[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 31, Number 20 (Monday, May 22, 1995)]
[Pages 856-861]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Institute 
Dinner

May 18, 1995

    Thank you, Admiral, for that introduction; and thank you, ladies and 
gentlemen, for that rousing welcome. Can we do this again tomorrow 
night?
    Thank you, Admiral; thank you, Gloria Caoile; to all the Members of 
Congress who are here. I thought I had a list of all of them, but I can 
look outside there and see I don't. I have seen Congressman Mineta, 
Congressman Matsui, Congressman Underwood, Congressman Kim, Congressman 
Faleomavaega. I see Congressman McDermott out there--your Medicare 
hearing was great--[laughter]--I watched you on C-SPAN--all the Members 
of Congress. I want you to know I'm watching you all the time on C-SPAN. 
[Laughter] I see Senator Inouye and Senator Robb, and there may be 
others here, and if I have not mentioned you I am sorry, I apologize.
    I'm delighted to see your co-emcees here. First, Ming-Na Wen, whom I 
first saw in the wonderful movie, ``Joy Luck Club,'' when Amy Tan came 
to the White House and showed it. And then, my daughter makes me watch 
``ER'' whenever I can. [Laughter] I was tired when I got here, and then 
I shook hands with her and my blood started pumping, so I feel so good. 
[Laughter] I'm especially glad to see George Takei, because I came here 
to talk about how we're going to take America into the 21st century, and 
he's already been there. [Laughter] This may be largely an academic 
exercise to him.
    I'm glad to be joined by Secretary of Transportation, Federico Pena, 
and by Phil Lader, the SBA Administrator, and many others whom I will 
mention in a moment who are here tonight. And I also--I met the board 
members, or at least several of them, on the way in tonight. I want to 
thank all of you for serving and for constituting this organization.
    Hillary and our daughter, Chelsea, just got back from a remarkable 
trip to Southern Asia. They went to India, to Pakistan, to Bangladesh, 
to Nepal, and to Sri Lanka. I got a few shirts and a lot of pictures out 
of it--[laughter]--and a world of education, because I watched several 
hours of rough film footage of their trip, and I must tell you that it 
was an immensely rewarding thing for them and for us, and I hope and 
believe it was good for the United States.
    We are at an extraordinary moment in our Nation's history, not only 
for the Asian Pacific American community but for all of our people who 
understand that we're going through profound changes, economic and 
social changes, that we have great problems and great challenges but, 
frankly, more opportunities than any other country if we understand what 
an incredible resource our people are, and how fortunate we are, on the 
verge of a totally globalized economy, to have, perhaps, the most 
diversified citizenry anywhere in the world.
    If we understand that we don't have a person to waste, and that we 
have to face our challenges together, there is no stopping the United 
States. I have been particularly gratified to have the services of so 
many people from the Asian-Pacific American community in our 
administration. Many of you out here, I see, have accepted various 
appointments to boards and commissions, and many of you work full-time 
for the White House or the administration, including Doris Matsui in 
Public Liaison. [Applause] Listen, she gets a hand when I'm in the non-
Asian crowds. I think she must be the best politician in the White 
House, certainly the best politician in the Matsui family.
    I see Congressman Pastor out there, an Hispanic-Asian-American 
Congressman; Maria Haley, with the Export-Import Bank; Ginger Lew at the 
Commerce Department; Denny Hiyashi of HHS; Debra Shon with the Trade 
Representative's Office; Paul Igasaki of the EEOC and Edward Chow of 
Veterans Affairs. And tomorrow I will get a list of everyone in my 
administration I have omitted to mention tonight, and I will eat a lot 
of crow.
    We are a nation of immigrants. Not very many of us can trace our 
lineage back originally to this continent. It is a good thing to 
recognize and celebrate that fact. That was the purpose behind 
Congressman Horton's tireless efforts to have the month of May des- 

[[Page 857]]

