Howard Berman

Mr. BERMAN

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. BERMAN

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I am honored to pay tribute to Donna Bojarsky, a dear friend who is intimately involved in Democratic Party politics and pro-Israel causes. I place great value in her opinion. Through the years, I have come to appreciate more and more her wise counsel and friendship. This year, she is the deserving recipient of the 1996 Richard S. Volpert Award from the Jewish Community Relations Committee. Donna's first foray into politics occurred at age of 8, when she distributed Bobby Kennedy buttons in front of a Beverly Hills delicatessen. After graduating from Brandeis University with a degree in political science, Donna began a string of campaign and staff jobs. She worked for Assemblyman Richard Katz and Mayor Tom Bradley, and on the Presidential campaign teams of Gary Hart (1984) and Michael Dukakis (1988). In 1992-93, she was the national entertainment coordinator for the Clinton campaign in Little Rock, AR. Head of her own firm, DB & Associates, Donna has provided fundraising assistance and political consulting to a range of clients, including Senator Daniel P. Moynihan and the Charles R. Bronfman Foundation. She also advises the actor Richard Dreyfuss on his political and charitable activities. Donna has always been a person of boundless energy. In addition to her political activities and professional duties, she is founder and cochair of LA Works, a nonprofit, public action and volunteer center in Los Angeles and serves on the national board of City Cares of America. Donna is also a founder and cochair of the New Leaders Project, a unique civic training program for young Jewish leader, and is a member of the executive committee of the National Jewish Democratic Council. I ask my colleagues to join me today in saluting Donna Bojarsky, whose dedication to the causes in which she deeply believes is an inspiration to us all. My wife, Janis, and I are proud to call her our friend.

Mr. BERMAN

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I am honored to pay tribute to my dear friend Walt Mosher, the recipient of the 1996 Nelle Reagan Award for Distinguished Community Service by the Olive-View UCLA Medical Foundation. Knowing Walt as I do, I cannot think of a more qualified candidate to receive an award predicated on philanthropy and volunteerism. Despite a hectic schedule, Walt always seems to have time for important causes. The numbers are truly staggering: Walt has donated more than 25,000 hours of personal service and hundreds of thousands of dollars to scores of charities, civic organizations, committees, and task forces in the San Fernando Valley and elsewhere. Those he has helped in one way or another include the San Fernando YMCA Child Care Program, the American Heart Association, the San Fernando Police Advisory Council, the American Cancer Society, and the American Heart Association. Walt has also assumed a leadership role with the Valley Industry and Commerce Association, a key business advocacy organization in the San Fernando Valley. Somehow Walt manages to stay intimately involved with his community while running a $28 million a year business that employs several hundred people. In 1956 he cofounded Precision Dynamics Corp., which was established to manufacture and distribute products in the health care field. One year later, he became president, a position he has held ever since. Walt is also an educated man; he has a Ph.D., in engineering from UCLA. I have enjoyed many stimulating conversations with him over the years about business and political matters. I ask my colleagues to join me today in saluting Walt Mosher, whose selflessness and dedication is a shining example to us all. I am proud to be close friends with him and his wife, Beckaa.

Mr. BERMAN

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I am honored to pay tribute to my good friend Dominick Rivetti, who has been police chief of the city of San Fernando since May 1986. This year Chief Rivetti is celebrating 25 years as a member of the San Fernando Police Department. I am proud to be among those congratulating him on achieving this milestone. Before becoming chief, he moved up the ranks, from patrol officer to senior training officer to watch commander to division commander. Chief Rivetti is passionately dedicated to law enforcement and San Fernando: He and I have had many conversations about finding funds to expand the size of the San Fernando Police Department. Indeed, the chief is constantly on the look out for government programs designed to help law enforcement. The chief is currently vice president of the Los Angeles Police Chiefs' Association, and is affiliated with the International Association of Police Chiefs, the California Police Chiefs Association, the San Fernando Police Advisory Council, and the California Peace Officers Association. In addition, he teaches at the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department North Academy at College of the Canyons. But Chief Rivetti's involvement with San Fernando does not end with the workday. He is also a member of the San Fernando Kiwanis Club, the San Fernando Rotary Club, and the Northeast Valley Jeopardy Board of Directors. He is clearly someone who cares deeply for his community. I ask my colleagues to join me today in saluting San Fernando Police Chief Dominick Rivetti, a compassionate man who is devoted to his family and his work. His selflessness and dedication are an inspiration to us all.

