Wisconsin in the News

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, we had an interesting 2 weeks out of this building, and sadly my home State of Wisconsin made the news again, in an effort to remove not just any person here illegally but somebody who had broken the law, an abuser, somebody who under normal circumstances would not be viewed favorably.

We had a judge in Wisconsin stop the hearing. Oh, let's not worry about putting this guy in jail. Let's let him sneak out the back door so he is not removed from this country.

This was after about a month ago, our Governor, Tony Evers, nice guy, came out with a directive implying that State employees ought not be that gung ho when it came to removing State employees from this country if they were here illegally.

We have two examples in Wisconsin alone in which elected officials aren't on the page of addressing the immigration laws.

I think it is important that we all be articulate enough to explain to people back home why these immigration laws are necessary and be articulate enough to explain we are not being mean to immigrants.

I do not hear enough people talk about the fact that in the prior 3 years--it goes up and down by year--but if you take a rolling average, in the last 3 years, we have over 800,000 people every year sworn in as new citizens legally in this country. How often do you hear about that? There are 850,000 people who did it right. It is not impossible to make your way here.

By the way, that is historically a very high number. If you go back to the fifties and sixties, frequently that number was only a little over 100,000. The number of people being sworn in as new citizens is already eight times what they were in the sixties and fifties.

Nobody should apologize or say that we are being mean or not letting people in here. When we let in people who came here illegally, what we are doing is kicking anybody who did it the right way in the face.

We know we have a housing crisis in this country. When you begin to flood this country with another 10 million people, as happened during the Biden administration, given the law of supply and demand, we know it is driving up rents, making it more difficult all the time for the average American to attain the American Dream.

I also point out that we have significant numbers of visas which allow people to come here, as well. We have about 900,000 temporary workers or trainees at any time. We have well over 5 million people here on visas for temporary visitors for business and pleasure. As far as college students are concerned, we allow another over 400,000 people into this country on student visas.

It is incredibly easy to get into this country. Rather, it is not always easy, but millions of people come into this country legally and are able to do so. We do not have to have sympathy for people who came here illegally.

I think it is important that we educate the American public on that because we are soon going to have to start the next phase where we not only get rid of the criminal element that came in here, but we have to get rid of the 10 million people who may not have broken a horrible law but broke the law just by coming here.

It is a complete kick in the teeth to anybody who wants to come here legally to allow the 10 million people who Joe Biden let in during the last 4 years stay here.

There is one more thing I will address as we begin to work on Donald Trump's big, beautiful bill. I remind people in this Chamber that we have a system of benefits right now whereby, if you are a single parent and you marry the father of your children or mother of your children, you can easily lose over $25,000 a year. In other words, the U.S. Government spends $25,000 a year bribing single parents not to get married.

I thought we were supposed to treat people equally in this country, but we don't treat people equally. We have an overwhelming bias in favor of keeping parents from being married. I hope Members in this Chamber remember that as we put together Donald Trump's big, beautiful bill. We should not pass that bill unless we do something first about the massive marriage hatred that we have.

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