Karen DeYoung
WASHINGTON POST
The number of people who have become U.S.
citizens through an act of Congress is small.
Some, including British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, Mother Teresa and 17th-century
English Quaker William Penn, were made
honorary citizens for their valor and good deeds.
Citizenship was posthumously bestowed on
Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg for his
efforts to save European Jews during World War
II.
Now, if somelawmakers have their way, another
person will be added to these rarefied ranks. Elian
Gonzalez, age 6.
Florida Sen. Connie Mack (R) and four House
Republicans – three of them from Florida – have said they
will introduce bills to make Elian a citizen when Congress
reconvenes on Jan. 24.
Swift movement on the measures seems likely, since
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) has signed on
to Mack’s proposal and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay
(R-Tex.) is the fourth sponsor of the proposed House bill.
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) “is supportive,” a
spokesman said.
Asked if President Clinton would sign such a bill into
law, White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said: “We’ll
deal with that when we get there. We’ll take great pains to
stay out of the politics of this.”
As a citizen, Elian would no longer be a foreigner
without legal status in this country, and the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, which has ordered him home
to Cuba, would have no more say over his fate.
Backers of the measures hope his case would then
head to Florida family court, where a Miami judge already
has given temporary custody of the boy to his Cuban
American great-uncle and has scheduled a March 6 hearing,
despite INS insistence that the court has no jurisdiction.
There, the boy’s future could be argued by his Cuban
father, who wants him back, and his Miami relatives, who
maintain that life in communist Cuba automatically
constitutes child abuse.
‘BEST FOR BOY’
“Right now, you have attorneys arguing archaic,
confusing and hard-to-understand immigration law,” said
Mack. “If it’s shifted to an issue of custody, the decisions
will be made in court. . . . All interested parties will have an
opportunity to voice their opinions. The fundamental
difference is you go away from being focused on the law to
being focused on what’s best for the boy.”
For his part, Mack said, “I don’t understand how the
land of freedom can say it’s in his best interest to be sent to
a place where the government can tell him what he thinks
and what he’ll become.” Mack said he thinks it is
appropriate for Elian Gonzalez to take his place alongside
Winston Churchill in the hearts and history of Americans.
“It’s fundamental about who we are as a nation.”
Elian’s plight would likely have elicited strong emotions
from parents, and even members of Congress, no matter
where he came from. Cute and photogenic, he is a motherless
child with enough pint-sized stamina to have endured two days
alone and adrift in the Atlantic Ocean. But because he is Cuban,
because his divorced mother drowned while fleeing the
island with him, and because he has been claimed by South
Florida’s politically powerful and highly vocal Cuban
community, his case has been propelled into the realms of
high politics and foreign policy.
CONGRESS RECONVENING
Congress has been in recess since Elian was rescued at
sea on Thanksgiving Day, so political debate over his fate
has been relegated to home-state news releases,
presidential photo-op commentary and candidate
statements. But with the all-but-certain failure of INS efforts
to get the boy back to Cuba before Congress reconvenes,
that is about to change.
“Hopefully, we can address it in the first week we’re
back,” Mack said.
Where it will end is anybody’s guess. Although Cuba
remains subject to the harshest economic sanctions under
U.S. law, congressional sentiment has slowly been shifting
toward more normal relations, particularly in the Senate.
Clinton has long been considered a closet advocate of
normalization and has publicly supported the INS ruling.
UNPREDICTABLE POLITICS
But election-year politics – and the tangled family
emotions that overlay the international policy aspects of the
case – tend toward the unpredictable.
Most members of Congress have said nothing at all
about the boy. With few exceptions, the flood of news
releases supporting the Americanization of Elian have come
from a relatively small group of House and Senate members
long-identified with efforts to isolate the regime of Cuban
President Fidel Castro. They include Mack, the three
Florida GOP House members who say they will sponsor a
citizenship bill along with DeLay – Ileana Ros-Lehtinen,
Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Bill McCollum – and Rep. Robert
Menendez (D-N.J.), as well as the co-sponsors of an
eponymous 1996 law tightening the U.S. economic
embargo on Cuba, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Rep.
