Jack Kingston: “I wanted to go on to the next topic that Mr. Weldon and I wanted to bring up, the subject of illegal immigration. First…”

“I wanted to go on to the next topic that Mr. Weldon and I wanted to bring up, the subject of illegal immigration. First, let me recognize Mr. Bob Ehrlich of Maryland, who is here with us tonight. Before I yield to the gentleman, let me throw out some statistics on how bad the illegal immigration problem is, because most Americans know that we have a lot of illegal aliens in America but they do not know how extensive the problem is. There are an estimated 4.5 million illegal aliens in America now, that is about the size of the State of Indiana; 300,000 new illegal aliens come each year and so the problem is getting bigger and bigger. In many cases, they are using false documents to get American welfare benefits, American jobs and so forth, and it is displacing people and putting a further tax drain on us. One of the huge tax drains is in the Federal penal system where right now approximately 22 percent of the prisoners in the Federal penitentiaries are illegal aliens, and about 80 percent of them are violent offenders which are the most expensive to incarcerate. We have a lot of direct and indirect costs because of the strain of illegal aliens, but one of them is now that school systems must offer not just bilingual education but multi-lingual education. In Seattle, for example, there are 75 different languages spoken in the school system; in Los Angeles, 80; 100 in Chicago.”