Speech #1050090398

Speaker. I wish to commend my colleague. the gentleman from California . for the remarks he just made and for the energy that he has put into this effort to bring our borders under control and to prevent hundreds of millions. even billions of dollars from being spent on people who have come to this country illegally. I think it is incumbent on those of us who have been very active in this effort to prevent illegal immigration into the United States. to express our appreciation for the fact that legal immigration has done great things for the United States of America. I know I am speaking for my colleague. the gentleman from California. . and I know I am speaking for myself and most of us. I think all of us who have been active on this issue in the House of Representatives. Legal immigration has served our country well. We are all immigrants. except perhaps for the American Indians who met us at our shores. The people who have come here legally. however. are screened so that they are not carrying diseases. they are screened so that they can take care of themselves. so that they are not criminals. so that they are not people who would be involved in acts of terrorism. We have. in fact. the most generous legal immigration system in the world where we screen out people who will not be taking care of themselves or are not healthy or pose a threat to our society. and let other people come to our society who will be producing wealth and become productive members of our society. We can be proud that the United States of America has a legal immigration system that permits more legal immigration into our society than all the other societies in the world combined. That is a wonderful thing. and we have benefitted from that. But what we have not benefitted from is a flood of illegal immigration in the last 10 years that is overwhelming many of the social systems that we put in place for our people. In California we find our education system breaking down. Our young peoples test scores are going down. down. down. even as we pump more money into the system. They go in and they say the class size is too large. And then we find out a third of the members of the class are illegal alien children. In California the health care system is breaking down. and those children in our school system are confronted with diseases that we thought we had knocked out years ago but perhaps are being brought in by illegal people from South America someplace. These are things we have got to care about. not because we do not like the people who are illegally coming into our country but because we care about our own citizens. The question the American people should be asking of their elected representatives. the question. the main question should be who do you care about. who are you representing. Are you representing some cockamamie liberal idea that they are going to share the wealth with everybody? I was in a negotiation with someone yesterday who was literally talking about an amnesty program. another amnesty program for the 5 million illegal aliens who are in our system. And also during the discussion we talked about the people who are here illegally perhaps bringing their grandparents over. being able to bring their grandparents over. I just could not understand how anyone could suggest that we bring people over from overseas who are senior citizens. who have never paid a cent into our system. who would then partake in the social benefit packages that our own seniors have paid for all of their lives.