The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MUDD: Good evening. I'm Roger Mudd in Washington. After our summary of the day's stop stories this holiday evening, we go first to a background report and debate over the rules for political asylum, then the continuing struggle over language in South Florida, and the new poet laureate of the United States. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MUDD: President Clinton is on his way tonight to the economic summit meeting in Tokyo. He said the leaders of the world's seven largest industrial nations need a new economic vision to deal with the post Cold War era. The President and Mrs. Clinton took off from San Francisco after he spoke to a National Education Association convention. He told the group that joblessness has become an international problem.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I am going to challenge the other countries to work with us in a new cooperative effort to tackle the most troubling problem of this new era, and that is the stubbornly high rates of unemployment even in times of economic growth, even in times of economic growth. There are European nations that have had big economic growth and have still not been able to get their unemployment rate down below 9 percent. Today I am announcing that I have asked my top economics and labor advisers to invite their counterparts from all these nations to come to the United States in the next few months to a meeting in which we search for the causes and possible answers for this stubbornly high unemployment. There are things each of us can do within our nation, and we do it together, that will help us not just to grow the economy but to ensure that economic growth means more jobs for Americans and more jobs for the world.

MR. MUDD: Twenty U.S. soldiers from the army's Berlin Brigade arrived in Macedonia today. They are the first U.S. troops to be deployed in the former Yugoslav republic. They joined blue bereted United Nations forces from other countries already there. We have this report narrated by Vera Frankel of Worldwide Television News.

VERA FRANKEL, WTN: There'll be 300 U.S. soldiers in Macedonia once the main body from Berlin arrives. They'll train near Scopia for a month before heading for Macedonia's borders with Albania and Serbia. There some 700 Scandinavian troops are already patrolling some of Macedonia's more sensitive border regions. This contingent of Norwegians is watching an area near the border with Kosovo. They're taking a particular interest in one very busy crossing point. The U.N. suspects that sanctions against Serbia are being broken here, but the Norwegians can only monitor what's going on. They're restricted to resolving differences between ethnic Albanians and Serbs before they escalate into conflict. What's left of Yugoslavia lies with sight. The Norwegians sometimes run into Serb troops from the garrison below. So far, the encounters have been friendly.

MR. MUDD: There was heavy fighting today in Northeast Bosnia in the town of Meglei. Meglei, with a population of 30,000, is one of the last strongholds for Muslim forces. The attack came from a combined army of Serbs and Croats. The radio report said the town was burning, the ground shaking from a constant artillery barrage. A team of United Nations weapons instructors led by a Russian expert left Baghdad today frustrated by the Iraqi government's refusal to allow surveillance cameras at their weapon sites. We have this report from Robert Moore of Independent Television News.

ROBERT MOORE: Nikita Smidovich is one of the most experienced of the U.N. inspectors in Iraq. Today he left Baghdad, saying it was the most difficult moment of his time here, adding that the surveillance cameras were vital for the long-term monitoring of Iraq's missile program.

NIKITA SMIDOVICH, U.N. Inspector: They're important, because we will be able to effectively monitor that no prohibited activities are taking place on those sides. Also I would like to stress that there is another issue, that Iraq's noncompliance with the Security Council decision on immediate installation of those cameras.

ROBERT MOORE: He had met Iraqi officials again only this morning, and there was still no hint of compromise. For Iraq, it's a question of sovereignty, for the U.N. a question of compliance with the Gulf War cease-fire agreement.

MR. MUDD: There was no holiday let-up by the rising Mississippi River. The rain continued this weekend in the watershed region of Southern Minnesota. In such towns as Marshall, Minnesota, people tried not to let it put a damper on the holiday spirit even though in most of the town houses remained underwater and roadways were closed. Down river in Davenport, Iowa, bridges and buildings were still submerged, and the local ball park looked more like a giant swimming pool. Men, women, and children joined the sandbagging effort. Near St. Charles, Missouri, a levee broke today, endangering about a dozen homes. Another levee had already broken to the North in Winfield, Missouri, threatening about 600 residents. More rain is expected. That ends our holiday News Summary. Now it's on to the debate over political asylum, bilingual Florida, and the new poet laureate. FOCUS - PERSONA NON GRATA?

MR. MUDD: We focus now on a subject appropriate on this holiday weekend given the fireworks, the parades, the flag waving ceremonies. The subject is America's immigration policy. A number of recent incidents like the recent grounding of the ship filled with would-be Chinese immigrants near New York City, are reminders that there are still thousands of people in the world willing to risk everything for a chance to live in America. But other incidents, like the explosion at the World Trade Center and last Friday's detention of Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman have caused some to conclude our immigration laws are too loose. We'll debate what should be done in a discussion that was taped last Thursday after a look at how the most controversial part of the policy works right now. Correspondent Tom Bearden reports.

MR. BEARDEN: New York's Kennedy Airport on a recent afternoon. It's one of the major ports of entry into the United States. If this day is typical, 13,000 people will arrive here from a foreign land. Some belong here. Some have permission to visit, and a few are trying to enter the U.S. through loopholes in the system. This young man tried to get in from Venezuela. Immigration inspectors say they caught him with a phony passport. He's now being escorted to the next flight back. The irony is that if he had just known the right words to say he could have stayed.

