    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [September 16, 1993]
    [Pages 1518-1522]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1518]]

    Remarks to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute
    September 16, 1993

        Thank you all, ladies and gentlemen, for that wonderful welcome. And
    thank you especially, my good friend Congressman Serrano, for that warm
    introduction and for not telling them that you are, after all, much
    faster than I am. [Laughter]
        I also have to tell you, I just left my daughter at home. She's home
    working on her homework. Hillary's still working on health care. She
    summoned me. She said, ``Dad, when you get the monkey suit on, come in
    and let me look at you.'' [Laughter] She always checks to see if I've
    taken all the shaving cream off my face. I was so proud of her because
    she is working on her accelerated Spanish course. When I heard Joe up
    here introducing me, I thought I should go ahead and confess that I
    asked my daughter if she would let me learn along with her. And she
    said, ``I doubt if you can keep up, Dad, but you're welcome to try.''
    [Laughter]
        I am deeply honored to be here tonight with the Hispanic
    Congressional Caucus Institute. Since the time this institute was
    founded and I was Governor of Arkansas, I have admired your work. Your
    programs are helping to pass the baton to a new generation of leaders,
    grooming them in the halls of Congress and in Federal Agencies and
    encouraging them to pass along what they've learned to others. It's
    important work for young people and for our country. I want to say thank
    you for that. One day, it will produce a President of the United States.
        I want to compliment the Institute's executive director, Rita
    Elizondo. Her hard work may help to inspire other children to pursue the
    lofty achievement of those whom you honor tonight: Ellen Ochoa, the
    first Hispanic woman in space, and Lucille Becerra Roybal, who has done
    so much to set an example for everyone in bringing urgent change to our
    country at the grassroots level. I would also like to honor and
    acknowledge Mrs. Roybal's husband, former Congressman Edward Roybal, and
    their daughter who has followed so well in her footsteps, Congresswoman
    Lucille Roybal-Allard.
        There are a few people here from our administration tonight; I'd be
    remiss if I did not acknowledge them. First of all, our brilliant
    Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Henry Cisneros, and his
    wife, Mary Alice. And I want to say a public and personal thank you to
    Henry Cisneros for what he did this week to prove that we're still
    behind the enforcement of civil rights in housing in this country. I
    want to acknowledge the presence of our outstanding Secretary of
    Transportation, Federico Pena, and his wife, Ellen. Unlike me, they may
    be faster runners than Congressman Serrano. Nelson Diaz, the General
    Counsel at HUD; Aida Alvarez, the Director of the Office of Federal
    Housing Enterprise Oversight at HUD; Norma Cantu, the Assistant
    Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education; Fernando
    Torres-Gil, the Assistant Secretary for Aging at HHS; Maria Echaveste,
    who runs the Wage and Hour Division at the Department of Labor; Joe
    Velasquez, the Deputy Assistant to the President for Political Affairs;
    Isabelle Tapia, the Deputy Assistant to the President for Scheduling and
    Advance; Patti Solis, the Deputy Assistant to the President who directs
    the scheduling for the First Lady; Lillian Fernandez, my Special
    Assistant in the House Liaison Office; and Carolyn Curiel, who is with
    Communications and Speechwriting and helped me write all the things that
    I may not be able to say properly tonight. I want to say a special word
    of thanks, too, to a former member of our staff, the Assistant to the
    President for Intergovernmental Relations, Regina Montoya, who went home
    to Dallas. But she's here with us tonight. I thank her for her service.
        The people now who serve in this administration, from the White
    House to the Cabinet departments, the people who serve on Capitol Hill,
    the people who are full-time public servants, have set an example that
    will be important to the whole country. All the people who are now in
    the unprecedently large Hispanic Caucus in the Congress can now honestly
    help to represent the hopes, the dreams of the Hispanic people of the
    United States and equally important, perhaps, to ensure that we make
    Hispanic-Americans full partners so that we move forward and do it
    together.
        I had an awesome experience earlier this week, as all of you know
    and some of you have

