    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [January 26, 1996]
    [Pages 105-109]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the National Association of Hispanic Publications
    January 26, 1996

        The President. Thank you very much. I feel a lot better than I did
    when I got here. [Laughter] Thank you so much. Thank you, Andres Tobar.
    Thank you, Louis Rossi. Thank you, Federico Pena.
        Secretary Pena gave me a beautiful introduction, and it illustrates
    Clinton's first law of politics: Whenever possible, be introduced by
    someone you have appointed to high office. [Laughter] I thank him for
    the outstanding job he has done at the Transportation Department and for
    being our friend and leader.
        I want to congratulate you on your 10th annual convention, on the
    opening of your office here in Washington under Executive Director
    Marlene Romero. There are so many Hispanic-Americans I want to thank,
    but I want to say a special word of thanks to Raul Yzaguirre for his
    leadership and his guidance and his advice. I know that you have leaders
    of several Hispanic organizations here with you tonight, Commander Jake
    Alarid and the members of the G.I. Forum. I think the Chairman of the
    EEOC is here, Gil Casellas; he's done a terrific job.
        I wanted to tell you that--I know Secretary Cisneros spoke
    yesterday, and he was to be here tonight, but his son is having a Cub
    Scout meeting, and Henry is the den leader. So we are trying to practice
    family values in our administration, and he's doing what he should be
    doing.
        Let me also tell you before I get into the remarks that I was going
    to make tonight--you know, when I gave the State of the Union Address I
    said, and I believe, the major choice before America is not whether
    we're going to have big or smaller Government but whether we're going to
    work together to solve the problems and meet the challenges and seize
    the opportunities that we have as a people. The choice is whether we're
    going forward together or whether we think Americans can really do their
    best out there on their own. And I believe we need to work together, and
    I asked the Congress to work with me.
        I want you to know that just a few minutes ago the Congress passed a
    continuing resolution so that there's no question now of the Government
    shutting down, and we'll be able to go on. And now I hope very much we
    can go back to work and pass all the remaining budgets for this year and
    pass that 7-year balanced budget in a way that is fair to all Americans.
        I also want you to know that the United States Senate has just voted
    overwhelmingly to ratify the START II treaty with Russia. And let me
    tell you what that means. That means that when the Russians follow
    suit--and I talked to President Yeltsin today and I told him that I
    thought the Senate would ratify it tonight. He said he would do his best
    to see that the Russian parliamentary body, the Duma, would do the same.
    When START II is ratified, between START I and START II we will have
    reduced nuclear weapons two-thirds below their cold-war high. Two-thirds
    of the nuclear weapons threatening the world will be gone. So I want to
    thank the United States Senate and the United States Congress for
    working together with us on this. And as I said, I very much hope that
    this is a sign of even more of that kind of work to come.
        I wanted to say just one other thing, too, about the appointments
    issue. When I came here to Washington, I found that in strange corners I
    was criticized for trying to develop an administration that looked like
    America, that I had this idea that you could have diversity and
    excellence and we didn't have to sacrifice one for the other. You heard
    Secretary Pena say that we have appointed a record number of Hispanics--
    and I might add, and African-Americans and women--to the Federal bench.
    And just this week, I nominated a distinguished judge, Richard Paez from
    California, to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth

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    Circuit--a very important court, and he'll do very well.
        And what I wanted to say, that what I'm very proud of is that this
    batch of judges together have the highest ratings from the American Bar
    Association in terms of their qualifications of any President's
    appointments since the ABA has been rating them in over 20 years now. So
    you don't have to sacrifice excellence to get diversity, to give
    everybody a chance to serve. And that is very important.
        I would like to talk just a few moments tonight--I know you're all
    here and you're having a good time and I want to get down here and shake
    hands, and I only have about one speech a week in me like the State of
    the Union--[laughter]--but I would like to talk about the things that I
    discussed in the State of the Union in terms of what they mean for
    Hispanics in America.
        I do believe that as we move from the industrial age and the cold
    war into the information technology age and the global village that we
    are going into an age of possibility where, for Americans who can take
    advantage of it, there will be more possibilities for people to live out
    their dreams than in any time in the history of our country.
        I also know that we face some stiff challenges. An awful lot of
    Americans, including an awful lot of Hispanic-Americans, because of all
    these changes, are having to work harder and harder and harder just to
    keep up and are worried about the security of their families: Will they
    be able to provide health care; will they have a pension when they
    retire; will they be able to educate their children; will they be able
    to get education if they need it in their middle years? These are
    serious challenges.
