[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.