Mel Watt

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lofgren).

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler).

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. Mr. Speaker, I think the reason he wanted to yield to me was that he had represented that he was on his final speaker, and he did not want it to look like he had misrepresented. I understand that other Members came to the floor after that. He probably also wants me to speak in favor of my substitute again, but I will not take advantage of his generosity.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I find myself in a very interesting position today, one that in the 6 years that I have been in this House is unprecedented. Because I am here defending the work product of the committee of jurisdiction in this case. On May 20, 1998, the full Committee on the Judiciary took a vote on a bill that I will be offering as a substitute to the bill that we are considering here on the floor, and we passed that bill out of the full Committee on the Judiciary by a vote of 23 to 4. We got to that bill after going through the subcommittee that the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Smith) chairs and on which I am the ranking member, and working out some details in the subcommittee, and we continued to work out further details as we moved from the subcommittee to the full committee. And by the time we got to the full committee, the full Committee on the Judiciary, we had broad bipartisan support for a bill. And that is the bill that I am here offering as a substitute to what is being offered on the floor today. So instead of me being the minority opposing what the majority of our committee did, I find myself in the very unique position of being on the floor of the House defending what the Committee on the Judiciary did by a 23 to 4 vote, bipartisan, with the chairman of the subcommittee having gone on and being told to support some other bill, which we will be voting on today unless my substitute passes. Now, why did we get to the bill that I will be offering as a substitute? We got there because we finally concluded that H-1Bs are probably necessary at this point. We have an H-1B program that authorizes 65,000 foreign workers per year to come into our country and work subject to certain specialty provisions. The H-1B, let me make sure everybody understands, the H-1B visas are available for workers coming temporarily to the United States to perform services in specialty occupations. A specialty occupation is one that requires a theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge and attainment of a bachelor's or higher degree in the specific specialty as a minimum for entry into the occupation in the United States. Now, that is a fancy way of saying, you have to be in a pretty narrow area that is specialized in order to be eligible to come into the United States on an exceptional basis and take a job that, in effect, we are saying we just do not have the United States workers in our country capable of filling that job. Now, this H-1B program has been around for a long time. We have 65,000 people a year that we allow to come in. They spend a total of 6 years each, 65 times 6 is almost 400,000 foreign workers that can be in the United States under the current H-1B program. Now, how did we get here? High tech industries expanded their employment base and concluded that they needed more than the 65,000 a year allocation and, in fact, the Committee on the Judiciary agreed with them. We will hear arguments all over the place, but the truth of the matter is that we finally concluded, well, we do not really know whether there is a shortage that requires an increase in H-1B slots or not, but we are prepared to give the benefit of the doubt and keep on moving. So let us do this and let us do it in a reasonable way that acknowledges that the high tech industry has a problem that they cannot get enough U.S. workers to fill these highly technical positions, but we did it against a backdrop where some people were really concerned. In fact, I am going to be reading here a lot, interestingly enough, from the committee's report. This is the full Committee on the Judiciary report that I keep finding myself reading from, one that I would have hoped that my colleague would be reading from in defense of our