        I am encouraged that the family values that the Hispanic community
    has always embodied are reasserting themselves. It's a good thing that
    the crime rate and the welfare rolls and the poverty rolls and the teen
    pregnancy rate are all down and that overall drug use in America is
    down. That's all good, but it is troubling that random violence among
    adolescents under 18 and random drug use and even cigarette use is now
    up among young people under 18.
        So that's a challenge. We have to find a way to reach these children
    and get them back into the mainstream of American life and give them the
    dreams that so many of us grew up with. And that's really what I was
    trying to talk about in the State of the Union.
        You can see all the progress that's been made by Hispanic-Americans
    in the corporate sector, in the classrooms. We see more Hispanic TV news
    anchors, reporters, publishers, authors, doctors, lawyers, lawmakers.
    But every child deserves to have a dream and to have a chance to live
    out that dream. And I think this community has a special role to play in
    seeing that America meets the challenges of today and tomorrow, because
    you know all about hard work and personal responsibility and family
    values but you also know that we will do better if we work together than
    if we just leave everybody out there to fend for themselves. And that is
    the central message of this time.
        I said at the State of the Union, and I repeat, I think this country
    faces seven great challenges: the challenge to strengthen our families;
    the challenge to renew our education for the next century; the challenge
    to provide economic security for every family that's out there working
    for it; the challenge to break the back of crime and violence so that
    crime becomes the exception, not the rule in America again; the
    challenge to protect our environment; the challenge to guard our world
    leadership for peace and freedom; and the challenge to make our
    Government work for all the people again.
        Think what this means, all these challenges, to the Hispanic
    community. Strong families are the foundation of your culture. But every
    child is vulnerable to the lure of television that no child should
    watch, to the temptation of cigarettes that shorten our lives--1,000
    kids a day will have their lives shortened because they're starting to
    smoke at an age when it is illegal--to the draw of the gangs and the
    drugs and all these things. We all have to set better examples. But we
    deserve help, too. We deserve help.
        That's why I fought so hard on the telecommunications bill, for
    example, to have a requirement that all cable television stations have a
    V-chip in them so that parents can decide whether their young children
    shouldn't watch certain programs. That's not censorship, that's parental
    responsibility.
        That's why I fought so hard for a welfare reform bill that would be
    both pro-work and pro-family. I have no problem with requiring people
    who can work to work; they should work. The welfare system was never
    meant to be a system which essentially said to people you can

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    move out of your house and have children out of wedlock and the
    Government will support you. But if we're going to require people to
    work, we have to remember that the responsibilities of parenthood are
    still the most important responsibilities in our society. So people must
    be able to succeed as parents as well as workers. That is my test for
    welfare reform.
        Education has been the key to advancement of virtually everybody
    standing in this room tonight, and our education system in many ways is
    getting better and better. But it's not quite hooked up to the future as
    it should be. The Vice President and I are determined to see that every
    classroom and every library in every school in America is hooked up to
    the information superhighway by the year 2000. And it will help open the
    doors of the future for Hispanic children as never before. You're going
    to have children in isolated rural areas in south Texas within 4 or 5
    years able to do research out of a library in Australia or China or
    India and learn things they never could have learned before. Because we
    have to bring the miracles of technology to the poor as well as the
    rich, to the rural as well as the urban, to all Americans. That is a
    vision worth achieving in our schools.
        I would also point out to you that even though the college-going
    rate is going up, among poor Americans the college-going rate has
    flattened out--in some cases it's declining--because of the cost of a
    college education. No young American should ever not go to college
    because of the cost. That is my goal. Never. Never.
        And we are working to increase the scholarships, to have everyone
    able to get a college loan--is a college loan that you would only pay
    back as a percentage of your income so that no matter how much you
    borrow, you can never be bankrupt after you got out of school. You would
    have to pay it back, but there would be a limit as a percentage of your
    income. Now, I am proud of the fact that we have given more loans, but
    we have cut the college default rate in half. If you make it possible
    for people to repay and then you require them to do so, you can educate
    more people and cut the college default rate. That's what we ought to be
    doing in this country.
        And let me also say, I know that it's popular today to bash
    bilingual education and to get into all this language business.
    Everybody knows that English is the language of the United States, but
    we do well by encouraging people to take other languages. My daughter
    just finished her Spanish exam, and I'm glad she's taking Spanish. And I
    wish more people would. And when children come to this country, whatever
    their native language, we want them to begin to learn immediately. We
    want them to develop a facility in English. We want them to keep their
    native tongue, and we want them to learn while they're doing it. That is
    all we have ever said. That is all anyone has ever asked. We don't need
    to make this issue a divisive issue for the American people.