Mr. BERMAN

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I want to join my other colleagues in indicating how sorely I will miss my friend from Texas, who is really a great Member of Congress, and I am sorry he will be leaving this body. The people of my congressional district and of southern California, and probably the entire country, desperately want us to do something effective to stop illegal immigration. It is wrong to conclude that the people who voted for Proposition 187 are racist or xenophobes. They are people who are looking at what has happened: The employer sanctions did not work, the other strategies did not work, the refusal or earlier administrations to fund the Border Patrol and the Congress to appropriate the money left the border essentially unprotected. They want something done. The problem with this bill is it cons the American people into thinking major new steps are going to be done. This President is the first President to put the money where the mouth is. He has proposed, and the Committee on Appropriations, to its credit, has funded massive increases in Border Patrol. He has initiated through Executive order an expedited procedure for asylum, which has reduced those frivolous asylum applications by 58 percent. We are depositing more criminal aliens and more illegal immigrants than we ever did before, and all the trend lines are up. What the Jordan commission and every single independent academic study of this issue says, without a verification system we will never make employer sanctions meaningful. Nothing else. Nothing else is serious if we do not do that and make a commitment to do that. Second, we know there are industries that systematically recruit and hire illegal immigrants, and for reasons that I do not know, the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Bryant] has a theory which sounds plausible to me, this conference committee struck inspectors and investigators to cover those industries. We should not be conned. Let me turn to what it does with legal immigrants. For the first time in American history, even when we had the moratoriums on immigration, a U.S. citizen, and, remember, this bill puts an income requirement on petitioning for spouses. An individual has to make 140 percent. Fifty- three percent of the unmarried American people do not make 53 percent, do not make 140 percent of the poverty standard. Mr. Speaker, 53 percent of the American people do not make it. A graduate student woman in medical school, who is not making that money, falls in love and marries a physician in France. She cannot bring him in because, even though he is affluent, has all the assets needed, there is no indication in the world he will go on any government program, she cannot bring him in. This is the stupidest as well as the meanest provision I can imagine. When we had moratoriums on immigration in this country, we allowed U.S. citizens to bring in their spouses. Why would we want to change that now? I urge a ``no'' vote on a bill that is soft on illegal immigration and harsh and mean on legal immigrants.

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I would say to my friend, the gentleman from California knows that no President has proposed more Border Patrol agents than this President. The Committee on Appropriations, not the authorizing committee, the Committee on Appropriations has funded those positions and more. He has signed those bills. We are doing more now than we ever did before.