WILLIAM SLATTERY, Immigration & Naturalization Services: He had a Venezuelan passport with what we referred to as a double laminate. The photo page has a lamination over the entire page. He had cut the original photo out, replaced it with his, and laminated it a second time, and you saw him going home.

MR. BEARDEN: If he had claimed asylum, would he still be here?

WILLIAM SLATTERY: If he had claimed asylum, he would have had a right to present that claim before the Immigration Court, venue lies with the court, and yes, he'd still be here.

MR. BEARDEN: So the key to beating the system is what you say when you get off the airplane?

WILLIAM SLATTERY: Well, if an alien wants to take advantage of the provisions of the immigration law, one way to do it is to claim asylum.

MR. BEARDEN: The blast at the World Trade Center threw a bright spotlight on this country's asylum policy. In particular, it raised questions about Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, inspirational victory for several of the suspects in the bombing. Rahman extended his stay in this country by asking for asylum. That's increasingly easy to do these days. About a hundred thousand people showed up on these shores last year and asked for asylum from political persecution. No one knows how many of those claims were authentic.

WILLIAM SLATTERY: What we're really experiencing is a problem with illegal aliens and within that, that larger group, the majority of them take advantage of the liberal asylum provisions of the law. Of the 15,000 inadmissibles apprehended last fiscal year, better than 9,000 made claims for asylum subsequent to apprehension.

MR. BEARDEN: It wasn't always this controversial. Two decades ago, most refugees fled across the nearest border to a neighboring country and never came near the U.S. Asylum was something granted to people who asked for it after they had entered this country. It was reserved for rare instances like East Bloc citizens who wanted to defect. The great refugee crises of the 1970s changed that. With the help of cheap air travel, people were fleeing persecution farther and faster than ever before. A lot of them wanted to come here. The huddled masses became so massive that the old system was overwhelmed. In 1980, a new refugee law designed to restore order was passed. It set up specific quotas to determine the number of people who could visit a U.S. embassy abroad and ask to enter as refugees. There were no quotas established for people asking for asylum after they arrived here. The eventual result is the current situation at JFK Airport. Today, pretty much anyone can show up at the airport without any travel documents at all and ask for asylum. These two young men arrived on a flight from Madrid without passports, apparently from China originally. No one's sure.

WILLIAM SLATTERY: They mentioned asylum, yes, based upon the "one child" rule in China, forced sterilization, that they're going to be scheduled for an appointment for an immigration judge. The judge has jurisdiction over the application for asylum. The only thing to be determined is whether they'll be detained until they see the judge or not. The short time that you and the camera crew were here, I think you've witnessed ten to twelve apprehensions at just one part of Kennedy Airport. What you witnessed today is being repeated at five or six other terminals.

MR. BEARDEN: Eventually, these young men will have a chance to tell an immigration officer or a judge why they're afraid of persecution back home. If the judge thinks they have a credible case, they'll get asylum, but the caseload is so heavy that the judge won't see them for months. What happens in the meantime? They could be sent here, a private detention facility run for the INS under contract. But they probably won't. The INS says asylum seekers are many and beds are few. Those who know enough to ask for asylum at the airport usually aren't sent to detention. They're released within hours, like these Tamils from Srilanka.

SPOKESMAN: If you're still in the United States on September the 1st, go for your hearing.

MR. BEARDEN: Some show up for the hearing. Others don't. The suspicion is they want to get in for economic reasons, but only political persecution qualifies people for asylum.

WILLIAM SLATTERY: Absolutely very few have legitimate asylum claims, and I say that because they, they never pursued their claim. Better than, better than 50 percent never showed for an initial hearing before the judge.

MR. BEARDEN: The problem really become acute in the last year, when the present system for hearing claims became fully workable and word began to drift back to foreign countries on how to beat the system. All of this has led to calls for change. The question is what kind of change and how much any change will accomplish. Even the lawmakers recognize that immigration policy is driven by conflicting goals.

REP. CHARLES SCHUMER: The word is out around the world that it's very easy to fool. People with not even the slightest colorable claim for asylum can fool the authorities, get here, and stay here. On the other hand, we also know that there's that Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. My middle name is "Ellis."

MR. BEARDEN: Some say those conflicts mean no immigration policy can ever be flawless.

ANNE PILSBURY: On the one hand, we can help people in trouble, and on the other hand, we're afraid of losing what we've got here and giving away the store. And I think those two conflicting interests have to be balanced, and there will always be a tension in our immigration laws between those two interests, and there's no way that tension's going to go away. We just have to find a way to balance it.

MR. BEARDEN: Back at Kennedy Airport, things went as expected. The two young men from Madrid were released a couple of hours after they had been picked up and disappeared into the spring afternoon, destination unknown. No one in the government knew where they were going, whether they'd show up for their hearing, or even their real name.

MR. MUDD: We pick up the debate over political asylum now with two members of the Congress and two advocates in immigration. Republican Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming sits on the immigration subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He's sponsoring a bill to tighten political asylum policy. Democratic Jerrold Nadler is a first-term Congressman from New York. His district includes the World Trade Center. He sits on the immigration subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. Congressman Nadler joins us from Capitol Hill. Dan Stein is executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, known as FAIR, a non-profit organization working to limit immigration. He joins us from public station WCVE in Richmond, Virginia, and Frank Sharry is the executive director of the National Immigration, Refugee, & Citizenship Forum, which is a nationwide coalition of more than 200 immigrant and refugee advocacy groups. Sen. Simpson, political asylum, which came out of, I guess, Nazi, Germany, and communist Europe, is a honored and revered tradition for America. Is it time now to shut it down?