        If you think of the question of economic security, this affects the
    Hispanic community more than anyone else. The minimum wage is going to
    be at a 40-year low within a year if we don't--in terms of what it will
    purchase--if we don't raise it. It is unconscionable. For 2 years, I
    have been trying to get a raise in the minimum wage. It is time to do
    it. If we say people ought to work, how can we let people work and live
    in abject poverty? It is wrong, it is not necessary, and we should not
    do it.
        Let me say, we're also trying to make sure that people get the wages
    they're entitled to. Between 1993 and 1995, the Wage and Hour Division
    of the Labor Department, headed by Maria Echaveste, restored more than
    $77 million in illegally withheld wages to workers in the garment
    industry, restaurants, hotels, motels, and agriculture, many of them
    Hispanic. I believe America needs a raise, and we ought to start with a
    minimum wage. And we ought to do that because it is the right thing to
    do. I believe it very strongly.
        I also believe very, very strongly that we can give people greater
    security when they know that their jobs have the capacity to get a
    pension system that they can take then from job to job, when at least
    they ought to be able to have access to health insurance that they can't
    lose when they change jobs or if someone in the family gets sick. That's
    why you have insurance, because someone might get sick. But you have
    people all over America who are losing their health insurance because
    somebody got sick; that's why you have it in the first place. Surely, at
    least, even though we could not agree on comprehensive health care
    reform last year, surely, surely we can agree to at least protect people
    who are in hard-working families when they change jobs or when one of
    their children get sick from losing health insurance.

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        Let me just say one other thing about security. I think if we're
    going to have security we have to have very firm, firm laws that protect
    the workplace in America. Federico said I opposed Proposition 187; I
    did. I thought it was a bad policy. I didn't want to see children thrown
    out of schools, sick people thrown out of hospitals. But I do not
    believe that people who are not here legally should be in the workplace,
    and a lot of them are being exploited today, exploited in unconscionable
    ways because we do not enforce laws that are on the books for legal
    immigration. I am for legal immigration. I am not for punishing
    children. But I think we have to take a strong stand against people who
    are not in the workplace legally, because they are being abused, and the
    whole American wage and hour system and the integrity of work is being
    abused by the people who do that. And we ought to stand against it. And
    those of you who believe in immigration, who believe we are a nation of
    immigrants, I ask you to help me do that, so that we can preserve the
    support of the United States for a good, strong, legal immigration
    system that continues to bring us together across our diverse cultures.
        I want to say just one thing about the crime problem. I was in
    Louisville, Kentucky, the day after the State of the Union. And I went
    into a poor neighborhood where we had put a community-policing program
    into effect, the city did with some help from the Federal Government.
    And I saw poor people who never before had any feeling of rapport with
    the police department actually working on a daily basis with the police,
    not to catch criminals so much as to prevent crime.
        We now know that the way to drive the crime rate down is for
    neighbors to work with neighbors, to work with police departments. They
    even set up a citizens police academy in Louisville, where people in the
    poorest neighborhoods could go down and learn how the police department
    is organized, how much money was being spent on what, how many police
    officers there were, how long it took them to get to the neighborhood,
    how they could be deployed. And it was a beautiful thing to see. All
    these people who lived in very difficult circumstances felt empowered as
    citizens because they were literally helping to run the law enforcement
    program of their community. The policeman was not some outsider who was
    a source of fear, he was a friend and a partner. And they were driving
    the crime rate down.
        But as long as children can be shot dead on the street from drive-by
    shootings, as long as children can be enlisted into gangs, and because
    they're young, taught by cruel older people to use weapons on the theory
    that they wouldn't be punished or hurt as badly, this country is never
    going to be what it ought to be. We must go back to the days when crime
    is the exception, not the rule. That ought to be our goal and our
    standard, and we should work until we get there.
        I thank the Hispanic community for the support we received for
    NAFTA, for the support we received for the Summit of the Americas, for
    the support I received in probably the most controversial--perhaps one
    of the two or three most controversial decisions of my administration,
    to try and reach out and give some support to the reformers in Mexico to
    keep the economy from collapse so that we could continue to be good
    partners and good friends.
        Secretary Pena is about to go to Chile to try to implement some of
    the agreements we made at the Summit of the Americas. These are
    important things. I ask you--this is something I want to ask you to do.
