(Editor's note: The following are portions of President Clinton's remarks at the White House Prayer Breakfast, attended by Bishop Howard J. Hubbard of the Albany Diocese. The Bishop's comments appear elsewhere on our web site.)
Some of you think I made a mistake when I signed the welfare reform bill, and I don't....In four years, we have reduced by 2.1 million the number of people on welfare, the biggest reduction in history, by doing the kinds of things that now this bill requires every state to do.
My objective here is, once and for all, to take the politics out of poverty and to treat all able-bodied people the same at the community level. What I long for is a system of community-based support for people who are out of work through no fault of their own, but a system of community-based norms that require people who can work to work when there is work....
This new law gives every state the right to give the welfare check to any employer -- including a church -- as an employment and training subsidy....If every church in America just hired one family, the welfare problem would go way down. If every church in America challenged every member of that church who had 25 or more employees to hire another family, the problem would go away.
The second thing I wanted to talk about a little bit is this whole business of immigration. The things I don't like about the welfare law have nothing to do with welfare and everything to do with the way we tried to save money -- I thought unfairly -- on legal immigrants. Our administration has done a lot to cut down on illegal immigration, but we believe that legal immigration has served our country well....
We have learned a lot in 220 years -- really more than 300 years -- about how hard it is for people of different races to get along. We know that that is difficult in all societies and all times, and it's something you just have to keep working at. America is not a white and black America. America is a country with scores, hundreds of different racial, ethnic and religious groups....How are we going to deal with that?
Against the background of what you see in Bosnia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, all of these things, these destructive impulses people have, how can we prove in America that we can all get along -- without giving up our basic beliefs but in finding a ground of mutual respect? It seems to me that that may be the single most significant decision facing the United States....
We're on the cusp here, maybe, of turning a lot of our social problems around. We know what we ought to do. Can we do it in the right way, in a spirit of reconciliation? And can we recognize that in this exciting new world, there's no way in the world for us to know the answer to all these questions that are out there before us?
And that's the last point I'd like to make. If we do things in the right way, we'll get enough of the right answers to keep moving our country forward and to keep doing the right thing for the rest of the world. And we won't be right all the time, but that's just because we're human. So that's the last thought I would like to leave with you.
The beginning of wisdom, I think, is humility and respect for what you may not know. Now, we were talking around the table here about the last speech Cardinal Bernardin gave in which he said that the precious gift of time should not be wasted on acrimony and division. And he said that knowing he had just a little bit of time left. The truth is, all of us just have a little bit of time left. He just knew it and we don't.
Three weeks or 30 years, it's a little bit of time in the life of a country, the life of the world. So I ask for your guidance, for your prayers for our country, for the efforts that all of us are making. I ask for you specific involvement -- particularly in the two issues I've mentioned, on the welfare and immigration issues. But most important of all, I ask for your help in creating a sense of reconciliation, the right sort of spirit in which we can deal with these issues.