[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 49 (Wednesday, April 23, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3562-S3564]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




          CONGRESS HAS 100 DAYS TO RESTORE IMMIGRANT BENEFITS

 Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, Congress has 100 days to restore 
urgently needed assistance to legal immigrants and refugees.
  On August 1, 100 days from today, legal immigrants who have worked 
hard, but were injured on the job, will lose their Federal benefits 
under last year's so-called welfare reform law.
  Refugees will lose their safety net. These are men and women who fled 
persecution in their own countries, only to find persecution now in 
America.
  They are people who fought with us in Southeast Asia, and this is the 
thanks they get from hawks who kept the war going long after it should 
have stopped.
  The Vietnam war and the cold war are finally over. But in the rush to 
forget, we cannot forget these brave families and their sacrifices, and 
treat them unfairly, because they are old or disabled.
  In recent weeks, some needy immigrants have taken their own lives, 
rather than burden their families.
  We must say enough is enough--100 days is long enough for Congress to 
undo the thoughtless damage an unthinking Congress did last year. I ask 
that a few recent news articles on this issue may be printed in the 
Record.
  The articles follow:

                [From the New York Times, Apr. 22, 1997]

  Confused by Law, Nursing Homes Bar Legal Immigrants--Fear Over Lost 
                                Benefits

                         (By Rachel L. Swarns)

       As the health care industry braces for Federal cuts that 
     will leave thousands of immigrants without Medicaid this 
     fall, nursing

[[Page S3563]]

