Alan Keye's Speech on Immigration. COULD KEYE'S Win?
I have to tell you that it always feels good when I have the opportunity to get back to Utah, if only because it gives me a chance to meet, once again, all the wonderful folks whose heart and spirit and values are so consonant with my own.
I know you realize that sometimes in the business of working in our politics in America today, you can kind of start to feel like you're a little bit crazy and isolated--especially if you've spent too much time reading the newspapers or watching TV--but I have the refreshing experience of coming back to Utah and finding that there is still a decent heart in America, and still a some common sense in America, and still a faith in America that can, I hope, revive our spirits and or will and save this country.
And it's not surprising, therefore, that we're at a juncture now where decisions that are being taken here will, once again, have an impact on an understanding and a debate on the possibilities of right action with respect to an issue that, I believe, ought to be obviously vital to our future to every American there is.
It's one of those things that I don't understand, at one level, how we could have this "debate," so-called, over what is going on with our southern border. I would just like you to pause for one second, because it helps, sometimes, to get past all of the verbiage and all of the different rhetorical methods that people use, all the anecdotes that are told to tug at the heartstrings and try to stigmatize anybody who doesn't go this way--"You don't have compassion, you don't have patriotism, you don't have this"--and let's just think, in a commonsense level, about what we're actually dealing with here.
All these folks want to talk about immigration law and immigration policy and immigration regulations, and so forth and so on, and I sit there thinking to myself, "Well, that's all well and good." Surely, surely, we're going to have to have some kind of immigration policy--and even if we did nothing, that would still be a policy. So, the point is that obviously we're going to have to have some kind of an approach to this.
And then the question becomes, well, are we going to actually take control of that approach, or are we going to leave it to chance?
Well, I can tell you, having done some work during the course of my career in the State Department as a consular officer--the folks who sit abroad in our various consulates and issue the visas, and so forth--I can tell you that if we put a "y'all come" sign on America, don't kid yourself, everybody would come.
We could fill this country up in ten years. We could go from a population that sits around, what is it now, about 300 million? We could go to a population of 500 million and a billion in a flash--just like that. And it's because this country represents so much in the way of positive allure. We emphasize the materialism and the jobs and the economic opportunity, but believe me, in countries where people can't hold their heads up in the presence of oppressive elites, where they can't have their dignity because they are stomped down with the belief that where you're born and how you're doing things, that determines who you are, they long to breath the free air and enjoy the dignity and self-respect that has come to be associated with our country.
So, don't fool yourselves. Put a "y'all come" sign on America, and billions will come. Not millions, anymore.
And so, the question then becomes, do we mean to do that? Because, if you open the door wide, that's what is going to happen. Well, I think everybody who has some common sense will say, "Well, no, we don't want to do that." We've got to have some rational and responsible regulation, so that we can make sure that the country can handle it, the infrastructure can deal with it; so we can make sure that the different values that go into helping our society to function, including respect for our constitutional process, a willingness to accept the outcome of elections--things we take for granted.
If you look around at the rest of the world, that culture that we take for granted, where after our guy loses an election, we just all go back to work the following day and hope that we can do better next time, I hope you've noticed that that's not the way things are often done in other parts of the world. People unhappy with elections will take to the street, they'll start killing, they'll start burning, they'll start tearing the place down or picking the automatic weapons up.
That doesn't happen in America, and it's not an accident.
[applause]
It's because we have accepted the discipline of self-government, and the discipline of constitutionalism.
And that's something that I think we ought to be eager to share with all the folks around the world who would like to share it--and certainly with some who want to come and be part, here, of this great experiment.
I have to say, from the outset, that in thinking about this, I wouldn't want anybody to get the impression that I am somebody who does not believe, not only in the universal appeal, but in the universal human mission of the United States.
Our founders believed it. They thought that it was going to be decided in this country whether human beings always had to live under governments that came about by force and chance and circumstance, or whether by deliberation you'd be able to establish a government that would respect human dignity, establish human liberty, and still lead to strength and prosperity for its people--vindicating the cause of self-government for all human beings.
And isn't it wonderful, what's happened? With that kind of a goal in mind--declared, by the way, at the time when the country only had a relatively homogeneous population. Just a few different national and ethnic groups were represented, and now look at us. We represent people from every different race and color and creed and kind you can imagine. The hope that we have extended to humanity has attracted all kinds of humanity here, hopefully to join in and help raise up this example of what can be done when human worth is respected, when human dignity is the foundation of government, when a sense of responsibility, grounded in our respect for ourselves and God, becomes the governing culture of a country.
