Transcription
I'm going to take a few minutes in the time that I have remaining to talk about another issue that is critical to the important to the, uh, state of Texas and to this entire country. And that is the fact that America, Texas, and Western civilization are under attack from within the cheap labor lobby, left-wing NGOs, radical progressive Democrats, Marxists, globalist organizations, United Nations. They've mobilized a coordinated effort to subvert our security, our immigration system to harm the American people.
Particularly concerning is the threat posed by Islamists who are spreading Sharia law into Texas, who are advancing throughout the country, and who have a stated goal of undermining American life, not assimilating into it. This is a political movement, well-funded, targeted at the American people, Western civilization, our rule of law and the Constitution. We should not be allowing more people into this country who are adherent to Sharia law. Period.
The Muslim Brotherhood's own motto is: Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Meanwhile, Europe has fallen. London, Paris, mere shells of their former strong self. You watch veterans who fought to defend the United Kingdom in World War II, those still alive, tear up and cry, wondering what it was they fought for when they watch the radical extension of Islam into the streets of London and throughout the United Kingdom. In France, a majority of young French Muslims put Sharia above their own national laws, and more than a third have sympathy for Islamification. French officials have warned President Macron that Islamists are infiltrating France's Republican institutions and are a threat to national cohesion.
[clears throat] The authors of the report to Macron identified the Federation of Muslims of France, FMF, as the main French emanation of the historic Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded 100 years ago to promote a return to core Islamic values. They said the FMF controlled 139 places of worship in France and a further 68 affiliated, and all around 7% of the total. The organization ran some 280 associations. Seven out of 10 French voters would back a ban on the Islamic veil in public because of what's happening in France. In the United Kingdom, Muslims are increasingly turning to Britain's Sharia courts, which are not part of UK law and operate as informal bodies. The number of Sharia courts in Britain has grown to 85 since the first began operating in the country in 1982. Polls have found that 41% of the British public believe that Muslim immigrants have had a negative impact on the United Kingdom. Nearly half think that Muslim women are pressured into wearing the hijab, and almost a third think that Islam promotes violence.
Parallel legal systems are not keys to a thriving society. There must be one rule of law for all of the people. All the way back in 1991, a lot of people won't know this, the Muslim Brotherhood issued a memorandum about North America detailing a plan for, quote, "the enablement of Islam in North America, establishing an effective and stable Islamic movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood, which adopts Muslims' causes domestically and globally and works to expand the observant Muslim base." It was a coordinated and specific effort to advance Islam into the United States.
Our founders did not envision a nation that remotely resembled today's Muslim world and the radical elements of Sharia. America was founded as a nation grounded in a distinctly Judeo-Christian history and understanding of human nature. It was the United States. It was Great Britain that led the ending of slavery. John Adams said, "One great advantage of the Christian religion is that it brings the great principle of the law of nature and nations to the knowledge, belief, and veneration of the whole people." Thomas Jefferson and John Adams hinted at the incompatibility of America's Republican virtues with the values of Muslim nations after meeting with the Islamic ambassador about the Barbary State's inclination to make war upon nations that did them no wrong after they were informed it was a requirement of the Quran.
[clears throat] Jefferson's papers in 1786, he wrote, quote, "We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation." The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their prophet, that it was written in their Quran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them whenever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Muslimman Muslim who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise. That's Jefferson in 1786. Our founders knew that Sharia law was not consistent with Western civilization and our and our values.
Sharia law is a problem that is growing throughout the United States and certainly growing in Texas. My home state bore the brunt of a four-year mass migration invasion under the previous administration. But there's been a quieter one of Islamists leveraging our immigration system and corporate interest to extend and use diversity visas, chain migration, H1B visas to flood our country with people who don't believe in it and have no intention of assimilating into it. A new Muslim community in Texas, not even a few days old, 150,000 square foot Muslim community center was opened in Houston. Epic City in Plano, outside of Dallas-Fort Worth, has raised all sorts of questions about their intentions to create an effectively Muslim-only community where Sharia law, no doubt, would and will be practiced. Now they've renamed it The Meadow rather than the East Plano Islamic Center, but they continue to develop and grow it. Even as there are almost 300 mosques in Texas, and more mosques being built in Texas every day than any other state in the union.
