of the ramifications of it also. So they simply scream about jobs.

Well, whining and screaming and complaining will not change a thing. It may get more of them elected, it may get more people to vote against the President and against Republicans, that is their purpose, that is all they care about. But it will not change the job situation in this country. But I suggest that everyone in this body, and the President could do something tomorrow to improve the jobs situation in our country without imposing a tariff, without taking one protectionist step, but they could begin to enforce the law, the law that is presently on the books that says you cannot hire people who are here illegally, the law that says you cannot come into the country illegally. That is all we need to do to improve the job situation in America dramatically.

Because, Madam Speaker, it is not just, by the way, people coming here to do menial jobs who are sneaking into the country. There are people paying thousands and thousands of dollars to be snuck into the country. They are not coming in, by the way, to work in the local 7- Eleven or in somebody's vineyard. They are coming in for other purposes. Some of them very nefarious purposes, some of them paying thousands of dollars to be here.

In fact, Madam Speaker, some Middle Eastern clients will pay $50,000 to be smuggled into the United States. As I say, they are not coming here to take a menial job. They are coming here for something else entirely. And I am fearful to think about what it is and how many are here and how many are coming here illegally, across those porous borders, alongside and in between and hidden among thousands of people who are coming just to take the jobs no American will take.

I dare us, I dare the President of the United States, I dare the Congress of the United States to test that theory. Just test it and see whether or not there really are all these jobs Americans will not take. Just test it. Let us see. And you know what? If we reduce the supply of cheap labor, yes, it is possible we will have to pay a little more for certain goods and services.

But, Madam Speaker, I am willing to take that chance. And I am willing to pay that price. Because porous borders are dangerous. They are dangerous to this country, they are dangerous to our economy, certainly, and they are dangerous, they are a danger for our survival. We must, in fact, do something to achieve some degree of security and control over our borders. It is imperative. It is the thing that distinguishes a country to be able to determine who comes and who goes and for what purpose and for how long.

And there is nothing racial about it; there is no ethnic issues, all the stuff that our opponents want to throw on this heap. You know all the epithets that they want to throw out. All the names that they want to call people who simply ask for secure borders will not stop certainly me, and I hope others, from raising the concern, from suggesting that it is imperative that our country secure its borders and uphold its laws.

If, in fact, we do not believe that there is a purpose; if, in fact, there is something wrong with our immigration policy; if we do not think there is a reason for us to actually have borders, have INS agents, have Border Patrol, then let us repeal them, repeal those laws. There is no purpose, is there, for them if we intend to ignore them?

There is a fascinating thing, Madam Speaker, there is a law on the books, we passed it in 1994 or 1996, I am not sure which, but it was a law that said this: That if any state or locality passes laws to restrict the ability of the State from obtaining--from the INS obtaining information, if you restrict the flow of information to or bar the flow of information from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, it is against the law. It says that is a violation of Federal law. Now, that is what we said. That is the law we passed. Unfortunately, we put absolutely no sort of penalty behind it.

And so, of course, States and cities routinely violate this law, passing what we call sanctuary city laws, telling their police departments, for instance, that they should not report when they actually arrest someone who is here illegally. They should not report that to the Federal Government.

Time and time again, by the way, we have situations where folks who are here illegally, commit a crime, they are caught, there is an adjudication, they sometimes are sentenced; but no one ever tells the INS, so, of course, the INS does not come and deport them, which is what they are supposed to do because they do not know they are there. And this person walks out on the street and commits another heinous crime. Time and time again this has happened.

There are literally thousands of cases where people who are here illegally and who should have been deported because they have committed a crime, but they were not deported because that crime was never, ever reported to the INS. And we have said that that is against the Federal law.

I tried to add a penalty to that in the last session of Congress and I was unsuccessful. I tried to say that no one could apply, no State or city, could apply for funds under the Homeland Security Act or when we were also passing the Justice appropriation, nobody could get funds, nobody could get grants if they had passed these sanctuary laws. I think we got about 120 votes.

Now, that is incredible to me. Here is a body that passed a law and said it was illegal to do something, but when we tried to apply a penalty to it, we could not get a majority of the members to agree to it. This is a travesty, Madam Speaker. This is a travesty. And it truly is something that we as a Nation have to think about in terms of calling ourselves, if we want to go around the world and talk about the fact that we are a Nation that reveres the rule of law. And, yet, we refuse to actually enforce our own.

And so I say to my colleagues, I have told the President that if he does not believe in borders and if he does not believe in immigration law, then let us repeal them. It would be better to do so than to pretend as though we have them but only be selective in the way we enforce them.

Now, I am a ``no'' vote, by the way. I believe that immigration laws are important, I believe borders are important, but if I am in the minority in that, so be it. That is the way our government is supposed to work. But I want a full-fledged debate, and I want our colleagues to have to stand up on the floor and take a vote.

And I want the President of the United States to take a position on whether or not borders matter. Because if they do, then there are decisions that you have to make. If borders matter, then you have to defend them. You have to secure them. If they are of no consequence, then simply take down the barriers, take down the ports of entry, abolish the Border Patrol, abolish the INS, because there is no purpose for them. They are a very expensive sort of luxury to have to pretend that we have an immigration policy which we do not have the slightest intention of actually enforcing.

There are enormous implications to porous borders. There are political implications, there are cultural, there are economic, there are social, and there are national security implications. Besides that, there is another aspect to this: massive immigration into this country, into any country, actually, when that immigration meshes with, combines with a sort of, what I call a radical multi-culturalism, a philosophy that permeates the society, a philosophy that tells our children and immigrants that there is nothing of value in our country, nothing to hold on to, no heritage worth someone's allegiance, when we tell our own children in schools that there is no reason for

them to have any attachment to Western Civilization or to the American experience; and we tell immigrants the same thing that they should keep their language, that we will actually teach them in the language that they have when they come here, teach their children in that language other than English, when we encourage them to stay separate, when we encourage them to actually keep their political allegiances to the country of origin. This becomes extremely problematic, and it goes even beyond the other issues of economy, of jobs, health care issues, social issues.

This goes to really the core of our society and whether we are going to be able to remain a Nation at all.

And this is happening, this cult of multiculturalism, it certainly does permeate our society. We see signs of it all over the place. As an example: at Los Angeles Roosevelt High School, an 11th grade teacher told a nationally syndicated radio program that she dislikes the textbooks she has been told to use and the State's mandated dated history curriculum because they ignore students of Mexican ancestry. She says because the students do not see themselves in the curriculum, she has chosen to ``modify that curriculum by replacing it with activities like mural walks.'' Mural walks. These are intended to open the eyes of the students to their indigenous culture.

When on one of these walks they were confronted by one of the individuals who had made one of these painted murals, they became the teacher and went on to tell the children that their education is one big lie after another and that they essentially have no reason to be connected to the American experience and they should, in fact, hate it.

Now, this is one tiny example that is magnified 100,000 times around the Nation in a million ways.

In a textbook called ``Across the Century,'' which is used for 7th grade history, the book defines the word jihad as ``to do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil.''

In 2002, the ``New Guidelines For Teaching History'' in the New Jersey public schools failed to mention America's Founding Fathers, the Pilgrims, or the Mayflower.

In a Prentice Hall textbook used by students in West Palm Beach, titled ``A World in Conflict,'' the first five pages of the World War II chapter cover such topics as women in the Armed Forces, racial segregation and the war, Black Americans and the home front, Japanese Americans being interned, and women and the war effort. Now, Madam Speaker, some 292,000 Americans died in that war, almost all of them white; but in the school text white male soldiers are represented far less in photos and words than all others.

A Washington State teacher substituted the word Christmas with the word winter in a carol to be sung in a school program so as not to appear to be favoring one faith over another.

In a school district in New Mexico, the introduction to a textbook called ``500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures'' states this book was written in response to the bicentennial celebration of the 1776 American Revolution. Not a bad idea. This is an interesting thing. But it was written ``in response to the bicentennial celebration of the 1776 American Revolution and its lies.'' That is what the book was written for. Its stated purpose is to celebrate ``our resistance to being colonized and absorbed by racist empire builders.'' The book describes defenders of the Alamo as slave owners, land speculators, and Indian killers. Davey Crockett is described as a cannibal. The 1847 war on Mexico is described as an unprovoked U.S. invasion. The chapter headings include, Death to the Invader, U.S. Conquest and Betrayal, We Are Now a U.S. Colony, In Occupied America, and They Stole the Land. This is a textbook used in New Mexico.

There are literally hundreds of examples that I could give of this cult of multiculturalism, this attempt to make children sensitive to other cultures by degrading our own. This is the concept that we live in this world where I am okay, you are okay cultures and civilizations; that everyone is the same as everyone else and that all things are relative. We cannot condemn or look down upon or criticize any other nation, culture, or civilization.

Well, this has seeped into the fabric of our society to the point where about a month ago I went to a high school in my district. It was recently built and in one of the wealthiest counties in America. It was a beautiful school, with all the finest trappings, and bright-eyed bushy-tailed kids who certainly were competent in skills in a variety of areas. They came in to talk to me. We had about 200 of them. And at the end of the conversation, they sent up several questions. One of them was, What do you think is the most serious problem we face as a Nation?

I said, Well, before I answer that question, I am going to ask you a question. Remember, 200 high school students. I said, How many of you believe that you live in the greatest country on Earth? Take a guess, Madam Speaker, as to how many raised their hand. Out of 200 students, and the question was, Do you believe you live in the greatest country on Earth, about two dozen said yes. About two dozen actually raised their hands.

Now, I found this incredible. And what I said was, I can answer your question now about what I think is the greatest problem. And this is it, the fact that 175 of you or so could not answer this question in the affirmative.

And many of them, Madam Speaker, I do not think for a moment were saying I hate America. Most of them simply could not feel comfortable about raising their hand because they may have been asked to actually defend the proposition, and that is what made them uncomfortable. I taught for many years, and I could see that look in their eyes: if I raise my hand, you might call on me, and I do not know if I can actually defend that proposition, that America is the greatest. What if you ask me to prove it? What if you ask me why I believe that it is? So it is best I just do not even raise my hand.

And it is because, Madam Speaker, that they have been taught that they should not dare suggest that this is something good, individually significant, and in fact the best. What would people think if you said you lived in the best country in the world? How would they react? How would I defend it? This is the product of this multiculturalist phenomenon.

And when you combine it with massive immigration into the country, of people who are not coming here necessarily to become American but simply to get the job no one else would get, and you tell them this same stuff, that there is nothing unique, nothing good, nothing of value, then we are creating a Balkanized society that will not know the answer to the question of who are we.

Who are we, is a great question. What is our purpose? What is the thing that we should all be gathering around? Are there any ideas or ideals that all of us, regardless of whether we are from Azerbaijan or Zimbabwe, whoever we are, when we come here to the United States, is there nothing at all that we should establish as being the primary thing people should adhere to; some ideas that are of value and that separate us from all the rest of the world; things like the concept of the rule of law; all of those things that are identified in the Bill of Rights, especially in the first amendment?

Those are uniquely Western ideas. This Nation, as opposed to all other nations, was founded on ideas. No other nation has that claim. In that respect, we are unique and wonderful. But we are also vulnerable. I mean, it is in fact ideas that we need to hold us together. It is not ethnicity. We do not all look the same and have the same background. We did not come here speaking the same languages or even worshipping the same God. So what other nations have to hold them together, the culture that they share in common, we do not have.

All we have, Madam Speaker, is ideas that made this country, and they are articulated in the Constitution and especially in the Bill of Rights. And it is imperative we tell our children in high school about them and that we transmit those values and ideas and ideals to them. It is imperative that we ask, in fact demand from people who are coming in to this country, that they also adhere to them.

That is not too much to ask. We are not asking people to change their religion. We are not asking them to

change their cultural identity. We are asking them to rally around a set of ideas. We should be asking, and we used to ask that. We asked it of my grandparents. But we do not ask it any more. In fact, we attempt to stop it. There is this hatred. It is almost a death wish for the country, in a way, that continues to push us in this direction, this radical multiculturalist path.

There are certain ideas that supercede others, and I suggest that diversity is not one of them. I mean, the one thing that we supposedly all have in common should not be our love of diversity. There are other things that are more important. There are ideas that are more important, and we should teach our children about them, and we should teach immigrants to respect and adhere to them. We do not do this, I think, to our peril.

So when I talk about the issue of immigration and immigration reform, it is not simply because I am concerned about jobs, which of course I am, and I believe it is a significant factor and something we should talk about when we talk about jobs. It is not just because I am concerned about the impact on our economy in terms of the health care costs and social service benefits that massive immigration imposes on us, although I am concerned about that. And it is certainly a concern about the costs we have to incarcerate. Twenty-five percent of the population of our Federal prisons, 25 percent, are people who are noncitizens of the United States. These are huge costs we incur.

Cheap labor is not cheap. Or I should say it is only cheap to the employer. It is not cheap to the rest of us. It costs a fortune. And those things we should talk about. But those things are not even the most dangerous aspects of massive immigration, both legal and illegal, until it combines with this cult of multiculturalism. That is the dangerous thing.

And this is a tough subject. It is very difficult sometimes, I know, to make this case because its requires us to really think about this in depth. You can make bumper stickers out of a chunk of this discussion, but you really have a hard time conveying this in a 30-second commercial. It is so much easier to use slogans and demagoguery, as our opponents are so able to do and so wont to do.

I do hope that we will think about this. I introduced a resolution a couple of weeks ago; and it simply states that all people, all children graduating from our schools, it is a sense of the Congress, should be able to articulate an appreciation for Western Civilization. What is so tough about that? And yet I do not know whether we are even going to get it on the floor of this House for fear someone will be offended by the discussion of whether or not our children should be able to articulate an appreciation of Western Civilization.

Now, you may say, well, who could be against that? How could anybody be against it? Why should we not be able to do that? Well, because, of course, we may be offending someone else.

We are not saying that anybody should condemn any other civilization, should criticize any other civilization. We are just saying they should be able to articulate an appreciation of western civilization, which is what started this. I do not care again if you are here from Azerbaijan or Zimbabwe. Anybody coming here should eventually be able to articulate that appreciation. It is important because it does in fact establish a canon, a set of ideas, around which we should all gather.

I have introduced that resolution. I have also asked other State legislators all over the country to do the same thing. I think to date we have 15 or 20 State legislators who have agreed to do so in their individual States. I have several hundred people who have gone to our Web site, www.house.gov/tancredo, and gone to Our Heritage Our Hope page and there they can sign up, they can take a resolution, I have got a model resolution that they can take to their school board and have them pass it saying that their children will be able to articulate this.

I hope people will do that. I hope people will actually go to our Web site, take that resolution, go to their school board and ask them to adopt it. If nothing else but to hear the debate that will ensue. If nothing else but to hear somebody say, oh, no, we could not, absolutely could not ask a student or demand that of our students, that they be able to articulate an appreciation for western civilization. Would that not be an interesting debate? I hope they will do it.

Once again, it is www.house.gov/tancredo, go to Our Heritage Our Hope.

I hope they do it, Madam Speaker; and I hope all over this country we will begin this debate as to whether or not this is an important requirement and whether it is meaningful and whether our children and the people who come into this country should be able to rally around a set of ideas that separate us from all other places.

Because, Madam Speaker, I have absolutely no doubt about it, this is the greatest nation on the face of the earth. There is plenty of empirical evidence to prove it. Because when the gates are opened all over the world, which way and where do people go? You just do not see that many fleeing from the West to say, Pakistan or Zimbabwe or anywhere else, but you see millions flowing here.

People do speak and vote with their feet; and to the extent that they can get here, they will come, or to western Europe, because it offers something that they do not have. It offers hope. I do not blame them for trying to come. It is the hope and desire I think of most people to certainly improve the quality of their life economically.

But all I am saying is that, when you get here, there is more to being an American than just getting a job. At least there should be. It should mean more than that. Or else we are just a place of residence, that is all, not citizens. We are just a place of residence, people who reside here, not people who have an affinity for the ideas and ideals that made America what it is. This is my fear. It is one that is sometimes difficult to encapsulate, even in an hour-long speech, although I appreciate the ability that the House provides for us to come here on the floor and opine like this.

It is I think a very serious issue, and I hope and I pray that we will as a Nation begin to grapple with it and that even in this House we will begin to debate what it means to be an American and what we have to do in terms of our own domestic policy and our immigration policy to enhance that concept. It will determine not just what kind of a nation we are in the future that is balkanized, united or divided, it will determine whether we are a nation at all, and that is why we absolutely must enter into this debate.