bill, rather than me having to read from it to defend the bill that we passed. Let me read what Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor said. He said, our experience with the practical operation of the H-1B program has raised serious concerns that what was conceived as a means to meet temporary business needs for unique, highly skilled professionals from abroad is, in fact, being used by some employers to bring in relatively large numbers of foreign workers who may well be displacing U.S. workers and eroding employers' commitment to the domestic work force. So how did we decide to address this in the Committee on the Judiciary on a bipartisan basis? We said, we acknowledge that there is a shortage, but we also acknowledge on the other side that some people say this program is being abused and has been abused. So if we are going to expand the numbers of authorized people who can come in under this program, then we also ought to expand the protections for U.S. workers and the guarantees that employers have to provide that they are neither displacing a U.S. worker, laying off a U.S. worker or having not sought to obtain a U.S. worker. And we need to put in place a mechanism to provide training to U.S. citizens so that we do not make this a permanent H-1B expansion going forward. And that is exactly what the Committee on the Judiciary set out to do, and it did it masterfully. With one exception, and that was the training component, which is also in my bill, in my substitute and in the committee, in the new bill that we are now considering on the floor. So how did we do this? We said, you need the workers. You come in, you make an attestation that you have not fired or will not fire an employee or replace that fired employee by a foreign worker. I mean, that is fair enough. You make an attestation that you have sought to find a comparable worker in the United States. That is fair enough. And yet now we have a bill in front of us that requires that attestation of only a very small group of employers. Here is the exception, so that everybody knows: Employers with fewer than 25 employees and more than 7 H-1B workers would have to make the certification. Employers with 26 to 49 employees and more than 12 H-1B workers would have to make the certification. Employers with more than 50 workers with at least 15 percent, 15 percent of their work force being H-1B employees would have to make the certification. But everybody else in the world can bring in their H-1B employees without making those certifications. Now, the House is going to have a classic opportunity here today. We have got a bill that does what 23 members of the Committee on the Judiciary said is fair. That is the substitute that I will be offering, along with the gentleman from California (Mr. Berman) and the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Klink). It is the committee's bill. And we have got a bill that is the base bill that was written by the Senate, worked out in the back room, agreed on last night on the floor at 5 minutes to 4:00 in the afternoon the next day, without anybody even having seen what the language is, except they printed it in the Congressional Record in small print last night. Now they are saying we should accept what the Senators said over here, lock, stock and barrel, abandon the bipartisan agreement that the committee had and go forward with that. Nobody thinks that is fair, and we have got a better bill, which addresses the issue and protects United States workers. That is the choice that the House has in front of them today. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds, just to say to my good friend from North Carolina that this is not about whether we become a global economy. We have acknowledged that we are a global economy. We made findings in the bill that the Committee on the Judiciary passed 23 to 4 that acknowledged there was a need. So this is not about that. Now, there are some people who believe we ought not be doing any of this, and I am going to yield to one of those people right now. The gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher), is a colleague of the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger) on the Republican side, who thinks we should not be doing any of this. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher).