But meanwhile, let's look at what's going on in the United States broadly. Our nation's foreign-born population has reached 51.9 million people, comprising some 16% of our population. We're at the highest levels of percentage in our history. The last time we had a similar level of foreign-born population, in roughly 1920, we froze immigration. And largely for about 40 to 50 years, we froze it. And then it has been exploding over the last 50 years. I've introduced legislation called the PAUSE Act to pause immigration and to pause it until we get our hands around all of the problems that are currently plaguing our immigration system. The abuse of birthright citizenship to have profit-centering, profit-centered ways to create American citizens by people coming here, coming across the Rio Grande, having children, making citizens that then can use American resources, our hospitals, our schools, our legal system, our welfare. We continue to allow a broken visa system to have extended family members be brought into the United States expansively and purposefully. H1B program has been exploited and abused now for years and must be abolished or massively reformed.
We obviously have still a very badly broken border that is only currently being held in check by a president and by leadership in the administration who are devoted to doing it and are empowered to do it. But all of the ways in which Biden, Mayorkas, and that entire administration allowed our border to be wide open and have 10 million flood our country, all of those things still remain in place statutorily. Congress could fix it. We haven't. The House passed legislation two years ago, what was in that Congress, HR2, to meaningfully change the law so that it can't be exploited to endanger the people. We've not brought that back up again this year. We should, we should codify these changes. Our priorities matter.
The results of this are stark. Thanksgiving week, we saw what happened with the West Virginia National Guard service member, Specialist Sarah Beckram, who was 20 years old. Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolf, 24, savagely ambushed and shot blocks away from the White House. Specialist Beckram tragically lost her life. The attacker, Ramanula Lakenwall, an Afghan national who was imported through the Biden-Mayorkas illegal operation Allies Welcome parole program, drove from Washington state to carry out this diabolical act in our nation's capital. According to DHS, over 5,000 Afghans brought to the United States through Operation Allies Welcome had either national security or public safety concerns. We are importing people who want to undermine and destroy our country. And both sides of the aisle have been guilty of this. This is not a debatable reality. It's literally occurring.
For us to survive, we have to act. We need to pass the PAUSE Act. We need to pause immigration. We need to pass legislation like the bill that I introduced to preserve a Sharia-free America, which would prohibit the entry of people that are known to be adherent to Sharia law, which is deeply in conflict with our values and our laws. We should take away the tax status of CAIR and other radical organizations with ties to terrorists and a vast network of well-funded organizations using American tax dollars, United Nations funds, wealthy donors, George Soros' funding, foreign funding, nation-states, all pouring in to organizations, NGOs driving this agenda. The Marxist-Islamist red-green alliance that wants to destroy America as we know it. I introduced legislation to take away CAIR's tax status. Why are we giving them tax breaks to try to destroy America?
Which brings me to the final point, which I was alluding to before on HR2. That is legislation designed to codify effectively what President Trump is doing to stop the abuse of parole, to stop the abuse of asylum, to stop the abuse of catch and release, to stop all of the abusive ways in which an exploited border can undermine our security and endanger us. We cannot rely on the administration to do it. Congress needs to act. Congress needs to codify it. Congress needs to change it. And states and state leaders need to stand up and use the legislation that we did pass in January to enable suit against the federal government when they fail to secure the border, that we included in the Laken Riley Act, because states can no longer be beholden to a federal government that refuses to secure the border. We have a reprieve under President Trump. That reprieve will no doubt one day come to an end. And states must be empowered and have leaders who are willing to stand up and fight.
States need to challenge things like Plyler versus Doe, the Supreme Court ruling that said that we must have taxpayer funding going to pay for the education of illegal alien children. You want to choose to do it, that's for you to decide. But we should not be forced to use taxpayer dollars to do that. And we should challenge that Supreme Court ruling, and we should stand up to defend our country. The fact is, you can't win a war that you're not willing to recognize exists. And it is undeniably true after the election of the mayor in New York, Adams, with what's going on in Dearborn, with what's going on in Minneapolis, with what we're seeing happen in Texas, in Dallas, in Houston, what we saw unfold in London, in Paris, that there is an attack on the Western way of life, and we must stand up and defend it if we're going to be able to pass down a country to our kids and grandkids. With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back.