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Thank you very much. Good evening. God bless. Praise God. Thank you.
Good evening.
[audience: "Good evening."]
I have to tell you that it always feels good when I have the opportunity to get back to Utah, if only because it gives me a chance to meet, once again, all the wonderful folks whose heart and spirit and values are so consonant with my own.
I know you realize that sometimes in the business of working in our politics in America today, you can kind of start to feel like you're a little bit crazy and isolated--especially if you've spent too much time reading the newspapers or watching TV--but I have the refreshing experience of coming back to Utah and finding that there is still a decent heart in America, and still a some common sense in America, and still a faith in America that can, I hope, revive our spirits and or will and save this country.
And it's not surprising, therefore, that we're at a juncture now where decisions that are being taken here will, once again, have an impact on an understanding and a debate on the possibilities of right action with respect to an issue that, I believe, ought to be obviously vital to our future to every American there is.
It's one of those things that I don't understand, at one level, how we could have this "debate," so-called, over what is going on with our southern border. I would just like you to pause for one second, because it helps, sometimes, to get past all of the verbiage and all of the different rhetorical methods that people use, all the anecdotes that are told to tug at the heartstrings and try to stigmatize anybody who doesn't go this way--"You don't have compassion, you don't have patriotism, you don't have this"--and let's just think, in a commonsense level, about what we're actually dealing with here.
All these folks want to talk about immigration law and immigration policy and immigration regulations, and so forth and so on, and I sit there thinking to myself, "Well, that's all well and good." Surely, surely, we're going to have to have some kind of immigration policy--and even if we did nothing, that would still be a policy. So, the point is that obviously we're going to have to have some kind of an approach to this.
And then the question becomes, well, are we going to actually take control of that approach, or are we going to leave it to chance?
Well, I can tell you, having done some work during the course of my career in the State Department as a consular officer--the folks who sit abroad in our various consulates and issue the visas, and so forth--I can tell you that if we put a "y'all come" sign on America, don't kid yourself, everybody would come.
We could fill this country up in ten years. We could go from a population that sits around, what is it now, about 300 million? We could go to a population of 500 million and a billion in a flash--just like that. And it's because this country represents so much in the way of positive allure. We emphasize the materialism and the jobs and the economic opportunity, but believe me, in countries where people can't hold their heads up in the presence of oppressive elites, where they can't have their dignity because they are stomped down with the belief that where you're born and how you're doing things, that determines who you are, they long to breath the free air and enjoy the dignity and self-respect that has come to be associated with our country.
So, don't fool yourselves. Put a "y'all come" sign on America, and billions will come. Not millions, anymore.
And so, the question then becomes, do we mean to do that? Because, if you open the door wide, that's what is going to happen. Well, I think everybody who has some common sense will say, "Well, no, we don't want to do that." We've got to have some rational and responsible regulation, so that we can make sure that the country can handle it, the infrastructure can deal with it; so we can make sure that the different values that go into helping our society to function, including respect for our constitutional process, a willingness to accept the outcome of elections--things we take for granted.
If you look around at the rest of the world, that culture that we take for granted, where after our guy loses an election, we just all go back to work the following day and hope that we can do better next time, I hope you've noticed that that's not the way things are often done in other parts of the world. People unhappy with elections will take to the street, they'll start killing, they'll start burning, they'll start tearing the place down or picking the automatic weapons up.
That doesn't happen in America, and it's not an accident.
[applause]
It's because we have accepted the discipline of self-government, and the discipline of constitutionalism.
And that's something that I think we ought to be eager to share with all the folks around the world who would like to share it--and certainly with some who want to come and be part, here, of this great experiment.
I have to say, from the outset, that in thinking about this, I wouldn't want anybody to get the impression that I am somebody who does not believe, not only in the universal appeal, but in the universal human mission of the United States.
Our founders believed it. They thought that it was going to be decided in this country whether human beings always had to live under governments that came about by force and chance and circumstance, or whether by deliberation you'd be able to establish a government that would respect human dignity, establish human liberty, and still lead to strength and prosperity for its people--vindicating the cause of self-government for all human beings.
And isn't it wonderful, what's happened? With that kind of a goal in mind--declared, by the way, at the time when the country only had a relatively homogeneous population. Just a few different national and ethnic groups were represented, and now look at us. We represent people from every different race and color and creed and kind you can imagine. The hope that we have extended to humanity has attracted all kinds of humanity here, hopefully to join in and help raise up this example of what can be done when human worth is respected, when human dignity is the foundation of government, when a sense of responsibility, grounded in our respect for ourselves and God, becomes the governing culture of a country.
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