Immigration: The Next Battle, A Debate

[Jeanfromfillmore]

pay you. That’s what we have going. And I told Karl Rove one day, if you pay me that kind of money to protect a mile of the border, I’ll make sure that nothing gets across that border for that kind of money.
And so that’s why I say we can build a fence, a wall and a fence. We can build an interstate, four-lane interstate highway for $4 million a mile. We’re spending $6 million a mile. And if we just did that every year for the last 10 years, we’d have two walls two lanes wide.
Now, I don’t suggest that we build it all the way. Not 2,000 miles. Just build it till they stop going around the end. That’s the measure. Then, we have to shut off the jobs magnet. And one of those ways is E-Verify mandatory. But another way is this — I’ve introduced legislation that I think has a reasonable chance, even this year, and this coming year. It’s called the New Idea Act. What it does is it clarifies that wages and benefits paid to illegals are not tax-deductable. It brings the IRS into the mix.
And so, when they come in and do an audit, they’d run the Social Security numbers of the employees through E-Verify. And if they kick them out, we give the employer safe harbor if he uses E-Verify. But the equivalent is this — it moves that business expense over into the profit column. When you deny the business expense, it becomes taxable. So the interest, the penalty and the taxes turn your $10-an-hour illegal into a $16-an-hour illegal, which opens up opportunities for $12-, $13-, $14- and $15-an-hour jobs for [legals].
And then, when we get to this point where we establish and reestablish the rule of law, I want to restructure the immigration policy consistent with the mission that I’ve laid out in the beginning — to enhance the economic, social and cultural wellbeing of the United States of America, to increase the average annual productivity, diminish the pressure on the welfare state in America, which is about half of the problem that brings about this immigration situation in the first place. And I’d like to set up a point system.
Today, we only control, based upon merit, between seven and 11 percent of our legal immigration. The rest is out of our control. Because it’s family reunification plan or whatever. I’d like to change that thing back around, and look at a score system, so we can reward youth and education and earning productivity, job skills, and, by the way, language skills. An ability to learn and speak English is the single — most strongest indicator of assimilation in our culture.
Thank you.
Congressman Ed Royce: Many of you have read [Edward] Deming’s work. And I had a chance to talk to him about this issue. And he said, you know, there’s good immigration and bad immigration. And for the United States, low-skilled immigration was not going to be helpful.
Along with Duncan Hunter, I authored the border fence legislation. We got it signed into law. The President did not like that. Karl Rove was quite upset about it. But they had to sign it because it was right before an election. The reason it is not implemented is because there was a lack of will to do what’s in the law.
And I just want to make an observation. I did some work in El Paso, Texas years ago. And I remember Juarez. Do you know how many Americans were killed last month in Juarez, Mexico? Well, there were 20 last month. But if you look at how many Mexican citizens since ’08 have lost their lives in that city — 7,100. That gives you a sense of the magnitude of the problem.
I held hearings down on the border, as chairman of the International Terrorism Committee, in which we heard testimony from the FBI, from one of our investigators who brought the components for a dirty bomb across the border successfully. We heard testimony from those who had worked with the 9/11 Commission Report, that border security is national security — that four of the hijackers were actually stopped separately — four cases — speeding here in the United States. They were ticketed. If there had been a concerted effort to check with the toll-free number — I know it’s not politically correct to do it in many communities — they could’ve been arrested at that point for being in this country illegally. They had overstayed their visas.
So as a consequence of that, the 9/11 Commission pushed us to pass some of the very laws that we enacted. And in that legislation, we allow Arizona and other states to enforce the federal law. Now, this is what’s unique about the President’s position — or, I should say, the Attorney General’s position. His position is, because the Administration has decided not to enforce the law of the land, the Justice Department now has the ability to prevent Arizona from enforcing the very laws that we passed.