ignated as Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month.
    I want to add my sincere congratulations to the well-deserved 
recognition Congressman Horton is receiving tonight. He did America a 
great service with this action. Thank you, sir. Stand up. Thank you. 
[Applause]
    The month of May has great significance in Asian-Pacific American 
history. The first week of May in 1843, the first Japanese arrived in 
America. On May the 10th, 1869, Golden Spike Day, the Transcontinental 
Railroad, built in large measure with Chinese labor, was completed. 
Today, more than 150 years later, nearly 8 million Asian-Pacific 
Americans can trace their roots to Asia and the islands of the Pacific.
    As we face the challenges of the global economy in the information 
age, we turn to you for hope and inspiration. You know well about 
overcoming barriers and embracing change. You know well about the 
importance of preserving the traditional values of family and hard work, 
and sacrifice today for a better future tomorrow. And, yet you have 
shown the most remarkable ability to adapt to changing circumstances of 
perhaps any group of your fellow Americans.
    Some of you are fifth generation citizens; others are the first in 
your families to call yourselves Americans. But all of you have a legacy 
of being willing to work hard to overcome obstacles to pursue the 
American dream. As immigrants and the descendants of legal immigrants, 
you understand, perhaps more than most, what it means to take on the 
responsibility of facing up to building a new life in a difficult and 
new circumstance.
    As we debate immigration policy in this country--and we should--and 
we all know that we have a problem of illegal immigration which 
undermines the support that has traditionally existed in America for 
legal immigration, at least in modern times, we should all remember 
something that President Kennedy once said in describing the value of 
immigration, and I'd like to quote, ``Immigration gave every old 
American a standard by which to judge how far he had come, and every new 
American a realization of how far he might go.'' It reminded every 
American, old and new, that change is the essence of life and that 
American society is a process, not a conclusion. Let us remember that 
today in this time. We welcome your creativity, your contributions, and 
your criticisms as we struggle to prepare all Americans for the coming 
century.
    For the past 2 years I have been focused--some would say obsessed--
with getting our people to do the things that I believe we must do to 
move into the next century. I think that what we have to do does not 
fall easily into the categories of established political debate, or even 
into the established agendas of the political parties. The future should 
not belong to Republicans or Democrats, it should belong to all 
Americans who are willing to do what has to be done to keep the American 
dream alive.
    In the next century, we have to face the fact that we will have more 
opportunities than ever before but that there will be challenges that 
are different than we have faced before. We will have to face the fact 
that wealth and success will not only depend upon hard work, it will 
require more smart work. We will have to face some new and different 
challenges to our security, for the information age requires us to be 
more open, more flexible, more mobile, to be able to get more 
information more quickly, to democratize access to all kinds of facts 
that previously were the province of the privileged few.
    But we know that as we do that, we give rise to new security 
challenges, for the open and flexible and fast-moving society is very 
vulnerable to the forces of organized destruction. We saw that most 
heartbreakingly recently in Oklahoma City. We live with the bitter 
aftertaste of the World Trade Center. And our hearts ache with the 
Japanese people when they endured the ability of one fanatic to go into 
the subway and break open a vial of poison gas and kill several people 
and hospitalize hundreds of others. All this is a reminder that in the 
21st Century we may be beyond the cold war, we may succeed--and that's 
what my recent trip to Russia was partly about--in completely removing 
the burden of the nuclear terror from our children and our 
grandchildren. But we cannot avoid organized, destructive, evil forces 
that will come at us in different ways, with the proliferation of 
biological and chemical

[[Page 858]]

and perhaps even small-scale nuclear weapons. That is what we must fight 
against. We must fight to protect the benefits of the open society with 
genuine security for all of our people.
    I think you could argue that the last 2 years have been a good down-
payment on the future we are trying to build. Our economy has produced 
6.3 million new jobs. Finally, after years of stagnation, we're 
beginning to produce high-wage jobs in the economy again. Our deficit is 
down by over $600 billion over a 5-year period. Today, our Government's 
budget would be balanced, today, but for the interest payments we are 
required to make this year on the debt run up between 1981 and the end 
of 1992. So we are moving in the right direction.
    We are shrinking the size of the Federal Government. It's over 
100,000 people smaller than it was when I came here, and we're going to 
shrink it by much, much more. But I would say to you again, in the wake 
of what we have seen in terms of expressed animosity toward our 
Government, the people that are working for our Government, therefore, 
are doing more work with fewer people. They, too, are being more and 
more productive, and they are entitled to our respect, not our 
condemnation. They are Americans too.
    The Small Business Administration, for example--its administrator is 
here, Mr. Lader--is having a huge reduction in its budget, but they've 
increased their loan volume by 40 percent. That is the kind of thing we 
see going on all over the Government. We have done what we could to 
support small business. It is really the engine of opportunity, 
historically, for the Asian-Pacific American community. In the budget in 
1993, we increased the expensing provisions for small business by 70 
percent, and adopted for the first time a capital gains tax for people 
who really invest long-term in businesses, who hold the investment for 5 
years or longer.
    Now, the SBA loan application has gone from an inch thick to a page 
long, and you can get an answer in a week instead of 2 or 3 months. We 
know that these are the kinds of things that we ought to be doing 
throughout the Government to create opportunity.
    Perhaps more importantly because so many of you will make the most 
of it, we saw in the last 2 years the biggest expansion of trade 
opportunities in a generation in America, with the passage of NAFTA and 
GATT, and with the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation group really 
getting organized for opening trade and tearing down trade barriers 
first in Seattle and then in Jakarta, where some of you were as we 
committed ourselves to an open trading system by the year 2010 for all 
the Asian-Pacific countries, including the United States of America.
    We have done what we could to make it easier for working families to 
deal with this world of new challenges and changes, with dramatic 
increases in education and training opportunities, with the Family and 
Medical Leave Act, with tax reductions for working families with incomes 
of under $28,000 a year, so anybody that works full-time and has 
children in the home should not live in poverty. If we want to reward 
work and family in this country, we ought to reward work and family. We 
shouldn't just talk about it. We ought to do it. And if you work full-
time, you ought not to be in poverty if you have to go home at night to 
children who deserve a decent future.
    As well as anyone else, you know that we must do more in education 
to raise the quality as well as the quantity of education in America, 
and so we have tried to do that. We've expanded educational opportunity, 
everything from more people in Head Start to lower-cost college loans 
for young people who go to college, better repayment terms. But we also 
have begun to give funds to States for the first time to really raise 
the standards of excellence in education.
    Let people decide at the local level how to achieve these new 
standards, but to finally, finally, fully measure our children by global 
standards of excellence, so that we will know whether our schools are 
doing the job. And if they aren't, we will know what we have to do about 
it. This is an investment we must continue to make, even as we downsize 
the Government. We have to continue to invest in the education of our 
people. That is our future.
    Indeed, if you ask me what the greatest threat to the preservation 
of the American

