Speech #980218049

SHAws amendment because it allowed some vestiges of legalization might be predisposed to vote against this amendment as well. I think that would be a mistake. however. because this does raise at least additional obligation that goes toward what what we would normally consider to be elements of good citizenship. an elementary sense of the history of the United States. the beginnings of some English knowledge and certainly usage of English. which are all to the good. We can have debates on bilingual ballots and we can have debates on bilingual education. but the fact of the matter is those who have served on this subcommittee for the last 6 years have had a chance to look at our refugee program. a program that has been established with every good purpose. Yet we have seen in States such as mine as much as 80 percent of the people from Southeast Asia in refugee status are still on the public dole. We have taken a whole culture of people who are very strongly independent and very strongly work oriented and somehow in a short period of time transferred them to a welfare dependency status. Upon examining that experience at least it occurred to me as it has other members of the subcommittee. that part of that problem has resulted from the lack of English ability for many of those members of that community. As I mentioned in my opening statement with respect to my amendment some hours ago we found. for instance. that although one may have a Ph.D. and be from a foreign country. he or she has a less ability to acquire a meaningful job in our society. a job that takes them off the welfare rolls. than someone who has basically no education. but at least rudimentary English language. Perhaps instead of always looking at the refugee program for the problems that may be involved there. and perhaps instead of just confining our look at the refugee problem to the refugee experience. we ought to elicit some lessons from that experience. Have you ever had a control group. not that they were intended as such. come to the United States and suggest what would be the impact of the welfare system and what would be the impact of not knowing English? We have that control group. It has been largely many of those who are in the refugee communities around our country today. We have done a disservice to them by not requiring English skills better than we have in the past. I would say we would do a disservice to those we would legalize if we did not require them to make sufficient initial strides toward learning English because other than that we will be fooling ourselves and we will be fooling these individuals. So those who wish to have some improvement in the legalization program that is in this bill. I would suggest that you might support this amendment. to those who said they could not support my amendment or the Shaw amendment because it allows some vestiges of legalization. you have to recognize this does. but at some point in time you are going to have to screw up the courage and say. "Yes. I am absolutely against it." The last thing I would say is I did a check and found out 180 Members of this House in the last Congress presented private bills to those of us on the Immigration Subcommittee. thereby suggesting that they felt that legalization was important and appropriate on an individual basis where it involved constituents in their district. I would suggest to you that what we are doing here is looking at it in a slightly different vein but nonetheless we are looking at it carefully and we are saying with what confronts us today. some form of legalization is appropriate and this amendment I think at least provides a modicum of improvement to the bill before us and I would support it.