I am the lead plaintiff on a brief that we have filed with Arizona — John Eastman actually did the legal work on this — in which our assertion is we have standing in the Congress because we actually passed the laws. And the Administration does not have standing not only to ignore the laws we passed, but to also ignore the mandate to allow states to enforce the law. I think we’re going to have standing in front of the Supreme Court on that.
But I want you to think for a minute about the condition we’re in today, where recently on a lake on the border, last month — we had a US citizen killed. The investigator in Mexico who was working on that case was just decapitated. If you’re asking for how many convictions we have or expect — out of the 20 Americans killed this month over in — or last month in Juarez, I can tell you this is what we’re facing, is the collapse right now of the rule of law.
And if we look at Juarez’s history, that was the principal job generator in Mexico. That city, per capita, created the most jobs in all of Mexico. That situation has totally been reversed by this war between the Zetas and the Gulf cartel. And the reason we need to be especially concerned with this, as we see the Zetas go through there, burning homes, burning churches, burning markets and scaring people out to become refugees — the reason we need to be concerned goes back to those post-9/11 hearings, the hearings that I did on the border with Mexico, in which we heard the testimony from our sheriffs, our Border Patrol.
By the way, our Border Patrol faces 700 attacks a year. What they’ve requested is a double border fence that they can deploy behind. All right? And that is what was enacted into law. And that is what is not being enforced.
But the testimony that we got was that by fraudulently securing documents and getting into this country, and violating their terms of stay, this is how the 9/11 attack occurred. And al-Qaeda leaders believe that illegal entry is more advantageous than legal entry for operational security concerns. That is the testimony that we heard.
We heard that Border Patrol routinely apprehends now people from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, crossing our southern border. The FBI testified that individuals from countries where al-Qaeda’s operational are changing from Islamic surnames to Hispanic surnames in order to avoid detection. That’s our FBI.
When individuals who are OTMs — from countries other than Mexico — are apprehended, they’re frequently released. I don’t have much time, so I will share with you the story of Mahmoud Kourani, a story that’s important to me because his brother was head of military security for Lebanon and played a role in launching the missile attacks in Haifa. I actually was there during those attacks, in the Rambam Trauma Hospital. I saw the victims of 600 of those attacks.
This is the brother of that man. His brother paid $3,000 to a corrupt official in Beirut, in the Mexican Consulate, in order to get entry into the United States. He then approached a cartel and paid a sum of money, along with a confederate of his, to be put in the trunk of a vehicle and driven into the United States. He then made his way to Dearborn, Michigan, where he rendezvoused with the other members of this cell group, which was in excess of 50.
I’ll just read from the indictment — “He is a fighter, recruiter, fundraiser for Hezbollah who received specialized training in radical Shiite fundamentalism, in weaponry, in spy craft, and in counterintelligence in both Lebanon and Iran. He has employed the Sharia Muslim doctrine of Taqiyya, which is concealment, pretense and fraud, while in the United States. He shaved his beard, he avoided mosques, he kept his beliefs private while inside what he called ‘hostile territory’.”
Now, luckily, he was apprehended. And he and his other 50 were serving time in federal penitentiary.
I don’t have a lot of time to speak on this. But I will just share with you that the concern that I have is that at least Arizona is getting serious about enforcing US law, at a time when the Administration is doing all it can do to undermine enforcement.
And the idea right now that we have testimony from Border Patrol agents who tell us that the cartels are using automatic weapons, grenades, grenade launchers — I’m quoting from the testimony — they are experts in explosives, wiretapping, counter-surveillance. And they monitor our offices, they monitor our homes as deputy sheriffs, and our cellular phone conversations. During the time of my hearing, one of those deputies had been shot. One of the sheriff’s deputies had been shot the week before.
This is the situation on the border today. This cannot be ignored. It has to be addressed. Edward Deming was right — there is good immigration, and there’s bad immigration. You cannot allow immigration to be controlled by a group like this. This has to be under the rule of law. And it’s up to us to drive this issue home.
Thank you very much.
Moderator: We’ve got about 20 minutes for some questions.