     homes have begun to mistakenly deny admission to some elderly 
     and sickly legal immigrants who will not lose their health 
     coverage.
       Bewildered by the new Federal welfare law and fearful that 
     immigrants will default on their bills, some health care 
     centers in New York and around the country are asking 
     prospective patients for citizenship papers instead of 
     residency papers upon admission, hospital and nursing home 
     administrators say.
       And while New York State health officials acknowledge that 
     a small group of immigrants will lose Medicaid as Federal 
     restrictions go into effect later this year, they warn that 
     the new practice unfairly denies care to the vast majority 
     who will keep that coverage.
       But as health care administrators peer into the faces of 
     their elderly applicants and struggle to interpret the law, 
     some have found it easier to refuse all legal immigrants--
     those with green cards but not citizenship--than to figure 
     out who will keep benefits and who will lose them.
       ``It's heartbreaking, but we're all too terrified to admit 
     anybody who is not a citizen,'' said Sheryl Geminder, the 
     director of admissions at the Sephardic Home for the Aged in 
     Brooklyn, which now rejects all legal immigrants who need 
     long-term care. ``A green card was the ticket in six months 
     ago, but now our attorneys are warning us not to take any 
     chances.
       The confusion is the unintended consequence of the changes 
     in the Federal welfare laws, which allow states to continue 
     Medicaid to some legal immigrants while denying coverage to 
     others.
       New York, along with at least 35 other states, plans to 
     continue benefits to poor legal immigrants who entered the 
     country before Aug. 22 of last year, when President Clinton 
     signed the welfare bill. But those who have arrived since 
     then will generally find themselves ineligible for Medicaid 
     coverage for five years.
       No one knows how many eligible immigrants have been turned 
     away from care centers for the elderly, but health care 
     officials in New York said that dozens had been rejected in 
     the last month.
       And administrators at public hospitals in Miami and Los 
     Angeles, who are also reporting their first cases, fear the 
     problem will balloon if the law is not clarified, stranding 
     immigrants in hospital beds needed by acute-care patients.
       Already, legal immigrants too sickly to bathe and too 
     senile to recognize their children are beginning to languish 
     in hospitals. And families who can no longer care for ailing 
     relatives now find themselves overwhelmed with few options.
       ``If this continues, what will we do with these people?'' 
     asked Carol Burger, an administrator at Elmhurst Hospital 
     Center in Queens as she searched for a place for an 83-year-
     old legal immigrant from Romania, one of about 20 patients 
     rejected by nursing homes for lack of citizenship. ``Where 
     are they going to go?''
       Representative E. Clay Shaw Jr., a Republican of Florida 
     and the chief sponsor of the new welfare law, called the 
     situation ``worrisome'' and said he had never intended to 
     deny care to eligible immigrants.
       By law, nursing homes may refuse patients who cannot pay 
     their bills. But Mr. Shaw said he doubted that elderly care 
     centers that receive Federal funds, in the form of Medicaid 
     payments, had the right to turn away legal immigrants who 
     were eligible for care. ``There's no question that it's 
     discrimination,'' he said in an interview.
       Mr. Shaw said that care centers needed better guidance from 
     state and Federal health officials and that his Congressional 
     committee would provide it, if others did not. ``I can 
     understand their confusion,'' he said of the nursing homes. 
     ``But obviously, some elderly people have fallen through the 
     cracks.''
       Paralyzed by a stroke that left empty spaces in her memory, 
     Raisa Kinker, a 74-year-old legal immigrant from Ukraine, 
     spent one month at Huntington Hospital on Long Island, 
     rejected by one nursing home after another, until a Brooklyn 
     rehabilitation center took her in.
       Withered by the stomach cancer that has left him marooned 
     at Elmhurst Hospital Center for two months, Lois Bejarano, 74 
     and a legal immigrant from Colombia, has been told not to 
     even hope for a nursing home bed, although he, too, will keep 
     his Medicaid coverage.
       And more than 30 legal immigrants from China, many of them 
     too crippled to walk or brush their thinning hair, recently 
     found themselves stranded with families who could not care 
     for them when a Staten Island retirement home rejected their 
     pleas for placement this month.
       ``These families come all the way from Chinatown and beg us 
     to take their elderly relatives, and I've got to look in 
     their eyes and tell them no,'' said Cindy Miner, the case 
     manager at the Staten Island home, the Anna Erika Home for 
     Adults and Assisted Living Programs, which caters to elderly 
     Asian patients.
       ``We've taken these people into our country, and now when 
     they need help, we have to turn them away,'' she said. ``It's 
     a horrible feeling. We'd love to take everyone, but it's just 
     too much of a risk.''
       The confusion over eligibility stems, in part, from the 