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens). (Mr. OWENS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio).

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of our time to close the general debate to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Klink), and then I will yield him some more time when we start the debate on the substitute.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I offer an amendment in the nature of a substitute.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I just point out to my colleagues that this has been an interesting debate up to this point, and my colleagues will see, if they have been listening to the debate, how difficult an issue this is. This is not a Republican issue. It is not a Democratic issue. There are some very difficult issues that we have had to address here, and I will just say to my colleagues that, in addressing those issues, the Committee on the Judiciary took every single point that was made in the general debate into account. There are people in the general debate who are saying we should not have an H-1B program at all because we got enough American workers here in our country to meet the need. There are people who said we ought to increase it a lot more than we increase it in either this bill or in my substitute. There are people who are all over the waterfront on this issue, and we tried to take every single view into account as we went through the process. Now listen to what the committee report says. This is the committee report in support of the bill which I am offering as my substitute which ought to be on the floor because it passed the Committee on the Judiciary by a vote of 23 to 4. This is what the committee report says. It says, it is in the Nation's interest that the quota for H-1B aliens be temporarily raised. First, unless Congress acts, employers will not be able to employ new H-1B nonimmigrants until the beginning of the next fiscal year. The committee report then goes on to say, the committee recognizes that the evidence for such a shortage is inconclusive. There are people out there who are saying there is no shortage of high-tech workers. There are people who are saying there is a major shortage of high-tech workers, and we, in our committee report, acknowledge that we could not decide that one way or another. Then the committee report says, however, the increase in the H-1B quota should be of relatively brief duration; there will be a bumper crop of American college graduates skilled in computer science beginning in the summer of 2001. Now, we acknowledge that if there is a shortage, it is a temporary shortage of high skilled workers, and we ought to respond to that shortage by increasing the number on a temporary basis. And that is exactly what the committee's bill does, the one that I am offering instead of my chairman defending the committee's bill, I am here offering on the floor, defending the committee's position. Now, what does our bill do? What does our bill do? It temporarily increases the number of H-1B visas until the year 2000 under our bill, because we recognize that this was a temporary problem that we were trying to address. So our plan was to increase it from 65,000 to 95,000 workers for fiscal year 1998, to 105,000 for the year 1999, and to 115,000 for the year 2000. And then we were going to go back to the current level of 65,000, because we had evidence that said in 2001 we are going to have a bumper crop of students coming out of school in these fields and we will not need this increase anymore. That is why we passed the bill the way we passed it out of our committee. So now you have a choice between a bill that we had hearings on, that documented, to some extent, the need for it. We acknowledged that there might be a need for it and increased the numbers until the year 2000, but not to 2001, like the bill we have on the floor today. The bill we have on the floor goes to 115,000 for 1999, 115,000 for 2000 and 107,500 for the year 2001, when we have in our record documentation that there is going to be a bumper crop of American students coming out, and it is in our report. So, you have got a choice: Do you take our efforts that we worked so hard in the committee on and passed, 23 to 4, to address this issue, or do you take something that somebody pulled out of the sky, where I do not know where the figures came from, I still do not know, and nobody will be able to tell us. Now, we had evidence before the committee that said this program is being abused, and we took steps in the committee's bill to address the abuse in the process. Our bill, the substitute which is being offered here today, requires all employers to attest that they have not laid off or otherwise displaced a U.S. worker who has substantially equivalent qualifications, and that they will only place the foreign worker that comes in under the program with another employer who has also attested to this. You cannot either bring in a person for your own benefit or for another employer unless you have attested that you are not going to lay off a U.S. worker. Now, is that unreasonable? There is not a person in this chamber who could say that that is unreasonable, if we are going to fulfill our minimum obligation to U.S. employees. Yet the bill we are voting on today does not apply that requirement to all employers. What it says is some convoluted formula, if you are under 25,000 employees, then you have to attest; under 25,000 to 50,000, you have to do another kind of attestation. It makes no sense. We had attestation that 23 Members of the Committee on the Judiciary said was a good way to protect against abuses, and we are throwing it in the trash can, unless we adopt the substitute that is on the floor today. The third thing our bill does is that it requires that all employers attest that they have in good faith taken timely and significant steps to recruit and retain sufficient U.S. workers in the specialty occupation for which the foreign workers are sought. That is not an unreasonable requirement. All we are saying is do not go and bring a foreign worker into the United States unless you have in good faith taken some steps to try to recruit U.S. workers. That is why all of these people are coming to the floor today and saying to us, well, in my part of the country, people are being laid off. If there are laid off people in Michigan and there is a need in California, my goodness, we ought to request the employer to go to Michigan before we send them to India. That is all we are saying, and that is all the attestation would do. And it applies to all employers again, just like it should apply to all employers. Now, there is something in our bill, because we did not have all the facts, that required a study to be done by GAO to determine what impact this is having. I do not know whether they put that in their new bill or not, but I do not see anything about the GAO in the draft of the bill that I got late last night in the Congressional Record in the fine print. So maybe they will tell me that that is in their bill too. But at least we ought to during this three or four year period document whether there is a shortage or is not a shortage, and our substitute does that, the bill that passed the Committee on the Judiciary, which I, a minority member of the committee, has to come to the floor and defend the committee's work product. That ought not be the case. We had a good bill. We passed it 23 to 4, bipartisan support, broad based support. It addressed the issues. It was not protectionist. It acknowledged that we had a problem. But we have got to do it in a way that is fair to the American workers. Mr. Speaker, I ask all of my colleagues to search their heart and vote for this bipartisan substitute that came out of the Committee on the Judiciary by a 23 to 4 vote; not a bill that we have been sent over here from the Senate that has nothing in it that really supports the findings that we made as a committee in this House of Representatives. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I yield three minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Berman), a cosponsor of the substitute.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Miller).

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Brown). (Mr. BROWN of California asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee). (Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, could the Speaker advise us as to who has the right to close, and why?

