[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 33, Number 38 (Monday, September 22, 1997)]
[Pages 1348-1352]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus

September 16, 1997

    Thank you very much. Thank you for the wonderful welcome you have 
given to the Vice President and me. Thank you, Xavier. Thank you, 
Carmen, Carolina. To the Members of Congress who are here, members of 
the Hispanic Caucus Institute, members of our administration--all those 
who were introduced by the Vice President. I'd also like to acknowledge 
the presence here of the general chairman of our political party, the 
Democratic Party, Governor Roy Romer of Colorado. Welcome, Governor 
Romer.
    Xavier pointed out that I have been here all 5 years I have been 
President. I come because I have a good time. [Laughter] I like it. I 
know that here I will see the future of America, the vitality, the 
energy, the commitment, the passion necessary to make this country what 
it ought to be. But I have been here five times. [Laughter] I mean, 
those of us who are linguistically challenged--[laughter ]--always learn 
a few phrases--you know, su voto es sus votos; mi casa es su casa. 
[Laughter] Now I can say, su caucus es mi caucus.
    I come here because when I leave here, I feel more alive, I feel 
more committed, I feel new energy, and I like what I see. I thank the 
Members of Congress for their service. I thank the Hispanics who have 
served in our administration more than in any other in the past; the 
members of the Cabinet who are here--Secretary Pena, Ambassador 
Richardson, Aida Alvarez. To all those in the White House--Maria 
Echaveste, Mickey Ibarra, Janet Murguia, and others. To my speechwriter, 
Carolyn Curiel, who I will soon nominate to be Ambassador to Belize. 
Gloria Tristani, whom I have just selected to serve as the newest member 
of the Federal Communications Commission.
    There is also another person here I want to acknowledge who will 
have a lot to do with

[[Page 1349]]

seeing that the face of the Federal Government and the policies of the 
Federal Government reflect the face and the heart of America. And here 
with me tonight is my nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil 
Rights, Bill Lee. And I'd like to ask him to be recognized.
    He grew up a Chinese-American in New York, has spent a lot of his 
life working for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He has worked to defend 
and protect the civil rights of the most vulnerable among us. And I 
thank you for your continued support for his nomination.
    I'd also like to mention two people who aren't here tonight. We all 
miss Frank Tejeda whose career ended far too soon, as did his remarkable 
life. But I want to say again how much I enjoyed working with him and 
how much I miss him. And I'd also like to say a very special word of 
appreciation and good wishes to the first Hispanic-American elected to 
the United States Congress, Henry B. Gonzalez. He has been an 
irrepressible force for progress. He is an irreplaceable legislator. It 
has been my great honor to know him for 25 years, long before I ever 
dreamed I'd be here, and I'm quite sure long before he ever dreamed I 
would be here. [Laughter] But we wish him well, and we'll miss him.
    Together, we have begun to prepare our beloved country for the 21st 
century. Tonight, I want to take just a few moments of your time to talk 
about the work ahead and the responsibility we have to support each 
other in that work.
    It's been nearly 6 years now since I announced my candidacy for 
President. Many of you started with me, almost all of you finished with 
me, and we have begun a journey--to restore the American dream to 
everyone willing to work for it, to make America the world's greatest 
force for peace and freedom well into the next century and to go forward 
into that new century in spite of all of our diversity as one America.
    We began with a bold, new economic course which reduced our deficit 
80 percent before the recent budget passed. For all of you who voted for 
that, I hope that you're out there clapping to yourselves, because you 
deserve it. We expanded our exports with over 200 trade agreements. We 
invested in our people and their future. We took on the tough social 
problems at home and the tough foreign policy problems around the world.
    Today the American people are reaping the results of these last 
years of effort: unemployment below 5 percent, Hispanic unemployment 
dropping from over 11 percent to about 7 percent, a drop of over 35 
percent; record rates of small business growth with Hispanic-American 
businesses growing at three times the rate of overall business growth; 
and hundreds of thousands of new Latino homes in this country.
    Violent crime has dropped 5 years in a row. We've had the largest 
drop in welfare rolls in history. All this signals progress. We should 
be optimistic, we should be hopeful, we should be confident. But we all 
know we have more to do before every one of our people, every one of 
your people and every one of the American people will be prepared to do 
well in the 21st century.
    The first thing we have to do is to continue to expand and improve 
educational opportunity. I am proud that the budget I just signed 
represents the largest single increased investment in education since 
1965. I fought hard to ensure that it included a 36 percent increase in 
funding for bilingual and immigrant education, to see that it expands 
Head Start, it funds our America Reads program to mobilize up to one 
million volunteer tutors to make sure our children can read well at an 
early age. It will help us to develop voluntary tests in reading and 
math to help children learn the basic skills they need to succeed, not 
to put them down but to lift them up.
    It also opens the doors of college to all Americans for the first 
time in history with the biggest increase in support for people going to 
college since the GI bill passed 50 years ago. There's the largest 
increase in Pell grants in more than two decades, a $1,500 HOPE 
scholarship tax credit to open the doors of the first 2 years of college 
to all Americans, and further tax credits for all higher education for 
people of all ages, because we know we have to have a system of lifetime 
learning in America, and we should support that for people of all ages.
    Despite a strong work ethic and falling unemployment, however, 
despite exploding