SEN. SIMPSON: Well, I wouldn't tie it up with Nazi, Germany. Asylum is a very sacred thing. It's for someone fleeing persecution or having a well-founded fear of persecution. And when people around the world gimmick it and cheapen and debase a remarkable thing like they do here, China is an example. We have a provision in the law that you get an enhanced kind of a situation if you're coming from China because of forced sterilization and you saw right there in front of you that some of the ones that use it and abuse it the most are twenty-one or twenty-three years old and single. So that's absurd! That's what we've got. We have absurdity, absolute absurdity.

MR. MUDD: But you, you don't mean that it's time to, to eliminate or so tighten political asylum that it no longer exists as a viable policy.

SEN. SIMPSON: Of course not, but remember that people who come here and ask for asylum and then get the whole load, it might take two or three or five years, more due process than an American citizen gets, when they're all through, we still only approve about 10 percent of 'em.

MR. MUDD: Are those people who come in and use political asylum as a lever to get in, are they not entitled to due process?

SEN. SIMPSON: Oh, of course, they're entitled to due process, but you have to see it. It's more than anything that you'd ever get if you were hammered flat in the United States and the judicial system. You can't believe it, layer on layer, on layer. It's in the record of the last hearing we had, Sen. Kennedy, Paul Simon, and I. We looked at it, and we could believe it ourselves. It's absurd.

MR. MUDD: So tell me what the Simpson immigration bill would do to correct the problem.

SEN. SIMPSON: Well, it's not an immigration bill.

MR. MUDD: I'm sorry.

SEN. SIMPSON: It's very important.

MR. MUDD: All right. My mistake, political asylum.

SEN. SIMPSON: You're a wonder at your craft, but it's so important, because people don't make the distinction between an immigrant, a refugee, an asylee, permanent resident alien, they don't make a distinction. What we're saying is this: Expedite the inspection. You eat your documents on the plane. You can't get on the plane without documents, and they eat 'em, some of them eat the documents.

MR. MUDD: Or flush them.

SEN. SIMPSON: Or flush 'em, get off the plane, say asylum in any kind of form you wish, and then we're saying at that point there would be a special, trained officer who will screen, screen those people. If it looks like they have a credible, "credible" claim for asylum, they set them aside. They say, you are screened, you will go through the full process. If they find someone like the young men with no credible claim, doesn't even know what country he's fleeing, doesn't know the government of his country, doesn't know who's persecuting who in this country, you take 'em across the tarmac and you put 'em on the plane, and you send 'em back. The others go through the system. And, remember, when they finish the whole system, still we approve only about 10 percent of those.

MR. MUDD: Does the, does the young man who gets denied asylum, does he get an appeal under your bill?

SEN. SIMPSON: There is, there is a procedure under Schumer's, Congressman Schumer's bill for that. In my bill, after you've been through the screening procedure and after you've been through the, through the basics at the airport, then it's deportation and you go back.

MR. MUDD: Mr. Sharry, I detect that you have a minimum high regard for the Simpson bill, is that accurate?

MR. SHARRY: That's right. We're concerned that legitimate refugees, people who are fleeing literally the knock on the door in the middle of the night are going to be sent back to the hands of their persecutors, and that's our fear that we agree that there should be some sort of accelerated process upon which people who are trying to take advantage of our system, get identified, have a fair hearing, and if they can't cut the mustard, then they should be deported. We're concerned that the sort of meat ax approach of a quick interview with a low level immigration inspector was going to lead to legitimate refugees being sent back, and that's our fear. A couple of things you have to keep in mind. There's 17 million refugees in the world. Less than 2 percent find their way to the United States. We're not being invaded by hordes. This year, the real problem is in JFK Airport, and I don't know that if a national asylum crisis that requires massive legislative reform puts a specific problem at an airport that's been mismanaged by the INS district officer there, and we need to do some reforms, maybe some legislative tinkering, but we're just concerned that we're going to go too far and hurt legitimate refugees.

MR. MUDD: If, if the Simpson bill were law, would it have prevented the World Trade bombing and the threat to blow up not only the Lincoln Tunnel but also Sen. D'Amato?

MR. SHARRY: No. Most of those people came in on other means. They came in through family visa, or they came in as tourists and overstayed. Now, we're concerned about the idea that this is going to somehow solve our terrorism problem. I saw an interview with William Webster, former head of the CIA, a 20-minute interview on the threat of terrorism to the United States, and in 20 minutes of prescription for how to deal with it, never once did he mention this notion of asylum. We're concerned that the two are being associated in an unfair manner.

MR. MUDD: Is it the World Trade Center and the, and the subsequent threats and the Chinese boat people, is that what's driving the movement behind the Simpson bill?

MR. SHARRY: That's right. I mean, it's very dramatic to have a boat load of Chinese show up on a New York beach, but the fact is we were talking about 300 people. And you know, 6 million tourists come into the United Statesevery year. The idea of, what Mr. Slattery of the INS in New York was talking about, 9,000 people applying for asylum as a threat to our national interest and that, therefore, we have to have a big reform of law to send them packing without so much as a fair hearing, we think is just going too far.

