Issues of the Day

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I am going to address a topic I have addressed before this time earlier in the week, but it was brought up again yesterday in the Oversight Committee, entirely inappropriately. It is something that is brought up with each authorization bill or appropriation bill, and it is apparent that the other side of the aisle desperately wants a new bureaucracy dealing with what I will call preferences.

It has been in the news lately because there was a Supreme Court decision saying that, for the first time in 50 years, in the United States, we could not discriminate or use--I guess they were primarily focusing on race but they could have used sex as well--in university admissions. It put an end to 50 years of discrimination at universities.

It has also been in the paper because we have a Secretary of Labor appointed, not yet confirmed, that believes that this country was built on white supremacy, and we have a proposed new head of the Joint Chiefs who believes that we should cap the number of White male officers at 42 percent.

Of course, this gets into other areas as well that the Court did not touch. It gets involved in the area of government hiring. It gets into the area of hiring by businesses that do business with the government.

I think a lot of Americans are not aware that if you have at least 50 employees and do business with the government, you are required it submit a statement every year to the government called the EEO-1, listing the race and sex and the amount of money all your employees make.

It also goes into play with government contracting. Frequently, government contracts are reserved for certain people.

It will continue to be an issue as even after this decision, individual universities have gone down the path of not using tests for admissions. Historically, for example, to get into medical school you had to pass a test called the MCAT test. I had always felt when I was in my teens and twenties that we had the smartest kids go on to become doctors.

But the medical schools are shifting away from tests, which are an objective measure of intelligence, and using things like essays to determine who the next doctor is.

I want to make several comments about this preference idea and why it is so important, as we work through our authorizing bills and our appropriation bills, that we do not slide into this.

First of all, for people who claim, like our Secretary of Labor, that we are a racist country, or a Eurocentric country, I want to point out that the most successful ethnic group in America today are people from India. The second most successful are people from the Philippines. Other groups like Chinese, Japanese, if you look at Latin America, Cubans are all more successful than the average American, at least judged by income earned.

According to Thomas Sowell, the children of immigrants from the West Indies, the children of immigrants from, say, Jamaica or the Bahamas are more successful than the native-born.

If all these people come here and are successful, why in the world would we want the government sticking their nose in and establishing a whole new bureaucracy?

I also had an experience over the weekend with regard to the Hmong. The Hmong are perhaps the most--the largest number of so-called minorities in my district. I talk to a lot of the Hmong at their festivals. It is always enjoyable to be at their festivals. And, it gives me a chance to eat Hmong food, which allows me to become more used to very hot food.

It is always enjoyable to see such happy people as the Hmong are in their festivals. They had a festival in Sheboygan last week.

One of the things I like to ask the Hmong, since if there was ever a group that would have felt like a minority when they came here it would be the Hmong; obviously not European. When they came here they didn't know the language.

I ask either the older generation how many children plus nieces or nephews they have and they all smile. When they get done adding it up, it seems like it is 30 or 40.

I ask, have any of them had any trouble with the law? No. Do all of them graduate from high school? Yes. Do all of them have jobs? Do all those that have children, were the children all with the mother and father at home? The answer is yes.

I find the same thing when I ask the younger generation, and I ask them about their siblings or their cousins. They have to add up in their mind how many there are. There could be 30, 35, 40.

All of them have had no problem with the law. All of them, when they have children, there is a father in the house. All of them are living the American Dream. Again, it drives home the idea that in America we do not have a problem in which we have a European class that is preventing other people from succeeding. Indeed, the new people who come here do better than the people who have been here all along.

That would be one indication that we do not need these new bureaucrats running around labeling people by their racial background.

The next thing I will point out that inevitably all of these programs have is what I will refer to as, ``stupid rules.''

Let us determine, for example, who is Hispanic and in need of help. If my ancestors were in Spain, came to Cuba for a couple generations, and then moved to the United States, they would be considered Hispanic in need of help. If my ancestors lived in Spain and came to the United States, they would not need help. They would not be considered a group in need of preferences.

If you are, for example, one-quarter Native American and one-quarter Hispanic and the rest, say, English or German, you would, again, be considered a minority.

A minority that needs help, even though nobody in your life even knew what your ancestry was, but according to the diversity bureaucrats, you get to check off a box and are in need of special help.