Dan Burton (R-Ind.).
REVIEW SOUGHT
Florida’s other senator, Democrat Bob Graham, has
asked Attorney General Janet Reno to defer the
enforcement of the INS ruling pending “congressional
review,” which he said should include “possible changes in
the law.” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G.
Hatch (R-Utah), a candidate for the Republican presidential
nomination, requested that Reno stay” her decision to send
the boy back to Cuba and asked to be personally briefed.
Among other Republican presidential hopefuls, Texas
Gov. George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) have
both been critical of the INS and said the issue should be
heard in court. So has Vice President Gore, although the
other Democratic presidential contender, Bill Bradley, said
he didn’t want to “second guess” the INS.
But support for legislative intervention has not been
unanimous among those who have expressed an opinion.
Longtime advocates of normalizing relations with Havana,
such as Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and Rep.
Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), have publicly backed the INS
ruling.
SILENT SMITH
Rep. Lamar S. Smith (R-Tex.), a major conservative
voice on immigration issues and chairman of the House
immigration subcommittee through which the citizenship
legislation would normally pass, has been noticeably silent.
Asked on Friday to comment on the proposed bills, Smith
issued a terse, four-sentence statement calling Elian’s case
“a sensitive issue that demands careful consideration.”
“No one can justify the oppressive, communist
government in Cuba,” Smith said. “But we should not rush
into separating a father and son. If any of us were a parent
living in Cuba, as much as we might not like the authoritarian
government, we would not want to give up our parental
rights.”
A Smith spokesman said it would be correct to
interpret the statement as a non-endorsement of citizenship
via legislation.
Smith’s Senate counterpart, immigration subcommittee
Chairman Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.), has said that it is
“appropriate for courts to examine” Elian’s case. But he has
not commented on the citizenship issue.
ABSCAM INFLUENCE
“Private bills,” those bestowing benefits on a single
individual, have been around since the beginning of the
Republic. Once common, their popularity “tailed off
considerably after the Abscam affair in 1980,” according to
former INS general counsel David Martin.
During the Abscam federal bribery investigation,
undercover agents posing as foreign businessmen offered
members of Congress cash in exchange for “one particular
favor,” Martin said in a recent interview with National
Public Radio. “And that was the passage of a private bill to
change their immigration status.”
Today, Congress generally frowns on private
immigration bills as opening the door to suspicions of special
favors and unwanted hordes of “me, too” petitioners. “The
overwhelming majority of members of Congress refuse to
introduce a private bill under any circumstances,” said
Washington immigration lawyer Michael A. Maggio, who
has tried to push his share of such bills.
The few that are introduced more often than not die a
quiet death in the immigration subcommittees and never
make it to the full judiciary committees, let alone to the
House or Senate floor. In the last Congress, only one such
bill became law – former New York Republican senator
Alfonse M. D’Amato’s petition to grant resident-alien status
to Swiss banker Michel Meilei, who lost his job for saving
Holocaust-era bank documents from a shredder.
STRAIGHT TO THE FLOOR
But congressional sources said that with support from
the Republican leadership, it is quite likely that legislation
granting citizenship to Elian would bypass the committees
altogether and go directly to the floors of the two chambers.
Although time has grown short, the Justice Department
holds out hope that it can move the issue onto the federal
docket this week – a venue where it believes the INS will
prevail – and thus satisfy congressional demands for Elian’s
day in court.
Should that effort fail and legislation succeed, the INS
and senior administration officials maintain that citizenship
wouldn’t affect the right of Elian’s father to take him home.
“There’s no guarantee that a citizen remains in the United
States,” said Martin. “U.S. citizen children move with their
parents to foreign countries all the time.”
The path to such an outcome is littered with obstacles,
however. Taking Elian to Cuba before the Florida custody
hearing would require wresting the boy from the possession
of his Miami relatives.
If the custody case does go to Florida court,
Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Rosa Rodriguez has said Elian’s
father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, must appear. But Gonzalez
has said he will never give in to “that mafia” in Miami by
showing up on its turf.
© 2000 The Washington Post Company