Mr. Chairman, there are opportunities sometimes provided for bipartisanship in this House and one looks for them because frankly they do not happen all that often it seems like. And so I looked at the Blue Dog budget with the hope that in fact there would be that opportunity to do something in a bipartisan way here that I could support it, and quite frankly there were things that I liked

when I looked into it. I liked the fact that it assumes permanent estate tax relief for families with farms and small businesses, a good idea. I liked the PAYGO provision, a good idea. Establishing a point of order against legislation with costs that begin outside the budget window, a great idea. I went through it thinking this is going to be good, I can support this piece of legislation.

But then, of course, you come to those parts that make all of this simply unsupportable and that is the fact that you get to the part where you see it raises taxes. It raises taxes that were enacted in 2001; it eliminates those tax cuts until 2010. It applies significant hurdles that could prevent us from making the current tax cuts permanent. This could cripple our economy and our economic recovery. It establishes various slush funds in order to increase government spending in education programs, in law enforcement, in health insurance; and it is presented as a truthful budget. But there is no reference to these slush funds that exist in this budget. That is not being truthful with the American public. It increases taxes on small business which is, of course, the engine that drives our economy.

And so I say, Mr. Chairman, it is impossible for me to support this budget although I looked longingly at doing so, the desire to do so; but it all comes to naught when you raise taxes on the American public. That puts us into a different situation entirely, and it stops the engine of recovery that I believe is under way.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express concern with the resurgence of the Leninist-Marxist FMLN in El Salvador. The FMLN is controversial in part because of its support for organizations such as the FARC, and for the public participation by some of its leaders in a pro-Al Qaeda rally where the U.S. flag was burned immediately after September 11, 2001. The U.S. Embassy in El Salvador was forced to condemn the written public statements related to the September 11 attacks that were issued by the FMLN and hostile toward the United States.

The leader of the FMLN has recently reiterated his commitment to communism. The FMLN continues to participate actively in international gatherings with violent and radical anti-U.S. organizations. Recent purges in the FMLN have reportedly left the party under the almost monolithic control of its most hard-line communist leaders.

Should the FMLN come to power in the upcoming elections, good bilateral relations between our two countries could be jeopardized. El Salvador's ARENA government provides military and intelligence cooperation, and is part of the coalition in the war on terror. The Salvadoran Government is also an active promoter of the free trade agreement with the United States.

To date, the United States Government has granted Temporary Protective Status to nearly 300,000 Salvadorans who are now living and working in the United States--workers who send home some $2 billion annually in remittances. If the FMLN controls the government of El Salvador following the presidential elections scheduled for March 2004, it could mean a radical change in United States policy as it pertains to the essentially free-flow of remittances from Salvadorans living in the United States to El Salvador.

Under an FMLN Presidency, the United States government would have no reliable counterpart to satisfy legitimate national security concerns, especially those regarding the threat posed by the FMLN's support of groups like the FARC. Therefore, if the FMLN takes control of the government in El Salvador, it may be necessary for the United States authorities to examine closely and possibly apply special controls to the flow of $2 billion in remittances from the United States to El Salvador--unfortunately to the detriment of many people living in El Salvador.

Mr. Speaker, as I sit and listen to my colleagues discuss the events in Haiti, I cannot help but think about the fact that although they are quite concerned about the recent events and that Mr. Aristide has been ousted, it is important I think for us all to recognize that it is the people of Haiti that ousted Mr. Aristide; and whether our colleagues in the House of Representatives do not like that or not, it is really irrelevant.

He was, in fact, a socialist and rather incompetent administrator; and it is not surprising that his regime came to an end.

At any rate, let me pose a question, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, would you believe that in the textbook in a school district in New Mexico, an introduction to that textbook which is, by the way, called ``500 Years of Chicano History In Pictures,'' states that, and remember, this is a textbook in a public school in the United States of America, specifically now in New Mexico. And this is not a question being posed. What I am going to read here is not what somebody just suggests.

This is what the textbook purports to be true. It said that this textbook was written ``in response to the bicentennial celebration of the 1776 American Revolution.'' You think good, nice idea, ``and it's lies.'' Its stated purpose is to ``celebrate our resistance.'' Who are they talking to here? Celebrate our resistance to being colonized and absorbed by racist empire builders?

The book describes defenders of the Alamo as slave owners, land speculators and Indian killers, calls Davey Crockett a cannibal, and it said that the 1857 war on Mexico, not war with Mexico, war on Mexico was an unprovoked U.S. invasion.

Chapters include headings like Death to the Invader. This is the chapter

heading: U.S. Conquest and Betrayal. Here is another chapter heading: We Are Now a U.S. Colony in Occupied America, and They Stole the Land.

Now this is a textbook. This is what has been printed. This is what has been adopted. This is what is being used in schools in New Mexico. I do not know how widespread this is. I do not know how many other schools have adopted it. I do not know whether it is on anybody's recommended reading list for children, but I do know that, as bizarre as all of this sounds, it is not unique. This is not an aberration. This kind of revisionist history, this kind of venomous descriptions of the United States is not unique.

That should concern us all, I think, and it is what I want to talk about to some extent this evening: What is happening to the teaching of our history, our culture and the heritage we call Western civilization, and why I think it is important to address this issue in this body.

There was an old chant during the 1970s, I think it was, maybe late 1960s, early 1970s. College campuses in reference to maybe Ho Chi Minh. Students would chant Ho Ho Ho, Western Civ has got to go. I remember that on my campus as a matter of fact, and it has gone by the way. It has gone. Seventy percent of all of the elite institutions of higher education in this country have dumped it from their course list and from the curriculum. They will not teach Western civilization anymore, and quite frankly, if this is a reflection of the way Western civilization is taught to students, not just in high schools but colleges, which of course it is, then I am glad they are not teaching it anymore because they are not teaching Western civilization. They are teaching a hatred for Western civilization and a hatred for everything we are as a Nation because, Mr. Speaker, we are a reflection of that civilization, a Judeo-Christian heritage about which we can be very proud, the story of which we should pass on to the children who come into our schools and the immigrants who come into this country.

Let us go through some other interesting examples of what we have found in the textbooks of America and why today at 10 o'clock across the street I and several other Members gathered to announce that we have introduced a resolution into this body. Simply put, the resolution says that children graduating from schools in this country should be able to articulate an appreciation for Western civilization. That is it. That is it. Does not mandate anything on schools. Does not demand that we change textbooks. Does not do anything. It just says that we think, as a body, that children graduating from our schools should be able to articulate an appreciation for Western civilization.

Would you think, Mr. Speaker, that that is a contentious amendment or resolution? Would you think that that is something where people would respond vitriolically and say how dare you? But they did. But they did.

The National Education Association thinks it is deplorable. By the way, there were similar press conferences held throughout the country today by State legislators or press releases they sent out saying they were introducing similar resolutions in their State legislature. We have probably, I do not know, 10 or 15 State legislatures that have agreed to take on this challenge. We have hundreds of individuals who have gone to our Web site on their own. I mean, it was amazing that even before we announced this today, we had all kinds of folks who had gone to the Web site, www.house.gov/tancredo, pulled up, and when the pop up came up, it is called Our Heritage, Our Hope. They went to that page, and they saw the resolution. They saw the resolution that the State legislature was going to introduce, and they saw a resolution they could bring to their school board, a similar resolution, asking that the board actually prepare students who would be able to articulate an appreciation for Western civilization. There is plenty of opposition to this. It is just amazing but there is.

People ask me why did I do this, why did I find it necessary to actually take this action and introduce a resolution. Well, Mr. Speaker, my colleagues know that I spend a great deal of time on the floor of this House and talking to you and other Members about immigration related issues and my concerns that our country is being divided up, it is being balkanized, that we are not encouraging assimilation, that we are encouraging this fragmentation of America by telling people who come here that they should not become part of the American experience; there is nothing really good about it; that they should keep their own languages. We should teach those languages in the school instead of English. We should encourage them to stay separate. We should encourage them actually to even keep their own political affiliation with the country they came from. We tell them they can become dual citizens. We send all kinds of messages to them that there is nothing good about America. Why would they want to attach themselves to this kind of a country?

We tell them this and we tell their children that when they come to school, and we wonder why we are having a hard time actually creating a homogenous society. We really wonder what is happening to us. This is one reason why I address this issue, because I believe that we are telling our children and the children of immigrants that there is nothing of value in Western civilization or in the United States of America.

I went to a school in my district about 2 or 3 weeks ago when we were on break. It was a high school, brand new high school, good principal, good teachers, as far as I could tell certainly, kids that had been relatively well-schooled in math maybe and reading. I do not know. I cannot tell you that I saw their CSAT scores or anything, but it seemed like a good school. Brand new, all the best accoutrements of education, and all these kids came to talk in an auditorium with me, and we had a really great kind of discussion, and then they started sending questions up to me.

One question that was posed to me was this. They said, what do you think is the most severe problem we face in this country, and I said, let me ask a question here, and then I can tell you what I think that problem is. I said how many people here in this auditorium, 150 I would say, 150 to 200, I am not sure how many, I said how many people here would say that you believe you live in the best country in the world. Simple question. There was a pause. A few hands began to go up. Maybe two dozen eventually raised their hand out of 150 to 200 people. I said, well, let me ask you about Western civilization. Do you realize you are a product of that and do you think by and large it is a good thing? Are you proud of that? Well, of course, no response to that one really. I said, well, then I can answer your question about what I think is the biggest problem we face. This is it.

Now, there were other kids in that room, Mr. Speaker, that I felt wanted to say, yes. You could tell that they were. I have been a teacher, was a teacher for years, and I have seen that look on their face. It is, I put my hand up, he may call on me, and I will be able to actually defend this proposition. That was the feeling I got that held them back, not necessarily that they did not like America, they did not think it was a good country, the best country to live in. It was, they could not defend it, they could not defend that proposition.

You wonder why. You wonder how it could be that by the time a child gets to high school that they would feel uncomfortable with saying, yeah, yeah, man, this is great, it is a country of freedom and we have got the Bill of Rights and just some things that you maybe reel off that you think are pretty good things and the reason why you live here, but they could not.

Not too long thereafter I met with a whole group of teachers. These were teachers from the Cherokee Creek schools. They were all social studies teachers. It was one of those in-service days. They were all supposed to come and hear me speak as part of their in-service. Some of them boycotted, would not come, because I was the speaker, understandable, but I would say again maybe 75 to 100 teachers.

I brought this issue up, and I told them what had happened in the other school. I said, do you believe it? Do you believe it? Again, maybe a couple of dozen, and I thought to myself, no wonder, of course. It is not a surprise then if the teachers in this room do not believe that they live in the best country

in the world, why would they teach their children that? Why would they teach students that? But what they teach them is to be critical of everything.

I want to emphasize, Mr. Speaker, I do not want us to tell children that all of our history is of glory and promise and hope. Certainly that is not true. Certainly there are many things we have done wrong, but let me suggest, Mr. Speaker, there is something absolutely unique about this country that deserves to be told, a story that deserves to be told and it is this.

Of all the countries on this planet, one, just one, started on the basis of ideas and ideals back in the 1700s. Every other country came about because somebody carved it up, conquered it, drew the lines or whatever, but we started the whole concept of starting a country with an idea. And where do these ideas come from? They are the ideas of Western civilization. They are the products of literally thousands of years of human development, starting with the Greeks and the Romans.

Certain concepts are uniquely Western. No other civilization can claim them. How about the concept of the rule of law as opposed to the rule of man? Uniquely Western. It is ours. It is good. It is a good thing. We are trying our best to right now plant those seeds in far off lands and are spending treasure, both monetary and human, in pursuit of that goal. The rule of law over the rule of man, not a dictator, not Saddam or Qusay or Uday, but the rule of law. That is what we are trying to do.

It is a noble cause. The men and women who are trying to plant those seeds are being fired on every day, some losing their lives, seems like every day.

But it is for a noble cause, Mr. Speaker. I believe that.

But how long would I believe those things if I had been taught every single day things like this: in a textbook called ``Across the Centuries,'' which is used for seventh grade history, and, boy, I have to put the word history in quotation marks there. That is my editorial comment. The book defines the word jihad as, ``To do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil.'' So now this is what children are taught the word jihad means.

When this child watches a program on television and this word is used, and it is a word used in conjunction with someone who has just blown himself or herself up, and a lot of other innocent human beings around them, this kid is supposed to think that that is what somebody is doing in order to resist temptation and overcome evil. And if we condemn jihad against the United States, then we are condemning someone who is just simply trying to overcome evil. This is what we tell our children?

In 2002, the ``New Guidelines for Teaching History'' in New Jersey's public schools failed to even mention America's Founding Fathers, the Pilgrims, or the Mayflower. In the Prentice Hall history textbook, used by students in Palm Beach County high schools, titled ``A World Conflict,'' the first five pages of the World War II chapter focus entirely on topics such as gender roles in the Armed Forces, racial segregation and the war, internment camps, and women and the war effort.

This is the way we introduce World War II to the students. It is all about this stuff, and not about trying to save civilization from a dark age; not about trying to stop a psychopathic killer who would have in fact destroyed the world. No, no, World War II was what do we think about the gender roles in the Armed Forces.

We have this list and many, many others on our Web site; and again I am going to say, Mr. Speaker, that it is www.house.gov/tancredo, and one can go to ``Our Heritage, Our Hope.'' Mr. Speaker, there are people who can help us out there. They can sign up and help us take a resolution to their school board. It is all on there, and we will give them all the help they want.

Now, here is McDougal's textbook. And, by the way, I used a textbook 30 years ago by McDougal that is completely different from this one when I taught seventh, eighth, and ninth grade civics at Drake Junior High in Arvada, Colorado.

Here is what this one says about American history. It teaches that Sitting Bull had strength of character while Custer was a fool and rode to his death. Now I am not saying Sitting Bull did not have strength of character and purpose; but, again, look at the way all these things are presented. It discusses U.S. soldiers killing Indian women and children in Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, but fails to mention the Indian killings and the kidnapping of white women and children the summer before Sand Creek.

It devotes 180 lines of text to discrimination in the United States in the late 1800s and 1900s, 180 lines of text. It notes in the context of the Nazi Holocaust that George Custer used the term ``final solution.'' It devotes 107 lines to the racist internment of Japanese during World War II, but nothing on the Japanese rape of Nanking or the 1942 Bataan death march. Not a word. It claims that anybody who opposes unlimited immigration is influenced by racism; that they were influenced by racism, especially in the 1920s, and were anti-immigrant.

Further, it editorializes that George W. Bush's conservative administration and policies are extreme. This is a textbook. It states that the Reagan-Bush ``conservative agenda'' limits advances in civil rights for minorities and that the conservatives' bid to dismantle Great Society social programs could be compared to abandoning the Nation.

I am telling you, Mr. Speaker. I mean, yes, I expect that here on the floor of the House. I expect to hear that from our opponents. Understandably, this is the place where this kind of tussle goes on. I expect to see it on the editorial pages of the papers in my district. They are all pretty liberal. I expect to see it by commentators in those newspapers, in the Wall Street Journal, in the New York Times, and The Washington Post. Yes, I expect to see all of this. But in a textbook? In a history textbook?

It also states that communism had potential totalitarian underpinnings. Potential? It contrasts Chiang Kai-Shek's repressive rule in China with Mao Zedong's benevolence toward peasants in the 1940s. It fails to mention the death of about 65 million Chinese after Mao came to power in 1949.

It classes sex roles in marriages with slavery as instances of inequality. It states that sex roles in marriage and in the family foster discrimination and inequality.

The Prentice Hall textbook ``America: Pathway to the Present'' contains references to Ngo Dinh Diem's repression in South Vietnam, but no references to the purge by Communists in North Vietnam from 1951 to 1956, which killed about 50,000 Vietnamese.

It states that Bush's 1,088 ads attacking Dukakis created a nasty contest, alienating some voters and contributing to low voter turnout.

It discusses the introduction of Old World diseases into the New World in the Colombian Exchange, but it does not discuss American diseases brought back to Europe. In fact, a lethal strain of syphilis, probably from America, killed many Europeans in the early 1500s.

Now, all these things are factual. And I am not suggesting for a moment that we should not talk about the problems that happened when Columbus came and the clash of civilizations. Would it be, I wonder, chauvinistic here and too one-sided to suggest that in the course of world history that whenever two civilizations clash the one with the greater technology is almost always, in fact always is the victor. And in the case of the clash of civilizations here on this continent, the fact is that the greater technology, the civilization with the greater technology, was the victor.