[applause]
That's an example that we can offer to the world. And nothing I say should even be construed as a willingness to abandon that mission. No. I'm actually concerned to make sure that we fulfill that mission.
But as I was just saying, if we put the "y'all come" sign out, billions come, we don't bother to work on the necessary process of assimilation, of sharing the culture of liberty and the self-discipline that goes along with it, we don't lay the groundwork in terms of economics and infrastructure, we don't allow for the necessary requirements of education and the development of true citizenship in a spirit that has folks coming here not just to gain a dollar but in fact to be true American participants in this great experiment on behalf of humanity. If we don't take care, do you think it's going to work? Do you think it will survive? Or will we have the millions and the tens of millions who will come in search of a dream that our irresponsibility has turned into a nightmare?
That's what we are getting, as a result of the policies that some are now trying to force upon us. It then boils down to a question of common sense. If we don't want that bad result--and I don't think anybody with sense in America would. I notice all these folks, even the ones who really want amnesty and open borders, they don't say so, because everybody else would look at them like they're crazy. We know that's a bad idea.
Well, since we know that it's a bad idea, why are we arguing about whether we need to control our borders?
Let me see. If you want to have a law that regulates immigration, then you must be able to control who is coming across the border. If you don't control who comes across the border, then your laws and regulations don't mean anything.
Am I the only person in America who understands this simple truth?
[laughter]
I watched these people stand in the Congress. They're debating this way and that, and they're saying, "Well, we need border security, but let's have guest-worker and other regulations." And I'm sitting there thinking to myself, "You can make whatever regulations you want, whatever visas you want to issue. If folks are strolling across that border at their free will, they'll come on their own terms, not on the terms of our law."
And any politician right now--John McCain and the whole lot of them--who stands up to pretend something else is lying to themselves and to the American people.
[applause]
So, it would seem to me--and I actually think, sometimes, that we could just note this fact and then get on with the business of deciding how do we control the border. But something's wrong, y'all. You have watched a film tonight and you've heard from various sources, and I'm sure, in firsthand experience, you are familiar, as many of us are, with some of the real consequences of illegal immigration.
One of the problems I think our politicians are having with lying about this particular issue is that too many of us are living with the reality for them to get away with their lies. They can tell us all the lies they want, but we just have to go on.
This isn't just true, by the way, in border states or other states you might think have a flow of immigration. It's true everywhere. Everywhere I go now in America.
All of you know that I have been greatly interested in certain issues like pro-life and so forth, and I go around the country speaking about them all the time. During the course of the last couple of years, one of the things that struck me forcibly was that I'd go to a place to give a speech on the defense of innocent life in the womb, which I deeply care about--and I'll be relating that, by the way, to this issue in a few minutes. You could have guessed that.
[laughter]
But I would go, and then what would happen at the dinner table? We'd all be sitting there talking about and exchanging anecdotes about the impact of illegal immigration on our community, and how it's affecting things and how it's hurting things and it's changing things, and how it's disappointing folks because it has lead to an increasing sense that Americans are no longer in control of this country, that we are no longer at the helm in a country where the government of the people, by the people, for the people is supposed to be the rule--but is now respected by who? I don't know. It doesn't seem like it's respected by anybody who is in leadership in this country.
Now, some of you would think, I'm a Republican, and I'm going to make an exception here for President G. W. Bush--but, I'm sorry, in this case I can't.
I watched the President's speech on the subject that we're dealing with here, and at the moment when he looked the American people in the eye and said, "We're not in full control of our borders," I found myself totally gasping in disbelief. And I can't believe that other Americans watching that speech just sort of sat there and said, "Oh, yeah, Mr. President, we're not in control of our borders."
I'm sitting there thinking to myself, "Well, let me see. This is the President of the United States. He's in charge of the federal government. The prime responsibility of the federal government is for the defense and national security of our country, including, first and foremost, the integrity and security of our borders."
Liberals and conservatives will argue about many things about the role of government and what it should and shouldn't do. One of the things I haven't heard anybody disagree about is the notion that the national government ought to be controlling and defending and guaranteeing the integrity of our national borders.