Q: For General Vallely — Texas has some 20 cameras in areas that they know are real active areas along the border. And those cameras are out on the Web, where anybody in the United States can view what’s going on and report directly to the Sheriffs Association. I think it’s called BlueServo. Are you all networking with people like that? And is there any ideas of using drones to maybe intercede in those situations?
Paul Vallely: We are talking — a lot of the technology that I brought back from Israel in the north there [involves]their use of technology along the border using drones and balloons — and that information’s fed right into the, I think, 7 outposts in the north. Very, very accurate as far as identifying moving, intelligent targets, and so on. That’s why I talk about the no-go zone, where you identify enemy targets that are a threat to the United States. This is not just a defensive operation anymore; we’re looking at on a war south of our border, for all the reasons these three gentlemen have pointed out — that now we are in a transition point, where we really have to think about offensive operations.
We just can’t sit back and let this continue to deteriorate, and more and more people — Americans, as well as innocent Mexicans and others — be decapitated and blown up. Because we know Hezbollah, as Congressman Royce has said — they’re coming in through the soft underbelly. Chavez is promoting it, along with Ahmadinejad. So they know what our soft underbelly looks like. And again, they’re going to take advantage of our laws.
And that is why the National Guard — that the states control, by the way, unless they’re federalized — need to be used in a better capacity, under Posse Comitatus on this side of the [board]. If I was the general in charge, in redeploying my forces, I would certainly develop a number of intelligence contacts within Mexico that I can trust, that would in fact work with our Special Ops, Delta Force, special forces, Green Berets, SEALs and so on. We find the targets, and we work with people, complemented by any technology that we have.
So I think we’re in a whole different war today. A different endgame needs to be resolved and recognized. If not, ladies and gentlemen, we will fall from below, just as we can fall from all the jihadi cells that are being developed in the country.
So that’s why we have to look at this as a total strategy. And hopefully, our leaders in Washington at some point in time, above and beyond Steve King and Ed Royce, will be able to deliver to us a strategy that will work to save America.
Q: I think the overriding theme is that there’s a lack of political will. And therefore, it leads to the next thing. You’re preaching to the choir in this audience here. But you obviously have a communication problem. Because the lack of political will isn’t getting through. And until that point, maybe you have to have billboard posters of decapitated bodies and American dead before we will get the political will. Because obviously, you know, this isn’t anything that we haven’t heard before. It’s just — something needs to be done.
Mark Krikorian: Yeah, I had a thought on the political will idea. I mean, it’s true what you’re saying, obviously. But I’m not sure it’s an issue of, you know, communication strategy. It’s not just that people coming to Restoration Weekend are on our side. The public is on the side of controlling immigration. It’s just that immigration, the research actually shows, is the area of policy where there’s the biggest gap between elite views and public views.
The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations actually did some research on this. And even things like support for foreign aid had a smaller gap, between elite views and public views, than immigration did. Immigration’s not a right-left issue; it’s an up-down issue.
And that’s really the challenge. And it’s a different kind of challenge than making the case for, you know, a lot of other things — whether it’s tax cuts, or on abortion or guns, or whatever it happens to be, which are clear are right-left issues. And it’s a very different challenge. And that’s why it’s been much more difficult to develop, to get any movement on it.
Thayer Verschoor: And the comment I’d like to make is — the media’s complicit in the lack of communication in this. They don’t want to tell the truth about how bad things are. I mean, it’s a civil war that’s going on in Mexico that is now bleeding into the United States. They don’t want to tell you that, because they don’t want to incite the public and the masses. They want to lowball this whole issue — that it’s just about prejudice, and it’s about racism and stuff like that.
But the fact is that as Arizona has stepped up, now 25 other states want to use that as model legislation to step up. And just like everything else, you know, that are big issues in the country, for the most part, they kind of have to come up through the states to reach the federal level. And that’s when you’re going to see that change, as more and more states start to adopt bills like Senate Bill 1070.

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Q: I’d like to address Steve and Ed. First of all, thank you for being here and being so frank with us. How are you going to — with the new Republican Congress, how are you going to get the Administration to start the fence-building and enforce these laws?
