Rep. Tiffany explains latest voting record
First term congressman outraged by immigration situation
Seventh District Rep. Tom Tiffany (RMinocqua) on Thursday told officials at a Western Marathon County Towns and Villages Association meeting that he voted against two major Democratic pieces of legislation and continues to be concerned with what he described as a flood of undocumented immigrants across the southern border with Mexico. The meeting was held at the Stettin town hall.
The congressman said one of the pieces of legislation he voted against was President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better initiative.
“We voted on that in the House before Christmas,” he said. “I primarily voted against it because of the price tag and because it would create lots of new programs, such as free community college and free day care.”
Tiffany argued that the cost of the $2 trillion Build Back Better bill was understated. He said that the true cost was $5 trillion over 10 years and that it would increase the national deficit.
“We are so deeply in debt in America,” he said. “I don’t support going further into debt with new programs.”
Tiffany’s critique is controversial. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal organization, says that the Build Back Better bill is “very nearly paid for” over the next decade and would not significantly increase the national debt. Further, the group claims the bill would reduce the national deficit over a second decade by $1.8 trillion.
Tiffany said he also voted against a Democrat-supported bill that combined the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. He said he had three reasons for opposing the legislation.
He said the bill would have authorized counting ballots seven days after Election Day and this was wrong. “This is part of what is getting us in trouble in our country,” he said.
Tiffany said states like California and New York allow counting ballots, including mail in ballots, weeks after Election Day. “There’s great uncertainty in these states,” he said. “That’s not the right approach from the federal level.”
A second reason he opposed the voting rights bill is that it would ban states, such as Wisconsin, from enforcing a photo ID for voting.
Third, he objected to the bill providing public financing for candidates like himself. He called the financing offer “welfare for politicians.”
The combined voting bill offers a variety of public finance options, including a $25 “democracy credit” that all voters could use to support candidates and a six-to-one federal match for small campaign donations.
Tiffany said both the Build Back Better bill and the voting rights legislation passed the House of Representatives and are now stalled in the U.S. Senate.
In response to a question about immigration, Tiffany said he traveled to Arizona after first being elected to Congress and thought construction of part of a border wall and stepped up enforcement were “really getting things under control” at the southern border. Tiffany said he returned to McAllen, Texas, in April 2021 and considered the immigration problem “completely out of control and people were just flowing in.”
Tiffany said the change was caused by ending construction of the border wall and halting a Trump administration policy of “remain in Mexico” for people waiting for their asylum claim hearings. He said immigrants who claim asylum, of which 90 percent are rejected, are now allowed to wait while in the United States.
Tiffany claimed on his return flight from Texas about half of the 200 passengers were “regular people” while the other half were migrants with a manilla envelope that listed their various destinations, including, San Jose, Philadelphia and Baltimore.
Tiffany said two million migrants have entered the United States over the past year. “The green light was turned on last year,” he said. “The numbers are simply staggering.”
The congressman said the current immigration system involves “so much human misery.” He said he was told last year in a trip to Panama that 10 percent of migrants die heading through “one of the most inhospitable jungles in the world” and almost all of the women are sexually assaulted.
He said that the amount of drugs, including fentanyl and methamphetamine, coming across the nation’s southern border is unprecedented. “Just talk to your local sheriff,” he said. “Every state is a border state.”
Tiffany, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, promised to have hearings on the border situation should Republicans take control of the House of Representatives following the November election.
He said the border crisis would improve by reinstating the “remain in Mexico” policy, building the border wall and halting the “catch and release” policy. “It was very successful what the previous administration was doing to control the flow of people,” he said.
Asked what the federal government should do with migrants who are already living in the United States, Tiffany said the nation had to protect its culture.
The congressman said there have always been immigrants to this country but that “there was always an insistence by people in America that you must assimilate into our culture.”
He said there was a waning insistence that migrants accept American culture. “And that’s what concerns me the most now,” he said.
Tiffany said, for example, the Chinese do not respect private property and do not protect private property under the law like is done in the United States.
“We have to educate people about what American culture is all about,” he said.
Tiffany said he lamented the use of non-English languages in public discourse. He said he had no problem with migrants, like the Germans, Nowegians and Polish, using their native languages in their homes, but objected to using anything else but English in public spaces.
“We have to make sure we have those common bonds that hold us together as Americans,” he said. “That’s what concerns me as much as anything.”
Many of Tiffany’s assertions regarding illegal immigation are controversial.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel for the American Immigration Council, said it was “simply not true” that the Trump administration handed over a quiet border to the incoming Biden administration and that, after the “remain in Mexico” policy was rescinded, border crossings significantly increased.
He said Tiffany’s assertion makes “a tidy story” but that only 70,000 people were turned back under the policy to Mexico out of hundreds of thousands of people crossing the nation’s southern border. He said that the policy has largely been replaced by something called Title 42, where people crossing the border are returned to their native countries as a COVID-19 precaution. Use of the provision was ramped up during the Trump administration and has been continued under the Biden administration.
Reichlin-Melnick said there is no academic scholarship that links surges in border crossings to changes in U.S. immigration policy. Instead, he said, the surges are caused by problems in other countries.
The counsel agreed that the U.S. Border Patrol had two million “encounters” with migrants in 2021, but that these encounters involved only 1.5 million unique people. Out of this number, he said, 60 percent were immediately returned to their native countries. Another 20 percent were unaccompanied children who received special programming. Only 400,000 migrants, he said, were released at the border. A similar number of people were released during the Trump years in 2018-19, the counsel claimed.
Further, Reichlin-Melnich agreed that a large quantity of fentanyl and methamphetamine comes into the United States at the southern border but that the vast majority of these drugs are brought in by vehicles at ports of entry, not by migrants on foot.
