The Gaza Strip

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I would like to address the current situation in what used to be called the Gaza Strip.

I believe looking at American polls prior to the invasion that took place in October, there were too many segments of the American population who--insofar as there were disagreements between, I guess, what we will call Gaza and the State of Israel or Palestinians in the State of Israel--sided with the Palestinians. They felt somehow Israel was doing something wrong.

I still run into some of these people when I go back to my office across from the Capitol building because sometimes they are out there protesting or making some sort of a case.

I believe that all Americans should realize that--until what they did to themselves about a month and a half ago--that the people in the Gaza strip were fortunate to belong in an area right adjacent to Israel proper.

First of all, in that part of the world, there is probably nowhere where you would want to live more than Israel.

As far as basic freedoms, which we take for granted in the United States, those freedoms are available to people living in Israel, and the freedoms, to a large extent, came from a Western culture which was brought to that part of the world as Jews moved there from other areas around the Middle East and from Europe beginning before World War II.

Indeed, that land was largely a wasteland. It is interesting to read Mark Twain's comments when he toured that part of the world. It was largely a wasteland until the great Jewish migration.

At that time, it not only eventually benefited the Jewish people who came to Israel from Europe, but it benefited the Arabs, as well.

Indeed, between about the year 1900 and right prior to World War II, as the number of Jewish people in that area went up from about 100,000 to 600,000, the number of Arabs in that area moved up from 600,000 to 1.3 million people.

In other words, Arabs from the other areas around Israel, as more people moved there from Europe, they moved there as well to take advantage of the economic opportunity that became available as more Westernized people moved in there, and that continues to this day.

I don't think it is reported enough in the press that many people from Gaza who were working worked in Israel, and the economic opportunities in Israel were far greater than the economic opportunities in Gaza.

Indeed, I believe something like a person who left Gaza to work in Israel may be making four times as much than if they tried to stay in Gaza and work for the employers in Gaza. Again, they are very fortunate that Israel was right next door.

Now, why is Gaza not well off in other ways? Because they are getting huge amounts of aid from around the world, and particularly aid from European countries.

Well, the problem is that the people they have elected, Hamas, grabs that money. There are people who are billionaires, not because they have done anything worthwhile or thought of a new way of doing something or opened a chain of hotels or whatever, the people who are connected with Hamas have become billionaires, taking money off the top that comes from the very poor people who are living in the Gaza Strip.

Indeed, they not only take the money and skim the money off the top, but they then don't recycle the money in the Gaza Strip. They live in Qatar, or maybe they live in Turkiye. This is what Hamas does to the local people.

By the way, I think if you look around the globe, the biggest difference between the prosperous countries and the not prosperous countries, is are the people that are running the not prosperous countries, are they siphoning off the money themselves?

In other words, we have a crooked government.

Nobody could not say that when left to their own devices, the Gazans have elected themselves, Hamas, I guess I would say, a very crooked government, which insofar as they don't have as much money as they would like, it is caused by who they have elected themselves.

Remember, I think there is some feeling out there that Hamas is this fringe group that happens to be running Gaza. Hamas was elected overwhelmingly by the Gazans.

Now, we can feel sorry for people that make such a stupid choice but we also have to say that you are guilty, to a certain extent, by electing such people.

Another indication of how lucky you would think people should be for being in that part of the world, in a region on the beautiful Mediterranean Sea, is that the people from all around the globe are coming not just to be next to Israel, but to be right in Israel.

One of the things that surprised me, as you read about what is going on, is that apparently some of the hostages were from Thailand. I thought, why in the world are hostages from Thailand being grabbed by these horrible Hamas militants?

Well, I looked into it. People, particularly from Thailand or Philippines but sometimes from other places as well, are coming from halfway around the globe to live in Israel.

Now, ask yourself that. I assume that these people from Thailand or Philippines are not Jewish, but, nevertheless, things are so good in Israel that people come from halfway around the globe, from Philippines and Thailand, to work and live in Israel.

