Why Our Border Matters

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, every nation has a natural right and a fundamental responsibility to determine who is admitted within its borders. This is what defines a country and ultimately determines whether its culture, customs, and institutions will endure.

The unique qualities that develop within each country's borders naturally make some countries more desirable places to live than others. These differences drive immigration patterns. The more successful a nation, the greater the demand to immigrate to it, and ours is the most successful in human history.

Most of the world's 7\1/2\ billion people live in violent and impoverished conditions, and it is no wonder that they find the United States an attractive alternative. Yet uncontrolled and indiscriminate immigration from those countries to ours risks importing the same undesirable conditions that encouraged their immigration in the first place.

History offers us many examples of great civilizations that have succumbed to this paradox, and the current crisis on our southern border poses a fundamental test of whether ours may join them.

America has traditionally welcomed the truly persecuted who have escaped to our shores, but what is unfolding today makes a mockery of our asylum laws. This was not a peaceful caravan of asylum seekers, as many have attempted to portray. A caravan is a group of people traveling legally and peacefully through a foreign land. An invasion is a group of people attempting to violate a nation's border by force, whether by military or mob action.

The vast majority camped on our southern border are military-aged males. Authorities have already identified roughly 600 as known criminals, and Mexican law enforcement has reportedly arrested roughly 100 for crimes committed in their country. The fact that this force has attacked both Mexican and U.S. law enforcement, with several injuries reported, contradicts any claims that, as a group, they come with peaceful intent.

Nor are they asylum seekers in any conventional sense. No doubt many are nonviolent and simply caught up in the group dynamic of a mob. But poverty and violence in a country does not entitle every person in it to enter ours. Asylum is reserved for those who have been specifically targeted for harm by their own government based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group, and who have entered directly into our country from their own.

In these instances, asylum is reached by crossing a border and accomplishing separation from that government. A Central American arriving in Mexico has already achieved this and, therefore, has no call on asylum in any other country. The appropriate request to make is to the Government of Mexico, a request some have already made and Mexico has granted.

Nothing succeeds like success. If this group is allowed to muscle its way into the United States, we can expect many and still larger groups to follow.

If anything, this crisis should emphasize the importance of completing the border wall that Congress first authorized in 1996 and President Trump is desperately trying to construct.

A forceful incursion of our border can be repelled only by applying equal or greater force. That is a recipe for violence and bloodshed. The physical separation provided by a wall can prevent that.

It not only protects the officers who place their lives on the line in defense of our law, it also protects the lawbreakers themselves from the violent conduct that their behavior otherwise would make inevitable.

Orderly immigration, regulated by law and protected by secure borders, is a prerequisite to a civilized and prosperous nation. If our immigration laws are not enforced, then our borders become meaningless and America becomes a vast, open territory between Canada and Mexico susceptible to every social, political, and economic disorder brought to it.

This seems to be the ultimate aim of the American left and its powerful chorus in the media. We are fortunate in this crisis to have a President obedient to his constitutional command to ``take care that the laws be faithfully executed.'' In the remaining days of this session, Congress has a responsibility to give him the tools to do so. It remains one of the great remaining tests of the 115th Congress.

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