Steven King: Well, I’ve said that I’ve now had almost eight years in Congress. And I’ve spent a lot of those eight years seeking to embarrass the Administration into enforcing immigration law. I have been challenged publicly by people who will say Congress needs to do something to enforce the law. And I have to go back to the separation of powers and identify that we pass the laws we appropriate to the executive branch. Their job is to enforce the law. In fact, that’s the President’s Constitutional oath, is to take care that the laws are faithfully enforced.
So, that sounds like a bit of a duck. But it really isn’t, in that we need to continue to turn the pressure up. And we need to continue to advance these ideas that are so important. One thing that I do is I applaud the states stepping up, like Arizona has. And I support in this country, down to the county level, enforcement of our immigration laws.
I’m looking at some things we might be able to do to highlight this and continue this debate. One is holding hearings, informing America, moving legislation that puts more pressure on the administration to enforce immigration laws. One is to address anchor babies in this country. That’s about 340,000, maybe as many as 750,000 babies in America — either one in a dozen or two in a dozen, depending on whose numbers you want to take. That’s something we can do by statute. And it would be litigated, but the clause subject to the jurisdiction thereof in the 14th Amendment, I think, makes it clear that Congress has the authority to pass laws [that] enforce the anchor baby issue.
The New Idea Act that I talked about — sanctuary cities are another. And I think we can bring significant pressure to bear in the appropriations process on sanctuary cities.
I grew up in a law enforcement family. I never envisioned, in all of those years spent around uniformed people — either military or law enforcement — as I grew up, that there was anything other than a cooperative relationship between all levels of law enforcement, from the city police officer all the way up to the federal officers. And so I think we’ll have a lot of opportunities to bring amendments to start to reduce funding, and eventually unfund sanctuary cities.
And then — and I want to just briefly mention, before I pass this microphone over to Ed, that Thayer mentioned the spotter locations in Arizona. I’ve gone to those locations, I’ve climbed those mountains. I found out about them when I was walking across the Tahotaotum Reservation with the Shadow Wolves. And they said, There’s a spotter on that mountain, there’s a spotter on that mountain. Of course, I couldn’t see them. But I wanted to go see what it looked like from there.
Later, I came back, climbed some of those mountains, sat in those locations. And then we took a Black Hawk, and we did some operations against them. And it was quite an interesting experience. But we have located at least 100 locations where there are tactical positions taken up on top of the mountains, where they’re overlooking generally intersections of highways, so they can tip off all of our — any time our law enforcement officers are moving on that highway, they know it. We can embarrass them about that, and I intend to do all of those things. And I intend to help elect a President that’ll reestablish the rule of law. And that’s more important [than anything else].
Ed Royce: Well, our first step is going to have to be to defeat the amnesty legislation that Nancy Pelosi’s going to move during this lame duck session along with Harry Reid. Our second step — you know, if you think about the fact that the Social Security Administration admits right now that there’s nine million people using fraudulent Social Security numbers in the United States — we know who they are, and there is a lack of will to enforce that. So one of the easy steps with E-Verify is to move legislation that makes that mandatory. And electronically, you can check. And, you know, that is a quick fix.
Lastly, I would just say we’re going to have to secure our border on our side of the border. I’ve been down to the border on a number of occasions working with Border Patrol agents. One of the interesting occurrences I saw was where, on the Border Patrol’s counterparts, on the other side of the border, a tunnel was being dug. And the fellows showed me how, you know, they were watching as the Mexican officials offered cover for the guys digging the border tunnel.
So we’re not — in that kind of environment, you’re not going to get a lot of cooperation on the other side of the border. We need to complete the double border fence and drive the hearings to do it. Thanks.