[[Page 1350]]

numbers of new Hispanic-owned businesses, Hispanic family income is not 
yet rising. And one of the biggest reasons for this disparity in income 
is that too many young Latinos continue to drop out of school. The 
dropout rate for Hispanic-Americans remains far above the rates for 
whites or African-Americans. Many of these young people leave school for 
responsible reasons--to begin to help their families by working. But, 
increasingly, in a global economy, we must teach our children that 
responsibility means staying in school and going the whole route.
    We have organized an intense effort in the White House to address 
the dropout problem of Hispanic-American students. I instructed Gene 
Sperling, the head of the National Economic Council, Maria Echaveste, 
who heads our Office of Public Liaison, Mickey Ibarra, who heads our 
Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, and our Education Secretary, Dick 
Riley, to evaluate all of our current programs and identify what more we 
can do right now to help young Latinos reach their potential.
    I am pleased that Senator Bingaman and Representative Hinojosa will 
soon introduce the ``National Dropout Prevention Act of 1997'' to 
establish a coordinated national strategy for lower dropout rates for 
Hispanics and others who should have their dropout rates lower. I want 
to ask you to help us with this. We need your support.
    Let me also say, in the context of education, that balanced budget 
agreement just set a framework for the next 2 years. Every single year 
we have to make sure that the congressional appropriations are faithful 
to the agreement. And I ask your support in helping us and helping the 
Members of Congress make sure that those investments are there.
    And in that connection, let me tell you, I, at least, and I think 
most of you, are quite concerned by the recent, very narrow decision in 
the Senate to support the Gorton amendment that would block-grant 
virtually all Federal education funds to the States. That's a step in 
the wrong direction, because whatever its intent, the effect of the 
amendment is to shift funds away from the schools that serve our 
neediest children. And unless we can persuade them to change it, I will 
not hesitate to use my veto power to prevent that hasty decision from 
becoming the law of the land.
    Let me also say that that budget did one more thing that I want to 
emphasize--it did a lot of good things, including providing health 
insurance for up to 5 million American children, many of whom will be 
Hispanic children and the children of hard-working people who work all 
day, every day, but can't get health insurance at work. It also kept a 
promise I made last year to restore benefits to legal immigrants who 
come to this country legally, work hard, and contribute to our society. 
And I thank the Members of Congress who are here who made that possible.
    The second thing we have to do is to sell more of our goods and 
services around the world. We have 4 percent of the world's population, 
20 percent of the world's income, 96 percent of the world's consumers 
live somewhere else. The growing developing economies are growing at 
three times the rate of our European and other traditional trading 
partners. We have no choice but to compete for those new markets.
    Indeed, 70 percent of our export growth this year comes from our 
neighbors--Canada to the north, and all the other neighbors are to our 
south, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, South America--70 percent 
of our growth is there. Now, the legislation I sent to Congress today to 
renew the President's traditional authority to negotiate trade 
agreements, to open markets to our products, and create good jobs, 
contains important provisions that will enable me to negotiate to 
protect both worker rights and the environment. And it will involve 
Congress every step of the way.
    But I say again, it is in our interest to open these markets. Week 
after week, I read of these European leaders going to South America, 
saying, ``America doesn't care about Latin America. Europe cares about 
Latin America. America is sitting up there sitting on its gain. We want 
you to be allied with Europe.''
    I say, they are our friends. I have worked hard to establish a good 
relationship, and I think we should go forward with fair, balanced 
trading agreements that will help our economy and help our relations.