There are a variety of reasons they claim we need affirmative action, one of them is to make up for past injustices, but all of these ethnic programs or whatever we want to call them, apply to people who just moved to the United States. Does it make any sense to say someone who moved here directly from Morocco or Nigeria or Haiti gets preferences when they had nothing bad happen to them in America?

As a matter of fact, it is even more ridiculous than that. They get preferences over the native born. For the purposes of filling out the form, if I move here from Peru and I am not even a citizen, but I have a green card, I get preferences over a person who has lived in America all along. That is, obviously, a potential for a lot of divisiveness.

Along these lines, there are two rationales. One rationale is, we have to make up for past injustices, which makes no sense when you are giving preferences to people who just moved here. The other one is supposedly to show diversity.

Now, let's look at our examples again. If I moved here or my ancestors moved here from Cuba, I don't know any Spanish, I have never been to a Spanish-speaking country, and I have grown up in a northern suburb in the United States. What diversity do I bring to any company? What diversity do I bring to any school? I bring no diversity at all. I don't know why that is not talked about by people who want to push these programs.

As I mentioned, these programs also affect grants given or who gets government contracts. The government sticks their nose in, and if a husband owns a business, he is penalized. If a wife owns the business, that may be considered good in creating diversity. Is that fair? They both have similar backgrounds.

It does encourage lying and crookedness in America as you run across people who put their business in the wife's name so they can get the government contract, but is that something we want to do? I don't think so. Nevertheless, that is an inevitable result of this diversity.

The next question that has to be brought up is for a lot of jobs, probably for the vast majority of jobs, is ethnic diversity really something that matters?

If we are hiring a new engineer, if we are hiring a new brain surgeon, does it matter whether you are from China or Cuba or Morocco or Poland? You want the best person, the one who has done best in school, the one who has demonstrated just an innate intelligence to do these jobs. Diversity or where your ancestors came from does not help as well.

Now, let's look at another big reason why it is important that the Republican Party fight these diversity bureaucrats every step of the way. These diversity bureaucrats have to justify their job, and to justify their job, they will do things like have little classes in diversity in their businesses or colleges or governmental areas.

These diversity bureaucrats, to justify their existence, will tell young people, or older people, that there is a huge amount of racism in America, and they need the diversity bureaucrats to even things out.

This is one way to destroy America.

You are going to cause people to walk around with a chip on their shoulder who should not be walking around with a chip on their shoulder.

Worse, you are going to be dividing America. One of the things that has made America so great is, out of many, one--E Pluribus Unum.

The diversity bureaucrats want to go the other way. They do not want people from all around the world considering themselves one united group. The diversity bureaucrats want to take what was one united group, tear it apart, and have people angry at each other or fighting with each other. This does not work anywhere else in the world.

When I read about elections in other parts of the world, one thing that makes them so contentious, sometimes violent, is that the elections become a contest between two different groups.

Look at what has happened in Sri Lanka over a period of years between the two big groups there. What has happened in Nigeria between the different tribes there. Of course, in the 1970s, it wound up there were tens of thousands of people dying as the ethnic groups or the tribes in Nigeria separated and wound up fighting.

Why in the world would we want elections in America to be a contest between groups? That is sadly what these bureaucracies are going to want.

I will close with a couple anecdotes, so people back home know what is going on in America.

I know somebody who worked for a manufacturing firm and that manufacturing firm had four engineers. They all were men. They had to hire a fifth engineer and they were told by the diversity firm they contracted with that their fifth hire had to be a woman.

It didn't matter if they had found a perfectly good candidate for the job. They were afraid that the government would come in and penalize them in some fashion or audit them if the next person was not a woman. It clearly is not right.

The same company was going to hire a new person in management and their first four or five members of management were all of European descent. They were told they had to go out of the way to hire somebody who wasn't European in management rather than just taking the best person that they could.

I don't think most Americans would agree with that sort of thing, but that is what has been going on in America for the last 50 years. I strongly encourage the Republican Party to draw a line in the sand.

Joe Biden wants to insert these diversity bureaucrats in all government agencies, and they will stick their nose in hiring decisions, in promoting decisions. They will stick their nose in who gets grants around the country.

This is a way to divide America. America has become the greatest country in the world by viewing people as individuals. We should keep viewing people as individuals. We do not need diversity bureaucrats throughout our government.

I encourage all Members of this body to treat everybody equally and look at everybody as an individual, not as a representative of where their ancestors came from years and years ago.

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

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