Speech #1040272397

The events of the past few days and the agreement achieved early Saturday morning have produced a far better bill for the Nation than the Republican conference report on which the Senate was scheduled to vote today. President Clinton provided the strong leadership needed to persuade Republican leaders to back away from their extreme positions and come to the table to work out genuine bipartisan legislation for the good of the country. The agreement addresses illegal immigrant head on. It reverses the serious mistakes by the Republican leadership to use illegal immigration as a pretext to attack legal immigrants. Entirely different considerations apply to legal immigrants. They come in under our laws. serve in our Armed Forces. pay taxes. raise their families. enhance our democracy. and contribute to our communities. The original Senate bill had rightly rejected harsh attacks on legal immigrants. and so does this agreement. That is a major victory. First. this agreement drops harmful provisions that would have made the recent welfare reforms even harsher for legal immigrants. Having banned SSI. food stamps. Medicaid. cash assistance. and other services for legal immigrants in the welfare bill. the Republican immigration bill would have expanded the restrictions to include Head Start. job training. and English classes. This was wrong. and this agreement corrects this grave mistake. The Republican bill would have shifted the rules in midstream for legal immigrants already in America and their sponsors. The bipartisan compromise. on the other hand. retains the formulation in the new welfare law. which applies primarily to future immigrants. Without this compromise. the Nations hospitals. clinics. and community based organizations would have been overwhelmed. and would have lost millions of dollars in Federal help. Second. the comprehensive welfare reforms made legal immigrants ineligible for many types of assistance. The Republican bill penalized the few legal immigrants who still qualify for assistance by threatening them with deportation if they actually used the assistance. If there are immigrants who abuse welfareor use it illegallythey should be deported. In fact. current laws permit this step. and we should enforce them. But it is wrong to add to the harsh new welfare reforms by saying to legal immigrants who qualify for child care assistance that if they actually use it. they can be deported. No parent should face that choiceof leaving their children home alone while the parent works or risking deportation by obtaining child care. It was right to eliminate these deportation provisions under the new bipartisan agreement. Finally. it was wrong for Republicans to insist on putting family sponsorship off limits to lower income working American families. Under the Republican bill. 40 percent of American citizens would have been denied the right to bring in their families. The Republicans try to claim that their party is the party of family values. but this bill was a flagrant denial of such values. Under the Republican proposal. for the first time in the Nations long immigrant history. lowincome working American citizens would have been denied the opportunity to have this spouses and young children join them in America. Republicans argue that most Americans who sponsor family members are. in fact. former immigrants. who knew when they immigrated that they would be leaving families behind. The fact is. according to the General Accounting Office. 64 percent of those sponsoring their families in any given year are nativeborn American citizens who were never immigrants themselves. Republicans also argue that if we do not set high income standards for sponsors. then lowincome sponsors will be pushed onto welfare because they have to support themselves and the sponsored immigrant as well. To guard against this possibility. the bipartisan agreement establishes an income test for sponsorship at 125 percent of the poverty level. The agreement requires sponsors to sign an enforceable sponsorship contract that requires sponsors to care for those they bring in.