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, first I want to say to my colleague from California, whom I have known for 34 years, who walked precincts in his first campaign, that I will truly, sincerely and sorely miss him. He is a model legislator and a pleasure to work with. I wish him well. The gentleman from Arizona, who spoke a few minutes ago, is so totally wrong when he says this is the bill that will finally do something about illegal immigration. Everyone knows, when they think about it, the only effective ways to do something to deter illegal immigration are at the border, and this bill authorizes more Border Patrol, but already the Committee on Appropriations and the administration have gone far beyond the authorization contained in this particular bill to do that. Setting up and committing to a national verification program to make employer sanctions meaningful. This bill started out like that but totally fell apart on the House floor, primarily at the behest of the majority party Members. And then to go after those industries that systematically recruit and employ illegal immigrants in order to have a competitive edge in wages and working conditions in their own operations. The Border Patrol increase is being done by the administration and the other 2 provisions are outrageously ignored in this conference report. I voted for this bill when it came out of the House of Representatives. I indicated I would vote for it in the form it was in if the Gallegly amendment was removed. The Gallegly amendment was removed, but in a dozen different ways the conference report is worse than the House bill and in many cases, notwithstanding the Committee on Rules waivers, exceeds the scope of what either House did in the most draconian ways. Draconian against illegal immigration? No. Draconian against legal immigrants. This is truly a desire by the people who lost on both the House and Senate floor in their efforts to cut back on legal immigration to do the same thing, but in the most unfair fashion, not straightforwardly by reducing the numbers but by focusing on the working class people in the society and stripping them of their right to bring legal immigrants over. The new welfare law bars legal immigrants from programs such as SSI and food stamps and from Medicaid for 5 years. It gives States the ability to permanently deny AFDC and Medicaid to legal immigrants. This conference report goes much, much further than that, makes legal immigrants not ineligible for these three or four programs but subject to deportation for use of almost every means-tested program for which they are eligible under the welfare law. In other words, what the welfare conference did not do, they decided to do here, and not declare ineligibility but make you subject to deportation. Let me tell you what that means. You are a legal immigrant child who goes through high school, applies to a college based on your superb academic performance and test scores. You get admitted to an expensive university, ivy league college, Stanford. You apply for a student loan. If you are on that student loan for more than a year, you are subject to deportation. What an outrageous provision that is. What a slap in the face of this country's traditions that is. Let me tell you how much else they do here. For the first time in American history, an U.S. citizen will be subject to an income test before he can bring his spouse into the country. I urge a ``no'' vote on the rule, a ``no'' vote on the conference report.

Mr. BERMAN

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, before a campaign led by Senator Bob Dole lashes out at President Clinton's policy on Iraq, humility should compel him to admit how deeply he misread Saddam Hussein before Desert Storm. When we were trying to pass sanctions on Iraq that would have stopped Iraqi imports of Kansas wheat, Dole tried to derail those sanctions. It was Dole who assured his colleagues that Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons but ``does not intend to use them'' although the entire world knew he had already used nerve gas against the Kurds Dole who said on TV shortly after the Iraqi invasion ``We're a foreign power. We don't belong in that part of the world * * * It ought to be settled by Arabs.'' Dole who said in October 1990 ``we are in the Midwest for three letters, oil, O-I-L.'' President Bush responded that day, charging, ``You know, some people never get the word. The fight isn't about oil. The fight is about naked aggression that will not stand.'' In fact, conservative columnist William Safire called Dole's attitude cynical and labeled him ``a prime appeaser of Saddam Hussein.'' The Senator who was fooled in Baghdad is on weak ground criticizing the President who bombed it.

Mr. BERMAN

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Mr. Speaker, I in no way question the sincerity of the gentleman's commitment to his amendment. I think he is wrong, but I think he is sincere. He has always had this position. He has pushed for it for a long time. I just wish that, given that he had two strong efforts in this bill, major efforts, one for a meaningful verification system that could give some meaning to employer sanctions, and what I think is a somewhat crazy scheme on how to try and help deal with the problem of illegal immigration by kicking kids out of schools, he had been able to prevail on the first and yielded on the second, rather than yielding on meaningful verification and insisting on his provision.

Mr. BERMAN. The gentleman misunderstood me. First of all, the 333 votes the gentleman referred to included a number of us who made it very clear that we want a great part of what is in this bill, we do not want, with all due respect, the gentleman's amendment in the bill, and that we would move it on to conference in the hope that a conference committee would convene and decide to pull that amendment out, since it was not in the Senate. The second point I wanted to make was my point about the growers had nothing to do with the 333 vote. It was why would the Governor of California do that, with a chance to get meaningful provisions.