    I think Hispanic-Americans just instinctively know that we cannot go
    into the future as an isolated country; that a part of our community has
    to be not only American families and communities, people in the private
    sector and the charities and the churches and the synagogues and the
    Government working together, we also have to have relations with other
    countries. I think you know that. And I ask you to remind our fellow
    Americans when they say, ``Well, why would they spend any money on any
    of that foreign stuff,'' that foreign aid is only one percent of our
    budget, only one percent, that our engagement with other countries is a
    very small percent of all of our tax dollars.
        But I will just give you a few examples. One of the reasons that
    seven members of the Cali cartel were arrested is because the United
    States and Colombia were partners, because they trusted us, we trusted
    them, we worked together. Those people had to put their lives on the
    line--we don't have to do that--to get that done. If we had no NAFTA, if
    we had no Summit of the Americas, if there were no larger vision about
    how to relate to the United States, why

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    should anybody cooperate with us in other areas?
        If I bring a terrorist, suspected terrorist back from South Asia,
    and a poor country in South Asia goes out and arrests somebody out of a
    neighborhood and sends that terrorist back here to stand trial in
    America, why should they do that unless they feel that we share the same
    values and the same interests and the same future? If I ask the Russians
    to work with me and to absolutely end the threat of nuclear
    annihilation, which is where we're going, why would they do that unless
    they feel we have a shared future? I think Hispanics know that kind of
    instinctively.
        This is a big deal for America. We have to be reaching out to the
    rest of the world because people still trust us. Why in the world were
    we asked to go to Bosnia, after we, through NATO, had actually bombed
    there to enforce the previous agreements? Because people know if we give
    our word, we'll keep it. Because they know we don't want any territory,
    we don't want to control any people. All we want is for people to live
    by certain rules of decency and to treat their people with decency and
    to be freedom loving.
        And finally, let me say we're trying to give you the Government up
    here you deserve, one that costs less and works better. And I said in
    the State of the Union and I'll say again, the era of big Government is
    over. Your Government today is the smallest it's been since Lyndon
    Johnson was President. By the end of next year--this year, '96--it will
    be the smallest it's been since John Kennedy was President. We are
    downsizing the Government.
        But having a small Government is not the same thing as having a weak
    Government. It can be smaller; it can be less bureaucratic. We can be
    giving more power to State and local governments, more power to people
    in the private sector, more power to groups that can solve social
    problems better at the grassroots level. But we don't need to walk away
    from America's challenges.
        We still have an obligation, I believe, through the Medicaid
    program, to help poor children and families with children with
    disabilities and elderly people who need to be in nursing homes. I
    believe that's our obligation. We still have an obligation to help
    people make the most of their own lives through education. We have to do
    more on that. We're going to have--you know, the average person in a 4-
    year school today is 26 years old. That's the average age. In the
    community colleges of this country, it's older. The average person who's
    18 years old today will have to go back and get a better education even
    if they go on to college and get a degree. This will become the work of
    a lifetime. We have to stay together.
        If this is going to be the age of possibility for every American,
    for every Hispanic child to live out his or her dreams, we have got to
    say, all right, the era of big Government is over, but we are not about
    to go back to the time when everybody was fending for themselves and
    everybody was on their own.
        Families work because people work together. People move to cities
    and towns because they could do more together than they could if they
    were living apart. And the same is true of our country. I think you know
    that. Impart your wisdom, your feeling, your conviction to the rest of
    America so that we can go forward together.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.
        Audience member. Say hi to Hillary! [Applause]
        The President. Thank you. Thank you.
        Sonja Hillgren. Wait one minute. And now I understand that he
    noticed his picture was not up there, and now your picture will go up
    because you are now a member.
        The President. I just have one question. Does this mean I get to ask
    questions, instead of answer them? Because if it does, I've got a
    wonderful backlog built up. [Laughter]
        Thank you very much. And let me say I want to come down and shake
    hands, and then I know you've got a busy evening and I thank you for
    letting me leave early. But I've got a little family values to tend to.
    This has been a long day in my family, and I'm going to take care of my
    wonderful wife and my daughter. So I'll see you. Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 7:35 p.m. at the National Press Club. In
    his remarks, he referred to Andres Tobar, convention chair, and Louis
    Rossi, president, National Association of Hispanic Publications; Raul
    Yzaguirre, president, National Council of La Raza; and Jake Alarid,
    national commander, American G.I. Forum of the United States. Sonja
    Hillgren was president of the National Press Club.