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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.