     Federal Government's distinction between ``qualified'' 
     immigrants, who will keep benefits, and ``nonqualified'' 
     immigrants, who will lose them.
       In New York State, virtually all legal immigrants, those 
     who arrived before Aug. 22, are considered qualified. These 
     noncitizens, who include legal permanent residents, refugees 
     and seekers of political asylum, will keep Medicaid, which 
     covers nursing home costs. Even the estimated 87,000 legal 
     immigrants expected to lose Supplemental Security Income 
     benefits, the Federal cash payments accepted by retirement 
     homes, will receive state funds to cover their stay, state 
     health officials say.
       The S.S.I. recipients' Medicaid status will be re-
     evaluated, but state officials say the coverage will continue 
     unless the recipients are no longer poor or disabled.
       Although the State Legislature has not formally passed the 
     welfare law that includes this provision, Democrats and 
     Republicans say there is no dispute over the issue.
       ``They should not be turning away this group on the basis 
     that they will be losing Medicaid eligibility, because that 
     will not happen,'' said Frances Tarlton, a spokeswoman for 
     the State Department of Health.
       But a group of about 16,000 immigrants, considered 
     ``present under color of law,'' who have been granted 
     temporary residency and receive Government services, are 
     expected to lose both Medicaid insurance and cash benefits 
     beginning in August.
       And legal immigrants who arrived on or after Aug. 22 of 
     last year--a group that will increase over time--will be 
     ineligible for Medicaid.
       State officials said they had tried to make the 
     distinctions clear. But health care administrators for the 
     elderly are still frantically seeking guidance, calling 
     politicians, reading trade newsletters and viewing Government 
     World Wide Web sites.
       ``I'm getting calls from nursing homes and they're saying, 
     `I have a legal immigrant here. What do I do?' '' said Scott 
     Sandford, director of regulatory affairs for the New York 
     State Health Facilities Association, a trade group that 
     represents 290 nursing homes.
       ``We have been telling our members, `You have to be really 
     careful about someone who is not a citizen.' '' Mr. Sandford 
     said. ``We assume that Governor Pataki's proposal is going to 
     pass, but we can guarantee nothing. It's a real risk.''
       The perceived risk varies from institution to institution. 
     The Cabrini Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, a 240-bed 
     complex in Manhattan still accepts legal immigrants. Menorah 
     Home and Hospital for the Aged and Infirm, a 253-bed center 
     in Brooklyn, on the other hand, has turned several away.
       ``Some homes are being extra careful,'' said James E. 
     Piazzola, the director of social work at the Los Angeles 
     County-University of Southern California Medical Center, 
     which saw its first legal immigrants rejected from nursing 
     homes six weeks ago. ``Rumors are flying everywhere.''
       Plans to ease the new welfare law's impact have been 
     bandied about for weeks. President Clinton wants to restore 
     most benefits to elderly immigrants. Republicans in Congress 
     want to give some states money to help them manage the 
     transition. And Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York City 
     has filed suit to keep the Federal cuts from going into 
     effect.
       But while the proposals fly, hospital administrators say 
     some legal immigrants are already suffering. And they fear 
     that the situation will only get worse as the summer deadline 
     for cuts in benefits approaches.
       ``As we get closer to August, more and more of the 
     facilities are going to refuse them,'' said Jill Lenney, the 
     administrator of social work at Jackson Memorial Hospital in 
     Miami. ``They're going to be occupying acute-care beds, and 
     patients who need those beds will be spending more time in 
     the emergency room.''
       Without clear guidance, nursing homes and retirement homes 
     currently refusing legal immigrants have no reason to change 
     their new policies, advocates for nursing home patients say.
       ``There are obviously people who need care, who are not 
     going to be able to get it,'' said Cynthia Rudder, the 
     director of the Nursing Home Community Coalition of New York 
     State, which advocates on behalf of nursing home residents. 
     ``They're in limbo until the state makes some 
     determination.''
       In a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, a 75-year-old legal 
     immigrant from Ukraine lives in that limbo. Rejected from the 
     Sephardic Home for lack of citizenship, Villy Vaysman lies in 
     bed, unable to move, his body mostly deadened by Parkinson's 
     disease.
       He is too heavy for his 76-year-old wife, Irina, to carry 
     to the bathtub. So every morning, she washes him bit by bit, 
     rolling him from one side to another, praying all the while 
     that some nursing home will take him in.
       ``I don't have the strength to take care of a paralyzed 
     man,'' she said as she wept last week. ``I don't want to 
     think that they won't take him. I don't know what we'll do.''
                                                                    ____