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member of our Committee on the Judiciary for yielding me this time. I rise in support of the motion to instruct the conferees. It is a funny situation when we deal with a provision in the bill that is the critical increase in the number of wage and hour inspectors in order to make immigration reform meaningful by giving us the resources to go to the work site where the big problem is, and the Senate bill provided, I believe, 200, 300. The House bill provided 150. It was taken out by a floor amendment that had nothing to do with the issue of wage and hour inspectors. It dealt with collapsing from a meaningful verification program to a weak verification program, and that was taken out, and now we come back with a proposed draft, the rumors are, and it is more than rumors. The proposed conference committee document that has very kindly been shown to out side of the aisle before the conference indicates there will be no increase in wage and hour inspectors. If my colleagues want to get a handle on the issue of illegal immigration, putting all of the rhetoric aside, there are some key steps. At the border, meaningful verification; right now employer sanctions are a joke, and a systematic effort to take those industries and employers who systematically recruit and hire illegal immigrants because of their desire to violate wage and hour standards and take a very exploitable work force and utilize them in order to produce their product at below average scale and capture the market in that fashion. This bill goes along with the Clinton administration's effort to increase the border patrol, does a whole bunch of other things which in some cases are very incendiary, dilutes its initial attempts to provide meaningful verification, thereby rendering fairly ineffective, to my way of thinking, all of the efforts to deal with denial of employment or public benefits to illegal immigrants and strips away any serious increase in wage and hour supporters, wage and hour division inspectors, which could provide the kind of policing of those employers who want to hire illegal immigrants in order to exploit them in callous disregard of Federal law knowing that those people will never utilize the remedies available to them. So the motion to instruct is a very important one. The other larger question which I think the majority has to consider is do they want the bill? They are insisting. The Governor from California came out yesterday and joined the Speaker of the House in a press conference, insisting on including a provision in this bill, an amended form of the Gallegly amendment that all law enforcement tells us is crazy, that all educators tell us is bad, which requires that the children of people who came here illegally at one point or another be refused admission or kicked out of the public schools. The President has made it quite clear that that will result in a veto. When I read that the Governor of California came back to Washington, came back to Washington to insist on a provision which he knows will require a veto, I tried to think why, since he ballyhoos himself as somebody who is trying to do something about illegal immigration. I think Ron Prince, who was the chairman; he was the chairman of the committee to pass proposition 187, probably put it most accurately when he indicated that there are some Republicans in this House and in the Senate and in the Republican campaign who want to veto a bill. They do not want to do anything about illegal immigration. They want an issue. So they take the one provision that has drawn a clear statement of a veto and insist that that provision be kept in the bill even though it is bad public policy, even though all of law enforcement says that it will make their job much more difficult. All educators, nearly all educators oppose the provision. I wonder what the agenda is of the people who would make that the condition for this conference report.

Mr. BERMAN. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. BERMAN. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Speaker, I should amend my statement. The vast majority of leadership and individual chiefs of police of jurisdictions most affected by this provision think it would be a terrible idea. Now I am trying to understand what the motivation is for someone like Governor Wilson to come to Washington, hold a press conference, urge passage of a bill with a provision that he knows will draw a veto. There is two cynical, but perhaps accurate, interpretations of the motivations for this action. One is again to have an issue rather than a law. All the time and effort spent by the chairman of the subcommittee and Senator Simpson to try and improve our ability to deal with illegal immigration will be a waste of time if this bill is vetoed. Those people want an issue. The other even more cynical interpretation of the motivations of the Governor is what happened on both the House and Senate floors. Actually the Senate did not even take it up. The large growers in California hate anything which makes efforts to enforce our laws against illegal immigration tougher because they have historically relied on bringing in undocumented workers to pick the crops. They came in with a rather brazen effort on the House floor to try and create a new 500,000 farm worker-guest worker amendment to bring in these people. That amendment got trounced on a bipartisan basis. My view is that those same growers do not want to see this bill pass, but no one can be against this kind of a bill from that community. So instead they and the Governor, as their representative, comes here and insists on a provision he knows will result in a veto. It is a pretty cynical story. It is a pretty sad story. It means a lot of important provisions in this bill, provisions providing for reimbursement for health care institutions, provisions that at least go down the road toward some meaningful verification, hopefully all of those will go down the drain because of an insistence on this one provision.