It does not excuse all of the problems that were inherent in that time frame and in that manifest destiny that we were pursuing. It does not excuse it and should not be overlooked. But is it the only story? Is that the only way to project American history and Western Civilization? Is that the only context we can actually think of to discuss this in for students? Is there anything that has happened here worthy of note from a positive standpoint?

The same ``Pathways to the Present'' argues that traditional sex roles deny women full equality because it does not empower them to perform as men. It

fails to mention in the brief reference it has to Thanksgiving that the Pilgrims were thanking God.

Now, there is Holt Rinehart Winston's ``American Nation in the Modern Era.''

And why I want to go through these, Mr. Speaker, I know it is lengthy, but I want to show the things I have pointed out were not aberrations. They were not just radical examples of this radical multiculturalist philosophy that actually permeates our system and our schools. It is the norm.

I talked yesterday to an editor at the Rocky Mountain News about this issue, and he said, well, you know, I do not know. I look at my kid's textbook and, admittedly, she is in a private school, so I am not sure it is the same thing, but I do not see a lot of this stuff. But he said, I do notice they are just not being taught American history, not any kind. Not this kind, but not any kind.

That certainly may be the case, that the problem here is there is simply a lack of American history or Western Civilization being taught all together. Whatever is the problem, whether it is this kind of revisionist history that is being taught, whether it is these kinds of skewed examples of who we are and what we are, or the fact that there is nothing at all, there is a problem. There is a problem because when we ask children, as I did, if they believed in who we are and what we are, they could not defend it. This is problematic, and it is something we should try to address.

Holt Rinehart Winston's ``American Nation in the Modern Era'' includes an exercise calling for students to criticize but not to defend nativists' support for immigration restrictions in the 1800s.

Again, could it be possible that some people during that period of time were concerned about things other than the race of the people coming in to the United States? Could it possibly be?

This links anybody who is opposed to immigration reform as racist and discriminating. It associates immigration restrictions with intolerance and discrimination.

I am surprised I did not get a mention in this book, but it is a little too early, I guess, for me.

It contains the theme that the only cause of violence in America, especially in the South in the Reconstruction area, were white racists. No other objection to radical reconstructionism. It devotes 1,456 lines to social protests by ethnic and other groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, but far fewer lines to U.S. involvement in World War I and II.

These things are not unique to just textbooks, by the way. At our colleges and universities there are a lot of awards that are given every year, called the Pollys, and they are for outrageous activities or behaviors or whatever on college campuses. They are as follows:

These are some of the events on college campuses: University of California at Berkeley. Student radicals broke into a Berkeley student office, stole the entire 2,000 press run of a conservative newspaper, the California Patriot, then threatened the editors with death when they filed a police report. It is believed the crime was committed by members of MeChA, a Mexican liberation group at Berkeley.

At Tufts University, hooded leftists assaulted a conservative student. The university let the attackers off with only a warning.

At San Diego State and at the University of North Carolina, campus administrators blame campus patriots and America for the terrorist attacks on September 11.

That was 2002.

The University of Oregon. Elements of the so-called Animal Liberation Movement specializes in ``liberating lab animals and destroying private property through vandalism and arson'' have an office at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Their newspaper, paid for by student fees, is The Insurgent. The December 8 issue, which contained an 8-page insert titled ``The ALF Primer: Your Guide to Economic Sabotage and the Animal Liberation Front''. It talks about arson and what else you can do to push this particular idea and agenda. A simple way to burn a vehicle is to place a sheet or blanket on top or underneath and soak it with a flammable liquid.

The university does not go after this group. They let them stay on campus.

The textbooks, of course, and professors at universities, things that are said about America and our involvement in Iraq, it is all absolutely incredible and absolutely one-sided. So that certainly does not help.

What one would hope is that children coming out of high schools in this country would have what is often referred to in the parlance in edu-speak as critical thinking skills. That is what we are supposed to teach children, critical thinking skills, so they are able to look at two sides of an argument and make some intelligent decision about which side is correct. But you can only have critical thinking skills if you are taught both sides of an issue, if you are shown there are two sides to these issues.

When children come out of our high schools and into these kinds of institutions, and we have literally scores of examples of things that happen and are stated on campuses all over the United States, it is no wonder that we see strange and bizarre reactions. For example, Antonin Scalia, a noted jurist speaking recently at an ivy league college almost was not allowed to speak. The students and professors protested the fact that he was allowed to speak on a college campus. They had big demonstrations outside. He is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, a noted jurist; and we had people in our country at institutions of higher education, and I have to put that in quotes, too, saying that he could not speak because what he said they did not agree with. It did not fit the model, this radical multiculturalist model that they had been force-fed for years. It is intolerance that we are, in fact, promulgating; intolerance for any other kind of idea other than that pushed by the radical left and the cult of multiculturalists out there.

Mr. Speaker, I believe it is problematic, and I believe there are things that we can and should do about it. If nothing else, we should simply start a debate about this. I hope that our resolution today helps generate some discussion and does help generate a debate about what exactly it is we expect from the students that are in our schools and what we expect from people coming into this country.

Mr. Speaker, I had occasion to talk to a bishop, a Catholic bishop in Denver, Colorado, named Bishop Gomez. We had a breakfast meeting awhile back. During the course of the discussion which naturally revolved around the issue of immigration, and I say naturally because that seems to be the issue I find myself discussing more and more often, Bishop Gomez said something to me and the other people at the table that I thought was quite incredible. He said, Congressman, I do not know why you are worried about the Mexicans coming into this country. He said, They do not want to be Americans. That was his comment.

I said, Bishop, that is the problem, of course. That does not make me feel good. If you think I am relieved by the fact that we have people coming into the country by the millions who do not want to be Americans, combined with the fact that everywhere they go in our society we tell them they should not be, if you believed what was in the textbooks that I just quoted, why would you want to connect with this country? You would want to take the benefits of a good job and send money back home, but you would not want to connect with it emotionally or politically. You would say, no, I think I will keep my citizenship in my country of origin. And between 5 and 10 million, huge numbers of people, are claiming dual citizenship in this country, which never happened before.

There are several great books, of course, but one is called ``The Clash of Civilizations'' by Samuel Huntington. I found it to be quite profound and quite provocative, and I certainly recommend it. But I harken back to another book I read a long time ago. It is called ``The Disuniting of America,'' and the author was a guy by the name of James Schlesinger, Jr. Mr. Schlesinger is not known as a conservative pundit or author, and he is not. He is a liberal. But the book was, I thought, quite compelling. Again, I recommend it to anyone. It is a great book, ``The Disuniting of America.'' He talks in

ways far more articulate than I, and he talks about this phenomenon. He talks about dividing this country and what we are doing to ourselves and what is happening to us. Why is it so hard for us to think about America and Western Civilization as a place and a civilization respectively of value? Is it because we are afraid to be patriots or to teach children to be patriots?

There is a fascinating article by Donald Kagan in ``The Intercollegiate Review'' in the spring 2002 called ``Terrorism and the Intellectuals.'' He says, ``Free countries like our own have had even more powerful claim on the patriotism of their citizens than do others, and our country has an even greater need of it than most. Every country requires a high degree of cooperation and unity among its citizens if it is to achieve the internal harmony that every good citizen requires. Unity and cooperation must rest on something shared and valued in common.

``Most countries have relied upon the common ancestry and traditions of their people as the basis of their unity, but the United States of America can rely on no such commonality. We are an enormously diverse and varied people, almost all immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. We come from every country on the face of the Earth. Our forebears spoke, and many of us still speak, many different languages. And all the races and religions of the world are to be found among us. The great strengths provided by this diversity are matched by great dangers. We are always vulnerable to divisions among us that can be exploited, to set one group against another and thus to destroy the unity that enables us to flourish.

``We live in a time when civic devotion has been undermined and national unity is under attack. The individualism that is so crucial a part of our tradition is often used to destroy civic responsibility. The idea of a common American culture, enriched by the diverse elements that compose it but available equally to all, is under assault. Attempts are made to replace our common culture with narrower and politically divisive programs that are certain to set one group of Americans against another.''

Mr. Speaker, it is called the textbooks of American public education.

He continues, ``The answer to these problems and our only hope for the future must lie in education, which philosophers have rightly put at the center of the propagation of justice and the good society. We rightly look to education to solve the pressing current problems of our economic and technological competition with other nations, but we must not neglect the inescapable political and ethical effects of education. We in the academic community have too often engaged in miseducation. If we encourage separatism, we will get separatism and the terrible conflicts in a society that it brings. If we encourage rampant individualism to trample on the need for a common citizenship, if we ignore civic education, the forging of a single people, the building up of a legitimate patriotism, then we will find ourselves a Nation of selfish individuals heedless of the needs of others. We will have the war of all against all, and we will have no common defense.

``The civic sense America needs can come only from a common educational effort. In telling the story of the American political experience, we must insist on the honest search for truth. We must permit no comfortable self-deception or evasion, no seeking of scapegoats; but the story of this country's vision of a free, democratic republic and of its struggle to achieve it need not fear the most thorough examination. Our country's story can proudly stand in comparison to that of any other land, and that story provides the basis for a civic devotion we so badly need.

``In spite of the shock caused by the attacks on New York and Washington and the discovery of anthrax in the mail, I am not sure we really understand how serious is the challenge that now faces us. We are only at the beginning of a long and deadly war that will inflict much loss and pain, one that will require sacrifice and steady determination during the very dark hours to come. We must be powerfully armed, morally as well as materially, if we are to do what must be done. That will take courage and unity, and these must rest on a justified and informed patriotism to sustain us through the worst times.

``A verse by Edna St. Vincent Millay provides a clear answer to the question of why Americans should love their country:

Not for the flag

Of any land because myself was born there

Will I give up my life.

But will I love that land where man is free,

And that will I defend.

``Ours is such a land.

``Up to now, too many American intellectuals and too many faculty members of our greater universities have been part of the country's problem. If we are to overcome the dangers that face us, we will need them to become part of the solution. My hope is that the natural, admirable, vitally necessary patriotism that is now gaining strength and expression among ordinary people of our land will help to educate those among us who feel intellectually superior to them. We will need that patriotism in the long, dangerous, and difficult struggle that lies before us.''

Certainly I cannot say it better than Mr. Kagan. Again, that was Donald Kagan from ``The Intercollegiate Review'' in the spring of 2002, ``Terrorism and the Intellectuals.''

My little attempt, Mr. Speaker, to do what Mr. Kagan is suggesting is the resolution I mentioned earlier today. Again, it simply says that all children graduating from schools in this country should be able to articulate an appreciation for Western Civilization. It will be interesting to see and hear the debate. It will be interesting to see and hear people say, no, they should not.

Mr. Speaker, as I listened to the comments that preceded me in the Special Order that dealt with our involvement in Iraq, certain thoughts came to mind that I think I would like to present this evening prior to getting involved with the issue of primary importance right now, or, I should say, not primary importance, but the issue I had intended to bring forward. I will do that, but I will do it subsequent to the thoughts I have had listening to our loyal opposition.

We have heard for approximately an hour that there were a number of things wrong with the intelligence reports that we received; that there are problems that we now face in trying to pacify Iraq; and that as a result of these things, there should be investigations. And a lot of people's integrity has been called into question, not the least of which the President of the United States.

There are many issues that I disagree with the President on, and I have not been hesitant to express my opinions when I do disagree. But on this issue of Iraq, let me just present a few ideas that may I hope stimulate some thinking about whether or not we were right to do what we did in Iraq.

I would ask, Mr. Speaker, for all of us to think about what pundits and political opponents would have said if in some time between, say, 1933, when Hitler took power in Germany, and 1939, when finally the world decided to go to war against Hitler, or at least a good portion of the world decided to go to war, what if at any point in time between 1933 and 1939 the United States and Great Britain and as many other countries as would join us would have taken a very, very bold action? And that action would have been preemptive. It would have been before any sort of aggressive action had been taken by Germany and by Hitler against the West, against the Allies, before Poland had been invaded, even before Czechoslovakia. Could we imagine what would have happened on this floor and throughout the world, really, in terms of the reaction, if America and a group of nations had taken preemptive action and stopped Hitler, if we had gone into Germany, if we had deposed Hitler and attempted to bring about a different and truly democratic regime?

Well, certainly there would have been an awful lot of second guessing. Certainly there would have been people here on the floor of the House talking about the fact that we really do not know for sure whether V-1 and V-2 rockets were being developed. Maybe the hard evidence would not have been available at the time. And so where were we? Why were we doing such things and was it not against all rules of engagement, was it not something that we should be challenging our administration for and saying you did the wrong thing?

We did not have all of the very specific information that we needed to make this decision. Could it be that we would have been questioning whether or not Hitler's intention would have been to, in fact, bring about the ``final solution'' for the Jews in the world?

All these things would have been speculative, certainly. We could not have perhaps proven that that was his intent. We would have been perhaps without all of the hard evidence to bring in front of the world body to prove that the decision we made to preemptively act was right. But if we had done so, just think about what would have been the outcome of that decision and that action. Fifty million people, 50 million people died as a result of our unwillingness to take action. National treasure, untold national treasure had to be expended; and, of course, hundreds of thousands of American lives were lost to try and stop him and stop the Axis powers after they made their intentions perfectly clear.

Now, I think that there is a lesson to be learned here, and it is that at some point in time it is imperative that the civilized world take action and, in fact, take preemptive action to try to prevent an occurrence similar to World War II. If we could have done that now, knowing what was the outcome of World War II, knowing what it took to actually stop him when we chose to finally get involved, who would suggest that we should not have taken preemptive action?

Does anyone really believe that we should have waited knowing now what we know? Does anybody believe that we should have waited for Hitler and the Japanese empire to strike first? Well, we did. That is history. And we know the outcome. So I will suggest to the body that there was a great deal of evidence presented not just to the United States but to many other countries and many other intelligence networks around the world that would lead us to believe that there was a problem in the making in Iraq. No one, not a single person has ever denied the fact that Iraq was in the process of developing nuclear weaponry and weapons of mass destruction; and, of course, we knew that they had used similar weapons in the past. So that was not a question.

The question is would he have, would Saddam Hussein have actually used those weapons had he gotten ahold of them? How long would it have taken for Iraq to actually obtain those weapons? Those are questions we do not know the answer to right now, but we can be fairly sure by all of the empirical evidence that we have in front of us that they have would have developed the weapons and that either he would have used them or think of this, what if, what if those weapons became disposable to the two sons of Saddam Hussein, Uday and Qusay? Does anybody really believe that they would like to live in a world where those two guys would have the ability to push the button?

Well, now they are gone. Saddam is in custody. Uday and Qusay are history. So now we can stand on the floor of the House and we can get on all of the talk shows and say we really did not have all of that to worry about. It really was not worth the expenditure of our resources, both human and financial. Well, maybe not. But I have to say that from everything we know about history and from everything that we know, absolutely, unequivocally know, not the if's, not the ``I wonder if,'' but what we know about the regime in Iraq would lead us to believe that the action we took eventually would end up saving a lot of lives. Not only that, but we are now engaged in a very difficult process and that is to impose democracy, to plant the seeds of democracy in an area of the world in which, of course, it is a very alien idea. And the task is incredible, it is true, but think of the task we have faced when we chose to rebuild Germany and Japan and to rebuild those countries on democratic models. In Japan, of course, where it had never ever existed before, and in Germany, where it had been bastardized, the concept of democracy. We undertook that huge, monumental task; and people could have said in 1946, 1947, 1948, look at the problems we are facing. How come we have not been able to construct these democratic models over there by now? Why are American troops still occupying Germany and Japan? Why are our people still at risk? Why are we spending hundreds of millions of dollars which would equate in today's terms to hundreds of billions of dollars in the rebuilding of both Japan and Germany? Why are we doing it? They would have been there and they may have been here on the floor saying those things at that time. I know that is true.

I am not saying they are not legitimate questions and that they should not be raised. All I am saying to you is that we have history on our side. We know what happens when you do not undertake the task, and we know what happens when you do in fact persevere, when you say we are going to rebuild these countries, it is going to take a lot of money, a lot of time and a lot of effort because they are not used to this concept; but did it work out to the benefit of humanity that we did what we did? Of course it did.

