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ON THE PASSING OF THE HON. JERRY SOLOMON, CHARLIE DANIELS, THE AIRLINE BAILOUT BILL, PROFILING, AMERICA'S BORDERS, AND BEING POLITICALLY CORRECT -- (House of Representatives - October 30, 2001)

   That means the utilization of profiling. That means if somebody has a student visa, that we require that university confirm that person's presence, we set up a tracking system. That means that we start saying no to people. It means that we start getting numbers of people that we allow across our borders so we can manage. There was an ad, I do not know if it is still running on television or not, but some people set up a business on the Internet. They are waiting for their first order. They are worried. They have put in all of this investment, and all of a sudden order number one comes in. That is not much, but at least we got one order on the first day of business. All of a sudden 2, 3, 4. All of a sudden a hundred orders come across. They are smiling and happy. All of a sudden it does not stop and it goes to 1,000 orders to 10,000 orders to 100,000 orders. They are in panic. We cannot possibly manage 100,000 orders. We cannot manage it.

   Mr. Speaker, the same thing is happening on our borders. Most people in the world dream of coming to the United States of America. A lot want to live here. It is the only country in the world where we do not have a problem keeping people. We cannot open the borders in such a way that the numbers are so huge we cannot manage them.

   Today that is exactly where we are. We have so many people coming across the borders that we cannot manage it. We need to reduce those numbers so that it is at least manageable. So that we know that people that come across our border, those 3 million people that currently every year come across the border and do not go home when they are supposed to, that we can begin to develop management tools to fill that gap. That is one of the weapons we can use in our war against terrorism .

   Mr. Speaker, I know it is not politically correct to talk about we had better cut down on our immigration. I know it is not politically correct to talk about tightening our borders, but we got a real dose of reality on September 11. We woke up in the morning leading a normal life, and those of us fortunate enough to be alive at the end of the day got a real wake-up call.

   We have to change our management practices, and one of the management practices we have to change are our borders which have become unmanageable. There are other things we have to change. You notice people agree across the board that we have to change the check-in procedure and security at our airports and nuclear facilities. Members will notice that Secretary Mineta today ordered no flying of aircraft by nuclear plants, et cetera, et cetera. We are changing our management practices. We need to change our management practices in regards to these immigration policies.

   Now the President, of course, has taken the lead on this. Yesterday the President talked about student visas . We have a big problem with student visas . We have a lot of people who never show up at the schools.

   Student visas have kind of become the popular tool of choice to get into America, and then not have to worry about being held accountable to anybody.

   Frankly, we have some universities, institutions of higher education, that depend very heavily on student visas because of the tuition that they charge foreign visitors. Those golden days will have to come to an end, despite the lobbying up here on the hill to leave student visas alone. We ought to stop the abuses, limit the number of student visas that we grant until we can get a management grasp on it. That is what I am asking for. Get it in our control.

   I think we should quit hesitating about what we do allowing students of countries that mean us harm. Do you think we ought to allow students of Libya or some of these other countries, Iran, Iraq, to come into this Nation? Should we educate them and train them how to fly planes? There are a lot of foreign students taking airline pilot instruction courses in this country as I speak this hour. We should not be ashamed of saying no to some people, and we should not be so worried about being politically correct that when we see someone from a country that is listed as a terrorist country, we ought to have enough guts to say at the border, You are not coming over here for your education and taking the benefit of our society to later on down the road turn against our society.

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   The National Journal, October 27, 2001 reported on a bill over on the Senate side which will require the airlines to submit their international passenger lists to the INS in advance so names can be run through the agency's look-out system.

   Well, today most airlines voluntarily submit those lists. Today most airlines, notice I say most, voluntarily give their list to the INS to see if there is anybody on that list that is on a suspect listing or on the look-out system.

   

[Time: 23:10]

   Guess which airlines that fly into the United States refuse to turn their lists over to the INS? Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. My response to that is if the airline coming out of Saudi Arabia, if the airline coming out of Kuwait, if the airline coming out of Egypt, if the airline coming out of Pakistan does not want to give us the list of their passengers that are flying into the United States of America, landing in an airport in the United States of America, to be dispersed once they get off the airplane into the cities of the United States of America, we should not allow those airlines to land in the United States. We are not asking too much to go to these airlines and say, we want your list. We want to know who you are bringing into this country. Is that asking too much? I do not think so. Just another example of sloppy management.

   I want to commend the President. Yesterday he made comments about the tightening we need to take on these borders. He talked about student visas . The President and the administration is on the right track and he deserves the support of the United States Congress.

