[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 44 (Wednesday, April 20, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: April 20, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                WELFARE REFORM IN RELATION TO IMMIGRANTS

  (Mr. BECERRA asked and was given permission to address the House for 
3 minutes.)
  Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, I wish to add my congratulations and 
applause to the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Clyburn] and the 
gentlewoman from North Carolina [Mrs. Clayton], for their efforts to 
have this special order on the issue of welfare reform.
  Mr. Speaker, I think it is tremendously important that we have a 
chance to discuss the issue since we will hopefully within the year be 
able to discuss meaningful reform. And I want to emphasize meaningful 
reform, because it is time for us to talk about meaningful reform and 
not political reform when it comes to welfare.
  Mr. Speaker, clearly it is time to change our welfare system, clearly 
the things that have been discussed this evening are important to all 
of us, making sure people are actually getting jobs and not staying on 
welfare, making sure children have a chance to be educated, all those 
things are very important to us, but I also believe we have to make 
mention of a number of issues that are becoming very controversial and 
very concerning to a number of us.
  Let me address, then, the issue of using immigrants to pay for the 
cost of welfare reform. There are several proposals right now that 
would use immigrants, legal immigrants, people who have every right to 
be in this country and soon will have a chance to become U.S. citizens, 
using them to pay for reform of the welfare system. We are talking 
about cutting back on benefits that immigrants receive, that they have 
paid for, because they have paid every single tax that an American 
citizen pays, they have provided every single type of duty and 
responsibility that a citizen has, including serving in the military, 
if necessary, so these are individuals who in every respect are the 
same as citizens, except, of course, they cannot vote and in some cases 
cannot serve in certain government positions. But otherwise they pay 
the same tax, they do the same type of work, they have the same type of 
responsibility that a citizen would have. Cutting benefits to 
immigrants and at this stage, there is talk of cutting benefits to 
legal immigrants who are aged, blind or disabled, which makes no sense. 
It seems to me it is time to consider a different means of trying to 
finance welfare reform if we truly wish to have meaningful welfare 
reform.
  Mr. Speaker, there are studies that show that immigrants of all sorts 
and all kinds and of all nationalities provide a great deal of money to 
our treasury. We have a report from the Business Week magazine from 
1992 which said that immigrants collectively earn $240 billion a year, 
and they also pay about $90 billion a year in taxes. Yet we are talking 
now of depriving them of welfare or perhaps other types of public 
assistance which they have paid for through their taxes. It seems 
unfair.
  More than that, if on the Federal level we deny them these benefits, 
what we would end up doing is cost shifting all of this particular cost 
to the States, which is something the Federal Government has done too 
often in the past and should not be done again. We should not cause 
State and local governments to pay the cost of something the Federal 
Government is receiving tax benefits for. We should not do that, we 
should not let anyone do that.
  Mr. Speaker, we must have meaningful welfare reform that is not done 
on the backs of people, including immigrants.
  I would hope that what we find is for people who can serve in the 
army, who pay every single tax and who have every single 
responsibility, we will make an opportunity to have meaningful welfare 
reform.

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