Who argues that we should not have rebuilt Western Europe and even Japan? They became prosperous. They became willing to accept the ideas and ideals of Western civilization, which will get me into my next area of discussion here. But we faced all of these things. We did it. We persevered.

In terms of the time frame that has expired between the ending of major hostility to today, it is a blink of the eye. Think how long it took for the United States of America to perfect this concept of a republic based on democratic ideals. It did not happen overnight. You may recall at the end of our revolution many people went to George Washington with a council, figuratively speaking, a council and said, We want you to be king. And, of course, Washington refused and said that is not why we fought a war against a king. That is not the kind of government we were going to establish. Even then, of course, we did not warm to this concept of a republic very quickly.

The Articles of Confederation were problematic. There were things in them that did not actually address all of the problems that we had in this country trying to pull it together. Just as today we are watching Iraq in this process, and we are saying, gee, whiz, even their constitution, or the lead up to the constitution, even what we have developed in Iraq today is problematic because we still do not know whether or not exactly what the role of religion will be in Iraq.

Well, you may recall that we did not know exactly what the role of slavery would be in the United States and we refused to address it in the Constitutional Convention because we could not come to an agreement. So we put it off and, admittedly, it led to a lot of violence. But the issue was settled. The republic remained and we now still present to the world the best possible hope for stable government and for peace. But it did not come easily. It did not happen when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. Lots of things, even bloodshed followed the surrender of the British.

Peace will not come easily in Iraq. Democracy will not come easily in Iraq. Many trials and tribulations lay ahead, much bloodshed, certainly true. Should we abandon it because there are these obstacles? Shall we walk away because the challenge is very, very difficult? Well, that is the proposition that is put before us. And I suggest to you that planting democracy and the concept of a republic in a part of the world where it had not heretofore existed is a worthy endeavor.

I also suggest to my colleagues that our efforts in Iraq up to this time can be described as noble.

This is an interesting situation that we are in; and this develops into another discussion that I want to have tonight, and that is the value of Western Civilization and what it really means, because tomorrow I am going to introduce a resolution, and I am joined by many of my colleagues, and the resolution is a simple one.

It says that this body, the Congress of the United States, believes that all children graduating from schools in this country should be able to articulate an appreciation for Western Civilization; and it may seem to some at first to be a heavy topic, some amorphous idea, and one might wonder what are its practical implications and why I would be doing that, as I say, and I and my colleagues would be doing this.

I think in a way it is ironic that we are desperately attempting to implant concepts of Western Civilization in a place called Iraq while we, in this country, challenge their relevance in our schools and in our textbooks and certainly in the media in our culture. I believe that we are in a war that can be described as a clash of civilizations. There is a great book by an author by the name of Samuel Huntington called the ``Clash of Civilizations,'' and I remember reading this book, I do not know, maybe 8 years ago and thinking that it was interesting; but I remember going back and reading it again after 9/11 and thinking that it was profound and prophetic.

I believe the United States is in a clash and Western Civilization is in a clash of civilizations. It is a real clash, if you will, a real war. It is bloody. There are times when the clash becomes even more violent and times when it subsides, but the clash is real and it will be here for some time. The clash is with radical Islam. It is with people who have said openly and repeatedly that their desire is to come here and kill you and your children, me and my children, to eradicate us from the planet.

There is an interesting diary, I do not know whether it was on Al Jazeera, but it was published some time ago, and it is a diary of a person who became a suicide bomber. He talks about in this diary why he has to do what he believes he has to do. He says that the ultimate threat to his view of Islam is the West, is the concept of a republic, a democratic republic. He said that this is a threat to the heart; this is a threat to the existence of Islam as he saw it because what the West provided, through democratic principles and free enterprise, was the good life essentially, what it sort of boils down to. It provided the good life. People could achieve more and more; and, yes, they could achieve in monetary ways, but they could also achieve even from the standpoint of advancing oneself and one's self-esteem, and this he said would turn people away from looking to the afterlife as the ultimate goal or as the ultimate glory.

I can tell my colleagues that certainly there are aspects of Judeo- Christian tenets that tell us also that it is what comes next that is important, but Western Civilization has allowed us many things. It has provided a system and a set of ideas and ideals that have served humanity well; and, yes, those ideas and ideals are a threat to other ideas; and, therefore, a clash occurs.

How do we fight this war? How do we deal with this clash? Well, of course, it will require the force of arms at times, and it will require the commitment of resources, and it will require something else. It will require a belief in who we are, which by the way is the title of Samuel Huntington's new book, which I certainly commend to everyone, ``Who We Are.''

We have to know the answer to that question. We have to know who we are. We have to understand that this Nation uniquely was created on the basis of ideas and ideals, all other nations formed for other reasons, but ours started for a brand new reason, ideas. Those ideas were held up to the world, and people came from all over the world to embrace them. Uniquely, we said this old concept that people should be ruled by individuals is not acceptable; it has not worked out well and it does not accrue to the benefit of most human beings. So Western Civilization was based upon a different idea, and it is called the rule of law, not the rule of man, not one person making arbitrary decisions about everything that affects our lives, but the law making those decisions as developed by people who represent all of us, a brand new concept that we put into effect and that I think serves the world well.

Western Civilization was based on other ideals, the ideal of the individual being superior to that of the collective; the idea that humans had inalienable rights. This is a Western concept. No place else does it show its face but in Western Civilization.

Today, in America, however, there is a movement, a philosophy, I call it radical multiculturalism. It has taken hold of our society. It is seeping its way into our public schools and on to our college campuses. This philosophy may be peculiar to most Americans; but it does seem to be taking hold among elites, academics, the media, and certain groups within the political establishment. It is a corrosive movement, and its purveyors are threatening to accomplish in the classrooms what they could not get through elections: one, to erase the notion of citizenship; and, two, to teach young people that there is nothing positive or unique about America and that Western Civilization contributed nothing to

world history but imperialism, slavery, and discord.

Let me emphasize something here. I do not for a moment want to tell the children of America, the citizens of America or the world that we believe that we have never done anything wrong and that Western Civilization is nothing but a set of ideas and principles that have been put into place without problem. Many of those ideals are not yet reached, by the way. So I am totally and completely supportive of the thought that we have to teach our children the truth about who we are, the truth, warts and all; but I have to tell my colleagues I am becoming extremely concerned, as I think many others are, about the fact that we concentrate so much of our effort and time on teaching children and immigrants into this country that there is nothing good about Western Civilization or about the United States as a representation of that civilization.

These are some examples that we have taken, by no means exhaustive. These are just tiny little snippets of some of the things we tell our children in textbooks and some of the things that, in fact, teachers and professors have told our children about America, about the West, all in an attempt to essentially eliminate any concept that there is something good and special about us and who we are, and I will go through them in a minute.

I just want to tell my colleagues about something that happened to me just a short time ago.

I was visiting a high school in my district, and there were probably 150 to 200 students who came into the auditorium to have a discussion with me; and it went on for, as I say, about 60 minutes or so, and at the end, some students were sending up written questions. One of them said, What do you think is the most serious problem facing the country? I said, well, I am going to answer that question with a question, if you do not mind, and that is this, How many people in here believe that we live in the greatest Nation on the Earth or as Michael Medved always says, on God's green Earth? And I looked around. It was fascinating to see what happened out there.

This was a suburban district in Douglas County, Colorado, middle- to higher-income families in the area, predominantly white. If one looked up suburbs in the dictionary, probably a picture of this particular area, and when I asked the question how many of you believe that you live in the best country in the world, about two dozen raised their hands, most of them very sheepishly I should say, and the rest just sat there. Some looked uncomfortable, and I must admit that I thought to myself at the time that some of them looked like they actually wanted to say yes, but they were afraid to. They looked at the teachers who were lined up on the sides of the walls. They were kind of looking at them like, gee, should I actually say this, and more than that I think that they were thinking, if I say yes, if I say yes I believe I live in the best country in the world, someone might challenge me, maybe even he will, and would I be able to defend that principle.

These are high school students; and I said, well, let me ask you about do you realize that we are a product of Western Civilization and that how many of you would agree that this is something again about which you can be proud? Maybe a dozen at that one, and I said, well, this is what I consider to be one of the biggest problems facing America, what is happening to you and what has happened to you as a result of this multiculturalist philosophy that we push in the schools.

This idea that all cultures are at worst the same; at best they are better than ours; and that we cannot make these kinds of statements about what is better or best, about which country is better or best, which civilization is better.

Now, that happened, and I know it is not unique to this little typical suburban school in my district. I could have asked that question in any high school in America and the response would have been similar; tepid, sheepish support, with most people saying, I do not know, I do not care, and what does it matter?

I wonder how this could have happened. How is it that people living here in this country, at this time, can look at the rest of the world and not recognize that every single day millions of people are struggling to get here, if not to America at least to Western Europe; that they are struggling to get to Western civilization? And I have to ask, how many people do you know that are struggling to go the other way? Is that not empirical evidence of some sort that what we have is pretty good; that it is worthy of our allegiance, worthy of continuing?

People ask me why I am so involved with the immigration issue; why I speak on that issue so often. Well, there are a whole bunch of reasons, and they deal with jobs and the environment, and the cost, and all that sort of thing. But after all of that is said and done, I worry about this. I worry about the fact that we are not doing a very good job of creating a society, a cohesive, homogenous society out of all of the disparate parts that make up America. I worry that we are working very hard to divide us, to divide this Nation into camps; into Balkanized areas that are based on linguistic, cultural, or political differences while simultaneously trying to erase anything that smacks of an attempt to bring people together around a set of ideas other than the concept of diversity, which is the only thing that multiculturalists will say is worthy of our allegiance.

I worry about what will happen to us in this clash of civilizations when it is not only the force of arms necessary to win the day but it is the force of ideas. For us to be successful as a people, as a civilization, as a country we have to know who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. We have to believe in who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. And I worry that too few of us know who we are, where we came from or where we are going, and that this in the long run will prove to be our undoing.

So that is why I talk about immigration, and that is why I talk about issues like this. That is why I worry about the fact that in the textbook called Across the Centuries, which is used for 7th grade history, the book defines the word jihad as ``To do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil.''

Now, maybe that is somebody's interpretation of jihad. But, remember, this was not even suggested as someone's idea, this is presented as the interpretation, the definition of jihad: ``To do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil.''

I guess we would not want to tell children, would we, that that word implied something quite different? It is a call to arms to those people who believe we should be annihilated, and everything we believe in should be wiped out because it is a threat to fundamentalist Islam. Well, we need to say it, because it is true. We may not like it, we may feel uncomfortable by telling children the truth, but it is imperative that we do so. That is not the only definition of jihad.

In 2002, the New Guidelines for Teaching History in New Jersey's public schools failed to even mention America's Founding Fathers, the pilgrims, or the Mayflower. How do you tell the history of the United States, I might ask, without mentioning the Founding Fathers, the pilgrims, or the Mayflower?

Maybe it is a good thing that the book did not, because in many textbooks, and certainly out of the mouths of many teachers, the mentioning of these people would be in derogatory terms. The Founding Fathers, all white men, who were slave owners, who came here to pillage and rape and whatever. Columbus came here to destroy paradise. I have seen that.

So maybe it was better that they did not mention it. Do you think at least some reference to the ideas and ideals upon which this Nation was founded should have been made, and the fact that people struggled and died to bring those ideals into fruition? Do you think that was worthy of mentioning?

In a Prentice Hall textbook used by students in Palm Beach County High Schools, titled A World Conflict, the first five pages of the World War II chapter focused almost entirely on topics such as gender roles in the armed forces, racial segregation in the war, internment camps, and women and the war effort.

Do you think I make this stuff up? You can go and look, if you do not believe me, that this is in fact being taught to our children. This is in the textbooks of the schools in this Nation.

By the way, Madam Speaker, if anyone were to be so inclined, they can go to our Web site, www.House.Gov/Tancredo and they can click on a pop- up that says Our Heritage, Our Hope, and they can see what I am talking about here, and they can also sign up to help us in this endeavor to change the situation. And I have some very specific things I would like them to do.

A Washington State teacher substituted the word ``winter'' for the word ``Christmas'' in a carol to be sung at school programs so as not to appear to be favoring one faith over the other. The lyrics in Dale Wood's carol From an Irish Cabin were changed to read ``the harsh wind blows down from the mountains and blows a white winter to me.'' Not ``Christmas.''

I was in a school, again in my district, again a typical public school, and it was right before Christmas. I was talking to a lot of, I think they were in grades 5 and 6 in an elementary school. When I left the room, I said Merry Christmas. Again, there was this kind of an uneasy response, and some kids said okay. And as I was walking out the lady who had invited us to come and speak, who was an aide at the school, said, you know, the principal does not like us using the word ``Christmas'' here. I said what is that, as I pointed to a Christmas tree in the hallway? And she said, that is a seasonal tree. And I said, are you telling me that we cannot use ``Christmas''? And she said, no, the teachers do not.

So I went back and I yelled, as I was leaving and all the kids were coming out, I said, Merry Christmas, and they all said, Merry Christmas. But this is happening, of course, in schools all over the United States. I bet if people go to their own schools and check these things out, they will see what I am saying is not just unique to my little suburban district in Colorado.

In a school district in New Mexico the introduction to a textbook called 500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures states that it was written ``In response to the bicentennial celebration of the 1776 American Revolution and its lies. Its stated purpose is to ``celebrate our resistance to being colonized and absorbed by racist empire builders.'' The book describes defenders of the Alamo as ``slave owners, land speculators, and Indian killers,'' Dave Crockett as a cannibal, and the 1857 ``War on Mexico'' as an unprovoked U.S. invasion. The chapter headings include, Death to the Invader, U.S. Conquest and Betrayal, We Are Now a U.S. Colony, In Occupied America, and They Stole the Land.

Now, again, I certainly do not say that mistakes were not made, that manifest destiny as an idea and an ideal did not have inherent in it problems for other people. I certainly believe that is true, and I believe we should teach our children about those problems. But this is what we call objective history text?

I am going to repeat it. This book, it said, was written ``in response to the bicentennial celebration of the 1776 American Revolution and its lies.'' Its stated purpose is to ``celebrate our resistance to being colonized and absorbed by a racist empire builder.''

Children are often taught only the most negative things about the United States and about Western civilization. And if these efforts go unchecked, children will lose any real connection to the goals and aspirations and ideals of America and the West, the ideals exemplified in the Constitution and articulated by the people who founded the country over 200 years ago. If we fail to instill these values in our children, we risk losing our national identity.

It is not surprising to me that a brand new phenomenon is developing in the United States with regard to the immigrant community. Since about 1947, the United States has allowed people to claim a dual citizenship. Most of this happened in 1947 as a result of the creation of the State of Israel, and to provide Israelis here with the opportunity to travel back and forth and to state their allegiance to Israel by accepting a dual citizenship. But we never had very many people, to tell you the truth, that actually accepted that offer. It numbered in the hundreds of thousands, at the most, at any given time in America.

Today estimates are that there are between, we do not know for sure, 5 and 10 million people in this country who claim a dual citizenship, mostly with Mexico, after Mexico allowed Mexican nationals to keep their citizenship once they came to the United States. This happened a couple of years ago, and the number skyrocketed.

When we tell people that they should keep their political associations, political allegiances to other countries, that they should keep their language of origin, that they should not actually blend into this American mosaic, should we be surprised by the fact that they do not?

McDougal's ``The Americas,'' another textbook, states that the Reagan-Bush conservative agenda limits advances in civil rights for minorities. Again, these are statements of fact by a textbook, not somebody's opinion, and that the conservatives' bid to dismantle the Great Society's social programs could be compared to abandoning the Nation.

It goes on to include a text stating that Communism had potentially totalitarian underpinnings, and contrasts future Taiwan President Chiang Kai-Shek's repressive rule with Communist Chinese Dictator Mao Zedong's benevolence toward peasants in the early 1940s.

Now, if we did not know anything else and read this, why would you not believe it to be true? If the book and your teacher failed to mention the deaths of about 65 million Chinese after Mao came to power in 1949 or Taiwan's peaceful transformation into a thriving, pluralistic multiparty democracy, no one would know this. They would never understand it. They would never truly understand world history. Would we be lying to tell children this was the case? Would it be chauvinistic of us to suggest that it was not just the possibility of some totalitarian underpinnings, but a totalitarian regime, and that Communism could only survive out of terror.

Is it not acceptable for us to tell the truth? That is what I wonder. Why are we so fearful about telling children about who we are really, all of the warts but all of the good things, too.

