Speech #1090112600

I promised myself to discipline myself and speak to the subject matter I came to the floor to address. and that. Mr. Speaker. is the issue of immigration. First. I would say that we have a history of immigration in this country that certainly goes back to the very beginnings of the colonization of the 13 American original colonies. America certainly is a nation that has benefited greatly from immigration. so that is why the Founding Fathers and the ratifiers of our Constitution put into this Constitution the directions to the United States Congress. Mr. Speaker. that we establish immigration policy. That immigration policy is the responsibility. the constitutional duty and the province of the United States Congress. and throughout the decades. and now centuries of immigration. that policy has been established by Congress. and we. for the most part. have adhered to those amounts and values that were reflected. As I look back across those two centuries. I think there was a time in the early part of the 20th Century when there was a significant and massive amount of immigration that came in. much of it through Ellis Island. there was a real effort to settle a land that did not have a lot of population in it. The region I represent in Western Iowa is one of those areas. as most of America is. I will say west of the East Coast. In fact. the population peaked out in my home county in the year 1912. much of it because of immigration. Since that time. it held steady for quite a while and has actually reduced in my agriculture county because we found ways to get the same amount of work done with less people because we have machines now to do a lot of that farm work that wasnt being done any way except by hand. So immigration has been certainly the only way that this continent could have been settled. As I look around the United States. that is the case for most of us. Mr. Speaker. I should back up to about 1924. That was a watershed year for immigration. That was the year in the aftermath of World War I. after the huge numbers of immigration had poured into the country. after my ancestors arrived here in a legal fashion. I would point out. In 1924. Congress made a decision that they wanted to slow immigration down significantly. They -wanted to do so so there would be an opportunity to have a time period where there could be an assimilation into this American culture. There was a concern that the picture of America would be different if the immigration kept continuing to refuel the cultural values that came from mostly Europe in those days. Mr. Speaker. Our predecessors in this Congress understood that there is a limit to how much immigration a nation can prudently accept. They understood that there is something called a unique American culture. an overall civilizational culture here. that is the sum total of the values of all the subcultures that come into America. They understood that we needed to have come on values. and one of those common values was a common language.