Crises Facing America Today

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, we had a debate last night, and, obviously, a lot of Americans are discussing public policy. I want to address what I consider the three greatest crises facing America today, only one of which was brought up by the press last night.

The one brought up by the press last night, which cannot be overstated, is the crisis at the border. I was disappointed that last night, people did not talk about the size of the crisis.

We are in a situation right now in which we have about a quarter of a million people crossing our border every month. Under President Trump, that number, depending on the month, was between 5,000 and 10,000 people.

We have gone from 10,000 to over 200,000 people coming here last month, and I think the press should be doing a better job of describing the size of that crisis.

I think they also have to do a better job of questioning the amount of legal immigrants that are coming here.

Some people are under the impression or seem to be under the impression that people coming to this country, and as a result, changing this country is only on the southern border.

Actually, we have almost a million people a year, depending on the year, 850 to 950,000 people coming here legally.

It is not impossible for people to come here, and I think there ought to be more focus on the 900,000 or 950,000 people who are sworn in every year as Americans.

I also think there ought to be more focus, depending on the month, on the 7,000 to 9,000 unaccompanied minors coming in this country.

For those of us who watched the debate last night, President Biden tried to weigh in on supposedly people kept apart from their parents. That was for a short period of time because their parents committed crimes.

Here we have between 7,000 and 9,000 people coming in every month who are unaccompanied by either parent. As a result, I think it is possible that they will never see their parents again, but the press does not emphasize or talk about what should absolutely be discussed in this country, that being, should we continue to allow children in this country without either of their parents present.

If we are going to do it, what is going to become of those children because we do know that, depending upon your source, tens of thousands of these children are not only in this country without their parents, but we don't even know where they are.

I think we have to talk a lot more about what is going on at our southern border and talk a lot more in specifics as to do we continue to allow unaccompanied minors in this country, and exactly how many people coming into this country described as illegally should be allowed.

We should talk about the fact that we have a new program under President Biden in which 30,000 people a month, or 360,000 people a year, are being let in through the parole program if you are Haitian, if you are Cuban, or if you are from some Central American countries. Another significant way America is changing is not being addressed.

The next issue that I would like to talk about, we had a hearing yesterday touching upon the idea of racial preferences or racial breaks in employment, be it government employment or be it employment in businesses that do business with contractors.

It seems strange that in America we have programs based on the theory that we have a huge amount of racism in America.

We live at a time in which the wealthiest Americans or the wealthiest group is people from India; the second wealthiest group, in the sources that I find, Philippines; third wealthiest group, Chinese. People from Cuba are doing very well. People from other countries in the Caribbean are doing well. There is this drumbeat that America has a horrible racist past or a horrible racist present, which I just think is not true all.

We have to ask about the motivation of people who keep these programs coming in which we identify people by where their great-great- grandparents come from.

There recently was a book that came out called ``America's Cultural Revolution'' by a guy by the name of Christopher Rufo, which kind of confirmed my worst suspicions.

The reason why we are taking almost all of these immigrant groups and trying to give them preferences is that the goal is to divide America.

There is a small but determined number of progressives in America who would like to permanently change America, have a different form of government.

These people have been around in America in the thirties and the forties and the fifties. They have certainly been around in the sixties.

During most of this time, they felt the way to overthrow America or permanently change America was through a class system, and they wanted to turn everybody against the wealthy people and have a revolution based on this, and we would have a new or different kind of government.

Well, eventually in the seventies or eighties, they gave up on that. They realized that wouldn't work. The American middle class is too strong. Americans love their freedom too much.

They were not going to be able to succeed in giving us a different form of government by breaking people down into how much money they were making.

It came to some of them that one way we could destroy America is create friction via race. In the early eighties, they decided that is what they were going to try to do, and they would go through America's institutions, the first institutions being the institutions based on education.

Again, it seems to me absurd that of all countries in the world, you could divide America or make America unstable based on race.

There are other countries in which there are racial or religious divides that really divide the country. In India, you look at the Hindu and the Muslim. In Nigeria, you look at the Hindu and the Muslim. In Iraq, you look at the Shiite and the Sunni.

You can even look at a country like Canada, which has problems because you have the English speakers and the French speakers or a huge number of countries in Africa, which are broken down by racial Tribes.

America is such a great melting pot. We all get along so well. As just mentioned, people come here from all around the globe other than Europe and succeed wildly.

It seems bizarre that anybody would say the way to break down America is to divide based on race, but that is what they are trying to do.