[applause]
And here we find ourselves listening to the President of the United States--now, I might have felt a little differently if this had been a president who had just gotten himself elected, and who was there looking us in the eye talking about, as certainly they have the right to do when they're newly elected, the bad legacy left by his predecessor, and what he was going to do to remedy it.
But I'm sitting there listening to a president halfway through the sixth year of his term of office, into the second term, he's been reelected and everything, and he's sitting there looking at us and saying we're not in full control of our borders--read between the lines, "I have not done my job for the last six years"--and then announcing, as if we're supposed to be enthusiastic about this, "Now I'm going to do it!"
[laughter]
And I have a simple question for you. It's a question I would put to folks in Congress who have been sitting for ten and fifteen and twenty years, all proud of the power they amass as they get reelected, and they turn to us now on this issue with all this stuff about what they're going to do. I think it's about time we got up and asked them what they've been doing all this time!
[applause]
Why are we living in a nation where almost not a single word they speak about what is and is not true about illegal immigrants can be verified in any way? You know why?
I was with a congressman just yesterday at a little rally in D.C., Congressman Garrett in New Jersey, and he made a very good point. He pointed out that if anybody talks to you about how the overwhelming proportion of immigrants are hardworking, decent folks, and so forth and so on, without disparaging anybody, you need to look at them and say, "How could you possibly know?"
There is nobody in this country who can reliably tell us how many illegal immigrants are in the country. If you don't know the whole, you can't know the proportion of the whole, last time I looked.
So what are they talking about?
I've seen numbers--six million, ten million, twelve million, fifteen million, all the way up to twenty-five million--and what that kind of numbers game tells you is that nobody knows, that this situation is so far out of control that we don't even know how far it's out of control.
And that tells you that this can't really--do you think that a job could be that badly done by accident?
[laughter]
I used to have a rule in the State Department. Because things are bound to go wrong in human life, right? People make mistakes, sometimes you do things right, sometimes you do things wrong, you've got to be a little forgiving sometimes when you go to work with human beings because we're all fallible. But I used to tell myself, though, that when something happens that is so wrong and so bad and so ridiculous that it's hard to believe any rational human person would allow that to happen, then you've got to suspect that somebody's doing you in on purpose. You really do.
[applause]
Now, let's take a look at this. They're acting as if, suddenly, by some, I don't know, "act of God," as they call it--I don't know why they want to blame God for everything--that we have millions of illegal immigrants in our midst. Oh, and they like to pretend, as well, that this is because of the aspiration of people better their lives.
Well, I think we realize, don't we, that people have had the aspiration to better their lives all down though human history, that billions of folks around the world have the aspiration to better their lives. I certainly feel like we ought to do our share in offering hope and opportunity to people who want to better their lives, but the sad truth is that in this particular case, we have millions of folks who have come across the border supposedly under this rubric, and they have done so in contravention of our laws and policies. Talking to me about why they wanted to come here doesn't explain why our law enforcement and our policies and our national security and defense along that border has failed.
See, this is what our leaders always do. They know we're good-hearted people, and they want us to be all choked up so that we will not notice that we're in the midst of a situation caused by their willful incompetence or neglect.
Now, which is it?
As I said, this is such a big problem that it's hard to believe that it was just incompetence. But on the other hand, if you're making an electoral choice, and you've got a whole bunch of people in front of you and there's a really bad problem, and it's either been caused by their incompetence or their malice, does it really matter which one it is?
I'll tell you, if it's malice, you surely ought to kick them out to protect yourself, and if it's incompetence, you ought to kick them out, out of pity for them.
[laughter]
Last time I looked, it's really a problem keeping somebody in a job they can't do to that extent. And so, I'm sick and tired of the incumbents coming to us, acting like this problem dropped on us out of the sky, acting like we should ignore a record of ten and twenty and thirty years of willful indifference and neglect to the common good of the American people--people who are still unwilling to defend our principles, to defend our language, and to stand up now and agree with all commonsense Americans that we have the right to defend our border, and not to ask Mexico, either, for its permission!
[applause]
And while you are considering why they would have done this, it does serve some economic interests. And you all probably know, if you know me at all well, I'm a big believer in free enterprise, and I'm a big supporter of what's needed to make sure that we have a thriving economy and that we leave folks free in order to develop that economy to the best of their ingenuity and ability. But I think it's a little bit unfair when some narrow economic interests want to purchase their advantage at the expense of something so vital to the identity and security of our whole people. That's not right. That's not fair. And that's not safe.