Mr. BERMAN

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Chairman, I have a somewhat different position than many of my party on this particular proposal. I think many of its provisions are very interesting. The idea of strengthening political parties, frankly, prior to the amendments the gentleman made in the Committee on Rules, the notion of opening up larger individual contributions made sense to me. There are many interesting ideas for participation in this process that I respect and that I think are worth seriously discussing. But I would suggest the provisions the majority has included in this bill dealing with union members and union dues demonstrates a level of animus, hostility, and hypocrisy. A deregulatory majority that speaks with such passion about the onus on the average person of government regulation, in the context of a series of laws that protect and require union democracy, elected representatives, have prohibited closed shops, have made compulsory unionism through union shop agreements weaker by allowing dues, who through the Beck decision have provided for rebate of monies spent that are not directly related to the collective bargaining process, by adding to all those existing schemes, a process that is so regulatory, which is so costly to the union movement, and which so denies the premises of elected representation and rule of the majority in that political process, demonstrates a hypocrisy which undermines the credibility of the entire bill. This should never have been put that in. It takes away from the arguments about political pluralism, participation, and how to broaden it. It demeans the very subject the gentleman claims to try to reform by doing it. I find it ironic that so many of the speakers from the majority party who speak on this issue do not focus upon the campaign reform provisions in this. They come in here to bash the unions, to bash the representatives of the working people of this country. They are not just trying to reform a political process and a campaign finance process, they are trying to tilt it against the interests that the union movement has always held historic, the protection of working people, the promotion of civil rights, the safety of the workplace, and to tilt it in favor of the corporations that have been their historic and traditional financiers. I do not think this is the place for that kind of a provision.

Mr. BERMAN

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will continue to yield, is it the same agreement among Republicans that was going to eliminate the Department of Commerce, eliminate cops on the beat, eliminate the advanced technology program. Is that the agreement we are talking about?

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Chairman, first, I think it is fair to say this fight is not about money. It is about implementing an effort by some Members of the other party to eliminate the Legal Services program. My friend, the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Gekas] says ``If there were $250 million in a block grant, I would support it.'' We have been waiting for a year and 3 months for the authorization bill which turned this program into a block grant program to come to the floor. It is not us, it is not the supporters of this amendment who have fought that. It is the leadership who has kept that from coming to the floor. We talk about class warfare. Let me suggest, I understand why some apartment owners, some growers, some government officials do not want Legal Services programs, because they do not want to afford the rights that the law gives. The right move is not to eliminate the poor's access to lawyers. The right way to do it is to change the laws that we do not like that accords substantive rights to people. Surely once those rights are accorded, we would agree that everyone should have access to them.

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. BERMAN. The appropriations process each year funds that Legal Services Corporation, am I not correct?

Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Chairman, I was wondering if the gentleman could tell me, other than the hortatory language in a budget resolution, which does not appropriate funds and which is not authorizing legislation, what agreement is the gentleman talking about that we reached regarding the eventual elimination of the Legal Services Corporation?

Mr. BERMAN

Mr. BERMAN. Madam Speaker, I offer a motion to recommit with instructions.

Mr. BERMAN. Madam Speaker, this is a motion to recommit with instructions. This motion to recommit is simply adding an amendment to the bill and asking that the bill be reported back forthwith. If this motion to recommit passes, the body will still be voting on the bill immediately after the vote on the motion to recommit. The motion to recommit is very simple: It simply asks for a GAO study to look at the differences in benefits, rights, and privileges available to persons in a marriage and to persons in a domestic partnership resulting from the non-recognition of domestic partnerships as legal unions by State and Federal laws. Once again, the passage of this motion to recommit will not send the bill to a committee, it will not bury this bill. The bill will come back immediately for a vote on final passage.

Mr. BERMAN. Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. BERMAN. I am in its present form, Madam Speaker.

Mr. BERMAN. I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.