Speech #1050075917

Speaker. across this country there are individuals who are entering this country illegally. who are violating the law. who are violating the trust of the American people. and then are demanding or acquiring automatic citizenship without due process for their children. Now I. for one. am very sensitive to this. I was raised by an immigrant of a foreign country who came here legally. who played by the rules. I think it is just an assault on our entire concept of fair play to say that there are those who are waiting patiently to immigrate legally. whose children are born in foreign countries. who do not acquire automatic citizenship but who are required to go through the process and naturalize. At the same time. there are those who enter this country illegally or enter this country. as most illegals do. and I want to point this out. legally. and then violate their agreement with the Federal Government by overstaying their visas. Then their children who are delivered here in the United States gain the right of automatic citizenship. while those who are playing by the rules. their children. as I stated before. do not. H.R. 7 points out that we need to address this issue of fairness. we need to make sure that we send a very clear message to everyone. And I want to point out quite clearly. it is not the immigrants fault. it is Congress fault. The Fourteenth Amendment says that Congress will have the responsibility to statutorily enforce these sections. Congress has ignored this problem because they did not think the problem was very big. did not think it was worth addressing. Mr. Speaker. let me just say quite clearly. even if it was one person benefiting from the violation of our national laws. that would be enough. But in California alone in 1993 we had 96.000 children born to illegal aliens who qualified for automatic citizenship. That is 40 percent of the Medicaid births in the State of California. the largest State in this Union. That population in itself sendsa very clear message that we are sending the wrong message to the rest of the world. Now I did not do a poll. and a lot of people in Washington did not do a poll. but I just received information from California that a group did a poll asking women who are illegally in the country. why did they come to the United States. Frankly. even those of us who are involved in illegal immigration were shocked to see that a quarter of them stated that one of the major reasons to come here was so that their children could gain the privileges and rights of automatic citizenship. of citizenship in the greatest Nation in the world. Now. I do not fault them for doing that.