Here is a study by Philip Sadler, director of science education at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which shows that students who had taken high school physics classes that used textbooks did substantially worse than high school classrooms that used no textbooks at all. I would suggest that if these other textbooks, these history textbooks are an example of what we are doing, it would be better to not use them at all.

Madam Speaker, tomorrow I am going to ask this Congress to pass a simple resolution, and that resolution will state, as I said, that all children graduating from our schools should be able to articulate an appreciation for Western civilization. That is it. No mandate, no textbook mandates, no curriculum change, just whatever you do, this should be an outcome.

Simultaneously we are going to be joined by State representatives all over the country who will be introducing into their representative legislatures a similar resolution, and we are going to be joined by hundreds of Americans, and this is where other people can get involved because we are going to be joined by I hope eventually hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of American citizens who will go to their school board with a resolution that we have on that Website that I mentioned earlier, www.house.gov/trancredo, and go to Our Heritage, Our Hope, and there you will see a copy of a resolution that a person could take to their school board and ask their school board to adopt.

Now, the NEA, the National Education Association, has already attacked this proposal. And I keep thinking to myself, what is there about this? And not just the NEA. Tomorrow is when we are going to actually drop this resolution and announce it, but we have had all kinds of people responding saying that in fact this is a bad idea. Now, please, let us really think about this for a second. They are saying it is a bad idea to teach children facts so that they could articulate an appreciation for Western civilization. I mean, is that not the definition of what would be a good history education, a good

civics education? Should children not be able to articulate those principles?

We can argue whether they are right or wrong, but we should be able to have children who can articulate them, understand who we are, where we come from and where we are going.

I know that this is a stretch for a lot of people. It is hard for a lot of people to get their hands on this because it is not an issue that you can condense into a bumper sticker, but I encourage people to think through this and think about the possibility that it is important for us and for our civilization to actually transmit these goals and ideas to the next generation. We cannot continue to teach only the negative. Doing so contributes to the balkanization of the United States into subgroups, subcategories, and hyphenated Americans.

In Numbers U.S.A., an organization that does a lot of great work and also has a great Website, Numbers U.S.A. talks about the fact that if we continue as we are in terms of population growth and the source of our population growth in this country, being 90 percent from immigrants, that by the year 2100 two-thirds of the people here in the United States will be descendants of people not yet here at the present time. Think about that. In 96 years, two-thirds of the people living in this country will be descendants of people not yet here. Think about that and then think about what we are teaching them, the folks that are coming in and the folks that are here about who we are. How can we expect this new Nation essentially that will be created by 2100 to be steeped in the same goals and principles and ideas?

Again, Madam Speaker, I hope that we will be joined by hundreds of thousands of Americans all over the country who will be willing to say that it is important for their schools, it is important for our civilization that we teach children to appreciate the value of Western civilization and there is something we all can do about it. I am going to do what I can do here, State legislators will do what they can do in their respective bodies, and then it is up to the people of this country to take this on and move it forward. It will determine whether we are a Nation at all in years to come.

Mr. Speaker, it has been an interesting time. I sat listening to our friends on the other side of the aisle decry the effects of outsourcing of jobs, which of course I agree, there is a significant problem. It is interesting to note also that during this entire hour when we have talked about jobs and when we have talked about the fact that American workers, even those that are employed, are making less than they were before, that wage rates have been depressed throughout the country, which is undeniably true for people who are low skilled, and it is also the case for hundreds of thousands of Americans who have been displaced from high-tech jobs because of the number of people who have come into this country under H-1B visas. And it is also true that we are facing a crisis, I think, in our system and in our economy. The economy grows, but jobs do not. Job growth is not there, and the jobs that we are seeing being developed are jobs that by and large are not going to Americans.

Recently California published a study which showed that although there had been a very marginal improvement in job growth in the State, when it was looked at carefully, it was found that those jobs did not go to American citizens. They went to people coming here from foreign countries, aliens, some legal, most not. Those are the people getting the jobs. Interestingly, we did not hear a word in 1 hour of discussion about jobs, and the problems with outsourcing and the rest, not one word was mentioned by the other side during their hour here about the fact that immigration, massive immigration into this country, costs Americans jobs.

It also costs American workers wages because of course this is a supply-demand system; and the more supply there is, the more downward pressure there is on wages, and we see it all of the time throughout the country, but no one talked about that. No one dared mention the word ``immigration'' in this discussion of 1 hour about jobs. They want to blame it all on President Bush's policy or the administration's policies regarding outsourcing. I am certainly critical of the administration's policy on a number of issues, particularly their immigration policy; but I ask people to be evenhanded in their criticism of what the problem is.

I have had a bill now for over a year, and certainly we will reintroduce, and I will be interested to see how many on the other side of the aisle will sign on. It is a bill that abolishes the H-1B visa program. This is a program where supposedly companies would be able to bring in people for a short period of time with very specific skills, skills that were not available here in the United States, no worker possessed them, they had to go overseas to get them.

Now, we have to think about that. Really and truly, how many people do you think there are in the United States presently employed in the high-tech industry or have been employed in the high-tech industry who would not be able to meet the criteria that we have established for these jobs, these certain high-tech jobs? I suggest very few. I suggest that American citizens are quite capable. I believe that we are producing enough people in our colleges and university system to take the jobs that may be available; but, of course, the difference is American workers were demanding higher pay, and so corporations began to look at H-1B visas to bring in cheap labor. So they forgot about the provision that said you can only bring people into this country under this particular visa status that had special skills and that would go back in a short period of time.

Mr. Speaker, guess what? Nobody has gone back. We have maybe a million people in the country with H-1B visas. Nobody has the slightest idea how many, if any, have gone back home after the 5 years were up that they were supposed to be able to work in the United States. I assure Members most, if not all, of them are still here.

I have a bill to abolish that category. I do not think, no, I am positive there is not a single Member who spoke here for the last hour that is on that bill.

How about the bill to attack the L-1 visas status which is now being used by major corporations to bring people in

for the same reason because they will work cheaper? They are higher- skilled people. We are not talking about people working in low-paying jobs. These are highly skilled people, and companies are bringing them into the United States under the L-1 visas status.

Where are these people when we are talking about what is happening to American people because our borders are porous and our immigration policy is dictated by the politics of it and not by the economics of it, at least not the economics of workers in the United States, but certainly the economics of major corporations? In fact, no one disagrees that massive immigration of both legal and illegal workers into this country is a benefit to employers. Cheap labor is a benefit to employers. Cheap labor is cheap to employers. It is not cheap to the rest of us, to the people who pay the taxes for the schools, for the highways, for the housing, for the health care, for the incarceration rates. Those all get passed on to the taxpayer so that there can be a higher profit rate.

I understand that every corporation wants to achieve that; that is their primary goal, and it is under our system appropriate that they should be seeking the best returns possible for their investors. Then is it not, however, the responsibility of this government to try to do what we can to protect to the extent possible, without becoming incredibly protectionist and starting trade wars, but are there not things that we can do in this country to try to protect American workers? It is our responsibility to do so.

Should we not be able to control the flow of immigration into this country, recognizing that that massive flow of immigration has an effect on working Americans, if not taking the jobs, certainly in terms of depressing wage rates? But nowhere in the diatribe that we heard for an hour was there one reference to this phenomenon, to the immigration phenomenon. Why? Why, because, of course, as they accuse the Republicans of being tools of big corporations, big business, they forget that for the most part they are tools of political subgroups that they look to for votes.

It is a political problem we face. It is true that our side of the aisle caters to the business interests who want cheap labor. It is also true that the other side of the aisle caters to the immigration community and looks at them as a source of voters and as a political support base, and they are fearful of ever saying anything that might discourage that political support base.

If you are going to talk about this issue, then you better talk about all of that issue, all of the problems that we confront in this country because of the fact that we have immigration policies and economic policies that are detrimental to American workers.

This issue, the immigration issue, is certainly one that is contentious, certainly one that causes a lot of very, very intense feelings to emanate out of the Members of the body here, and for a long time an issue no one wanted to talk about. I would come to this floor night after night to bring my concerns to the body and to those people who were listening, but it was a lonely struggle.

I am happy to say that things do appear to be changing, that American voices are being heard. Not too long ago, the President of the United States proposed a new immigration plan, one that although he said was not amnesty was, from my point of view and, I think, from the point of view of most people, certainly an amnesty plan for people who would be coming here under some sort of guest worker arrangement, and all those people who are here illegally would be given the ability to stay even though they broke the law of the land coming in here.

There has been a significant response to that proposal. Our office, my office in Denver and the office here in Washington combined over the course of about a day and a half or 2 days received almost 1,000 phone calls after the President made that speech. Nothing that has ever happened in this country, not the war, nothing, no proposal for any initiative ever generated that kind of response. 99.999 percent of the people calling were upset by the proposal, were furious, as a matter of fact, at the President for putting it forward. Some of my colleagues, in fact many of my colleagues, heard the message because their phones rang off the hook also. Their e-mails came in by the hundreds and thousands, something that they did not expect.

I do not think it was something that even the White House expected. I think that they felt the President could make this speech, move on, satisfying a certain constituency, hoping that we would pass the bill eventually in this Congress, and that it would be something of relatively little note. But boy, oh boy, oh boy, were they wrong. People noticed, and they called, and they are still calling.

It is important, I think, for people who listen to this to recognize that their voices can be heard. I know it is simply a frustrating experience to pick up the phone or write a letter to our Congressman. Does anybody really care? Does anybody really read it? Believe me, you were heard. You were heard. So much so that I do not believe the President's plan will even evolve into a piece of legislation that we will see on the floor of the House. If it does, I predict that it will fail. And it should.

There are signs, as I say, that things are changing. Perhaps one of the most incredible things I have read in the recent past that indicates that there has been a change in the attitude of the American people when it comes to the issue of immigration and immigration control, not just a change on the part of the American people, because, frankly, that has been there for quite a while, poll after poll after poll tells us that 70 percent, maybe sometimes 75 percent, of the people in this country say no more illegal immigration. A majority say they want a reduction in legal immigration, until we can get a handle on the problem. And it is a problem.

For the longest time major media outlets would simply ignore that, as well as the Members of Congress, as well as the President of the United States, be he George Bush or Bill Clinton, would ignore the fact that those people were out there and that they were telling pollsters how they felt, because we always assumed we could finesse this; that although people were upset about it, it was not their number one issue, and, by the way, we have this constituency we are trying to grab onto, this huge constituency, this growing number of people coming into this country as immigrants, and they will become voters, and we want to get their votes, and so we certainly cannot attack the whole process that allowed them to come here, legally or illegally. So we figure we can finesse this, and all the people who say in those polls that they are against it, they are going to say it, but that is not their number one issue, so they will let it slide.

How did the major media approach this? Anyone that suggested we need to look at our immigration policy was xenophobic; at best xenophobic, at worst racist. That is the only way the media ever looked at it, because that is the only way they could explain how someone would stand up on the floor of the House or in a State legislature anywhere in the country, a city council or anyplace else and talk about the possibility that massive immigration into this country could be problematic, and that we had to be able to control it, and that we have to know who is coming into this country. We have to know how many, for what purpose and for how long. In order to call ourselves a Nation, that is a requirement, to be able to actually control your borders. That is a requirement.

But the major media would follow the lead of papers like the Wall Street Journal that every single year for years on the Fourth of July would write an editorial saying that borders should be eliminated, they don't matter anymore, they are insignificant, and they just impede the flow of goods and services. And, after all, the only thing that should determine that flow of goods and services and people, the only thing that should determine that is the market. And so borders are irrelevant, they said. They wrote that every year, year after year, on the Fourth of July. All of the major media in this country followed along.

9/11 comes along, a lot of things changed, and one thing that changed was the Wall Street Journal stopped printing that editorial on the Fourth of July. It does not mean they stopped believing it, they just stopped printing it for obvious reasons. But something is happening.

This is a reprint of a cover story in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, January 25, 2004, by a gentleman by the name of Lee Green. This is really an incredible article, incredible because, of course, I think it is very profound, it is certainly well written, it is well documented, but it appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

The Los Angeles Times, I think if it had a logo, if it had a masthead, it would be of the three monkeys with their eyes covered, their ears covered, their mouth covered because they did not want to see, hear or talk about this problem. It did not exist in the Los Angeles Times. Immigration was not a problem for the Los Angeles Times. They could go to their offices, their ivory tower offices, and look out over a sprawling city and think, gee, you know, I'm sure those people down there are having a great time and life is good for them, so as long as I don't have to participate in any of this stuff, as long as I can get home easily, have my limo pick me up, and I don't have to worry about a lot of these kinds of things that the poor trash out there worry about, then we can continue to think about markets as being the only thing that should determine the flow of people.

But, as I say, something happened. And so they agreed to publish this article. I am certainly not going to read it all, but I am going to take excerpts. It starts out:

By birth, by foot, by automobile, from every other State and other country, legally and illegally, people have arrived in California for decades in unrelenting swells, human surf breaking steadily on a vast shore. Occasionally a big set rolls in and harasses State and local officials trying to determine how many new classrooms to build or where to bury the trash, but Californians take it in stride.

You can complain, but what good would it do you? You can complain about winter, too, but it comes anyway. We tolerate endless strip malls, foul air, contaminated runoff, window-rattling boom boxes and the weekend crush at Costco and Home Depot. We remain composed in the face of runaway housing prices, electricity shortages and crowded schools.

But what we suffer even less well than crowded schools, the thing that makes even the most tolerant Californians realize that their cities have become overstuffed, is the endless, miserable, stinking, standing traffic. In Los Angeles, in San Diego, in Sacramento, in the Bay area, freeway traffic sits like an automotive still life, then inches along as we fume in the fumes. On a roadside in San Jose after a fender bender, a driver grabs another driver's small dog, Leo, and throws the helpless animal into oncoming traffic.

This is what it has come to in California. We live in the age of Leo. If projections through 2040 by demographers in the State Department of Finance prove accurate, conditions will only get worse, much worse.

New residents continue to wash over California's borders, but the State is neither attempting to restrain growth nor building adequate infrastructure to accommodate it. And the boat continues to fill. During the last half of the last century, an epoch encompassing most of the baby boom and, a generation later, all of the boom's echoes, the State population grew by more than 24 million. The next 24 million, more than the population of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Nebraska combined, will arrive more quickly, inflating the total to nearly 60 million within 36 years. Barring the long overdue mother of all earthquakes, a tightening of Federal immigration policy, which is more unpredictable, by the way, than the earthquake, or the Rapture, California's population, currently at 36 million, likely will double within the lifetime of today's schoolchildren.

A close look at the numbers suggests that the 1990s began a pattern in which California receives more new residents each decade than it did the previous decade. The 2020s will witness the greatest 10-year increase in State history, and the number in the 2030s will be even greater.

Come to California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger urged the world more than once in his State of the State Address this month, but most residents are not happy about this trend. Even Senator Dianne Feinstein isn't happy about the numbers, either. I find them, she says, very distressing, and I'll tell you why. If the growth comes before the ability to handle the growth, what you inevitably will have is a backlash. That's what drove Proposition 187.

The Eagles were right: This could be heaven, or this could be hell, but the more closely you examine California's plight, the more the heaven part looks iffy. No other State has so many residents. Texas ranks second, but with almost 40 percent fewer people. No other State comes close to matching California's annual net population increase. During the next 25 years, the region is projected to grow by 6 million people. This is not exactly a formula for a Golden State.

Immigrants, specifically Latinos who constitute the majority of the State's more than 9 million immigrants, inflate the population not just by coming to California, but by having children once they are here. While the combined birthrate for California's U.S. citizens and immigrants who are not Latino has dropped to replacement level, the birthrate for Latino immigrants from Mexico and Central America averages more than three children per mother.

Changes in Federal policy since 1965 have elevated the number of immigrants legally admitted to the United States annually from a few hundred thousand to more than 1 million in recent years. California has long received far more immigrants, legal and illegal, than has any other State. It worked out well in some respects, cheap labor, ethnic diversity; not so well in others, social welfare costs, increasing poverty. While the costs are significant, the benefits are so vast and varied from critical high-tech expertise to breathtaking multicultural richness that anyone but an unrepentant xenophobe would agree that they are all incalculable, none of which alters the fact that immigration more than any other factor will probably determine how crowded and environmentally unsustainable California becomes in the years ahead. Immigration directly and indirectly accounts for more than two-thirds of the population growth nationwide.