MR. MUDD: Let me ask Mr. Stein in Richmond. Do you think, Mr. Stein, it's time to, to suspend perhaps the tradition of political asylum?

MR. STEIN: Well, Roger, I think we're all concerned about bona fide political refugees, but the, the problem with the asylum system now is, as Sen. Simpson pointed out, is it's being massively abused by hundreds of thousands of people now every year. The backlog before the 1993 is likely to exceed 300,000 cases. The basically four issues you're dealing with in asylum, what kind of hearing a person gets when they show up without documents and claim asylum, what kind of a hearing, how long they have to wait for that hearing, what we do with them while they're waiting for that hearing, and then what's the burden of proof or the standard of proof once they actually go in front of a judge. Right now it takes several years to get that hearing for all but known terrorists. We don't have the detention space for most of those who are waiting for the hearing. They get an INS work document. That let's them get a Social Security card and a driver's license. With that they can get AFC-DC documents, or go out and buy assault weapons. When they finally do get the hearing, a lot of immigration judges give people the benefit of the doubt because, look, if somebody says to you, I fled China, and I want to have another kid sometime, and somebody whispered to me in the dead of night, I mean, how do I know the guy's telling the truth? And if you give somebody asylum who doesn't deserve it, Roger, you're letting them jump in front of the three and a half million people who are right now patiently waiting in line for permanent residence or green cards. And you've got about 20 million, as Frank said, 20 million political refugees worldwide. People know that it's a way to get in. It's a ticket to get into the country and disappear. And that's why we need reform.

MR. MUDD: So what is your idea of reform?

MR. STEIN: Well, the first thing is you have to make sure that people don't get a preference or an advantage by coming here illegally first, destroying documents and making phony claims as opposed to making their claim to a consular officer overseas. Every year we admit well over now a hundred thousand allegedly bona fide political refugees through a very elaborate consultation process. There's federal funding for those refugees. Many of them seem to get preferential spots. We have that program. Now, why do we also have a wide open program which allows anyone who shows up, gets two feet on U.S. soil, to have the opportunity to have a full evidentiary hearing, cross-examination, right to have counsel, five layers of appeal, all the way up to the Supreme Court, if you want to, in your deportation process? It's not in the real world. It doesn't reflect adequately the scope of migration pressure, the speed with which people can move around the world today, and as a result, we've lost control of the process.

MR. MUDD: Let me ask Congressman Nadler on Capitol Hill how he reacts to what he just heard from Mr. Stein.

REP. NADLER: Well, I think there is a real problem, but I think we have to react reasonably and not hysterically. Of the 300,000 people who come into the country illegally every year, about 9,000 come in with false or no documents at our airports and ports of entry and claim political asylum. The fact is that we have a real problem, but the problem is that we're not devoting enough resources to the, to adjudicating those claims. For 9,000 people who claim asylum at the airports and the total of 50,000 who claim asylum altogether, we have 160, I think it is, immigration judges. Sweden, by contrast, has 800. I am going to introduce legislation to double the numbers of immigration judges and to increase the number of detention facilities, and I hope we would use those detention facilities more intelligently so that we detain those who pose potentially or conceivably some sort of threat and don't waste the space on people who don't. The real problem is, is that if we had a system where when someone came to the airport and claimed political asylum he'd go before an administrative, before a hearing officer in 15 days, an administrative law judge in 30 days, and the whole case would be over in sixty to ninety days, you wouldn't have thousands and thousands of people out on the streets waiting for hearings a couple of years later.

MR. MUDD: So is the solution then -- is the problem then not the policy but the lack of money, is that it?

REP. NADLER: I would say the policy, it's mostly the lack of resources that we've devoted to it. It's secondarily the fact that I would agree we probably have one too many review steps in the review process. We could expedite that somewhat, but we have to be very, very careful that we don't do things like summary exclusion at airports, deprive these people of all due process with a genuine political refugee, genuine people who are fleeing a hostile and murderous regime are arbitrarily denied asylum because of one low level employee at an airport. And remember one thing, that the real purpose of political asylum is to give asylum, refuge to those people who really have to fear for their life of limb from a murderous or tyrannous government if they were to be deported. It's exactly the people most deserving of political asylum who are not going to have valid passports stamped by in former years the Gestapo or the KGB or the East German secret police.

MR. MUDD: Let me ask Sen. Simpson how an immigration officer can determine on the spot whether the applicant carries with him a credible fear. How do you determine that at an airport gate?

SEN. SIMPSON: You have specially trained people to do that. People may not know that when you're in another country and you go to our embassy and you're saying that you want to be considered as a refugee that you are processed just that way, and you're asked questions by people who know that -- you're asked questions by people who are from the State Department and the Justice Department and know the situation, the condition on the ground, where the conflict is, what social or political organizations are out to do people in. That's what you do, and that's what we ought to do, and it ought to be case by case.

MR. MUDD: Do you have faith in the, in the sophistication of a, of an immigration officer to determine whether there is a credible fear?

MR. SHARRY: No.

MR. MUDD: Why? I mean, does the INS bear responsibility for this then? What's the problem?