Folks have talked tonight, rightly, about how incongruous it is on several levels that in the midst of the struggle we are now waging against the international terror network, and that has taken various forms, including, we are told, the form of the effort that we are making on behalf of self-government and liberty in Iraq, I think it's kind of incongruous that we should be putting forth such a maximal effort of sending our men and women over there to risk their lives and spill their blood, and risk also, by the way, their psychological well-being and their spiritual well-being in wars terrible as hell--I think it's kind of incongruous that we're asking all this of our folks and our soldiers and our young people to defend and maintain and sustain the self-government of the people in Iraq, and meanwhile we are being told that we don't have the right to defend the integrity of the identity and the borders and the self-government of our own people.
[applause]
And in case President G. W. Bush is finding it a little hard to understand why so many people who voted for him and kind of like him in various ways would be standing up all excited about this, it's because we don't understand: standing all firm in defense of liberty over there, and meanwhile over here, we are sacrificing that which is the physical prerequisite of liberty!
You can't have freedom in principle if you won't defend it in fact! And if we let our borders collapse, the facts that support our freedom will be gone, and you know it.
And that's where we are. But it's not just the President. Other folks seem to have gone down this road in Congress, on both sides of the aisle. Because, even though I want to give deference to the majority of folks still in the Republican congressional delegation, before anybody tries to stigmatize the Republican Party as the party that won't defend our borders, and so forth, I see a majority of our congressional delegation trapped in a situation where a minority of Republicans joining with the Democrats is betraying the interest of our country.
[applause]
We need to keep this in mind. And what are these people doing it for? Well, you and I both know the first thing they're doing it for is money, so some people can make money at the expense of the whole people's best interest; so some people will be able to have cheap labor.
Now, I can understand why any particular businessman might want to lower his cost margins and increase his profit margins by getting cheaper labor. This makes sense from a certain narrow point of view. But tell me something. Do you think that we are, all of us, supposed to pay in the coinage of burdened infrastructure and higher taxes and other things, while folks are taking money and putting it into their private purse, and we bear the public consequences of what they're doing?
Do you think that's right? I have my problems with it, myself. I don't think it's rightly fair. I also kind of wonder, too, about the truth. I have spent a lot of time, in the course of my career, looking at the problem of development in countries that are poor countries. And I'm glad that Carmen [Mercer] stood up and reminded us that we ought to be really careful about this notion that Mexico is a poor country. Mexico is a country that has a lot of poor people in it, but if you look over the history of Mexico, you will find that one of the reasons Mexico has a lot of poor people in it is because there's a handful of rich people in Mexico standing on the necks of their poor to keep them from having opportunity, to keep them from developing enterprise, to keep them from being able to share in the great wealth that could be generated in Mexico.
And I have found that same pattern repeated in country, after country, after country, after country, where the reason there are so many poor is because the few rich will not respect the dignity and the rights and the liberty of the great majority of the people.
And now they want to come to us, and look at what we've accomplished through a system that allows us to stand tall and stand strong and build our associations and organize so that we don't have to be oppressed by a few, but can stand together as the whole people of this country to defend our interests. And they want us to pretend that that isn't what has made us strong and wealthy and given us the base for prosperity that we have.
Well, I, for one, believe that it is--and it's about time we stop allowing folks to make us feel guilty about our success, so guilty that we are willing to throw away the prerequisites that made it possible. And that's what we will do.
[applause]
And that's what we will do, if without some care for the culture of liberty, for the assimilation of the kind of values and discipline that's needed to sustain it, we start admitting tens of millions of people to residence and citizenship, without really looking carefully at making sure that they mean to become not just exploiters of American wealth, but participants in the great American experiment of self-government.
And some of our leaders don't seem to care about this, because all they want to talk to us about is economics. I think economics is very important. But I think we need to remember that liberty has made successful economics possible in America, and if we sacrifice the Constitution and representative government and the culture of liberty that has allowed us to stand strong as a people governing ourselves, then our economic prosperity will go, too.
This immigration issue includes one of the symptoms of that, because, hmm--let me think about it. They keep telling us that the folks are coming in to do "jobs Americans won't do," and you and I both know that really what they're saying is that these people are coming in to do jobs at a wage that a lot Americans wouldn't accept.
[applause]
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