[[Page 859]]

dream in the next century is, I would have to say it is that the middle 
class is splitting apart instead of swelling and coming together. From 
the end of the Second World War until about 15, 16 years ago, American 
incomes grew together without regard to income group, and we also were 
coming together. That is, incomes were going up, and the poorest 
people's incomes were going up a little faster than middle class people 
and the wealthiest people's incomes were.
    So, we were increasing equality and increasing growth at the same 
time. For the last 15 years, that has all changed, partly as a result of 
our going into a global economy, partly as a result of the dramatic 
explosion in technology, putting higher and higher premiums on high 
skill levels, and the ability to learn for a lifetime. We see now, 
today, that slightly more that half of our people are working harder for 
the same or lower wages they were making 10 years ago.
    So that, while in the last 2 years we've had more small businesses 
formed than in any period in history, we've seen more new millionaires 
in America than at any time in history, a cause for celebration, we see 
more and more and more people going home at night after a hard day's 
work, sitting down with their families, wondering if they'll be able to 
guarantee their children a better opportunity, wondering if, as hard as 
they've worked, somehow they've done something wrong and failed. They 
haven't failed. What we have done is failed to keep up with the changes 
in the global economy which require every advanced country to have a 
system of lifetime education and training available to all people so 
they can move into higher paying jobs.
    The dispute we are having today, which I hope will be very short-
lived, over the so-called rescission bill in the Congress, which I have 
said I will have to veto if it comes to me in the present form, is not a 
partisan dispute. I say it is not a partisan dispute. There were members 
of both parties in that conference committee that produced this final 
bill.
    It is a dispute about yesterday's politics and tomorrow's politics, 
for I believe we, whether we're Democrats or Republicans, have to keep 
bringing the deficit down, and we have to be prepared to make tough, 
sometimes unpopular budget cuts to liberate the American economy from 
the crushing burden of debt we have sustained in the last 12 years. We 
cannot continue this way. We've brought it down a lot. We have to 
continue until this budget is brought into balance. We must all do that.
    But in a time when we are cutting spending, we have to be more 
careful with the dollars of yours that we do spend than ever before. If 
we are going to spend less and cut the deficit, what we have to spend 
must be spent with even greater care. And my dispute with the bill 
produced by the conference committee is not how much money was cut. In 
fact, I have offered even greater cuts. We have to start now to cut more 
spending. My problem is when the bill moved from a public process to a 
private process, over $1 billion in educational opportunities were taken 
out of the bill, and $1 billion-plus of pork was put back into the bill, 
everything from a special Federal grant to a city street, to nine 
specific road projects in a single congressional district, to $100 
million for one courthouse in return for cutting out over $200 million 
to make our schools safe and drug-free, cutting out funds to give our 
children a chance to work in community service and earn college 
education, cutting out funds to train our teachers to meet international 
standards of excellence instead of just to continue to do what's being 
done in schools when it's not good enough. And I could go on and on.
    So the issue is not cutting spending. I am for that. And it is not a 
partisan issue. Both parties were represented in the conference 
committee. It is about the old politics against the new politics. If 
we're going to have the courage to cut this deficit and to make 
unpopular spending cut decisions, then every dollar we do spend should 
be spent to take us into the 21st Century, to raise incomes, to crease 
jobs, to give us a better future. That is what is at stake here, and we 
must fix it.
    And let me say one other thing that we must focus on and that I hope 
you will all be thinking about and celebrating tonight. As we define our 
security as a people and our strength as a people, we have to protect 
ourselves against destruction from within and

