Mr. Chairman. this bill was first introduced in the Congress to cover the years 1983 and 1984 responding to conditions in El Salvador in 1982. conditions that no longer exist. Long since then. we have put in place the Intergovernmental Committee on Migration which interviews and protects every deportee back to El Salvador. There is no further danger of the random violence that was rampant in 1981 and 1982 which gave rise to this legislation. In fact. there were 9.000 cases reported in 1981. there is no doubt about there being random violence. By 1985 this had declined to You might compare that to the number of 1.600 homicides that occurred in 1 year in the city of New York. Mr. Chairman. the major problem with this measure is that it does violence to the Refugee Act of 1980. Congress passed that act to supplement the piecemeal and nationspecific legislation for refugees. for example those we adopted for Cubans and for Hungarians. Prior to 1981 refugees were paroled into the United States. following consultation with the Congress. In place of this system. the Refugee Act set up a system under which any person. regardless of origin. can apply for. and my point is. Mr. Chairman. that this act. the Refugee Act. was intended by this Congress to be the exclusive available remedy and the legislation that I seek to strike this evening circumvents this system by creating a new system for handling Salvadorans and Nicaraguans during the next 2 years while we wait for this GAO report. In addition. it raises the prospect that a stream of Salvadorans and others from the Caribbean Basin will illicitly enter the United States. A claim will be made.
Keywords matched
Refugee deportee refugees