Speech #1040274705

One of the issues that is of most concern to me. Mr. Speaker. and of most concern to Californians is the flood of immigration. especially illegal immigration. that is flowing into California that is destroying some of our basic institutions and our social infrastructure. Today in California. many Americans who have spent their entire life paying their taxes. living honestly. trying to raise their family. trying to be good citizens in their community. are finding that the social infrastructure that they have come to rely upon is being destroyed because people from other countries are coming to our State illegally and flooding into the schools. into our hospitals. they are crowding our jails and preventing the judicial system from functioning and the other social services systems from functioning as they were set up. For the first time Congress has come to grips with this problem. I am very proud that although the President of the United States. who claimed that he was going to try to do everything he could to help us with this flood of immigration. that the President of the United States instead did everything he could to drag his feet and to prevent us from passing a meaningful immigration bill. but despite this. we were able to pass an immigration bill that turned the country around. There is still very much to do. and next year we will accomplish more on the issue of immigration reform. But we can be proud that instead of aiming at policies that made the situation worse. we have now turned this Government toward solving the problem and confronting the challenge to the American people. One area of concern to me. and I believe that our people should be alerted to this. is that this year this administration decided to speed up the process of naturalization of people who are in this country legally. However. many of those people who have been sworn in and become citizens of the United States were people who entered the United States illegally and were granted amnesty back in 1986. What we have had in the last year is a speedup of the naturalization process so that 1.3 million legal immigrants now have basically become citizens. That is three times the number that were normalized just 2 years ago. Of that 1.3 million. this administration was in such a rush to grant them citizenship that thousands upon thousands of individuals who should have been screened out because they were convicted felons have been granted U.S. citizenship and turned loose among us. This cannot be tolerated. I would hope that the American people note who is trying to solve the problem and who is not trying to solve the problem. who is trying to come to grips with the ever increasing load of taxation and spending that we have seen from Washington. who is trying could to come to grips with this threat of a massive flood of illegal immigration. Mr. Speaker.