``But Diane Feinstein says that trying to stem the ever-rising count is not a topic of discussion in the U.S. Senate. Though the Earth's population doubled to 5 billion in a mere 37 years and will more than double again this century, many countries, particularly in Europe, now have low fertility rates, relatively low immigration levels, and are losing population. In sharp contrast, the U.S., at more than 292 million people, the world's third-most populous country behind behemoths China and India, will soon glide past 300 million en route to 400 million before mid-century . . . '' ``United Nations projections show just eight countries accounting for half of the planet's population increase between now and 2050,'' and of course the United States is one of them.

I will skip to the end of this here. ``Researchers at the Rand Corporation think tank,'' and the Rand Corporation, by the way, is not known as a conservative think tank by any means, ``spotted these troubling trends in 1997 after studying 30 years of economic and immigration data. Rand's review concluded that `the large scale of immigration flows, bigger families, and the concentration of low- income, low-tax-paying immigrants making heavy use of public services are straining State and local budgets.' '' California, a $38 billion deficit. Yes, it is definitely straining local budgets.

``The lifeboat keeps sitting lower, water spilling over the gunwales, provisions stretching thin. Yet we keep taking on more passengers, and nobody's doing much bailing. Is this any way to run paradise?

``Shall we just paint ourselves into an overcrowded corner and then see if we can figure a way out?

``There is more at stake here than mere comfort and convenience. Apply enough stress to any biological system and eventually it falters. `The economy is inside an environment. The environment is not inside the economy. Which is to say, the laws of nature will ultimately prevail over the laws of economics.' ''

He ends by saying, ``But if the people entrusted to lead the State are not having this discussion, if they're not grappling with these issues, then who is? That's a fine thing to think about

the next time you're stuck in traffic. Which will be soon.''

It is a great article, much lengthier, of course, than I was able to state here tonight. But people can all go on line, of course, and pull it up. It is called ``Infinite Ingress'' by Lee Green for the Los Angeles Times, January 25, 2004. It is a great article.

There are astronomical types of issues to deal with here, enormous problems. Certainly they are issues dealing with the environment. I mean, this piece concentrates on that. What is the impact of massive growth rates in this country? Is it always good? Is growth always good? Some will benefit, it is true. Many will not.

The President mentioned in his speech on immigration that we need to match every willing worker with every willing employer. That is a sentiment I know many of my colleagues even in this House believe in. It is sort of an admirable goal. We can say things like that, and at first glance we would say, sure, that is true, absolutely. What is wrong with that, matching a willing worker with every willing employer?

The one thing that I can tell the Members that strikes me right off the bat that may be wrong with it is this: There are billions of willing workers out there, billions, willing to come, be matched up with millions of employers here in the United States who are quite desirous of obtaining cheaper labor. Do we really mean that? Do we really mean that we will match every willing worker in the world with every willing employer? Do we think that that will not have an impact on our society, on our system? Of course it will. And I do not think we really and truly mean that. At least I hope we do not, because, of course, there is a role for us to play in this body, and that is to control that flow.

We hear all the time that there are all these jobs going begging, all these jobs that Americans will not take. I will tell the Members right now that I believe with all my heart when we have got 5.6 or 5.7 percent unemployment rate in a free economy, there is no such thing as a job an American will not take. It is just a matter of how much one is willing to pay to get the worker. And as long as we continue to import cheap labor, we will be absolved of the desire to actually provide a good job for Americans and will say that the better thing is to just simply have cheaper products coming into our stores. But it does require somebody here to buy those products, and we cannot have an economy that is a two-tiered economy of most folks living at lowest level and some folks at the highest, and that is, I think, a future that comes into view when we think about this kind of world, a world of infinite ingress into the United States.

Something will change. And I will not ask a question. I will tell my colleagues that I do believe that it is true that there are a lot of folks here even in this body, maybe even in the administration, who believe that borders are irrelevant, they are of no consequence, and they impede the flow of goods and services and, yes, people, and that soon we will be able to achieve a new world order in which there are no real borders, or if there are borders between countries, they will be like one that was described by someone I was debating from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank here in Washington, who said, yes, we will still have borders, but they will simply be like the borders between Kansas and Colorado and Nebraska, of no real consequence.

That is a world view. It is a world view held by a lot of people. It is not a world view I hold, nor one that I will accept without a lot of fighting, but it is something that a lot of people want to see, and that is why we can see this constant movement toward a world and a country in which the whole concept of citizenship is completely and totally obliterated, where it just does not matter anymore if one is a citizen of the United States, of Mexico, of Canada or anyplace else. They are just a resident of where they happen to be.

We see cities in the United States passing laws, calling themselves sanctuary cities, laws telling people that they really do not need to show us anything except perhaps a utility bill to show that they are a resident and we will let them vote. One of those cities is not too far from here, College Park, Maryland, but they are all over the country. The State of Maine is proposing that the State be the first sanctuary State.

Among other things, we would see these States and cities not cooperate with the INS, with now the Bureau of Immigration Control and Enforcement; not have their police forces, the State patrol and the local police, help the Federal Government enforce immigration laws, not that we do a very good job at it anyway, but they are saying the cities will not be allowed to do that. Four cities in my State have done this, have passed these laws.

What is the end result of this process? It is to achieve a place in which we are simply residents, we are not citizens, that citizenship does not matter; that if one comes here across our borders even without our permission, we will give them free schooling for their children. We do that. If they come here, cross our borders, even without our permission, we will give them access to our health care system. We do that. If they come here, we will give them access to our Social Security system. We are proposing that. Even if they are here illegally, the President is proposing a totalization agreement with Mexico, saying that any Mexican worker who is here, even here illegally, after only six quarters of work would be able to be vested in the United States Social Security system. So we do that. We are proposing that. We are even telling them, as I say, that if they come here even without our permission, they can vote.

So I ask the Members if one can come into this country as an illegal immigrant, an illegal alien, and obtain all of these benefits, then what is the difference between that person and the person who has lived here all of his or her life and is, in fact, an American citizen? What is the difference? None. It does not matter. And that is a goal that a lot of people in this body want. It is not what I believe is an appropriate goal certainly, and one that I certainly will fight in every way I can.

Not too long ago there was a bill on the floor. We were fighting over the budget for the newly created homeland security agency. I think we just had its first year anniversary here a day or so ago. But on the floor of the House when we were creating the budget for this newly created agency, I proposed that no city that passes these plans, these amnesty plans, these sanctuary city policies, would be able to get any funds under that particular grant system, the grants from Homeland Security. I got 122 votes out of 435. Everybody kept saying this is not the time or the place to talk about that, and it got very contentious. It was about midnight on the floor here, and people got very upset, did not want to fight this issue, did not want me to even bring it up, kept saying it was just a divisive issue.

Why is it divisive? What in the world is divisive about it when we simply say, okay, there is already a law, it is already on the books in the Federal Government, we passed it in 1994. It says no State or city can impede the flow of information to the INS or restrict the flow of information from the INS. It is on the books. We have it.

There is one little tiny problem. There is absolutely no penalty for its violation; so States and cities routinely violate it. And when I tried to say let us really take a tiny little penalty, all I was saying at that point in time was they should not be able to get a grant under the homeland security agency if they are passing laws saying that they will not even tell the INS if they have arrested an illegal alien within their city boundaries. We could not pass it. We could not pass that amendment. Of course I will try again, and we will continue to tell as many people as we can about the Members who chose to vote against it, and they will have to explain why.

I would love to actually hear an explanation for opposition to that particular proposal. It is really fascinating, other than to say we simply do not want to alienate our constituency. I have had Members to say to me on the floor, after maybe a little 1-hour thing like this, people say, You are right, Tom. You are right about that, but I am not going to support you on this stuff. I have a huge minority constituency in my district.

And I am saying, so what?

If you think I am right about what I say is happening to this country and

the potential for what is going to happen to the country, how can you just so cavalierly say, yes, but I cannot vote for you?

For the last part of this hour, I want to talk a little bit about another aspect of this problem that I think is quite disturbing. It gets to the problem of assimilation, the ability of the United States of America to assimilate huge numbers of people into our society when we are laboring with something else inside the United States. This is not the fault of any immigrant; it is not the fault of massive immigration. It is a result of it, but it is not the fault of it. It is something we are doing to ourselves.

We are becoming wrapped up in, and, really, this has been going on for a number of years, we are becoming wrapped up in this philosophy I sometimes call the cult of multi-culturalism. Now, this is not just the multi-culturist philosophy you say simply references the value of diversity and the fact we have many different cultures that we can explore and we can enjoy in this country. That is all true, and I, certainly, as an Italian and the grandson of Italian immigrants, I am well aware of the value added by immigrants coming to this country from all over the world. I am not arguing that.

I am talking about a different kind of multi-culturalism, a different brand of multi-culturalism. This multi-culturalism is radical multi- culturalism. It says that not only should we enjoy the diversity, but we should make it our universal characteristic. The one thing we should all strive for, and the only thing that is of value as a national goal, is diversity, and that any idea that there is a common set of values, attitudes and ideas that we call America, or, worse yet, Western Civilization, any of these things should be erased from the textbooks, taken out of the discussion in classrooms; that we should encourage children to think of themselves not as Americans, not as Americans, but as part of some sub-group, usually some victimized class seeking a redress for that victimization from those who perpetrated it, mostly those, ``those'' being the code word for Western Civilization itself.

Textbooks all over the country, we pulled out just a few, and I have on our Web site we have a lot more, but a few things as an example of what I am talking about here. In the textbook ``Across the Centuries'' used for seventh grade history, the book defines the word ``jihad'' as ``to do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil.''

Does anybody really believe that is the definition of jihad, that a textbook would be given to children in the United States, considering the fact that 9/11 was another example of jihad? ``To do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil.''

In 2002, the ``New Guidelines for Teaching History'' in the New Jersey public schools failed even to mention America's Founding Fathers, the Pilgrims, the Mayflower. These were the guidelines for teaching history. What history? Whose history? Not ours. Because, of course, maybe somebody who read this could not relate to the Pilgrims or the Founding Fathers.

I will tell you that in my life, as I mentioned to you, I am the grandson of immigrants who had a deep love and respect for their home country of Italy, but had absolutely no desire to have themselves or their families attached to that country in any other way than some sort of fond nostalgia and periodically going down to something called the Feast of St. Rocco, believe it or not, and another one called the Feast of St. Anthony. I used to joke about the fact could there really be a St. Rocco. There was, evidently. But that was about it.

But in terms of who we were as individuals, what was our heritage, what was the country we connected to. There was never any doubt in my mind, never any doubt, that my heritage was the Pilgrims, the Founding Fathers. That is what I thought of, because that is what my textbooks taught me, that is what my grandparents taught me, that is what the schools taught me. But we refuse to even mention them in our history textbooks.

In a Prentice Hall history textbook used by students in Palm Beach County High School titled ``A World Conflict,'' the first five pages of the World War II chapter focused almost entirely on topics such as gender roles in the Armed Forces, racial segregation and the war, internment camps and the women in the war effort. That was World War II, okay? That was it.

Gender roles in the Armed Forces. That was the discussion of World War II. Now, it maybe deserves a line, maybe a paragraph, but this is the analysis of World War II in a history textbook?

In Washington State, a teacher substituted the word ``winter'' for the word ``Christmas'' in a carol to be sung at a school program so as not to appear to be favoring one faith over another. The lyrics in Dale Wood's ``Carol from an Irish Cabin'' was changed to read ``harsh winds blow down from the mountains and blow a white winter to me.''

I was in a school in my district in Colorado not too long ago around Christmastime. I was leaving, and I said ``Merry Christmas'' to the children I had been talking to in an elementary school. I noticed there was sort of a strange reaction. Some said, ``Merry Christmas? Yes, what did he say?'' I thought that was weird.

As we were walking out, the teacher said to me, ``The principal doesn't really like us using that word.'' I said, ``What word?'' ``Christmas.''

This is a public school in my district. I went back to the school and I yelled, I said, ``Hey, Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.'' They were all excited that somebody would actually say it; they could be actually allowed to say it in the school, Merry Christmas.

In a school district in New Mexico, the introduction to a textbook called ``500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures'' states this is why the book was written, ``In response to the bicentennial celebration of the 1776 American Revolution and its lies.'' Its stated purpose is ``to celebrate our resistance to being colonized and absorbed by racist empire builders.'' The book describes defenders of the Alamo as slave owners, land speculators and Indian killers; Davy Crockett as a cannibal; and the 1857 war on Mexico as an unprovoked U.S. invasion.

The chapter headings included ``Death to the Invader,'' ``U.S. Conquest and Betrayal,'' ``We Are Now a U.S. Colony in Occupied America,'' and ``They Stole the Lands.''

``McDougal's,'' another textbook, I remember using a McDougal's textbook when I was teaching ninth graders in Jefferson County, Colorado, well, the new McDougal's textbook, ``The Americas,'' that is the name of the textbook, states that the Reagan-Bush conservative agenda limits advances in civil rights for minorities.

This is not an observation, this is not an opinion, this is what the textbook says was the Reagan-Bush administration; and that conservatives' bid to dismantle the Great Society social programs could be compared to ``abandoning the Nation.'' It goes on to include text stating that communism had potentially totalitarian underpinnings. Potentially. This goes on and on and on and on. We have hundreds of examples like this.

Now, why do I bring this up in conjunction with this immigration discussion? Because, I will tell you, it matters. It matters. It matters that we are telling our own children, I went into a school in my own district just a couple of weeks ago, had, again, probably 200, these were high school students, however. They brought them into the auditorium, 200, 250, something like that.

At the end some kid wrote a note to me and said, ``What is the most serious problem you think we face in the Nation?'' I said, ``Let me ask you a question and I can tell you that.'' I said, ``How many people in here believe you live in the best Nation in the world?'' And there were maybe two dozen hands, at most, two dozen hands went up, a tenth of the group. A lot of people again very uncomfortable, looking at the teachers on the side of the wall thinking, Gee, I don't know.

I had the distinct impression that a lot of kids wanted to answer yes, but they were afraid to, because what would they say if somebody challenged them? How would they actually defend that statement? So they just did not say a word.

So I said, ``Let me ask you, should we be proud of the fact that we are a product of Western Civilization and there are some incredible things Western

Civilization has brought to the world, including, among others, the idea that society should be based upon laws and not upon men; that individuals matter more than the collective? These are uniquely Western thoughts, and we can be proud of them, and we should be proud of them. We have all kinds of warts, I know it is true. There are plenty of things we have done wrong. But to only emphasize the worst in America, the worst things that have happened, and even rewrite history to make events even more problematic for us is despicable; and it makes us wonder, it makes children wonder, it makes Americans wonder who they really are and whether this is all really worth it, it seems to me; who are we, where are we going, and how are we going to get there.

Now, if we have a hard time trying to transfer this knowledge to the children that are coming out of our public schools, think how hard it is to transfer that knowledge also to the people who are coming here as immigrants, many of whom are not coming for the purpose of being an American. Many of them are coming simply for the purpose of getting a better job. The whole concept of integration and assimilation goes out the window when it clashes with or comes in contact with, because it is really not a clash, but comes in contact with this cult of multi- culturalism, and that is why it matters. That is why immigration policy fits into this discussion.

We need to rethink the way we teach our children and we need to rethink what we tell immigrants. Instead of telling immigrants that there is no reason for them to integrate into our society, that we want them to stay separate, we want them to keep a separate language in the schools, we want them even to keep their own political associations of the countries from which they came, which now we have almost 10 million people in the country living here with dual citizenship.

I had an interesting conversation with a bishop in Denver, Bishop Gomez, who was arguing with me about this issue, and he said to me at one point, ``I don't know why you are worried about the Mexicans who are coming into this country.'' By the way, I am not worried about ``the Mexicans''; I am worried about massive immigration. He says, ``But I don't know why you are worried about the Mexicans coming into this country.'' He said, ``They don't want to be Americans.'' Those were his exact words: ``They don't want to be Americans.''

They are coming here for a job. They love Mexico. They want to keep their Mexican heritage, their Mexican citizenship. Of course, today it is a lot easier to do so than it was when my parents came from Italy, a land very far away, very difficult to get back and forth. Now, of course, all over the world it is a short hop to wherever it was we may have come from. The world has gotten much smaller, and it is a heck of a lot easier to retain those ties than it was before. He says, ``They don't want to be Americans.''

I said, ``Well, Bishop, of course, that is the problem. To the extent that you are right, to the extent that what you said is true,'' it is certainly not true for everyone coming, ``but to the extent you are right, that is the problem.''