MR. SHARRY: Yeah, actually INS bears a substantial responsibility for this. Look, I mean, to have an INS, a low level INS inspector at the airport when someone arrives off of a plane and says, you know, I want asylum, I'm afraid to go back to my country and in a 20 minute interview determines and really when it becomes a life and death decision whether that person can stay or is sent packing is really, I mean, that's like having a toll collector administer the death penalty. We don't have police officers adjudicate fines. We have judges.

SEN. SIMPSON: This is absurd.

MR. MUDD: What's absurd?

SEN. SIMPSON: I'll tell you one thing that's absurd. Many of these asylees have been to two or three or four countries before they come to the United States. And if you're missing that, you're missing everything, because the essence of asylum is you're leaving the area of persecution. Once you set your foot on a country that is free, you are home free. They don't. They stop there. They go to another country. They get another fake passport. They do Libya, they do Wer, and then they come to Moscow, and they get to the U.S. and say asylum, and we're sucker enough to believe that? Because if they were really fleeing persecution, they would have stopped when their foot hit free ground.

MR. MUDD: Let me ask everybody if there's room for compromise, given the Simpson bill to start with. Would everybody agree that, that the process should be speeded up, but that the applicant for asylum should get at least one review or one appeal within the first twenty-four or forty-eight hours? Would you accept that, Senator?

SEN. SIMPSON: I don't have any problem.

MR. MUDD: Review?

SEN. SIMPSON: I'm ready to do that.

MR. MUDD: Well, your bill doesn't have review in it, does it?

SEN. SIMPSON: I said when I put it in, I'm ready to listen to other people, I'm ready to work with the attorney general. We have a very bright, capable attorney general, and we have Doris Misener now as the head of the Immigration & Naturalization Service, and that's going to be a tremendous advantage.

MR. MUDD: How about you, Mr. Stein?

MR. STEIN: Well, you have to have a very quick hearing, but I imagine the amount of money required to give everybody a hearing far exceeds what we can provide. I think that Sen. Simpson is absolutely right, that for those people who have acted inconsistently with asylum, before they've got here, they've been going through five state countries, if they haven't taken advantage of the first opportunity to ask for it, you should be able to summarily deny that claim without an elaborate hearing. Those claims which have spatial credibility, appear to have a plausible basis, you should have a very rapid hearing. If you can do it with one level of appeal within thirty or forty-five days and therefore can detain all applicants, you would cut down on an awful lot of the fraud.

MR. MUDD: Congressman Nadler, how about you?

REP. NADLER: I think that we ought to cut down on the bureaucracy, and I mean, we could do with one less level of appeal, but I want to make sure that we, that people's lives and, and survival is not dependent on a couple of people and without legal assistance. You have to make sure these people have their due process rights protected, because they should be entitled to legal assistance. Remember, the Senator talks as if everyone who is claiming asylum is a lawyer. What you're dealing with are terrified people fleeing regimes. If they're bona fide people, bona fide seeking relief, they may not know they should stop right away. They may not know a lot of things. But we can, there's no reason for a reasonable amount of money that all of this can't be done within forty-five or sixty or ninety days --

MR. MUDD: All right.

REP. NADLER: -- through every level of review.

MR. MUDD: Final question. Do you expect, Mr. Sharry, the White House to produce any sort of workable compromise that'll bring everybody together?

MR. SHARRY: I think they're looking for a solution that provides for an accelerated process and that's fair. I think we all agree that that is the goal. We need to weed out abuse, but we just want to make sure that there's enough fairness in it so that we don't hurt legitimate refugees. I think we all agree on those bills. I know the Senator does. It's a question of what kind of fairness. We just want to make sure that it's not so expedited, it's not so fast that we're sending scared refugees back to their persecutors.

MR. MUDD: All right. Thank you, Sen. Simpson --

SEN. SIMPSON: Thank you very much.

MR. MUDD: -- Sen. Sharry, Congressman Nadler, and Mr. Stein. FOCUS - SI SPANISH - ENGLISH NO?

MR. MUDD: Next tonight, the bilingual battle. Last May, the Miami Dade County Commission repealed the ordinance that made English the official language of government. Despite expectations, the repeal did not end South Florida's long running argument over bilingualism. Tom Bearden reports.

MR. BEARDEN: This could be any city in Central or South America, but it happens to be Little Havana on Miami's Kayee Ocho, 8th Street to English speakers. You won't find much English spoken here. [people speaking Spanish] Nor in this studio. This Spanish language newscast is transmitted via satellite from Miami to the entire Spanish-speaking world. The Telemundo Network launched the broadcast in June. The company aspires to be a Spanish-speaking CNN.

OSVALDO SOTO, Spanish American League Against Discrimination: Here we are the, feel the capital of the Americas. The young countries, the Mexicans, the Argentineans, the Chileans, they realize that Miami is their capital now.

MR. BEARDEN: From a language perspective, Miami is now as much as South American city as a North American one. It is the United States' first truly bilingual city. More than half the population speaks Spanish as a first language. The major newspaper, The Miami Herald, publishes in both Spanish and English. There are several Spanish language television stations in addition to the usual network affiliates. Business is routinely conducted in both Spanish and English. Signs are frequently in both languages. But until recently, most government activities were conducted only in English. And that's been a major bone of contention for more than a decade. The controversy began in 1980. A new wave of Cuban immigrants in the Mariel boatlift joined tens of thousands of early Cuban ex-patriots already in the city. Alarmed Anglos in Dade County overwhelmingly petitioned for a city ordinance establishing English as the official language of local government. Florida also amended its constitution, making English the official state language. For 13 years that meant that most government business had to be conducted in English. There were exceptions for emergency services and the like. But in May, the headlines, both in English and Spanish, reported the fact that the newly elected Dade County Commission had voted to rescind the ordinance. It reflected the fact that the Anglos who passed the original ordinance were outnumbered by Cuban immigrants. Lawyer Osvaldo Soto is a frequent participant in a weekly radio talk show that originates in a little Havana restaurant.