Q: One of the things that, I guess, last night we talked about, about our armed forces — how we are overstressed. Unfortunately, the border is really our Achilles’ Heel. The situation is so bad, as you guys have talked about, and there’s so much research that has gone on. I don’t understand why we don’t have troop deployment here. Because this is the most serious war we’re going to fight. Not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq; it’s here. And people are coming through here — al-Qaeda, all kinds of other terrorists. And everyone in Washington is passing legislation when nothing’s happening.
Why can’t we have true deployment here? Why can’t we stop it? We’re not going to get help from the Mexican government. Because money is being funneled to the Mexican government by the immigrants. That’s supporting their economy.
Ed Royce: The short answer is that the Obama Administration just pulled the National Guard off of the Texas border, the California border and the New Mexico border. So they’re headed in the wrong direction.
Mark Krikorian: This is the National Guard, mind you, he just sent before the election. And so now the election is over, the emergency is over, so he’s pulling them off the border.
But I mean, I think to answer your question, one of the reasons you don’t see more use of troops on the border is that legally, Congress would have to, it seems to me, adapt the law to permit the military in a certain range near — which I’m all for. But I mean, [it’s not simple.]
But also, there has been use of military on the border in antidrug patrols. And one — there was one kid, sort of a hapless kid who was herding his family’s goats and had a shotgun to keep the coyotes away, who ended up, you know, in the middle of the night with a group of marines sneaking up, or behind him. He turned around, aimed the gun at them, and they shot him down — that kind of thing that immediately shuts down, really, any talk of it. So, I mean, it’s a politically problematic thing that needs, it seems to me, a legal structure to kind of control it and establish it.
And the final problem is, starting in the Bush Administration, we basically contracted out our immigration policy to the Mexican Foreign Ministry. And the Mexican government is dead-set against any use of American troops on American soil to protect our border. And since they, you know, to some degree have a kind of veto power, both in the last administration and this administration over our immigration policy, you see why it hasn’t happened yet.
Thayer Verschoor: Sooner or later, the public demand is going to be so high. Anybody in here familiar with the term “aztlan”? This is a philosophy held by many Mexicans to retake the western part of the United States through migration, and to repopulate it with their citizens.
In Arizona, we’ve already [ceded] about 60 miles of land to the cartels. We’ve got signs up there saying, Don’t go here. If you do, it’s at your own risk. Because the cartels — they don’t say this specifically, but the implication is the cartels actually control this land now, and we can’t guarantee your safety there. That’s insane for our government to allow that to happen to our border. So we’re just basically giving up that much land right now that we’re saying we can’t control. We do need to change that. And I think the public outcry is starting to grow on that point. And that’s what will change it.
Unidentified Audience Member: May I please say one thing?
Q: First, I want to thank you, Mr. Vallely, for calling this what it is — illegal migration and, more specifically, invasion. Because this is invasion. And all these proposals, all these calls for legislation, all these ideas and everything — great. The President has pulled the National Guard off the border.
Now, he is — he has taken a solemn oath to uphold our Constitution. And if I’m not mistaken, all the congressmen and -women have as well. Am I correct? All that is needed is to uphold the oath, uphold the Constitution. And every time that vow is broken, we need to treat it as sedition and as treason.
It’s very, very simple. We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of our liberty, for ourselves and our posterity. It must be upheld.
And if someone pledges and takes the vow, and takes the oath in the name of God, and his solemn oath, and does not uphold that; and rather, in fact, undermines it and destroys it, he must be held accountable.
Ed Royce: And the most effective way to hold it accountable is to lay out this issue — we’ve got an election coming up — and run somebody on these issues who is going to be in step with the will of the American public and with our Constitution.
Mark Krikorian: One last comment on this that relates to what Congressman Royce said — even on the right, there is dissention on this. And one of the first things we need to do is put our own house in order. And, you know, it’s — Grover Norquist, the Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal, Dick Armey, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — are on the side of the socialists on this issue. And that’s where we have to start, even before we start attacking Obama and his minions.
Thayer Verschoor: I’d just say in conclusion that whenever I’ve watched the Statue of Liberty, I’ve never envisioned her as having a voice. But now I do. Thank you.
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