That is what is fearful, and that is why we need to think about what we teach children and what we say to immigrants, and that is why we need to get a handle on immigration, reduce even the amount of legal immigrants, and certainly stop the flow of illegal immigrants into the country, until we can in fact get a handle on this problem.

I have a Web site. On our Web site, WWW.House.Gov/Tancredo, you can go there and see a little pop up thing that says ``Our Heritage, Our Hope.'' If you go on that you will see these things that I pulled out of the textbooks, and you will see a resolution that I am going to introduce on the 3rd of March.

I hope that maybe 8 or 10, maybe more, of my colleagues will join me, however many have the guts to do so, and it will be a very simple resolution. It will say that the Congress of the United States wants to encourage all schools in this Nation to produce children who will be able to articulate an appreciation for Western civilization.

Now, one may not think that that should start anything, but I guarantee my colleagues that it will. I guarantee my colleagues it will. I really and truly look with enthusiasm and exhilaration, a certain amount of exhilaration, to that debate; to hearing somebody explain to me why we should not teach children to appreciate Western civilization. Appreciate. I did not say that they had to disparage any other civilization; I just say that they should be able to articulate an appreciation of Western civilization. Do we think that they can do it today? How many do we think could do that today? Do we think that they should be able to? Do we think any child should be able to do that graduating from a public school in the United States, or any school, actually? What would be wrong with having that as a goal? I would love to have this debate. Well, we are going to.

And then I am going to ask State legislatures all over the country; we have now I do not know how many signed up already, but quite a few State legislatures, and simultaneously they are going to introduce a State resolution in their legislatures saying the same thing. Then we are going to ask parents to go to school districts and bring that resolution to their school district and ask the school district to do exactly the same thing. You can go on line, go to Our Heritage, Our Hope page on our Website, and you can get all the information you want, and you can sign up to help us in this endeavor, and I hope you will. I hope everybody will, because I need your help. But this will be a great, great battle for us to enjoin. It is about time we did so.

Mr. Speaker, there is a reason. There is something of value in Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian heritage, and this place we call the United States, which is the greatest example of that heritage. And as I say, I know that there are warts, and I do not mean to ignore them. I am not asking children to be told that there are only wonderful things about Western civilization or about America, I am just asking that they be told the truth, both the bad side and the good side, because today, they will always, I guarantee my colleagues, children will be able to articulate a problem with Western civilization, but I wonder how many can actually stand up today, a high school senior, and be able to effectively say what is good about Western civilization and the country in which they live and be able to defend it. I certainly want that to happen before we get more people here as immigrants, legal or illegal, who are not coming because they do not want to be Americans.

Mr. Speaker, I cannot think of an issue that has commanded more attention on the floor of this House, and rightly so, probably since its inception, than the issue of the budget, and how much we should be spending, and how much we are going to spend. This year is no different in that regard in that there will be a great deal of attention paid to it and a lot of words expended on it.

I am a member of the Committee on the Budget, and we are beginning that process today to write the budget resolution, that document that we then submit to Congress for its approval and will hopefully become sort of an outline for how we will spend the taxpayers' money in this next fiscal year.

As we embark upon that project, we are given a lot of information to start our deliberations. I must say the information that we have been given this year, in just the last few days actually, is really quite startling. It prompts certainly me and I think it will prompt many other people to begin perhaps an early discussion of the issue of the budget and what we are in store for when we start looking at some of the implications of our fiscal policy.

There is a friend of mine who is an ex-governor of the State of Colorado, and he is now teaching at the University of Denver in Colorado. He is teaching a class called Hard Choices, Difficult Choices I believe is the name of it. He presents his students with a variety of difficult questions they will have to answer from a public policy standpoint, what would they do if they were in our shoes.

I cannot think of a more difficult task to put before anyone than to come up with the right decision when it comes to how much money we are going to be spending in the next fiscal year, how much money are we going to be taking away from our constituents not just today, but how much debt are we going to be giving our grandchildren and their grandchildren, and millions and millions and millions of Americans yet unborn. It is frightening, it is overwhelming, and I can understand why many Americans, perhaps even some of our colleagues here on the floor, would tend to just let all of this go over their heads saying this is overwhelming stuff, the numbers are so huge, I am just not going to focus on it that much. But I suggest that it is imperative that every single Member and every single citizen focus on these numbers and on the debt we are incurring and on the enormous amount of money we are spending even though we are not taking in the same amount of money in taxes.

Let me preface my remarks by saying I am absolutely convinced that the problem here and that I am going to address in the next few minutes has nothing to do with the possibility that we are not taking enough money away from taxpayers. I believe that the tax rates, especially for folks in the middle- and upper-income tax rates are quite high, significant, and high enough, certainly.

I think a case could be made that we are not taking enough from everyone in the country, every income earner. Some people have suggested that some sort of tax, there ought to be a minimum tax that anybody who makes any money has to pay because then they have a stake in the system. I think there is merit in that discussion, and I would like to have more of it. I think the people who are paying taxes are certainly paying enough taxes. The problem is not on that side of the ledger, as far as I am concerned. The problem is almost entirely on the other side of the ledger, the spending side of the ledger.

The blame can be shared by every single Member, myself included. I do not stand here as someone who has never voted for a program increase. I certainly have. I have voted almost every time in the 5 years I have been here for the defense appropriations. We recently all had the opportunity to vote for the homeland security appropriations, and I have supported those. I believe, and I still believe, that the primary responsibility of the Federal Government is to protect and defend the people of this country and almost all of the other things that we do are extraneous to that particular purpose.

Surprising as it is to many people, there is, of course, no requirement in the Constitution of the United States that the Federal Government provide funding for the education of children, although it is certainly a laudable goal. There is nothing in the Constitution that requires us to be doing probably 75 percent of what we do. It is not required. We are required to protect and defend, and that is why I have been willing to go along with increases in those budgets. But we have to make some very hard choices, very hard choices for all of us because we are at a point where the case could be made that the budget is out of control.

We are now approaching $500 billion in deficits for the next fiscal year, and we can no longer think about this as something that we can get under control in the near future, that we can grow our way out of it or tax our way out of it. Those two things I do not believe are legitimate short-term goals.

I certainly believe that the economy can be stimulated by a lot of the actions we have taken, including tax cuts; and I believe we are seeing some of that happen. I think there are a lot of indicators to suggest that the economy is recovering. We are noticing a growth in productivity, we are noticing a growth in manufacturing jobs, a general growth in the economy and economic activity for the third quarter of the last year, which I should say was almost historical, over 8 percent. There are certainly some indicators that would suggest that the economy is getting stimulated and that we are beginning to see a growth even in the jobs category which has been the one that has been the most reluctant and most difficult to actually affect positively by our tax actions.

However, I do not believe that growth will ever be enough to overcome the spending spree this Congress and past Congresses have been on, along with the administration.

Something that was just given to Members not too long ago by the comptroller, and it was put out by the U.S. Accounting Office and the comptroller, is information that I know for a lot of people would be pretty darn boring stuff. When discussed, people think it is billions and trillions, what is relevant about it.

Again, I think it is really important for us to understand, Mr. Speaker, that

some significant changes have occurred in spending patterns and habits of this Congress over the last couple of decades. I would actually say over the last, let us say, 40 years. We can condense this into just a very, I think, concise description of the problem.

In 1963, the defense budget of this country was 48 percent. Almost one-half of the total budget of the Nation was spent on the defense of the Nation, 14 percent of the budget was spent on Social Security costs, 7 percent on interest, and 31 percent on all other things. That was in 1963, 40 years ago.

Fast forward to 2003. The total budget for defense was 19 percent. It had fallen from half of what we spend in this Congress to 19 percent for defense. That is our primary responsibility, remember, the thing that we are supposed to do, 19 percent. But the budget for Social Security and Medicare had grown to 41 percent of the budget. Again, interest stayed about the same at 7 percent and all other spending again at 33 percent.

So we see what happened here. We narrowed what we spent significantly, and a lot of people will claim that we are spending too much on the military, a claim that could be made, but just remember it is only 20 percent today as it was almost 50 percent of the total Federal budget 40 years ago.

There is also something that is taking hold here; something that the American people have to understand is that a relatively small part of that budget that we fight about every year is in something we call discretionary programs. Those programs over which we have some control, how much we are going to appropriate every year, is a matter of debate and negotiation, but it has become a very, very small part of the budget.

About a third of the budget actually falls into that category of discretionary spending. Two-thirds is spending on what are called mandatory programs. These are programs where the determination of how much we are going to spend is made by how many people become enrolled, how many people are eligible. That is Social Security, Medicare, and there are several other kinds of programs including certain veterans programs that are in this category of mandatory spending. It is sort of on autopilot.

That has grown enormously over the last couple of decades, now commanding, as I say, two-thirds of the entire budget. And so that when we start talking about how to deal with the problem of the budget and a $500 billion deficit, it is impossible to talk about this in any meaningful way without addressing the issue of mandatory spending.

Will we actually take that on is the question everybody really has on their minds. Will we have enough guts in this Congress and will the administration propose to actually do something about mandatory spending? Because we can talk about freezing the expenditures or reducing the rate of growth to a certain percent for all those things that are not mandatory, and it will have little if any real impact on the overall budget and on that debt that is presently held by the public.

What is the debt, by the way? Debt that is held by the public today is $3.9 trillion. Add to that the debt of our trust funds like Social Security and that is $2.9 trillion for a total debt of $6.8 trillion. How does that figure out? How does that break down per person in this country, every man, woman and child? That is $24,000 apiece. If we add in everything that is not included in these things we call trust fund debt and public debt, but all the other expenditures that we have in the Congress and that really are just simply debt, but they are just not added for government purposes in the figure above, the burden per person rises to a little over $100,000.

It goes on to say here in this GAO report that it amounts to a total unfunded burden of about $30 trillion in current dollars, which is roughly 15 times the current annual Federal budget and three times the current annual GDP.

Okay. Lots of figures, lots of acronyms and pretty darn boring, I guess, to a lot of people, I know certainly to a lot of people. But I hope we can all understand that these hard choices we have to make will affect not just the quality of life of the people that we represent, but the quality of life that we are preparing, if you will, for our grandchildren and their children. It will be a significantly different quality of life unless we do something about this, unless we make some very hard choices this time around.

I had a call just before the House adjourned for the day from a member of the media. It was a call with a question attached to it that I thought might have been a joke actually. I thought somebody was perhaps making a kind of bad attempt at some sort of humor. But I had a call, and there was a question from a reporter at a prestigious newspaper in the Nation. He said that in fact the President's budget, when it comes out here soon, will include, among other things, a significant increase in the National Endowment for the Arts.

I say a joke because, of course, I could not believe that considering everything we have talked about here, considering the state we are in, the economic condition we are in, that we can be talking about significant increases in anything that we do in this Nation, let alone something like the National Endowment for the Arts. The reason why I think that this reporter was calling me is because I have tried year after year to strike funding for the National Endowment for the Arts as a frivolous expenditure and one that could never, I think, be justified based upon what it is that the Federal Government is supposed to be doing here. I have tried to make the case over and over again that art would survive even if we did not fund it, and that it was there and doing well even before the Federal Government began giving it $150 million a year, and that there was really no need for Federal involvement in this issue, and that all of the arguments that could be made and were made on the floor during the debate over funding for the arts, they all went to the quality of life people had, to giving people inspiration, to making them feel different about themselves and about the world in which they lived.

They were all really very commendable arguments. They were things that I think all of us would suggest would be good for us as Americans to be so inspired. But the question remains, what business is that of the Federal Government, and that we could make exactly the same case for a national endowment for religion, then we could form a panel and make them presidential appointments, and that we turn over to them the responsibility of distributing $150 million to various religious activities or religions in the country. Then when somebody asks which ones, we would say, that is up to the board to decide because we believe religion is a good thing and that it provides a quality-of-life experience and that it does inspire people and makes them feel better about the world in which they live.

All those things are certainly true, but, of course, no one would agree, or I think very few people would agree that we actually needed a national endowment for religion. But it is all based on the same premise, that it is an appropriate function of the Federal Government.

Of course, I suggest that it is not and have tried to strike the funding. That is why, as I say, the reporter called me.

But apparently it is not a joke. Apparently that is going to be part of the President's budget. I certainly hope that request is not granted, and I certainly hope that we go far, far beyond that in saying that that is not going to be an indication of just how serious we are about fiscal responsibility, that we are not going to significantly increase the national endowment. We have to do something of major, major proportion in order to actually get a handle on this issue.

Just to give Members an example of how scary things are, we could completely eliminate every single dime of discretionary funding, and we would probably still not be really close to getting to that balanced budget goal we have in the next 5 or so years. We could completely eliminate it, or at least, I should say, we could completely eliminate several major portions of it, including the amount we spend entirely on the military. We could eliminate the entire defense appropriation and not be in balance the next fiscal year. It just goes to show you how difficult the choices are that we are going to have to make. The question is, will we?

Time and time again, I have been involved in discussions, both on and off the floor of the House about this problem, how dramatic it is, how difficult it is going to be to deal with it; and time and time again the forces arrayed against spending are overwhelmed by the forces that are arrayed in favor of spending. Should our folks on the other side of the aisle chastise us for spending too much, which they certainly will, it is important to remember that during the debate on the budget last year that if you added up all of the amendments that were submitted by the minority side for additional spending, it would have approximated $900 billion of increased spending by amendments that were offered by the other side.

So it is not as though we could look to the Democrats for any leadership in this area. They are being true to form and certainly spending restraint is not their strong suit. But it is not ours either, I must say. Certainly not if we look at the recent history of the Congress and of our spending habits, we have not been all that much better. I am sad to say that. But it is time, all right, to really think about how we are going to address this issue.

And what are the hard choices we are willing to make? Are we actually willing to talk about things like Social Security containment, Medicare and Medicaid containment? Are we willing to talk about even significant reductions in other levels of discretionary spending? I am willing to look at everything, I will tell you right now, including a restraint on the spending in the Federal budget that goes to our defense establishment.

I am concerned about a number of things that have happened recently. I am concerned that when we leave out big chunks of the budget, we make them sacrosanct and say we cannot go after those, we can go after everything else but we cannot go after defense, we cannot go after homeland security, that a lot of things get added to both of those budgets that are sometimes, I think, frivolous; and they get added to protect them from the budget scrutiny that would naturally be there if they were not in the category of defense or homeland security.

I think those budgets will grow astronomically if they are left to be untouched by any sort of action of our Congress, of especially the Committee on the Budget.

I am certainly willing to look at all of those things and to apply some sort of tourniquet on this hemorrhage that we are experiencing that is actually defined as spending. Because it is a spending problem. I want to reiterate that. It is a spending problem. It is not a taxation problem. It is spending.

Remember the old sign that used to hang, I think, at a previous President's election headquarters? It said, ``It's the economy, stupid.'' So every single person answering the phone in his campaign headquarters would have to try to direct their answer to the question, no matter what the question was, and somehow they would try to deal with the economy or to make that part of the answer so that people would focus on the economy, which was in a slight recession at the time.

We should perhaps put a great big sign around this House, maybe around the outside of the House and the inside of the House both that says, ``It's the spending, stupid,'' because it is the spending that we have to deal with. It is what we must get under control. As I say, I certainly do not speak from a holier-than-thou perspective. I know I have voted for increases in the past on various budget items. I also am saying that the time has come for us all to look very carefully at how we are going to address this very serious issue. There will be some very hard choices.

Mr. Speaker, to tell you the truth, I do not know that we are up to the challenge. I have seen this happen before. There is a great deal of talk at this point in time about the need to do something, but at the point in time when push comes to shove and the rubber meets the road and all those other little things we throw in there to describe a tough situation, we will back away and the forces of spending will overwhelm the forces of moderation in this regard, including the budget process itself.

Everything in this body is built so as to construct an ever-expanding government with ever-greater costs. And I am not suggesting that it is done nefariously, that people are trying to figure out how to sink the government by spending us into oblivion. It is just simply the way the system works, and it is the nature of this Republic that we will represent the interests of our constituents as they are reflected by ever-increasing demands for certain services that the Federal Government does now and gets involved with.

There are so many places to look for budget cuts; however, I want to encourage us to think about all of them; to leave nothing off the table including defense, including homeland security. I certainly for one, as I say, I am willing to look at all constraints because it is absolutely clear that there is no way to say we are going to simply freeze expenditures or we are going to have only a 1 percent increase in expenditures that are in this category nonmandatory, nondefense related, nonhomeland security related.

