Remarks to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute dinner

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 28, 1998

Audience members. Viva Clinton!

The President. Thank you.

Audience member. Twelve more years! [Laughter]

The President. That's for the guy that just left. [Laughter] Thank you.

Congressman Becerra, thank you so much for your remarks and for your truly outstanding leadership of the Hispanic Caucus. Thank you, Carmen Delgado Votaw, for your welcome. I thank all the Members of Congress and our administration and staff who are here for their service to our country. I thank you for that warm welcome, for being my friends, for standing with me on sunny days and in strong winds. But most of all, I thank you for being willing to fight for the America we want for our children in a new century.

Before we begin, as the Vice President indicated, I would like to say just a word about Hurricane Georges. In Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, in Haiti, in the Dominican Republic, businesses and homes have been swept away and lives have been lost. Tonight our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of this terrible storm. Our FEMA Director, James Lee Witt, has told me that we are already assisting in the cleanup effort, and we are providing humanitarian aid in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. We are also helping the people of Florida to prepare for the hurricane, and Secretary Cuomo is leading a delegation to Puerto Rico. I thank him for that. We will be there every step of the way to help these communities and these people to rebuild.

I also want to join the Vice President in paying tribute to Henry B. Gonzalez and Esteban Torres. They are both friends of mine. I first met Henry Gonzalez in 1972. I never will forget an evening I spent with him in the Menger Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, the weekend before the Presidential election. And about the only thing we had to enjoy was the mango ice cream they had served there for over 100 years. [Laughter]

On the night before my election as President in 1992, we had a late-night rally in San Antonio; and thinking of that night so long ago - 20 years ago then - I got $400 worth of mango ice cream for our campaign plane so that we could eat it with two reasons to be happy. And let me say that Henry B. Gonzalez has been a pioneer and a conscience for the Congress and the, country. He has the heart of a lion, and we'll always be grateful to him.

From his days as a UAW shop steward to his days as chair of this caucus, Esteban Torres has fought tirelessly to make certain that economic growth benefits all working people and not only the people of this country but of Mexico as well. He has been a lion in the fight for a decent and better America. I will miss him, very, very much. And I thank you, sir, for your service.

If I could just continue the appreciation for a minute, I want to thank the members of this caucus and their supporters for what has been done for America and what we have done together, Together we expanded the earned-income tax credit and cut taxes for 15 million hard-working families, including more than one million Hispanic families. And when the majority in Congress tried to slash it, together we said no.

Together we increased the minimum wage for 10 million Americans, including nearly 2 million Hispanics. And we are trying to increase it again for 12 million Americans. I'm very disappointed that yesterday over 95 percent of the Senate Republicans voted against it, but I haven't stopped fighting, and I don't think you have either. It is time to raise the minimum wage for people who need and deserve it.

Together we fought for and won the biggest increase in children's health care in more than 3 decades to insure up to 5 million uninsured children, almost all of them in low-income working families in America. We expanded the Head Start program and passed the family and medical leave law, to give millions of people a chance to take time off from work when a baby is born or a parent is sick. Together we have opened the doors of higher education with the HOPE scholarship, more Pell grants, tax credits for all higher education, deductible student loans. Because of your efforts, everyone who is willing to work hard can now go to college without being afraid of being crushed by the burden of debt, and I thank you for that.

Together, under the leadership of the Vice President, we created more than 100 empowerment zones and enterprise communities, community development banks; we doubled small business loans to minorities, tripled them to women. Administrator Aida Alvarez is here, and she would want me to say that businesses owned and operated by Hispanic women are the fastest growing category of small business in America today.

Together we shaped and passed an historic crime bill to take guns off our streets, put police back on our streets, and provide more prevention to keep our children out of trouble in the first place. Together we have built an America that has the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years, the lowest Hispanic unemployment rate in a generation, the fastest real wage growth in 20 years, a record number of new small businesses every year, the lowest crime rate in 25 years, the highest homeownership in the history of our country, and you did it. None of this could have been done without the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.