[[Page 1351]]

    I want to say a special word of thanks to Congressman Becerra and 
his allies in the Hispanic Caucus for the contributions that they made 
when I last went to Latin America several months ago, when I went to 
Mexico and Central America and to the Caribbean. Congressman Becerra and 
Congressman Reyes went with me--Congressman Romero-Barcelo joined us in 
the Caribbean.
    In a few weeks, I'll be going for a week's visit in Brazil and 
Argentina and Venezuela, and I'm looking forward to working with you, 
Congressman Becerra, and with the Caucus to make this productive for 
America, as well. Thank you very much.
    Let me make one other comment now about the last thing that I think 
we have to do. Our journey into tomorrow is about more than economics. 
It's about the kind of people we are and how we relate to each other. 
It's about whether we can really learn to not only tolerate each other, 
not even just to respect each other, but to celebrate the fact that 
people who are so different share this land together and want to share 
its future together and deserve to share its future together because we 
are bound together by common values--by faith and family and work and 
community and service to country.
    Now, in order to do that, we have to face some facts. The first fact 
is that we still have some unfinished business in this country, some 
discrimination that we have not resolved--it still exists. The second 
fact is that all those people that want to get rid of affirmative action 
carry a heavier burden than they have yet borne to show about what they 
were going to do to replace it, to guarantee everybody has an equal 
opportunity.
    The third thing we have to do is to treat each other respectfully 
and honestly in all of our dealings, particularly in putting together 
our political system. So in that connection, let me just make one 
comment more about the census coming up in 2000 and the whole issue of 
sampling. My sole goal is to have the most accurate count of Americans. 
I have no other political agenda. I have never been involved in this in 
any way, shape, or form. Every expert who has reviewed the census 
process, including a recent report from the National Science Foundation, 
says that the sampling method the Census Bureau proposes to use in the 
year 2000 is designed to count hard-to-find Americans, including the 
homeless and some minorities, not to leave them out. We are not 
interested in counting people who do not live here and do not exist, but 
we want to make sure, finally, that everybody who is here is counted in 
the census of the American people in the year 2000.
    If we're going to be one America, we have to make sure our 
immigration laws are fair and humane to all. To that effort, we have 
undertaken two initiatives I want to mention briefly. First, we're 
seeking to extend the legal authority that permits people to obtain 
permanent immigration status without having to leave our country, often 
leaving their families and their jobs behind. And, second, we're working 
to enable some Central Americans and others who have already made lives 
for themselves here in the United States to be considered for permanent 
status under less stringent rules in place prior to the passage of the 
recent immigration bill.
    But the most important thing we can do is to really make up our 
minds that we're going to share the future together. The reason that I 
organized this national conversation on race for the next year and had 
an advisory board constituted, including Linda Chavez-Thompson, who is 
well-known to many of you, is that it bothers me that so few Americans 
have really thought about what this country is going to be like in 20 or 
30 or 40 years.
    Within 5 years, our largest State, California, will have no majority 
race. Hawaii already has no majority race. Hispanic-Americans are the 
fastest growing American minority, but within a matter of decades, we'll 
all be members of some racial or ethnic minority.
    Now, people have said for years--maybe for over 200 years, maybe 
going all the way back to the beginning--that America is not a place, a 
nation, that is about a particular religious creed or a particular race 
or even a particular place; America is just a set of ideas. We are about 
to find out. We are about to find out.
    And so I say to all of you, when I come here and I feel your energy, 
your spirit, your patriotism, your dreams, your affection for

[[Page 1352]]

each other and for your country, that is what I want every American to 
feel. And that's what I want you to be able to feel about every other 
American. And we have a heavy responsibility here. No other great 
democracy like ours has ever been so diverse, and yet people living 
together so closely. No one has ever tried to do this. We are trying to 
do this against the backdrop of reading in the last several years about 
all of the problems, from the Middle East to Bosnia, to Northern 
Ireland, to Africa, to you name it.
    We say to the bottom of our soul, we don't believe in any of that. 
We don't seek, any of us, to lift ourselves up by putting someone else 
down. We are simply trying to create a country where everybody's 
responsible, has opportunity, where we're drawing together more closely 
every day, and where we're still trying to promote what we believe in 
around the world.
    You, as the fastest growing group of Americans, have a special 
responsibility to make sure that message pierces the mind and heart of 
every one of your fellow citizens, because if it does, we'll take care 
of the economics, we'll take care of the other work we have to do. If we 
can get our hearts right and our heads straight about how we're going to 
do this together, we will get to the next century with this country 
still the greatest nation in human history.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:15 p.m. in the International Ballroom at 
the Washington Hilton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to 
Representative Xavier Becerra, chair, and Carmen Votano, vice chair, 
Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute; and Dr. Carolina Reyes, wife of 
Representative Becerra.