    [[Page 1519]]

    already commented on it, when I hosted the Prime Minister of Israel and
    the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization in signing an
    historic peace agreement that, if you had asked just one month before,
    probably 90 percent of the American people and 90 percent of the
    informed opinion in the world would say could never come to pass.
        It was an amazing thing, you know, once I realized it was going to
    happen and they wanted to come here to Washington to consummate the
    signing and make sure that the President didn't forget that the signing
    was the beginning, not the end, of the process, and then trying to work
    out how these two men who had fought each other literally for decades,
    who had put their whole lives into spilling the blood of one another's
    family and friends and allies, how they could somehow undergo this
    transformation to see each other as problems but not as necessary
    enemies. Someone said--I don't want to claim credit for that phrase--
    that this whole thing happened because, for some reason, at this magic
    moment in our history, those people looked at each other and saw enemies
    no more, but only problems. Problems can be solved. Progress can be
    made. Enemies don't talk to each other.
        Tonight I want to talk to you from the heart for just a moment about
    possibilities. Because what that moment reminded me of, again, is that
    if we can imagine it, it can happen. If we can somehow engage the
    thorniest problems, if we can somehow unlock the ears and the hearts of
    the toughest adversaries, it can happen.
        Tonight I ask you, my fellow Americans, to think about what it is we
    would like our children and our grandchildren to say we did with this
    moment in history, a moment in which many, many good things are
    happening and many, many bad things are happening at a bewildering rate
    of speed. The cold war comes to an end when the Berlin Wall drops and
    the Eastern European countries abandon communism and Russia abandons
    communism, revealing there a whole new set of problems, economic
    problems, social problems, religious and ethnic conflict but still, to
    be sure, taking away the threat of nuclear annihilation. We see people
    hungering in Latin America for democracy and seizing it and trying to
    build free economies where free people can work hard and be rewarded for
    their labors, trying to escape from the dark years of political
    repression and economic depression.
        We see so much to be hopeful about. Here in this country, we see the
    wonders of technology opening up worlds we would never have imagined.
    That's all true. But we also see a world in which none of the rich
    countries can figure out how to create jobs, a world in which most
    Americans are working harder than they were 10 years ago for roughly the
    same wages in real dollar terms they were making 20 years ago to pay
    more for education and health care and in taxes, wondering whether ever
    they will be able to pass along to their children the dream that they
    had as children.
        We have to face the fact that, in spite of the fact that people look
    to us all over the world to make peace, they wish us to go in and stop
    the starvation and the oppression in other countries, we of all the
    countries in the world have the highest percentage of people in prison
    because we are so violent. We have cities where the average age of
    murderers is now under 16, where teenagers carry weapons that are better
    than those police officers have. So we have this anomalous situation. If
    you are well-off in this country, you have the best health care in the
    world, but if you're one of the 35 million or so who don't have it,
    you're in a real fix. If you work for a living and you lose your job,
    you might lose your health care. If your child ever gets sick, really
    sick, you may never be able to change jobs without losing your health
    care.
        We have a Government desperately needing more funds to grow the
    economy and to deal with the real problems we face at home and abroad,
    mired in the operating patterns of 60 years ago. And it is no wonder
    that so many of us are distrustful of our Government and afraid of our
    future and unwilling to take the kinds of chances that Americans have
    always taken in expanding trade beyond our borders, in reaching out to
    establish closer ties with our neighbors, in believing that the future
    belongs to us and can be bright and broad and deep if we do what we
    should.
        So I ask you tonight not to take the shine off a perfectly wonderful
    and happy evening, to simply search your heart and say if Itzhak Rabin
    and Yasser Arafat could come here and sign away the legacy of the last
    four or five decades of hatred, to try to make a new beginning, can we
    not also make a new beginning in this time of sweeping change?
        My dreams for this country are not very com-

    [[Page 1520]]