Another example of a lack of racism in America is if you look up the new people who come to America, who are sworn in as new citizens, and they have these ceremonies in Wisconsin every month in the city of Milwaukee. I have attended several of them.

At least none of the 10 countries that we allow to come in here and get sworn in as American citizens are European countries. They are countries from southeast Asia. They are countries from the Indian subcontinent. They are countries from all over Latin America.

I mean, it seems almost ridiculous that someone would say that America has a racist problem or are so euro-centric when the vast majority of people who we allow to become citizens are not of European decent.

Another thing that makes it so strange or shows how divisive the left is trying to be is they do all they can to tell as many people as possible that they are being picked on and should view themselves as a separate ethnic identity.

How do they do that? They do it by giving preferences, be it in government contracting, be it in government employment, based on race, regardless of how well you have it otherwise.

Here in America, people pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion will say that if my grandparents came here from India, and I am in the process of inheriting $20 million, I still get preferences.

When I go to the ballot box, presumably, I should be looking out for other people from India or be looking out for other people of Japan and not just voting as an American.

Another example of this is their bizarre idea of trying to define people by where they come from. I will give you an example. Right now, if somebody comes here from Spain, they are not considered a picked- upon minority, but if somebody with Spanish ancestors spends three or four generations in Cuba, they are considered to be Latin Americans in need of special help.

Obviously, I don't think the average American could tell the difference between somebody who came here from Spain or somebody who had Spanish ancestry who went through Cuba, but in the eyes of DEI specialists, in an effort to get as many people as possible walking around with a chip on their shoulder, in an effort to ingratiate themselves to as many different people as possible, their rules are such that if you are of Spanish descent but your ancestors spent a couple of generations in Cuba, we need to give you special privileges as far as government contracting, government hiring, and being hired by companies that do business with the government.

It is something that I think we have to bring up more. I think it is something that should be a topic in America. We recently added a new group to get preferences for government contracts or get preferences in government hiring, and that is a group of people called North Africans or Middle Easterners.

Again, even though immigrants here from Iran do very well, are very great people, and, as a result, succeed overwhelmingly in America, the Biden administration has said that if you come here and your ancestors are from Iran, Egypt, Morocco, or Gaza, quite frankly, you will be treated as an aggrieved minority and will be given preferences over Americans who are already in the United States.

We should discuss whether that was the right thing. The incompetent American press corps has hardly publicized that. I go home and explain this to the people back home. They ask why they never heard of it.

They never heard of it because the American press corps isn't particularly competent, but that is something that should have been discussed.

It should have been discussed at the debate last night. The press should have said: Are you in favor of the policy that if an immigrant comes here from Iran, Syria, Gaza, or Morocco, they will be given preferences over the native-born Americans when it comes to government hiring, working for government contractors, or being the beneficiary of a government contract, or, for that matter, being the beneficiary of a government grant?

I strongly encourage the press corps to educate Americans on what is going on here and to see whether we should continue with this policy.

I mentioned for a second, by the way, people who are working for companies with a government grant. Very few people know that if you have a company that does business with the government and you have at least 50 employees and do $10,000 of business with the Federal Government, you are required to fill out a form every year listing the racial background of every one of your employees together with their compensation and job description.

The purpose of those forms is so that the government can look at them and perhaps cause trouble for you if the answers on the form are not what they like. Again, if you are working, say, for a company like General Motors, which I am sure does a lot of business with the government, most people do not know that they are required to fill out a form every year listing the race, sex, and compensation of every employee. Is that something we should be doing?

As a result, it means that when it comes to hiring, promoting, or letting people go, your race will play into how those decisions are made. I think that is something that should be discussed more.

We had a hearing on some of this the other day. I do not think America can remain the great country that it is if we are teaching our immigrant groups particularly that they should be asking for or expecting something based on their racial history, not to mention it does not deal with merit.

Inevitably, if you are saying that you are not going to pick the best person, that you are going to pick persons by their background, and that you are going to lower the quality of engineers, lower the quality of product that these companies put out, lower the quality of our medical professionals, what have you.

It is time to get rid of this stuff. Most of these rules began to be put into effect in 1965 under Lyndon Johnson, so we have lived with them. I think the companies are more afraid of them now, but we have lived with them for 55 years. It is time to put an end to these programs.

One more comment as far as the effect it is having on the native born. There was a study done not long ago of 88 companies in the S&P 200. When they got done looking at the number of people hired during 2001-2002 in those companies, 74 percent were non-White.

What does that indicate? If almost none of the new hires were White, it indicates to me that the companies were going out of their way, due to the pressure to be all DEI, to not hire White people. I do believe somebody should look into this further and see why only 6 percent of the new hires were White.