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Smith) has the right to close?

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1\1/2\ minutes. Mr. Speaker, before I yield to the final speaker to close debate, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Klink), I just wanted to spend a minute or two, or less than a minute or two, really, saying that I understand the predicament that the chairman of my subcommittee is in. I suspect he would rather be supporting my substitute than the bill that he is on the floor with, so I do not envy his position. He has worked hard on this bill, and to kind of show Members how interesting this is, we had to get a special ruling from the Chair to determine who has the right to close this debate, because the bill that came out of our committee, except in one respect, is the same bill that I am offering as a substitute. This is a very unusual process. The bill that I am offering as a substitute is a bill that passed our committee by a vote of 23 to 4, and here I am, defending the committee's bill. So I want to just empathize with my friend, the gentleman from Texas. He has gotten a bill shoved down his throat, just like we are having a bill shoved down our throats, but we are the House. We have the right to stand up and vote against the Senate's bill and support our own bill. That is what I hope my colleagues will do. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of our time to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Klink), the cosponsor of this substitute.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I rise to a point of personal privilege.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the resolution. I asked myself three questions: Is the public's right to know paramount to the right of the accused to a fair hearing? My answer to that is no. That has always been the answer of our country. Is there any precedent for what we are doing? My answer to that is no. We gave the defendant McVeigh and the defendant who shot police officers in this Chamber more due process than we are extending to the President of the United States. We fight to keep from having pretrial publicity and information out there, to assure fair trials, and we give it up today when we release this report. Now, having dug ourselves this hole, can we provide a fair determination and fulfill our constitutional responsibility, with the public and the press second-guessing every single step and every single evaluation? It is like having the press and the public standing and saying to every single juror, ``We have already made up our mind. Now you go provide a fair trial and a fair process.'' On all three counts we have failed the system. This is a sad day from two perspectives. It is a sad day that we are here in the first place, but it is an even sadder day for what we are doing to the Constitution and to our obligations under that Constitution.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I want to address one of the legal issues that has been raised by the Republican majority. The gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Skaggs) will talk about the constitutional issue, but one of the issues that the majority has raised is that the constitutional power of Congress to determine how the census will be conducted is being somehow undermined by the administration. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The Constitution, as the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Skaggs) will point out, clearly says that the census will be taken in such a manner as Congress shall by law direct, and the Congress has passed a law, title 13 of the United States Code, which governs the way the census will be taken. And that title, section 141, says that the Secretary of Commerce shall take a census of population in such form and content as he may determine, including the use of sampling procedures and statistical surveys. The Republicans seem to have a different interpretation of that. But clearly, the statute that is on the books allows, directs the administration and the census body to take this census with the use of statistical sampling. They seem to think that that is unconstitutional, and that case is going up to the Supreme Court. But several courts have held it constitutional and as long as the law is on the books, that is the law that we are obligated to follow and comply with. That is what we are doing. That is why we are here today, trying to debate this issue on an appropriations bill, rather than trying to attack this frontally. We have got a law on the books that everybody is trying to follow. They have no capacity to repeal the law so they are trying to do by indirection what they cannot accomplish directly. The language in the statute clearly allows, one would argue mandates, the use of statistical sampling. And the Republican majority is trying to undermine that because they cannot pass a law that repeals that law. They are trying to do this indirectly. We should not allow them to do this. We should pass the Mollohan amendment and move on with the census as the law now currently authorizes us to do.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I think that the underlying legislation legislating on an appropriations bill is inappropriate. I am opposed to the underlying legislation. But if the underlying legislation on an appropriations bill is appropriate, then so would the amendment be appropriate. We cannot say we are going to waive the rule and allow legislation on an appropriations bill, and then say or make a point of order that an amendment to that legislation is nongermane. That is the perspective I bring. Mr. Chairman, I would join other Members who would say that the underlying legislation itself should not be on this bill. But if the underlying legislation should be on the bill, then this amendment ought to be allowed to be on the bill, and ought to be found to be germane.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I wish to be heard on the point of order.