Do my colleagues know what that comes down to? Squat. There is nothing there, Mr. Speaker. There is just this tiny little bit of the budget that then is eligible to be held in check, and it will do nothing except give us the rhetorical high ground. It will certainly not give us the moral high ground. We will be able to go out and say we froze the budget. We will not add all these other exceptions. We will be able to say that we only allowed a certain small percentage increase, but will we explain what that increase is in or what that constraint is in? No. We will just talk about it as being part of the budget process because most people frankly do not care.

Most people are confused by these issues and want to turn off the message and certainly the messenger if we are talking about cutting them. But I am hoping that we can all do what needs to be done for the country because the consequences are dire; and as I said earlier, the choices are very hard. But we cannot shirk them. It is our responsibility, and so I hope that we will all undertake that with a most serious attitude because I just do not know how else we will accomplish our goal, Mr. Speaker.

And the public, as I see the polls recently and the concerns being expressed and certainly from the information that we get in our office, the kinds of calls we get, I think that the public is at this point in time ready to say we need to do something even if it affects their favorite program. I guess we will see about that. But we get a lot of information now coming to us from our constituents talking about the budget as being a very serious topic to them and worried about these deficits and worried about our spending, and that is good. I am glad that it is actually getting out there to the point where people are focusing on this because it will take that kind of commitment, it will take a public that is supportive of our efforts to try to cut the budget for us ever to actually get the job done, and it will take talking to the public in terms that we can all understand and explaining to them and to us all, not just the general public but certainly to other Members, the importance of being more fiscally responsible and the dire consequences of huge deficits that go on for year after year after year.

It is not as sexy a topic as many others that we could address, I know; and it is challenging to inspire the Nation to stand behind us as we try to cut spending. That is very difficult. It sounds so much better to stand up and say I want to do X, I want this program. It will solve so many problems. It will cure disease. Let us triple the budget for the NIH, for the National Institutes of Health. And people come into my office all the time with requests to increase funding for the research into particular diseases and searching for solution and a cure, and our heart goes out to them. They bring their children in with them, children afflicted with these horrible diseases; and we want to say yes, absolutely, certainly we will do that. I want to put all the money I can think of into curing this disease so their child will have the possibility of not just a productive life but life itself, and I want to do that. I mean, I certainly am susceptible to the same kinds of siren songs that all the rest of us are.

Again, I am telling the Members I am not immune to the call for spending.

So it is easier to say yes to them. It is easier to say yes to every person that comes into our office asking us for money for a certain project because they can make a great case. As long as I have been here, I can think of few times that I have been confronted by constituency groups or advocacy groups that do not make a good case for whatever it is they are trying to advance. They are, for the most part, I believe, very good people, all motivated by the best of intentions. And so it is so much easier to say to them, okay, I will do my best, yes, I will vote for an increase. And we all do it, and we have all got to reconsider it in light of what is happening in this country and in light of the very stark projections about where we go from here.

And the President needs to do this also. He has to provide the leadership so that we can look to him and the administration for guidance and for the example that he can provide for fiscal constraint. So I am just hoping again that things like that that reporters call to me about the increase in the National Endowment for the Arts are simply trial balloons, as we say around here, and that they put them out just to see if there is any hope and, of course, if they see that there is not, it goes down. I hope that that is the case. I hope he is not serious.

I certainly hope that the President comes to us with a budget more austere than the one I have been hearing about, and I hope those of us on the Committee on the Budget can muster the courage to present a budget resolution to this Congress that is austere, truly austere, that it does not just have the rhetorical flourish of budget freezes or restraints in the rate of growth and that sort of thing, but a true cut in spending because really this is the only way we will actually get to a balanced budget in the foreseeable future, or even if it is not a balanced budget, a more reasonable approach toward solving our fiscal crisis.

So I just want to keep emphasizing I know I am certainly not the purest of the pure on this and cannot come to everybody with a holier- than-thou attitude and say I never voted for an increase in the budget. I do not believe I ever voted for a tax increase. That is certainly true. But I cannot say I have never voted for an increase in the budget. I can tell the Members that there is little that I can think of today that would make me able to cast such a vote now in this budget cycle coming up, and I am going to do everything I can to make sure that the budget resolution that our committee reports is one that we can all be proud of from the standpoint that we can defend it, not just to our constituents but to our own consciences. That is a challenge for all of us.

Mr. Speaker, profound political change has come to Aurora, Colorado, and that change provides an opportunity to reflect on the contributions of Mayor Paul Tauer and City Councilors Barb Cleland, Bob LeGare, Bob Perosky and Dave Williams.

These dedicated public servants had a profound impact on a growing and vibrant city. Aurora has grown dramatically and it is now one of the largest city in the nation--indeed people now refer to the Denver- Aurora Metro area. Aurora's population is approaching 300,000, or almost the size of Buffalo, New York and St. Paul, Minnesota. During this period of rapid growth, these civic leaders insured that services kept pace with growth, and that growth met the needs of the residents.

Few people contributed more to this process than the out going Mayor Paul Tauer. He served as Mayor from 1987 to 2003, and sat on the city council for eight years prior to his election as Mayor. During his tenure, the face of the city was literally reconfigured to respond to the demands of the 21st century.

During the Mayor's tenure Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center was closed and it was replaced by the largest medical facility between Chicago and California. The former Fitzsimmons campus is now home to the University of Colorado's Health Science Center, the University Hospital, the Lion's Eye Bank, the University Physicians HMO and a large and growing biotechnology research park which has become a magnet for research and development firms in the Rocky Mountain Region. Soon the former Fitzsimmons campus will be the location of a new Denver Children's Hospital and a new Veterans Administration Hospital, replacing the antiquated facility in Denver. The Fitzsimmons campus will employ more than 30,000 people and generate untold millions in revenue.

The phenomenon of Fitzsimmons was not the only notable development contributing to the increasing dynamism of Aurora. Buckley Air National Guard Base became Buckley Air Force Base, a new facility of the Air Force Space Command. Ongoing growth at Buckley is likely to continue as the role of space-based defense in our national security grows to meet the requirements of military transformation and the war on terror. It was Mayor Tauer who worked actively with the Air Force to make the new base a reality ensuring that the requirements for national security were balanced against the requirements of a growing urban community.

Mayor Tauer also presided over the redevelopment of ``original'' Aurora and development of the Southeast area of the city. This revitalization was accomplished by a city-wide growth management plan which created realistic, yet forward-looking standards for ``quality'' and ``smart'' growth. Aurora's implementation for these policies has won widespread recognition for its excellence.

Perhaps in no area was Mayor Tauer's foresight more evident than his leadership on water resource issues. During his time in office Aurora has acquired new water resources, increased distribution and treatment facilities and implemented innovative recycling and drought management policies. The result has been an effective doubling of water system capacity. Among his most notable achievements was forging an agreement with the Department of Interior's Bureau of Reclamation that ensured the city's storage facility in the Bureau's Pueblo Reservoir. I am currently working with Representatives Beauprez and Hefley to codify that agreement in federal law.

Mr. Speaker, Mayor Tauer has been the force that has given shape, form and a distinctive identity to Aurora. Nowhere is this more evident than in the new Aurora Municipal center. The new urban core of the city includes a recently opened municipal building, public safety building, a central library and museum. Together, they constitute the virtual center of this increasingly urbane metropolis. This distinctive city locus took shape during the tenure of Mayor Tauer.

Paul Tauer did not do it alone. Working with him for growth and progress in Aurora was an exceptional cadre of city councilors whose vision and understanding contributed mightily to the city.

Barb Cleland served on the council for two decades and focused on insuring that public safety and public services in Aurora were unrivaled. An early advocate of victims' rights, her leadership and influence extended beyond Aurora to the National League of Cities and other municipal groups. The valuable contributions to all areas of city governances will be sorely missed.

Edna Mosely spent 12 years on the city council. Edna, whose husband was one of the

original ``Tuskegee Airmen,'' worked tirelessly on behalf of military veterans and was actively involved in military cultural diversity issues. She served with distinction on a host of city boards including the Fitzsimmons Commission and served with distinction on the Fitzsimmons Redevelopment Authority Executive Committee, Aurora Economic Development Council, Denver International Airport Business Partnership, Lowry Economic Recovery Project, Adams County Economic Development Council, Community College of Aurora Advisory Council and Aurora's Business Advisory Board.

In 10 years on the council John Parosky was a voice for fiscal prudence and effective and efficient government. He brought his financial expertise to bear in ensuring that tax dollars were used as optimally as possible. His commitment to the city can also be found in his work; he devoted countless hours to make Aurora a better place through his work on the Economic Development Committee, E-470 Authority, Aurora Chamber of Commerce, Utility Budget Committee, Visitors Promotion Fund, Aurora Education Foundation, Spirit of Aurora, Community Housing Services and Aurora Rotary club.

An eight year veteran of the council, Bob LeGare was a passionate advocate of small business, who took in a leadership role in many economic development programs. Bob was devoted to the importance of small business, he worked to make Aurora a partner with business to provide jobs and services. He provided leadership on a variety of economic development initiatives including the Fitzsimmons Redevelopment Authority, Colorado Commission on Taxation, Aurora Citizens Advisory Budget Committee, Colorado Office of Regulatory Reform Advisory Board, Aurora Chamber of Commerce, Aurora Association of Realtors and the Aurora Realtor Governmental Affairs Committee and further contributed to the community through Leadership Aurora, Aurora Museum Foundation, and Aurora Open.

Dave Williams served 11 years as a member of the Aurora City Council. He worked to improve the efficiency of the city by encouraging better review processes and more efficient administration. He has been a leader in the business community as illustrated by his experiences on the Aurora Economic Development Council, E-470 Authority, Aurora Rotary Club and the Urban Drainage and Flood Control District.

Mr. Speaker, these dedicated officials deserve our thanks. At a time when cynicism about public officials appears to be the prevailing sentiment, they provide models of dedication and selflessness that defy these contemporary stereotypes. I am honored to have worked with them and wish them well in the days ahead.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 1904, the Healthy Forest Restoration Act. I would like to thank leadership for allowing this long overdue bill to come to the floor today, and most importantly, I would like to thank Forest Subcommittee Chairman Scott McInnis, whose hard work and dedication this bill has brought us to this point today.

Mr. Speaker, there are many reasons to cut through the current procedural and bureaucratic thicket that has engulfed the U.S. Forest Service. It is time to eliminate the ``analysis paralysis'' of administrative appeals and litigation that has heretofore prevented the U.S. Forest Service from conducting badly needed thinning projects that are needed to protect communities and wildlife.

The fires of the last few years have ravaged the west. My district was no exception, where the 137,000 acre Hayman Fire tore through the Pike National Forest last year. That wildfire--the largest and most destructive in state history--burned homes, fouled streams and reservoirs, and may even have pushed an endangered butterfly into extinction. Fires like these have proven once and for all that no management on our public lands, is bad management.

Unfortunately, much of the destruction caused by these fires is attributable to the bureaucracy, appeals, and red tape that have hamstrung land managers for years. The Hayman Fire, for example, occurred in part in an area slated for treatment. Unfortunately, the treatments took years to plan because of arcane procedural rules, and were then further held up by frivolous appeals filed by a host of environmental groups. Before the treatments could begin, the fires reduced the area to ashes. This bill will seek to streamline that process, and curtail frivolous litigation so that we can avoid the large scale environmental devastation caused by these catastrophic fires in the future. In addition, the bill will help reduce costs to the American taxpayer.

The cost to extinguish these abnormally massive fires to protect communities and their water supplies has cost more than $1 billion. With the passage of H.R. 1904, rather than continuing to treat the expensive symptoms of this dangerous buildup of dead and diseased trees in our forests--we will finally get at the root cause of the problem.

Mr. Speaker, I believe every dollar we spent on a thinning project that prevents a fire, is several dollars saved in suppression and first responder costs when the fire starts. Restoring our forests to a healthier state by clearing out dead fuel and bug-infested trees before they feed wildfires isn't just good environmental policy, it's good fiscal policy too.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to welcome President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan to the United States, and to wish him a pleasant visit to New York City at the end of this month. I am pleased that he will have an opportunity to visit with many Members of this Congress, and I am confident that his visit will be productive for our two countries.

During this time of uncertainty and regional instability in many areas around the world Americans appreciate President Chen's continued efforts and dedication to winning the war on terror, his pledge to provide humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan and Iraq, and his support for the United States as President Bush and regional leaders work to diffuse tension on the Korean peninsula.

Taiwan has been a reliable friend of the United States for many decades, and I hope that his visit will provide an occasion for our two nations to further strengthen our positive and mutually beneficial relationship.

I also want to assure President Chen and the people of Taiwan that they have many friends in the United States, and to reiterate America's support and commitment to the security of Taiwan embodied by the Taiwan Relations Act, and President Bush's statement last spring that, ``Our nation will help Taiwan defend itself,'' should that need ever arise. I also want to again state my unequivocal support for Taiwan's participation in international organizations like the World Health Organization and the United Nations.

Mr. Speaker, I applaud President Chen's insistence on pursuing a higher standard of human rights for people in Taiwan and across the globe, his commitment to individual liberty and democracy, and would like to again thank him for the stabilizing influence that his democratically elected government brings to the entire region.

I welcome President Chen to America, and I hope that many of my colleagues have the chance--as I have--to meet and visit with him when he arrives later this month.

Mr. Speaker, the first meeting of the Interparliamentary Conference on Human Rights and Religious Freedom was held in Brussels, Belgium from September 16 through September 18, 2003, under the auspices of the Washington-headquartered Institute on Religion and Public Policy.

The Interparliamentary Conference on Human Rights and Religious Freedom is composed of members of national and supranational parliaments from around the globe, allowing members of parliaments to meet and address the issues of human rights and freedom of religion and belief with common understanding and background as parliamentarians. I ask that the Conference's concluding document, as follows, be entered into the Record.

Declaration of the Interparliamentary Conference on Human Rights and

Religious Freedom

Whereas, recognition of the inherent dignity and of the

equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human

family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the

world;

Whereas, disregard and contempt for fundamental human

rights have resulted in acts which have shocked the

conscience of humankind, the advent of a world in which human

beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief has been

proclaimed as the highest aspiration of humankind;

Whereas, it is imperative to promote the development of

friendly relations between nations;

Whereas, Member States of the United Nations have pledged

themselves to achieve the promotion of universal respect for

and observance of fundamental rights;

Whereas, a common understanding of these rights and

freedoms is of great importance for the full realization of

this pledge;

Whereas, this Declaration of the Interparliamentary

Conference on Human Rights and Religious Freedom appeals to a

common standard of achievement for all peoples and all

nations, to the end that every individual and every society--

keeping this proclamation constantly in mind--shall strive by

dialogue and education to promote respect for these rights

and freedoms and by national and international measures to

secure their recognition and observance;

Therefore, we hold that,

Respect for human life is fundamental;

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and

rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and

should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood;

All are equal before the law and are entitled without

discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are

entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in

violation of their rights;

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience,

and religion; this right includes freedom to have or adopt a

religion or belief. Everyone has the freedom alone or in

community with others and without any outside interference to

express his/her religion or belief in teaching, practice,

worship and observance, within the limitations prescribed by

law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health

or morals or the fundamental rights or freedoms of others.

Nobody shall be persecuted or denied his/her rights because

of his/her religious beliefs. No discrimination or privileges

based on affiliation or rejection of affiliation to a

religion are acceptable.

The Interparliamentary Conference on Human Rights and

Religious Freedom will convene annually to further the

recognition and observance of the principles contained in

this Declaration.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to urge the Saudi Ambassador to the United States to help resolve a long standing dispute between another Saudi Prince--a cousin to the Ambassador--and a resident in my home state.

Nearly 20 years ago, Prince Abdul Aziz, son of Prince Salman, the current Governor of Riyadh, borrowed $1.7 million from Bob Burch in Colorado.

In 1991, an independent accounting study confirmed the debt. Regrettably, after promising to honor the results of the study, Prince Abdul Aziz never paid up.

Bob Burch had been a great friend to the Royal family, supporting them through medical and personal crises, college degrees and even a plane crash.

This is a time of great challenge in the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia. Never before have we asked the Saudis to work so closely with us to fight terrorism. It is in that spirit of cooperation that I urge the Saudi Ambassador to work to put this longtime dispute behind us.