[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 33 (Monday, March 23, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2415-S2417]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
MUHAMMAD ALI--ATHLETE OF THE CENTURY
Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I am delighted that my dear friend Muhammad
Ali has been named by Gentlemen's Quarterly as Athlete of the Century.
We have had many noteworthy athletes in this century--the century
that has brought us modern sport. Excellence has been personified by
such sports heroes as Lou Gehrig, Babe Didrickson Zaharias, Bobby Orr,
Walter Payton, and Michael Jordan. But, to my mind, though this company
is clearly outstanding, GQ made the obvious choice.
Muhammad Ali's road to sports immortality began on January 17, 1942,
in Louisville, Kentucky. Introduced to boxing at the age of 12, Ali won
National AAU and Golden Gloves titles. He brought home the Olympic gold
medal from Rome in 1960.
After turning professional, he stunned the sports world by defeating
the also great boxer Sonny Liston in 1964. His victories over such
accomplished opponents as Liston, Floyd Patterson, Ernie Terrell, Joe
Frazier, George Foreman, and Ken Norton make him, in my mind, the
greatest boxer of all time.
But Ali's greatness goes beyond his physical strength and
athleticism, In 1964, he converted to the religion of Islam, adopting a
set of beliefs for which he would sacrifice a great deal. In 1967, at
the height of his career, he was convicted of draft evasion and
stripped of his heavyweight title. For a period of three years, Ali was
shunned by the boxing world and vilified by many who had previously
hailed him.
The conviction was eventually overturned by the United States Supreme
[[Page S2416]]
Court, and Ali turned to the ring in 1970 and took on Joe Frazier in
the ``Fight of the Century.'' This bout, between the only two
undefeated fighters, resulted Ali's ascension as the undisputed
heavyweight champion of the world. Ali brought speed and grace to the
world of boxing, demonstrating how to ``flit like a butterfly and sting
like a bee.''
Ali held this title until 1978 when he lost a hard fought bout to
Leon Spinks in 15 rounds on points. But, just seven months later, he
dethroned Spinks and recaptured the title for an unprecedented third
time.
I have come to admire Ali, however, not just for his unparalleled
skill in the boxing ring, but also for his faith and his humanity.
Ali has traveled the world on humanitarian missions. And he has given
most unselfishly, particularly to young people. During his recent visit
to Utah he was never without a gaggle of kids surrounding him. Even
though the effects of Parkinson's disease have made speech difficult,
he really does not need to talk to communicate. He exudes kindness and
friendship.
I am honored to count Ali and his wonderful wife Lonnie among my
friends. I commend the writers and editors at GQ for selecting Ali for
this very significant distinction. No one deserves it more. He's the
greatest.
SUCCESS OF IMMIGRANT CHILDREN
Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, according to a recent study by
sociologists at Michigan State University, and Princeton University,
one of the great contributions of immigrants to America, in addition to
their own skills and hard work, is the values they instill in their
children--respect for hard work, doing well in school, succeeding
against the odds, loving their families and their cultures, and an
abiding belief that the United States is the best country in the world.
Contrary to many of the myths about immigrants, this study concludes
that the vast majority of immigrant children learn English. Nine out of
10 speak their native languages at home, but 88 percent preferred
English by the time they completed high school.
This study is also significant because it does not gloss over the
challenges that many immigrant families face along the way. The study
reminds us that immigrant children struggle against discrimination and
anti-immigrant attitudes and policies. The study found that as a result
of attacks on immigrants in public policy in recent years, children of
immigrants were less likely to regard themselves as ``Americans'' and
more likely to regard themselves as members of their ethnic groups.
This kind of polarization could have profound consequences for our
society in the future, and we need to be vigilant against it.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a March 21 article in the
New York Times on this study may be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the bill was ordered to be printed in the
Record, as follows:
[From the New York Times, Mar. 21, 1998]
Best Students Are Immigrants' Children, Study Says
(By Celia W. Dugger)
A multiyear survey that is the largest ever of the children
of immigrants--who now account for almost one in five
American children--found that they overwhelmingly prefer
English to their parents' native tongues and have higher
grades and steeply lower school dropout rates than other
American children.
While a majority of those surveyed, who were predominantly
Hispanic, Asian and black children, said they had personally
experienced discrimination, an even larger majority of them
said they still believed that the United States is the best
country in the world to live in. The youths were adolescent.
The lead researchers on the study describe these findings
as reassuring indications that the children of immigrants are
unlikely to form a new multiethnic underclass, as some
experts fear, cut off from the mainstream by academic failure
and an inability to speak English.
But the researchers also say it is still an open question
how well these young people will do in college and the job
market, a caution shared by other experts.
The researchers said that the survey brought into sharp
relief the extraordinary diversity of the children of
immigrants, not only by national origin, but by social class.
It reaches from the young of Chinese and Indian couples from
highly educated, upper-middle-class backgrounds to Mexicans
and Dominicans from the humblest origins.
``What can certainly be predicted now is that the destinies
of these youth will diverge,'' said Professor Ruben Rumbaut,
a sociologist at Michigan State University. ``Some will go up
and some will go down.''
The survey, which shows that the children of immigrants
outperform their American peers and that those from more
advantaged backgrounds do better than poorer children,
will inevitably become fodder for the larger debate about
the United States' immigration policy.
Supporters of the current high levels of immigration will
cite the achievements of these young people, while critics
may find reinforcement for their view that national policy
should be titled to favor more highly skilled and educated
immigrants.
The research team, led by Rumbaut and Professor Alejandro
Portes, a sociologist at Princeton University, first
interviewed 5,200 youngsters in Southern California and South
Florida in 1992 when the youths were in the eighth or ninth
grades, and then tracked down 82 percent of them for a second
interview in 1995 and 1996 when most of them were high school
seniors.
