Remarks to the community in San Diego, California

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, June 17, 1996

Thank you so much. Thank you, Chief Emerson, Sheriff Kolender, District Attorney Phingst. Chief Sanders, thank you very much for the tour of your activities this morning and your statements. Thank you, Congressman Filner. Thank you, Madame Attorney General for all the great work you do. I'd like to also say a word of appreciation for some others who are here who have not spoken today: our United States Attorney, Alan Bersin; the Immigration and Naturalization Commissioner, Doris Meissner; the person who was very active in helping me pass the crime bill which put these police officers on our streets, former Congresswoman Lynn Schenk, I'm delighted to see you here.

I want to thank all the officers who are here from the Customs, the Border Patrol, Immigration, from Chula Vista, from San Diego. I especially want to thank these uniformed officers who give their lives to make our lives safer and all the community citizens' groups who work with them. Thank you all very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, when I came to California and to San Diego 4 years ago and I listened and attempted to learn what was going on here, I saw an enormous amount of potential and a lot of stress. Mostly what people talked to me about then were two problems, the economy and the problem of crime and illegal immigration. I spent a lot of time here 4 years ago and had the opportunity to come back often since. If you'll forgive me just one personal note, this is the first time I've come back to San Diego since the death of my friend Larry Lawrence, who served this country so well as our Ambassador to Switzerland, and I miss him now, coming back here, and I want to thank him for what he did for me here. Anyway, what we tried to do was to develop a serious approach, to work with you, to help you seize control of your destiny, and to help you do more of what you were already inclined to do.

On the economy, I'd like to make just a couple of comments. Because we're building two new ships for our national defense, the San Diego shipyards are busy, securing another 4,000 jobs until the year 2000. I think that's a good and Positive step. Because in 1993 and 1994 the Congress agreed to invest in defense conversion, in high technology research and development and new environmental technologies and biotechnology, jobs are being created here that have a real future to grow in number and to strengthen and diversify the economy of this area. Because we've started work on a new sewage treatment plant and we're proposing to step up our sand reclamation efforts, thanks in no small measure to the relentless efforts of Congressman Filner, we're ensuring that the San Diego beaches will be enjoyed by children and their children for generations to come.

But we all know that America has had, building over years and years and years, a serious problem of illegal immigration which has aggravated the crime problem along our borders. The Attorney General talked about some of the progress we've made. She gave me a report today which reviews where we are and what we've done. So as we have worked hard to bring the crime rate down all over America, we've made special efforts in our border communities, because we know that we have special responsibilities there.

Immigration laws are national laws, not State laws. They have to be enforced. And the consequences of their enforcement or their failure to be enforced have to be borne primarily by the National Government. I have done what I could to get more money into California in very difficult fiscal circumstances in Washington to help you deal with the costs of illegal immigration - more than ever before - and I will continue to work on that.

But the most important thing is we have to be able to work together to prove that we can do better. I agreed with what the district attorney said when he said there's a difference in being a safer community, and a safe community. I agreed with what the sheriff said when he said that we'd never fully solve this problem until both the United States and our friends in Mexico are working together in a long-term and consistent way.

But think about how far we have come in the last 3 1/2 years. Three and a half years ago, many people believed that these problems were totally intractable, that drugs would always flow freely, that illegal immigration would always be rampant, that criminal immigrants deported for crimes they committed here in America would return the very next day to commit crimes again.

For a lot of years people in public life at election time talked tough about immigration, but didn't do much about it. We tried to change that. We tried to substitute deeds for words. It's a pretty good practice in a lot of areas of life, and I think it's worked pretty well here. Our message has been simple: We will work with you to give you the tools you need to patrol your streets, protect your children, secure our common border. And you have to do what you can to help the police to bring the crime rate down and make your community safe.