             [From the Wall Street Journal, Apr. 22, 1997]

  Suicide Shows Why Welfare Fight Persists--Immigrant's Death Raises 
                       Questions Over Cuts in Aid

                           (By Dana Milbank)

       Stockton, CA.--A few days before his 76th birthday last 
     month, Ignacio Munoz clambered down into a dried canal bed 
     beneath the railroad tracks here, put a .35 caliber Colt 
     revolver to his right temple, and pulled the trigger.

[[Page S3564]]

       Three weeks earlier, the Mexican-born laborer, who came to 
     America half a century ago, received an ``Important Notice'' 
     from the government warning him that he might lose his $400 a 
     month of Supplemental Security Income. The reason: Mr. Munoz, 
     though a legal immigrant, wasn't a citizen--and therefore 
     stood to lose his benefits because of welfare overhaul. 
     ``They're going to cut me off,'' he told friends after 
     receiving the letter. ``If I had a gun right now, I would 
     kill myself.''


                         funds may be restored

       It's difficult to know what causes any suicide, or what 
     other demons might have haunted Mr. Munoz. But in the debate 
     over welfare policy, the laborer's story provides just the 
     sort of powerful anecdote that can affect the course of 
     events in Washington. Ronald Reagan's tales of welfare queens 
     in Cadillacs helped spark the drive that led the government 
     to revise the welfare system last year. And now tales of 
     hard-working immigrants like Mr. Munoz are leading 
     policymakers from both parties to question whether some of 
     those changes went too far.
       Leaders of both parties now support restoring some of the 
     funding cut last year from benefits for legal immigrants, 
     although they disagree on how much. Republican legislators, 
     under pressure from GOP governors and worried about the 
     public relations problems that stories like Mr. Munoz's could 
     cause, have already proposed adding back $2 billion of 
     funding for immigrants over the next two years--mostly for 
     SSI and food stamps. President Clinton and the Democrats are 
     proposing adding back much more--more than $14 billion over 
     five years. If the White House and Republican leaders are 
     able to reach a budget agreement, it will probably include a 
     compromise on increased immigrant funding somewhere in 
     between.
       In Mr. Munoz's case, the sad irony is that he need not have 
     lost his benefits. The law requires immigrants to either 
     become citizens or prove that they have worked 10 years or 
     more in the U.S. to keep their benefits. Mr. Munoz had worked 
     in this country since the late 1940s, and a welfare counselor 
     told him he could obtain an exemption if he could document 
     his employment history. That, however, would have required 
     his patrons to acknowledge that they had employed him against 
     the law, and Mr. Munoz considered it a matter of honor not to 
     betray his former bosses.
       ``I'd rather die,'' he told his friend Salvador Aguierre. 
     Lupe Marquez, another friend, explains it this way: ``He 
     really loved the patron. He got in his mind that he'd have to 
     put the finger on his patron. That's why he died.''
       Mr. Munoz, whose nickname was ``Nacho,'' was born in 1921 
     on a ranch in Colotlan, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, the 
     son of a laborer. He came to the U.S., illegally at first and 
     alone, in the late 1940s. He lived in labor camps and cheap 
     hotels or with friends. He held a string of odd, seasonal 
     jobs--pruning pear trees in the winter, picking olives in the 
     fall, working in a tortilla factory, and doing landscaping 
     and office cleaning at a local radio station. Anselmo Ambriz, 
     who met Mr. Munoz in the fields in 1951, says his friend 
     worked until age 70, sometimes for 10 hours a day.
       Whenever he worked, he was dogged by a fear that border 
     police would catch him. Indeed, he was once returned to 
     Mexico but snuck back in soon after. ``He thought he was a 
     criminal,'' says Frank Gonzales, whose family housed Mr. 
     Munoz at various times.
       Mr. Munoz developed intense loyalty to his patrones, his 
     employers through the 1980s: Knox LaRue and Arnold Toso. Mr. 
     Munoz worked illegally for both men, but Mr. LaRue, under an 
     amnesty program passed by Congress in 1996, obtained a green 
     card and a legitimate Social Security number for him in the 
     late '80s. ``He was a very nervous little guy.'' Mr. LaRue 
     recalls of the 5-foot-7 Mr. Munoz, who had bushy gray brows 
     over sad, dark eyes. ``He'd been on the lam for 40 years, 
     looking over his shoulder.''


                         considered citizenship

       Mr. Munoz stopped working after 1992 and moved into the 
     Franco Center, a big, concrete building for the elderly poor, 
     where he took a noisy one-bedroom apartment overlooking a 
     freeway. He paid the $184 monthly rent with his Social 
     Security payment of $286 and his $400 of SSI. At some point, 
     he contemplated becoming a citizen; among the possessions in 
     his apartment is a wrinkled, 11-page list of study questions 
     for the exam.
       Mr. Munoz never married and had no children. He spoke 
     little English and never visited the cantinas (tavern) with 
     his friends. He had cataract surgery in January, and walked 
     stiffly because of arthritic legs, but friends say he showed 
     no signs of depression.
       The trouble, says Mary Serna, a neighbor, ``all started 
     with that letter he got.'' He showed the letter to his friend 
     Mr. Aguierre. ``I worked all my life, now they're cutting me 
     off,'' Mr. Aguierre recalls Mr. Munoz saying.
       He paid a visit to a local advocacy group called Concilio, 
     where Susan Casillas offered to help him document his work 
     history. On Monday morning, March 17, he returned unannounced 
     to the Concilio office. Ms. Casillas asked him to return at 1 
     p.m. Instead, he walked that afternoon down to the railroad 
     track, past a cement and lumber yard, through some weeds and 
     down into the dusty canal bed. He was found bloody but still 
     breathing just after 1 p.m., the time of his appointment at 
     Concilio.
       Mr. Munoz was buried in a simple gray coffin in a plot for 
     the indigent in the county cemetery. The police found $717.40 
     in the dead man's pocket--the $1,000 in savings he had 
     recently withdrawn from the Franco Center office, less the 
     price of the gun.

                          ____________________