[[Page 860]]

without. That's what the crime bill is all about, putting more police on 
the street, having more prisons, having more prevention programs. It's 
what the anti-terrorism legislation I sent to the Congress is all about. 
But let us never forget the real security we have as Americans comes 
from the positive things about this country. The real security we have 
as Americans comes from the fact that almost all of us are devoted to 
our families, raise our children as best we can, put in a full day's 
work every day, pay our taxes as best we can legally, and otherwise obey 
the law and respect the differences in this country.
    Now, we have free speech and free association. And we are proud of 
our differences. I am proud of the fact that you live in a country which 
encourages you to gather here because you share a common ethnic and 
geographic heritage. I am proud of that.
    I am proud of the fact that Hispanics and African-Americans and 
Polish-Americans and other Americans have that same opportunity. I am 
proud of the fact that people who have different religious convictions 
that lead them to different political conclusions have the freedom to 
organize and speak their mind even if they think I am wrong on 
everything. I am proud of that. That's what America is all about. I am 
proud of that.
    But every group should remember one thing: There are very few 
countries in the world where you have as much freedom to do as many 
different things as you do in this country. There are very few places in 
the world that are blessed with respecting diversity as we do in this 
country. And so, there should be a limit on the extent to which we go 
beyond celebrating our diversity to glorifying division. There should be 
a limit to the extent to which we go beyond disagreeing with our 
opponents to demonizing them.
    You know, I'll just give you one example from my own experience. 
There's not a politician in this audience--I don't believe, including 
me, so I will only criticize myself, I have done this--there is no 
telling how many times in my life, just since I've been President, I 
have been so proud of being able to get the Congress to pass budgets 
that reduce the size of the Federal Government by 270,000 while we're 
taking on a higher work load. And I go around and brag about it, and I 
don't know how many times I have used the term, ``Government 
bureaucrat.'' And you will never find a politician using that term that 
doesn't have some slightly pejorative connotation. That is, we know 
taxpayers resent the money they have to pay to the Government, and so we 
try to get credit by saying we're being hard on bureaucrats or reducing 
bureaucrats.
    After what we have been through in this last month, after what I 
have seen in the eyes of the children of those Government bureaucrats 
that were serving us on that fateful day in Oklahoma City, or in their 
parents' eyes who were serving us when their children were in that day-
care center, I will never use that phrase again.
    I had to face the fact that I was out there trying to get some 
political credit from my fellow citizens by implying that people who are 
in a certain category were taking their money for no good reason. Well, 
we have to downsize the Government. We have to have early retirement 
programs. We have to stop spending on some of the things we're spending 
on. And the Democrats and Republicans both have to get on that program, 
and we have to work together on it. But we should never--and everybody 
has got one story where some person working for the Federal Government 
or a State or a local government has been unreasonable in pursuit of a 
regulation or unreasonable in enforcement of the law or just not polite 
to someone when they came in.
    But remember, most of those people are just like most of you: They 
love their children; they get up every day and go to work; they do the 
very best they can; they try to do honor to this country. And they take 
those jobs knowing they will never be rich, but drawing some fulfillment 
from the fact that they are serving the public. And that's just one 
example. All of us should now begin to think about this again, about the 
way that this country works and that we can celebrate our diversity and 
our differences, but we have to be connected in a seamless web of 
commitment to common values with a common vision of the future.
    Yes, we've got a lot of problems. But we've had worse problems in 
the past. Yes, we have problems of getting along together. But noth- 

[[Page 861]]

ing compared to the shame of what happened to Japanese Americans during 
the Second World War.
    There is nothing wrong with this country that we can't fix if we 
have the right attitude and enough courage and vision and willingness to 
think in new terms about a new future rooted in old values. That is what 
Asian-Pacific Americans are most famous for among your fellow citizens. 
And so I ask you to help lead us into that future.
    Thank you and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 7:37 p.m. at the Hyatt Regency. In his 
remarks, he referred to Adm. Ming Chang, USN, Ret., acting chairman, 
Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Institute; Gloria T. Caoile, 
dinner chair; actors Ming-Na Wen and George Takei; and author Amy Tan.