The next issue that was not debated last night, but it is what I thought, was the number one issue facing America when I ran for this job 10 years ago--sadly, we are not talking about it--when you talk to people my age, they uniformly feel that America is not as great a country or as favorable a country to live in as the country we grew up in.

When you ask them why, one of the top two or three reasons-- frequently, the number one reason--is the breakdown in the family. The breakdown in the family did not just happen. There are people who have never wanted the old-fashioned nuclear family to succeed or be dominant in the United States.

This goes back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who wrote at length about the fact that they wanted to get rid of the family. They wanted the dominant unit to be the government. They wanted the government to raise people. They wanted the government to brainwash people or teach people how to think. It is, unfortunately, apparently not uncommon for people in American universities to follow or be a little bit entranced by the writings of Marx and Engels.

As a result, we see Americans, say, in the 1960s, some of the leading feminists, some of the people involved in the Black liberation movement, were outright opponents of the old-fashioned nuclear family. Angela Davis was an example of somebody well known by people of my age who was a very important revolutionary figure in the 1960s who eventually came out for the breakdown of the family.

There are right now approximately 78 programs in which your eligibility for the program is based on the income level of your household. Due to the way they calculate poverty, it means that if you have one decent wage earner in the household, you probably aren't eligible for these programs. This means, as a practical matter, if you have one parent, frequently the mother, in the household, she is eligible for all sorts of benefits--free housing, free food, free healthcare, and free Pell grants to go to college. If she would marry someone with a decent income, she would lose all of these benefits.

Another benefit that can easily be $6,000 to $8,000 is the earned income tax credit. If she decides to work a little, she also may be eligible for free daycare.

You add up these benefits, and it is not unusual to find hypotheticals in which someone can be penalized by $25,000 or $30,000 in tax-free income if you decide to be married. Conversely, you can lose $25,000 or $30,000 if you decide to be married.

This is a problem that has been pointed out since Senator Moynihan in the late 1960s, so nothing has been done about it. The rate of children born without a mother and father at home has skyrocketed since the middle 1960s when these programs were put into effect.

As a matter of fact, usually what we do is throw more money into these programs. In the current budget that Congress is working through for the year beginning October 1, President Biden did try to increase the number of these programs, which, in other words, is to put more of a bribe on people to not live in what they call the old-fashioned nuclear family.

By the way, another group that does not like the nuclear family or what they describe as the so-called Western-prescribed nuclear family was the original founders of Black Lives Matter. It is shocking the number of people who work in this Chamber who were happy even after Black Lives Matter came out against the nuclear family and who would stand by it, who would attend rallies with those signs out there. It just shows the power of people who have this antifamily agenda.

In any event, I am very interested in, when the new Congress is sworn in next January, what the new President who will work with that Congress thinks about the huge marriage penalties we have in our society. Seemingly, in this country, we seem to have a goal of having more and more people raised in single-parent families rather than married couples.

A variety of problems come from this. There are wonderful children raised by all parents, but statistically, it would be better in many cases, probably most cases, to have both a mother and father at home. The current system, which frequently discourages, in particular, the father from being at home, takes away the purpose in a lot of these men's lives.

I think a lot of the problems we have in society--depression, crime, drugs--can be attributed to the fact that the American Government today seems to not want to give men a purpose in life by encouraging them to be part of an old-fashioned nuclear family.

In any event, I ask the press corps, as they cover the Presidential race, to see where the candidates stand on the idea of racial preferences. Should we continue to say, for example, that if somebody is one-quarter Peruvian, they, therefore, can fill out the form and say they are an aggrieved minority? I wonder, do they agree with the idea that immigrants who come here from Iran or Gaza are immediately entitled to preferences in government employment or preferences in hiring by corporations? I would like to know that.

I would like to know where the candidates stand on the huge marriage penalties we have in effect, which appear to be put in place by people who do not want children raised with both parents at home. Do they plan on doing something about it? I would like to know because it is one of the biggest problems we are facing in America. It is not talked about.

Then, when it comes to illegal immigration, I would like a little more discussion of numbers. If we are going to begin to take people outside the normal pathway to become a citizen, how many people should that be every month? Should it be 5,000 a month, like we had under President Trump? Should it be 200,000? Should it be 300,000? Should it be over 400,000? I don't know, but I think the press should try to nail down the candidates on that.

In any event, those are three issues that I think a competent press corps would be putting out there in the newspapers so that people can analyze those issues and decide which way the government wants to handle each one of those issues.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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