This fall, another team of sociologists will begin a large-
scale survey of the grown children of immigrants in New York
City and its suburbs, focusing on adults 18 to 32 years old,
rather than adolescents.
The number of children who are either immigrants or the
American-born offspring of immigrants grew to 13.7 million
last year, from 8 million in 1990, making them the fastest-
growing segment of the U.S. population under the age of 18,
according to a new analysis of census data by Rumbaut.
The $1 million survey of the children of immigrants was
financed by the Russell Sage, Andrew W. Mellon, Spencer and
National Science Foundations. The researchers provided their
findings to The New York Times.
Among the most striking findings of the bicoastal survey of
children from San Diego and Dade and Broward counties in
South Florida have to do with the contentious issue of
language. While nine out of 10 of the youths surveyed spoke a
language other than English at home, almost exactly the same
proportion, 88 percent, preferred English by the end of high
school.
Rumbaut wrote, ``The findings suggest that the linguistic
outcomes for the third generation--the grandchildren of the
current wave of immigrants--will be no different than what
has been the age-old pattern in American history: The
grandchildren may learn a few foreign words and phrases as a
quaint vestige of their ancestry, but they will most likely
grow up speaking English only.''
And the professor also pointed to the ascendancy of English
as evidence of the irrelevance of a California ballot
initiative that could end bilingual education, which has been
depicted as an impediment to the acquisition of English.
``English is triumphing with breathtaking rapidity,'' he
said.
The study presents a generally upbeat portrayal of the
children of immigrants as ambitious, hopeful and resilient in
the face of discrimination.
In San Diego, the children of immigrants had better grades
than their American peers in every grade. The gap narrowed
over time, largely because the poorly performing children of
immigrants were more likely to stay in school than their
peers who were not the children of immigrants, the
researchers say. In South Florida, the school districts were
unable to provide the researchers with grade-point averages
for the district as a whole.
But when the researchers analyzed how the children of
immigrants were faring by national origin, they found that
levels of scholastic success diverged sharply. Generally, the
children whose immigrant parents had better educations and
jobs and who came from stable, two-parent families were
predictably more successful, with a few startling
exceptions.
The children of Chinese, Indian, Japanese and Korean
parents had the highest grade-point averages, A's and B's.
English-speaking West Indians had lower grades, C's and C-
pluses. Latin American and Haitian youths performed most
poorly, with averages that were slightly higher or lower than
a C.
But a few groups defied what would have been expected based
on their socioeconomic status. The children of Southeast
Asian refugees, who came from the most impoverished
backgrounds and whose parents were among the least educated,
were also among the least likely to drop out of school and
had above-average grades. They did it by studying for longer
hours and watching less television than many of the other
children of immigrants, the study found.
And the children of Cuban immigrants, who were from average
to above-average socioeconomic backgrounds, had the highest
dropout rates and among the lowest grades (an average of C or
C-plus), the survey reported. The Cuban children, who
belonged to the dominant group in metropolitan Miami faced
less discrimination than any other group in the survey, the
researchers said.
The children of Cubans did worse academically than the
children of Mexicans, who are one of the poorest and by far
the largest immigrant group in the United States.
The findings about Cubans were among the survey's most
startling to Rumbaut and Portes and their colleague, Lisandro
Perez, director of the Cuban Research Center at Florida
International University, who are all Cuban immigrants
themselves.
Portes had earlier hypothesized that Cuban youths would use
their economically powerful ethnic enclave as a springboard
to higher education and the middle class, much as
[[Page S2417]]
Eastern European Jews did in an earlier wave of immigration.
``As it turns out, the enclave may not be a springboard,''
Perez said, ``but a cushy net that means you don't have to
depend exclusively on education for a job. It may be that
Cubans are right, and will do better going to work at an
uncle's factory in Hialeah. We're not certain how it will
translate economically.''
The survey also found some intriguing changes in the way
the children of immigrants identified themselves, possibly
reflecting their altered relationship to the rest of American
society or perhaps just adolescent rebelliousness.
When the youths were first interviewed, more than half
labeled themselves as hyphenated Americans or as plain
Americans. That sounded like old-fashioned assimilation and
it might have been expected that, three years later, even
more of the youths would have chosen an American identity.
But the results of the second interview, conducted in the
months after California's passage of Proposition 187, the
initiative that called for restricting social and educational
benefits to illegal immigrants, turned those expectations on
their head.
Only a third of the youths in Southern California picked an
American identity the second time around, while almost half
identified themselves by their national identity, especially
youths of Mexican and Filipino descent, who belong to the two
largest immigrant groups in the United States.
The researchers interpreted the change as part of a
backlash among these youth against what they perceived as
immigrant bashing that surfaced in the campaign for
Proposition 187.
In South Florida the pattern was different, but equally
striking. The proportion identifying themselves by some kind
of American label dropped to about a third, while those who
chose ethnic identities such as Hispanic or black doubled to
38 percent, mainly among Latin Americans and Jamaicans.
The more militant, nationalistic identities assumed by
Mexicans and Filipinos in California, and the minority-groups
identities chosen in Florida, reflected the youths' rising
awareness ``of the ethnic and racial categories in which they
were persistently classified by mainstream society, Rumbaut
wrote.
In one of the more troubling findings of the study, the
young people who identified themselves by ethnic identities
like Chicano or Latino in junior high had lower grades and
somewhat higher dropout rates than the other children
studied. This finding lends support to analysts who have
suggested that children of immigrants who come to identify
with American minorities may take on ``oppositional''
identities and see doing well in school as ``acting white.''
____________________