Speech #1090114615

I hear two things. two things on different sides. One of them is that business cannot get along without illegal labor and that if we pull that illegal labor out of the marketplace that our economy would collapse. And the other side of that equation is that because we are all sons and daughters of immigrants. therefore we should not deny access to America to anyone because. after all. we either came here as immigrants ourselves or we descended from immigrants. That actually includes the Native Americans who. according to anthropologists. came over here about 12.000 years ago across the Bering Strait. So they were the first to arrive. but immigrants the same. As I pose some of those questions in hearings. as I listen to the testimony. one of the questions. Madam Speaker. I posed was to the witnesses: Name a nation that was not built by immigration. And I add no one on the panel could answer that question as to any nation that had not been built by immigrants. In fact. all nations in the world have been built by immigration. There is no police in the world where there is an indigenous people that just sprouted up there and lived there and they did not leave and no one else came. We have all been the beneficiaries of fresh blood that comes in from new regions. new ethnicities with new advancements to their culture. new vigor that comes from the fresh blood of immigration. That has taken place in the United States of America in a more effective way than any place in the world. We have done a better job of assimilation than any other place in the world. But any nation you want to look at. including Iraq. which many will say is the cradle of civilization. but there has still been immigration that has flowed back and forth there for millennia. If you look at Europe. we know the history of the Normans and the Celts that came across that part of the world and they vied for who was going to be the rulers in that region. As the Huns came down from the north and the Romans came in from the southeast. they mixed their culture. and today we have some of that vigor.