   Let me move on to some final points I want to make, and that is about the battle that we are engaged in. I notice in the last week, there has been a lot of publicity about, gosh, maybe we're stuck in Afghanistan, maybe we're not accomplishing militarily what we hoped to accomplish. You know what people are doing, we are comparing the first few days. We controlled all the airspace over Afghanistan within 3 days. It is always when you go to pick fruit, at least when I picked fruit, when somebody hired me especially to pick fruit, I always filled my basket. The easiest time to fill a basket was when I first got to the tree because that was the fruit that hung the lowest. That was easy pickings. So the first couple of bushels came real fast. But when I had to get to the third and fourth bushel, it took a lot more work. It was not because I was bogged down in the apple tree, it was because of the fact you had to exert a little more energy. You had to climb up into the limbs, you had to reach out, you had to hunt those apples. You did not have four our five apples hanging where you could just put them right in the basket. You had to get up in the tree, you had to reach, you had to move the limbs to find them. That is exactly what we are engaged in right now. Do not try and urge the President to stop this war, or to slow down this bombing for some holiday that these terrorists would use simply as a shield to rebuild, take a fresh breath and recoordinate their strategies. We have got to go after those guys and gals that have instigated such horrible damage to this Nation. Actually the worst thing we can do and the best thing that could happen to them is for American people to begin to lose faith in the military effort that our administration is carrying forward. These are not tough warriors when you are able to get them out of their caves person to person. We will destroy them. There is no question about it. If you got them out of their caves, you got them in an open field, we destroy them. There is not even a contest there. Some people think that these Taliban fighters are supermen. They are not supermen. They have emotions. They are susceptible. I would much rather have our weapons than have their weapons. The fact is we have to locate them. They have extensive cave networks. They hide in the mosques. They hide in the schools. They move their weapons so that if you try and get them or their weapons, you have got to kill some of their civilians. That is exactly the kind of strategy they are using.

   There is one other strategy they are using against the United States. When it comes down to it, they do not think the United States of America has the resolve to go after them. They think all they have to do is take a couple of Americans, capture them, skin them alive, torture them, send their bodies back in body bags and that the American people will lose their resolve to win this war against terrorism . If that happened, it would be the greatest military victory probably in history for an organization like the Taliban. It would be a huge defeat for the United States of America, because you are not eliminating the cancer. The Taliban is a cancer. If you do not get rid of that cancer, it will come back and it will come back in a harsher form than you ever believed it could return in. We have got to destroy the Taliban.

   Last Friday, I think, in the Wall Street Journal, Senator McCain, our colleague, wrote an excellent article about victory, victory in a war. This is a war. I would suggest to my colleagues, read this article. It is excellent. It talks about that war is dirty, that the consequences of war are horrible, but Winston Churchill once said, the only thing worse than war is losing it, and that is exactly what we face tonight. The only thing worse for us than this war that we are currently engaged in is to lose it. Do not try and urge our Armed Forces to lay down their arms until the job is finished.

   Support the administration until the job is finished. The President stood right here on this floor, right here at this podium, and he told us and he told the American people, this battle will be a long battle. This battle will be an intense battle. But that we have hereby resolved that we will eliminate terrorism , that we will fight this war. And so 4 weeks into it, I see some commentators saying, gosh, are you spinning your wheels? Are you stuck? How come we haven't wiped out the Taliban? How come you haven't found that miserable little guy in this cave somewhere? Give me a break. These are the very commentators that ought to drop that type of comment and ought to be saying, what can we do to help? This is our country, too.

   I heard a commentator the other day that said, we have responsibilities in the media, to remember that yes, we are Americans, but we should not let that take away from the point that we should be a neutral party and that our obligation is to report the news. It sounded as though if you are a journalist, that you have a higher calling than being an American, you have a higher calling and that is of a journalist. And if it means that you leave the auspices of sanctity of your country to complete your job, that is the necessity of being a journalist. I could not disagree with that respected journalist more.

   I do not care whether you are a journalist or a Congressman or whether you wash windows or drive taxis, America comes first. Your country comes first. Your obligation is not to your profession, your obligation is to your Nation. You need to stand for your Nation. We need to support our administration, and obviously our military troops, to carry out this mission until we win. Not until the Ramadan holiday starts. That was not a part of war. We need to carry this mission out until we destroy the enemy, until we cut their heads off, until we are so savage to these people, so horrible to the enemy that the enemy will never again have a future under which they would consider attacking the United States of America. The price that they will pay has to be so high that they never ever again want to be in that war. That is what we have got to do. We have a mission. Every citizen in America has this mission, and, that is, your country comes first. The values and the principles of America have never been matched in the history of this world. Never has there been a country as great as our country. Never has a country done as much for the poor people of the world as the United States of America. Never has a country gone to more aid and assistance and gone to war across vast oceans to help friends. Never has a country contributed more to health care, to education, to industrialization than the United States of America. The United States of America does not deserve what occurred, what has happened. But the United States of America must accept the fact that it has happened and that the United States of America must respond with a

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horrible, horrible sword, because anything short of it will make you think of what Winston Churchill said, and, that is, the only thing worse than war is to lose it. For our generation and for all future generations, we cannot afford to lose this war.
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