Illegal immigration was the topic du jour when U.S. Rep. Todd Tiahrt came to El Dorado for a townhall meeting Monday morning. One of three stops yesterday – Tiahrt was also expected in Augusta and Haysville – the Republican congressman was looking to local constituents for feedback on the issues they felt needed attention.

“What I hope to have is a conversation about what’s going on in our nation,” Tiahrt said. “What’s going on here in Butler County?”

Harold Cooper was the first to speak up on illegal immigration, bringing up Kansas Sen. Peggy Palmer’s state legislation against unlawful workers crossing the borders.

“We’re fighting tooth and nail to get that passed, so that businesses will e-Verify these people,” Cooper said. “The problem is, big business, chambers of commerce, the Farm Bureau, Kansas Livestock Association, a lot of these companies are fighting tooth and nail to keep that from happening because once we start e-Verification, they’re going to lose a good bit of employees. You know that Kansas taxpayers are making up the difference.”

Cooper said the bill had been sent to a committee which “gutted” many parts of the bill, stripping it of its “teeth.”

“There are federal penalties,” Tiahrt said.

“The federal government’s penalties to hospitals for not treating someone that’s sick – which turns out to be these illegals – that’s staying,” Cooper said. “The federal government’s law which requires you to educate their children, that’s seems to stay. The federal government’s rules, whatever they are, maybe under the I-9 system, don’t keep these people from being employed in the state. It’s obvious the meat-packing industry, the landscaping businesses, construction businesses, they’re just loaded up with illegal and cheap help.

“If somehow the federal government would go into all of those businesses like on July 1 this year and e-Verify all their employees, that would be wonderful.”

“[Immigration and Customs Enforcement], which is the organization of the federal government that does that, is in Cargill Meat [Solutions] now, as we speak,” Tiahrt told Cooper.

Based in Wichita, with locations in Dodge City, Tiahrt said Cargill has a seven-step system in place to determine citizenship of its employees. He said the federal government tends to focus on bigger operations, leaving the smaller companies to be regulated by the states.

“What’s been frustrating for me in Washington is to see us struggle with building this barrier that controls our borders,” Tiahrt said. “About three years ago, we passed legislation to build a physical fence on the southern border and an electronic fence on the northern border. We’ve run into technical problems with the electronic fence and we’ve run into lawsuits on the physical border.”

The lawsuits, Tiahrt said, have come primarily from organizations attempting to protect migration patterns of endangered species.

“One of the things we look at is what damage is caused by illegal immigrants coming through the national park system,” Tiahrt said. “They have a huge environmental impact. We find abandoned cars, a lot of trash. We spend millions of dollars every year just cleaning up after illegals coming through here and we can’t build a fence because of the lawsuits. It’s a really frustrating experience.

“I think we’d have a lot less problems in Kansas if we could just manage to control our borders. When you consider that a nation is defined by its borders, we’re not doing a very good job of defining where America is.”

Cooper said that the lack of progress made since an amnesty bill was passed by Ronald Reagan in 1986 is a clear indication of the federal government’s failure to resolve the issue of illegal immigration. He said the issue must be cornered at the state level.

Cooper also addressed the 2006 Homeland Security Report called “A Line in the Sand,” which states that during 2005, “border patrol apprehended approximately 1.2 million illegal aliens; of those, 165,000 were from countries other than Mexico. Of the non-Mexican aliens, approximately 650 were from special interest countries. Special interest countries are those ‘designated by the intelligence community as countries that could export individuals that could bring harm to our country in the way of terrorism.’”
Based on the report’s assertion that “[f]ederal law enforcement estimates that 10 percent to 30 percent of illegal aliens are actually apprehended,” Cooper suggested there are about 6,500 “possible terrorists” entering the U.S. each year. He said he felt these non-Mexicans aliens were establishing themselves within Latino communities in Kansas.

“I think your assumptions might be a little wrong,” Tiahrt said. “They’re coalescing in different areas of the United States; in northern Virginia, in southern California, in Detroit. They go to where they have common language and common culture, where they can find a Mosque and place like that.”

“Why doesn’t the United States government declare this a security risk?” Cooper asked. “It’s got nothing to do with immigration, nothing to do with Mexicans. We’ve left the border open and we’ve got thousands of these people that have come into our country. I don’t understand how the federal government can allow this to continue.”

Tiahrt said the process to secure the southern border is a long and arduous one.

“It’s not happening as fast as I’d like to make it happen,” Tiahrt said. “But we don’t live in a benevolent dictatorship, we live in a democracy and a democracy gets frustrating. Welcome to my world. It takes 217 people to agree with me before I can get anything done. Can you imagine getting all the people in this room to agree on which restaurant to go to in Wichita tonight? We’d all have a different opinion and to get consensus is a very difficult thing.”

Charles Jimenez chimed in with his thoughts.

“You can’t put up a China wall,” Jimenez said. “If we had stricter and enforced laws with the businesses for hiring them … then [employers] will be deterred if [the immigrants] don’t have work visas.”

“The laws are there, it’s just a matter of enforcing them,” Tiahrt said.

Tiahrt raised the point that there are many places where illegal immigrants can obtain fraudulent identification to acquire employment.

“Should we punish [employers] for doing the best that they could with the full knowledge that they’re trying to only hire people that are legal?” Tiahrt asked. “That’s why this e-Verify is important to make sure that the driver’s licenses are real Kansas driver’s licenses, because there are some people who are here to not make their dreams come true, but instead to make our nightmares come true.”

Larry Adams also spoke up.

“We have no teeth in our laws,” Adams said. “We are such a permissive society, we can’t get anything. Somebody – starting in Washington, D.C., I think – is gonna have to tighten up. They just keep coming and keep coming. You put one in a position of authority and they take care of each other and you and I don’t stand a chance.”

“Our economy grows faster than our population,” Tiahrt said. “When [that happens], you create a job vacuum. Those jobs are going to be filled from somewhere. Since we’ve had a diminished growth in our population, we’ve created part of this problem culturally ourselves.

“So how do we get around this? First you have to establish the borders. We’ve tried to get that going for at least the last three years … people have just got to express their frustration and anger with this. This is going on all over the United States.”

Tiahrt also said congressional districts sometime skew political agendas, too. He mentioned a southern California representative whose district was comprised mostly of illegal immigrants based on the population of her region.

“I think our founding fathers and mothers were the wisest group of people that ever came together to start a government in the world, but one of the things they didn’t do was to set up congressional districts based on citizenship. Instead they based it on population,” he said. “If they based it on citizenship, we would have more representatives in places like Kansas and less in places like California. It’s just the way that it was set up and one of the by-products of our democracy.”

For more on Tiahrt’s visit to El Dorado and the other issues discussed, see tomorrow’s Times.