    plicated. I believe that, in a time of change, you can do two things:
    You can hunker down and turn away from it and hope it'll go away, and
    that works about one time in a hundred. About once in a hundred it'll
    work. Or you can say there has to be a way I can make this change my
    friend. There has to be a way that the most basic traditional values I
    harbor, to have a good family life, to live in a safe community, to see
    my work rewarded, to give my children a good education, there has to be
    a way for me to enhance those values and hopes and dreams in the face of
    all this change. What is it I must do to do that?
        And if I ever do anything, whether you agree with it or not, and you
    want to know, ``Why in the world did that fool do that?'' all you have
    to do is to remember what I just told you, because I believe in this
    time of momentous change, it is my job not to turn away from it and
    hunker down but to embrace it with gusto and figure out how to preserve
    those basic values by making the changes that will make all these trends
    our friend and not our enemy.
        I do not pretend for a moment that I am always right or that I have
    all the answers. Indeed, sometimes I am so perplexed it is almost
    heartbreaking. But I know that the people who walk the dusty roads of
    south Texas or the hard streets of the South Bronx, the people who were
    in the Adelante Con Clinton army that got me 70 percent of the Hispanic
    vote in the last election, hired me to change things in this country.
        And so I ask you to be part of that change. Everything that we have
    done is a part of that. The motor voter bill is important. Why? Because
    it makes it easier for more people to vote who aren't represented. Why
    should you trust people in politics to make changes if you're not a part
    of electing them?
        The family leave law is part of that. Why? Because in a world in
    which more than half the mothers of children under 5 are in the work
    force, we have to make it possible to be a successful parent and a
    successful worker. We cannot force people to choose.
        The economic program was part of that. Why? Because it is criminal
    for us to leave another decade where we quadruple the national debt and
    we load it onto our kids. And then the Congress, 10 years from now,
    comes to town, and they have no money to spend on education, no money to
    spend on the economy, no money to spend on new technology, no money to
    spend defending the country, no money to spend on anything except paying
    checks, more money for the same health care, writing checks for
    retirement, and writing checks on interest on the national debt. There
    will be no ability to create the future unless we do something to
    release the burden of the debt.
        The economic program was also important because, for the first time
    in history, we changed the tax laws so that millions of families,
    including millions of Hispanic families, can be told, if you work 40
    hours a week and you have a child in your home, you will no longer be in
    poverty. The tax system will lift you out of poverty, not drive you into
    it. That was a profoundly important thing.
        But there is more work to be done. We began today the formal
    campaign to try to pass a drastic reform of the health care system. Look
    at the Americans without health care. Look at the Americans in peril of
    losing their health care. Look at the businesses going broke or at least
    not able to hire anybody else because they can't afford the cost of
    health insurance for extra employees, so they work their present
    employees overtime or work part-time people because they can't pay for
    health insurance. Look at the number of people who live in our cities
    who don't have access to public health facilities that ought to be open
    around-the-clock and that ought to be engaging in primary and preventive
    care. Look at the number of children who are born with low birth weight.
    Look at all these things, and ask yourself how in the world can we
    justify continuing a system which costs our people 40 percent more than
    any other people on Earth pay and does less with it because we insist on
    funneling money into things that have nothing to do with the health of
    the American people and everything to do with undermining the future of
    this economy. I tell you, we cannot do it.
        We are spending more money every year on the same health care. And
    I'm having trouble preserving funding for the space station, something
    which provides high-tech employment to Hispanic Americans from Texas to
    Florida to California and made possible future astronauts like Ellen
    Ochoa. Why? Because we have not faced our obligations. So I ask you to
    join me in this great effort to provide affordable health care to all
    Americans. We can do it, and we must do it.
        Now, I ask you too--and I know, you know,

    [[Page 1521]]