OSVALDO SOTO: The Hispanic people believe now that they are really first class citizens. Up to this point it is though we did not want, we didn't want to accept it. We realized that we were prohibited from using our own language.

MR. BEARDEN: But not everyone in Dade County is celebrating. Mike Thompson is the chairman of the Florida Conservative Union.

MIKE THOMPSON, Florida Conservative Union: I think it's an outrage, because this is the first government at any level in the history of America to reject English as the official language. It's a pretty shattering step to take in a community as large and as dynamic as this one.

ENOS SCHERA, Citizens of Dade United: I view this as taking away my language and part of my constitution and my civil rights as like ripping up little pieces of my American flag.

MR. BEARDEN: Enos Schera was instrumental in the passage of the original official English ordinance and opposed its repeal. He says repeal sends a message that they don't have to learn English to live in Miami.

ENOS SCHERA: In the past, millions of immigrants came here to America. They melted in the system. They became good Americans. They adopted the American language, adopted American culture, but too many Cubans have adopted the theory in defiance of the melting pot. Now, I have a neighbor, so help me, they've been here for 32 years, and all they know is about three words, "hello," "good morning," and "thank you," and that's about it.

MR. BEARDEN: Luis Capo fits that description. He came to America 26 years ago. Despite five separate English language programs, he speaks very little English. It hasn't slowed him down. Starting with a $10,000 loan from the Small Business Administration, he founded the El Dorado Furniture Business in 1966, named after the boat in which he fled Cuba. Last year, the company took in over $30 million in revenue and employs more than 300 people. Luis Capo Jr. does speak English, and he says his family has assimilated.

LUIS CAPO JR.: We assimilated into the melting pot, and we have a bilingual system, no matter how you look, the way we eat, the way we go out, the way we express ourself, the way we pay taxes. We assimilated the, the system definitely, but not completely. We want to keep our roots alive.

MR. BEARDEN: Luis Jr. says there's nothing sinister in the fact that his father hasn't learned English.

LUIS CAPO JR.: My father don't speak English, because he can't. He tried. He goes to five schools, and when you have some kind of age, no matter how you look, it don't you. If you are about 50 years and you go to China, it would be very hard for you to learn Chinese, and that is same thing.

MR. BEARDEN: But some, like Schera, believe the Cubans have set up a Spanish-speaking enclave that excludes English-speaking Americans.

ENOS SCHERA: You come to America, you keep your language, you keep your culture, you establish a little country of Cuba within side of the United States in primarily Dade County, and you just go on operating your business like Americans don't exist.

MR. BEARDEN: That also worries Ossie May Conley. She says repeal of the official English ordinance means more Spanish being spoken in the work place, and that means English only blacks will be excluded.

OSSIE MAY CONLEY: It means that we as black people will lose jobs wherever there is an Hispanic store, a Hispanic neighborhood, it's only Hispanic people, they're working, and that's enough evidence right there.

MR. BEARDEN: Luis Capo's grandson, Danny, also works in the family business. He says bilingual people do have an advantage in the job market but not because of the repeal of the official English ordinance.

DANNY CAPO: The only way I see it is if you get American and someone that speaks bilingual English and Spanish and with the same knowledge and they got to go apply for a job, I think the bilingual has more advantages, because every day more and more Cubans are coming and not just Cubans, more Latin people are coming.

MR. BEARDEN: For many Anglo residents the repeal symbolizes what they have long feared, they have lost control of their city. Mike Thompson believes the Cuban-dominated county commission was sending the Anglos a very specific message.

MIKE THOMPSON: I think it means that you better know where your place is, this is a different community now. We're the majority. We're going to reject English as the official language, and you just better be prepared to deal with us, because we are the majority. I think that's what they're saying.

MR. BEARDEN: Miguel Diaz De La Portilla says that's nonsense. He was one of the 13 Dade County commissioners who unanimously voted to repeal the ordinance.

MIGUEL DIAZ DE LA PORTILLA, Dade County Commission Member: We have no interest in being, in seceding from, from the United States. That's ridiculous! There is absolutely no risk and no threat to Anglos nor to the English language in this country. And I'm living proof of that, and my children are living proof of that.

MR. BEARDEN: But Mike Thompson and others aren't convinced. They say the repeal of official English will cost taxpayers millions of dollars as routine government proceedings are translated into Spanish.

MIKE THOMPSON: We're going to have a Tower of Babel in Dade County. We're going to be providing translations of meetings, of documents, of every service imaginable in as many languages as there are people speaking it.

MR. BEARDEN: De La Portilla says that's not going to happen.

MIGUEL DIAZ DE LA PORTILLA: We're not saying, for example, that we need to publish everything in Spanish or in Creole or in any other language for that matter. All we're saying is we have flexibility now, and if we see that it's necessary, if we deem it feasible, if we deem it convenient, we can do it now, and that flexibility is important for our government, it's important for our community.