If you know anybody who says how horrible it is and how the Israelis are picking on these people, ask them: If it is so bad there, why do these people come from all over the globe to work there?

Another point to be made, Gaza is not the freest country in the world, but they live next to Israel, which probably has as many freedoms as anywhere else in the world, as far as freedom of speech, freedom of religion; things are about as open as they can be, which is another benefit. They have an example of a modern western state right next door.

The next thing I think the public should consider as far as these poor people on the Gaza Strip, is apparently no one else in that part of the world will take them.

I mean, there are all sorts of people who feign interest in them, who feign sympathy toward them. How many of these people are being invited into, say, Qatar, a Muslim country, in that part of the world that presumably needs people to do work.

I have a feeling there are a lot of people in Qatar from Asia as well doing the work. Why don't the Qataris say, oh, you are wonderful people. Why don't you come to our country?

What do the Egyptians think? The Egyptians are right next door.

If this is such a sympathetic group of people, why don't the Egyptians say: Come here, we can easily take another 1 to 1.5 million people in Egypt. We can even take over that part of the world.

You don't hear that from the Egyptians or from any of the other Muslim countries in the region.

You don't hear Turkiye saying we want these people.

You don't hear Syria saying we want these people.

You don't hear Iran, who is funneling some of the money toward this terrorism, you don't hear them saying we want these people.

So before you have too much sympathy for this group--and I guess we can have sympathy for all human beings--you have to ask yourselves, why do none of these other Arab-Muslim countries in that part of the world, or in the case of Iran, a Muslim country, why aren't they taking them?

Mr. Speaker, I ask the American people who are out there, the demonstrators and such, before saying how horrible things are for the people in Gaza, look at the history. Look and see the benefits that these people are getting from living next to Israel. Look and see the number of Arabs who moved to what is today the Gaza Strip, or Israel as a whole, moved there from other parts of the Middle East after--not before--but after the big Jewish migration that took place in the first half of the last century. Illegal Immigration Across Our Southern Border

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, the next issue I think is the most important issue facing the United States today, and that is the illegal immigration across our southern border.

We have new numbers that came out for October. Again, we hit records, as far as the number of encounters, of people coming across the southern border.

The most recent number shows 241,000 encounters at that border, up from 1 year ago at 231,000; up from 2 years ago at 164,000; up from 3 years ago at 72,000 when we had a different President.

So again, we hit records on the number of people who are coming here.

We have 71,000, what they call got-aways, which are people who come across the border and do not check in with the Border Patrol.

Most people who come across the border ask for asylum. They don't need asylum but at least they ask for it, and there is a perfunctory check on things.

We hit another near high of almost 62,000 got-aways who won't even check in and ask for asylum crossing the southern border.

This is a disaster waiting to happen. You are permanently changing America. Our forefathers anticipated that America be a country for a moral and religious people. We have no idea what the background of these people is.

Are they going to stand with our Constitution?

Do they understand the natural ideal that our forefathers wanted independent people coming here, not people who would view the government as giving something to them?

So I would hope that the press--it is still not too late--think about running a banner headline rather than focusing on some of the less- important issues around here to educate the American public. We, again, are getting record numbers in our country.

By the way, when you look at migrants who stay here--not just encounters, but who stay here--they are estimating 235,000 in October; 1 year ago, it was 178,000.

So what is that? That is about a 35-percent increase over the last year. Doesn't that merit a banner headline given that Joe Biden isn't hardly kicking anybody out?

After Joe Biden became President 2 years ago, that number was over 100,000; 3 years ago, at the end of President Trump's term, it was about 19,000.

So from 3 years ago in October when we had a different administration, we have gone up by about a factor of 12. Think about that; 12 times as many people crossing the border in October 2023 compared to October 2020.

Mr. Speaker, America had better wake up or we are going to lose this country. People back home tell me that we must let some immigrants in here; we are a country of immigrants.

I attended a ceremony in Milwaukee of over 250 people, in one day, in one city, who were sworn in to be new citizens. We are now swearing in over 1 million people a year that do things right, that are vetted, that we know are not breaking the law, that almost always have jobs; sometimes they have opened a business by themselves.