    one of the worst things you can do at a dinner is talk about something
    where people at the dinner disagree. But I have to do this on the NAFTA
    issue, and I want to tell you why. I don't care if I change a single
    mind tonight, but I want you to think about this. I want you to think
    about--now, wait a minute. Wait a minute. You all can all speak and
    argue with each other when I'm gone. That's what I want you to do.
    [Laughter] I want you to think about this: The argument against the
    treaty is that it will lead to the movement of American jobs to Mexico
    because their wages are lower than ours. That's true. That's the
    argument, right?
        There are 2,100 companies now in the maquilladora area. I governed a
    State where people shut down and moved their plants to Mexico, and I
    knew the people who lost their jobs. The only thing I want you to know
    is I would not knowingly do anything to make more people like that. So
    you say, why is this nut doing this if he's had personal experience?
    I'll tell you why. Because if we beat this thing, they can keep on doing
    that.
        I'll give you another thing that I think is important. Because of
    the immigration laws passed before I became President, 2\1/2\ million
    Hispanics will have the opportunity to become legal citizens of this
    country. I believe that immigration has enriched and strengthened
    America. But the rising tide of illegal immigration in States like
    California is sparking a disturbing hostility to the diversity that is
    clearly the future of America. And I hear people in California say,
    ``Well, I'm against this because of all this illegal immigration
    problem.'' What I want to tell you is anybody who wants to go to Mexico
    for low wages can go regardless of NAFTA. If we don't raise incomes in
    Mexico and incomes in America by strengthening our ties, the illegal
    immigration problem will get worse, not better. And then you will have
    more of this highly destructive, emotional, counterproductive feeling
    rifling throughout our political system. And I don't think that's good.
        I think America ought to revel in its diversity. We ought to embrace
    our diversity. When people go to Los Angeles County, they ought to be
    happy that there are 150 different racial and ethnic groups there, not
    worried about somebody else who might show up tomorrow. So we, we should
    produce the policy, whatever it is; we should pursue the policy that
    will reduce illegal immigration, keep legal immigration going, and make
    Americans feel better about the diversity. Because without it, we'll
    never be what we ought to be, moving into the 21st century.
        And let me say one last thing. A rich country in the world we're
    living in only grows richer, a rich country only grows richer by
    expanding its economic contacts beyond its borders. And we do not have
    the option to do what our friends across the Pacific and Japan did to
    build their economy--they don't even have the option of doing it
    anymore; they're going to have to quit--which is to sell everything to
    other people and not buy any of their stuff. We don't have that option.
        So when I look at what's happening in the world and I see that Asia
    is the fastest growing part of the world and Latin America is the second
    fastest growing part of the world and Latin America is just here handy
    and starts on the south of our border with Mexico, the reason I want to
    do this over the long run is I want to keep the movement to democracy, I
    want to keep the movement for economic growth, I want Americans to
    prosper by helping our friends and neighbors in this hemisphere to build
    a stronger world. I think over the long run it will protect America's
    economic future.
        Now, you don't have to agree. You don't have to agree. But I ask you
    if you disagree, don't win just because people are scared today, because
    we all know they're scared of losing their jobs. We all know people are
    alienated. But somebody's got to explain to me how people would be more
    likely to move their jobs to a place where they can move their jobs now
    if all they want to do is chase lower wages when the wages will be
    coming up, the environmental standards will be coming up, and people
    will be buying more American products. I believe it is in the interest
    of this country, again, not to turn away from the change but to embrace
    it, not because it will be easy, not because nobody will be hurt but
    because on balance we'll be better. We can never make in a world in
    which we live, which is always imperfect--we cannot make the perfect
    solution the enemy of the better solution. That is why I have embraced
    this course and why I hope others will as well.
        Now let me just say one or two other things. I am excited about the
    upcoming referendum in Puerto Rico. Whatever they're for, I'm for. And I
    hope you are. I am excited about the prospects we have been given to
    promote de-

    [[Page 1522]]

    mocracy from Russia to the Middle East to Haiti. I am excited about the
    promise of change. I am profoundly disturbed about the problems we have.
        The only thing I ask you to do is, even if you disagree with me,
    never run away from the problems. I don't understand why in the United
    States of America, when we've got the violence we've got on our cities,
    we can't pass the Brady bill in the Congress and take these assault
    weapons out of the hands of teenagers. I don't understand why we can't
    do that. I don't understand why we don't have an education and training
    system that from the moment someone loses their job--because now people
    don't normally get the jobs they lost back; they have to find another
    job--is no longer an unemployment system, but is a reemployment system,
    and from the get-go, from the first day, from the first week, people are
    told, ``Here are the new jobs of the future, and here are funds to train
    for them.'' I don't understand that. But if you will help me and you
    leave me in, I'll fix those two problems, because you will fix them, not
    me. We'll do it together.
        And I could give you example after example after example of this.
    The thing I always love about being in the presence in any form or
    fashion of the Hispanic culture is that it is so life-affirming. It is
    so passionate. It is so real. It is so straightforward. I tell you, my
    friends, think about that event last Monday. Think about the passion,
    the feelings, the strength you have, what you worry about for your
    children and what you want for the future and say, if they can make
    peace, how can we in America walk away from our challenges? We're going
    to walk into them. We're going to conquer them. And the Hispanics in
    America are going to lead the way, lead the way in partnership with our
    administration and on every street and in every community of this
    country. I love what we can do, but I am troubled by the fact that we're
    not doing it. Let's seize every day we have to make the most of it. And
    always remember that peace agreement in the Middle East as a spur to us
    to make this country what it ought to be for our children.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:30 p.m. at the Washington Hilton.