MR. BEARDEN: But Bill Anderson, who heads the national organization U.S. English, says there's more to the issue than just bilingualism and government operations, that it goes to national unity.

BILL ANDERSON, U.S. English: If it's truly bilingual, and they all know English, so why tinker with it? What they're, what they're using that -- they're misusing the word "bilingual." Bilingual suggests that you can use two languages, and, and that is the problem, that there are a lot of people coming to this country who are being misled to believe that they don't even need to speak, learn to speak English, and so you, truly again, you know, a hackneyed phrase but it's, it's a balkanization. It is a creation of linguistic ghettos around the country, and, you know, sometimes somebody has to say "no," or we're going to see more of this rather than less.

MIKE THOMPSON: I don't want this to become another Quebec. I want this to continue to be part of America. And one of the greatest things that we can do to unite this country and unite this community is to have a common, official language, a language of government.

MR. BEARDEN: But David Lawrence says official English laws ignore reality in South Florida. The Miami Herald publisher says times have changed and that Miami's future is a bilingual future, laws or no laws.

DAVID LAWRENCE, Publisher, Miami Herald. This is a community with an extraordinary future as a world capital of the 21st century. But to get there is going to require people learn how to live with one another, people learning to give each other the benefit of the doubt, people learning to live in mutual respect. We have an immense opportunity to have the nations to the south of us as full partners with this country, full partners with full respect.

MR. BEARDEN: And a bilingual city has an innate advantage?

DAVID LAWRENCE: Absolutely, huge advantage.

MR. BEARDEN: Meanwhile, both English and Spanish are being taught in the public schools and so is Creole, recognizing the fact that the steadily growing population of Haitian immigrants speaks neither English or Spanish. The language argument isn't over. Florida's constitution still contains an official English clause, and several anti-bilingual organizations are threatening legal action. CONVERSATION - RITA DOVE

MR. MUDD: Finally tonight a conversation with Rita Dove, the new poet laureate of the United States. As poet laureate, she will be responsible for selecting poets to read and present their work at programs sponsored by the Library of Congress. She will also advise the Librarian of Congress on literary issues. Ms. Dove officially takes office in October, but already has been visiting Washington to get ready for her new assignment. Charlayne Hunter-Gault has more.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: This is Rita Dove's private world, in the rolling countryside outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. It's here that she spends her spare time with her husband, German novelist Fred Vibon, and their 10 year old daughter, Aviva, and writing what she calls her truest love, verse.

RITA DOVE: Dug out just before sunrise, still moist where the roadside dips into a hollow, each common closed blossom, clanton, heat thrush, feathered shoot of yarrow, creepy charlie, hawk's foot, and a dandelion. Each blade of meadow poises discreet in its moment abstract. What road could I be walking on, fresh with weeds and the gnarled insistent wild flower?

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Rita Dove spends the rest of her time teaching English at the nearby University of Virginia. She has written four books of poems, including Thomas and Beulah for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 when she was 35. She's also published a book of stories, Fifth Sunday, and a novel, Through the Ivory Gate, and she's also written a forthcoming play. I spoke with her yesterday during one of her Washington drop-ins. Rita Dove, thank you for joining us.

RITA DOVE: It's my pleasure, Charlayne.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Why is it important for a country to have a poet laureate? Well, we've had six. Why is it important to have one?

RITA DOVE: I think that it's important symbolically, because poetry is one of those things in literature that has been relegated to the sidelines of our lives, and poetry is an art that allows human beings to think about themselves. It allows us to contemplate ourselves, and in our world we have so much information that's kind of dumped on us every day that we have to process we really don't take time to think about what it means to be a human being walking on the planet. You know, we have a lot of information, and poetry gives us that contemplative moment to think about how we fit into this universe.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Why has it been relegated to the sidelines? Is it technology or what?

RITA DOVE: I think it's a lot of things. I think that first of all it is technology in the sense that, that poetry and literature is an intimate act. I mean, we sit in a corner and curl up on a coach, and we read, and there's no one there for that space of that reading except the reading and certainly the writer. They meet on the page. And that's hard to get across in terms of, you know, big media. But there are other reasons as well. I think that government funding of the arts is, we have one of the lowest government funding of the arts in, in the western world, and that has a definite impact. I also think that the, what has happened to poetry and literature in this world is because there's not a lot of avenues, let's say for artists, both literary artists, even visual artists, to earn a living. They have gone to the universities to teach, and that's wonderful to teach our youth and to have them learn about literature, but let's face it. Not everyone can go to the university. I hope to use the position to talk about the need to get poetry out on the streets, you know, get it out of the university. Well, keep it there too, but also have readings, heftings, which move out of these hallowed halls and go right to the very life that, in fact, poetry is witnessing.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Much was made of the fact that you are the youngest person ever to be chosen poet laureate and that you are the first black person ever to be chosen poet laureate, therefore, the first black woman ever and on and on and on. Does that matter and if it does, how does it matter?

