It has been unfair. it has shown that some Central Americans and some others like the Nicaraguans have been given one treatment and the Haitians the other. It is not a fair yardstick. Do we want to deport 40.000 Haitians back to Haiti after this country has allowed them to come in and to have a chance to get green cards and work in this country? In my district Haitians live in the same neighborhood as the Cubans and the Nicaraguans. which this Congress saw fit to give them a chance to get their green cards. Can my colleagues imagine that neighbors living next door to each other. one can receive a green card and another one cannot? We should not have abandoned that in this rule. Let me give my colleagues just a short bit of history on this matter: Last fall the Senate added to the Fiscal Year 1998 District of Columbia appropriations a bill giving permanent green cards to all Nicaraguans and Cuban immigrants who were in this country at the end of 1995. This provision helped more than 150.000 people. That provision was added on the Senate floor without any Senate hearings. The House accepted the Senate provision on Cubans and Nicaraguans. but they would not accept any provision on the Haitians. The Senate then realized it had failed to help Haitian immigrants who had fled a terror similar to the terror of the Civil War in Nicaragua. so last November Senator GRAMM and Senator MACK introduced a bill to correct this unintentional omission. This bill moved quickly through the Senate. It is only the House where there seems to be some real strong reason why there has to be this unfairness to Haitians.
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green card immigrants green cards