The leader of the nation's largest Hispanic political organization on Wednesday blasted President Clinton's commitment to sign the Republican welfare-reform bill as "mean- spirited," saying Latino voters will make Clinton pay in November for supporting the legislation.
"This is a disaster for the nation," said National Council of La Raza president Raul Yzaguirre. "We are shamed and dismayed that he said he would sign it. He's going to kick 1 million kids out into poverty."Clinton said last week he would agree to legislation ending the current federal welfare system and delegate much of the power to set welfare policy back to the individual states. Among other provisions of the new law, welfare recipients will be limited to a maximum of five years of benefits at the welfare trough and would be required to enter the work force within two years.
Although a $21 billion block grant will be established to provide child care for working mothers on welfare, the food-stamp program will be cut, and legal non-citizens will be barred from many welfare benefits. Yzaguirre said this amounts to taxation without benefits and accused the president of using the issue to curry favor with middle-class white voters.
"Millions of hard-working legal immigrants will be required to pay taxes without the possibility of receiving benefits," he said.
Yzaguirre was at Snowbird resort Wednesday as a keynote speaker for the 1996 National Community Development Lending Conference sponsored by the American Bankers Association Center for Community Development, the Federal Reserve System and the federal Small Business Administration.
The current welfare legislation, along with state and federal attempts to declare English the official language of the United States, are simply attempts to drive a wedge between whites and America's ethnic groups, Yzaguirre said.
He said the country's political leaders are looking for scapegoats and simplistic solutions to avoid dealing with America's real problems like deficit reduction, balancing the federal budget and rebuilding infrastructure.
La Raza has begun national campaigns to fight new anti-immigration legislation many see as tar-geting Hispanics. The organization is also resisting English-only laws and has initiated a campaign to "hurt Clinton" on the welfare issue.
"There has to be a cost," Yza-guirre said. "They need to know we're not going to take this lightly."
U.S. Census estimates said there were 27 million Hispanic Americans in 1994. Hispanics make up the fastest-growing minority group, and recent state estimates showed the population of Latinos in Utah had reached 116,000 by 1994 - a 37.8 percent increase over 1990.
Yzaguirre told conference attendees America's minority population will be the marketplace of the future for home building and other loans. Afterward, he added that although minority-owned businesses are growing, Hispanics need better access to capital and that most Latino businesses are small one or two person concerns.
"Minority business really grows out of employment in corporate American," he said.
Typically, a minority employee of a big company will quit and then form his or her own company after seeing there is a particular niche for a product or service that the large corporation didn't provide.