RITA DOVE: My, my response to that was, first of all, you know, if I had been, you know, a white man, none of the first, even as the youngest, it wouldn't have mattered so very much. But I think that it matters only in the eye of, it matters in the eye of the public as they try to figure out and certainly what kind of change or what kind of direction this may, may symbolize. I tend to view it as an indication that, that poetry is inclusive rather than exclusive, that I take it as a very positive act. I remember when I was growing up the only writers that I ever saw were hanging on a wall and they were, you know, they had long, white beards, so we know what gender they were, and we know a lot of things about them. But it's wonderful that, that this is, that this is possible and that it happens on many different levels, I think, not only that I am the first black but also the youngest, and I would take that more as an indication that, if anything, that there's energy to be brought to the office, but also that it's a world where our poets come in all colors and in all genders, and isn't that wonderful? I certainly feel that way. I certainly feel that I'm still questioning exactly what poet, how far poetry can be stretched, and just how well poetry is to our world, but because I'm thinking about those things.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What do you mean how far can poetry be stretched?

RITA DOVE: Well, I'm very curious about what we're going to do with our youth who watch television more and more and don't pick up books, and rather than just say, oh, well, you know, they should read books and it's such a shame. I've started thinking about possibilities to bring poetry and literature into the, you know, into the media, into the television media, and I think that the influx of things like, well, even when I first saw about what, seven, eight years ago, when I saw my first rhythmic, and TV show. I thought, well, this is a little piece of poetry. I mean, there was an entire, not only the visuals but the way the, the way the words worked in. I thought, you know, this is three and a half minutes long, this is the perfect kind of venue to bring across a little bit of, of language and, and you know, and illustrated, and I really feel that poetry anyway is music, so to combine poetry with music to me seems like a very natural thing. In fact, poetry began with music. Original poets were part of the community, and it was part of a ceremonial function, and music was part of that, so why not bring them back together?

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, what about rap music, isn't that what rap is doing?

RITA DOVE: I think that that's one of the things that rap is doing. Rap is interesting, because it is, it is taking the human voice and making it into an instrument in a way, and the music, when I say music, the instrumentation gets kind of relegated to the background more, and really good rap is simply wonderful, because it's doing exactly that. You hear the words. You know what they mean. But you also hear how they sound, and that affects how you think about it too.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: So you like it?

RITA DOVE: I like some rap. I like good rap.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: And what is good rap and what is not good rap?

RITA DOVE: Well, I mean, this is the question we could apply to anything and talk here, you know, for the next three days. When I say bad rap, sometimes I find a real irresponsibility in the lyrics that seems to be there in order to sell the record, and really I don't have a feeling that the rapper is connected to the words that they're saying. But, as I said, this could apply, there's also good and bad poetry, and I would apply the same kind of judgment to that when it doesn't seem connected.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Much of your poetry has been about the black experience and about your own family. And I was intrigued by something that you said about the importance of recording ordinary experiences. You've tried to, as I read it and see it, capture something about the black experience through your own writing that lets people know things that they don't know, or maybe you could express it better than I.

RITA DOVE: No. I think you're absolutely right. I am really dedicated to portraying the ordinary moments of life, because I believe that we live our lives fully through our ordinary moments. I think that one of the things that I'm very interested in is the individual, the very individual individual and how that individual works out their life for a moment even in the flux of history. For instance, in my book Thomas and Beulah, which is based on the lives of my grandparents, I tell their story in individual poems, but you see them doing things that every human being does, I mean, going for a walk or, or sweeping a floor. And the world and all of its big events are swirling around them, and you get --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: The great migration.

RITA DOVE: The great migration in World War II and the Depression, all of these things are there, and they do impinge upon their lives. But at the same time, they have to have the floor swept. At the same time there may be a neighbor who won't let their child go next door and play with the, you know, with the black girl, and so they, they, you know, that stuff is certainly, that's much more important than the depression to that individual, and that's really how we live.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Why is it important to convey that, and what, what is the importance to society of having that insight?

RITA DOVE: Because if you can see another person as an individual and you, you can get inside of their head, or you understand how they feel in a moment or what kind of soap they use and all that stuff, it's much harder to kill that person. I think it really boils down to that when we can think of each other in terms of groups, of stereotypes, it's much easier to, you know, to eliminate a group, but it's much harder to eliminate a person whose name you know.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Are there any positions that you think or points you want to press as the poet laureate? I mean, do you plan to write any public poems, for example, or --

RITA DOVE: I've never planned a poem in my life. I've never said I'm going to sit down and I'm going to write about this or that. But I do hope as poet laureate to impress upon people, exactly the way that poetry can make us feel less alone and more connected, that it is an inclusive resonant, exclusive experience, it's an extremely renewable and cheap pleasure. You know, you can pick up a book and read it anywhere, that it is nothing to be afraid of, and it's not exalted but, in fact, it really springs right out of life.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, we're looking forward to your year as poet laureate. Thank you, Rita Dove.

RITA DOVE: Thank you. RECAP

MR. MUDD: Again, the main stories of this Monday, President Clinton, before leaving for the economic summit in Tokyo, said today that high unemployment had become an international problem. He called for a meeting of experts from industrial nations to deal with their deep seeded unemployment problems. Sixteen U.S. soldiers, the first of three hundred U.S. peacekeeping troops, arrived in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia. Flooding continued along the Mississippi River. The river crested today at Davenport, Iowa, but more flooding is expected. Additional storms are forecast in the Mississippi River Basin through the week. That's the NewsHour this holiday night. We'll be back tomorrow with a Paul Solman preview of the economic summit in Tokyo. I'm Roger Mudd. Thank you, and good night.