It is not like America is saying you could never get into America or we are so xenophobic, that we are no longer a country of immigrants. No. We have over 1 million people every year coming here, that are sworn in. That is not including children who are born here to parents who are non-immigrants. Right now our government wrongly is saying that if you are born in this country, you are automatically an American citizen.

It is also not counting the tens of thousands of people who are on visas that have expired. So we are flooding America with new people.

America, again, has to remember, and I want to repeat those figures one more time, in this October compared to three Octobers ago, we have about 12 times as many people coming into this country and being let in across the southern border than were in that short time period ago. I encourage America to wake up. Appropriations Bills

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, one more issue I would address so that the American public is aware, is that when we put together what I think a normal person would refer to our budget, we try to break it into 12 different parts, which we call appropriations bills.

The Senate has an appropriations bill--we are trying to get them to break things up--and the House has separate appropriations bills, and then negotiations take place between the House and the Senate to see what the new law will be.

Now, there are a variety of the things that the press should be paying attention to in these bills. A lot of things are details with regard to spending.

We have to remember that right now we are borrowing about 22 percent of our budget. I hope all Americans are paying attention as debates are being had over every item in these appropriations bills, as to whether we are spending more or spending less.

Remember, the reason we have these high interest rates, which are making it almost impossible for young people to buy a house, is because of inflation, which comes from excessive spending. That is one thing for people to look up.

The thing I want to address today is that in almost every one of these bills there are efforts being made to increase the number of bureaucrats who are involved in diversity.

In other words, people are going to get into these agencies, and rather than doing something productive, they are going to stick their nose in and say when we hire somebody, when we promote somebody, when we fire somebody, whether we give somebody a grant or not, one of the things to look at is that person's ethnic background.

This is an incredibly divisive thing to do. These people add nothing--by the people, I mean the diversity bureaucrats--add nothing to the wealth of our country, but they do create divisiveness because they begin to cause people to view themselves not as Americans first, but they begin to say: What are you going to give me because my ancestors are from Africa? What are you going to give me because my ancestors are from Southeast Asia? What are you going to give me because my ancestors are from India? What are you going to give me because my ancestors are from Bolivia?

That is a very dangerous thing to do. Also, this is something that is going to result in kind of lower standards, because rather than just saying we are going to hire the best person for the job, you begin to look at people's ancestry.

There are going to have to be debates on every one of these 12 bills in which we say, are we going to let new committees into these bills? Are we going to let new bureaucrats into these bills who use their power to judge people solely by ancestry?

I hope that, again, our press corps, which is sometimes missing the boat on these issues--and in there, I will even include the conservative press corps--I hope that they pay attention as each one of these bills move forward.

Since now is the time of year when we appropriate money, in other words, now is the time of the year when we spend money, are we going to allow an increase or any of these diversity bureaucrats to be hired?

Nowadays, you are getting college degrees and these sorts of things saying I want to spend my whole life trying to divide people and trying to cause Americans to view themselves as an ethnic group; an ethnic group from a country where not only their parents or grandparents or maybe even great-grandparents have never stepped foot in.

I talked about Bolivia. Are they going to identify as Bolivian, even though they may have never seen Bolivia, their parents never saw Bolivia, their grandparents never saw Bolivia, or even though they have never spoken a word of Spanish? Maybe they think it is important that they be part of this agency so they can bring a Latin-American viewpoint to this agency or represent other Latin Americans. It is just a completely ridiculous idea.

That idea is taking root. I think the only reason I would push it is if I wanted to destroy America, if I wanted Americans to turn to a fight between each other or a contest between each other, which is sure to end in the weakening of America.

Again, we ask the press corps to pay attention as each one of these appropriation bills moves forward and educate the American public, which is what the press corps should be doing, educating the American public on the degree to which we are hiring more people to judge new hires, promotions, and grants or government contracting, who gets the contract based on their ancestry.

Those are three new issues that I hope the press covers.

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