Mikhail's Army

When Mikhail Rabinovich, a refugee from the former Soviet Union, heard that under the new welfare reform bill, legal immigrants would be cut off of disability and food stamps if they failed to pass the citizenship test, he did what any good U.S. resident would do: wrote to President Clinton.

But not just to protest. Rabinovich had found an old law that said veterans of the Armed Forces of the United Nations who had served between 1950 and 1955 would be accepted for U.S. citizenship without having to pass the English language requirement — something that's difficult for older immigrants. The ability to acquire a new language diminishes with age.

Rabinovich, a member of the Alliance of Veterans of War and Labor and the Delaware Valley Chapter of the Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge, fought as an artillery man during World War II for the Soviet Union, then an American ally. He and some of his brothers in arms — former Soviet World War II tankers, pilots and machine gunners now living in the Philadelphia area — requested that Clinton expand the exemption to veterans of the World War II Soviet Army.

"No one of us could ever admit the idea that the government of the most democratic country in the world might disregard the main vital needs of those who fought, hand-in-hand with American soldiers, against our common enemy," reads the letter signed by Rabinovich and friends.

And like any good president, Clinton wrote back, an apparent form letter which did not mention Rabinovich's proposal. Clinton's letter spent several paragraphs talking about the importance of jobs and parental responsibility as anti-poverty measures but failed to contemplate whether World War II veterans, who are at least 69 years old this year, might have difficulty finding employment, and whether the parents of these former soldiers, if still alive, were capable of taking responsibility for their senior citizen sons.

"Dear Mikhail and Friends... I know this legislation is far from perfect, and it includes some provisions I deplore and am determined to fix. Unfortunately, the congressional leadership insisted on using welfare reform to target other unrelated programs," wrote Clinton, who, all of his own volition, signed Congress' welfare reform bill into law on Aug. 22.

No word from Washington yet on which provisions Clinton intends to fix, nor how.

— Daisy Fried