Bush Finally Gets Immigration Priorities Right

By Jennifer Solis

Now we know why President Bush hired a new press secretary in Tony Snow. His 17-minute talk tonight on immigration was the best speech of his life.

Except for the extreme fringe on the far sides of this issue, the comments by the public, on C-SPAN and other media, were almost unanimously favorable. The only criticism was whether he and Congress would have the will to follow through on such a reasonable solution.

The most significant positive of the speech was getting the priorities right. “First, the United States must secure its borders. This is a basic responsibility of a sovereign nation. It is also an urgent requirement of our national security,” Bush stated as his first of five goals of a comprehensive program he wants the Congress to pass.

By the end of 2008, Bush promised to hire and train 6,000 new border patrol officers, and back them up with fences, new roads along the border, motion sensors, infrared cameras and aerial vehicles. Meanwhile, an equal number of National Guard troops will be temporarily assigned for support duty along the border, so that existing and new trainee patrol officers can accomplish their primary duty of border enforcement.

His second goal is the creation of a temporary worker program, “that would create a legal path for foreign workers to enter our country in an orderly way, for a limited period of time.” It would reduce the appeal of using human smugglers, and would ease the financial burden on state and local governments, by “replacing illegal workers with lawful taxpayers,” and “making certain we know who is in our country and why they are here.”

Holding employers accountable for the workers they hire is the third goal of the President’s proposal. Existing law from the 1986 Reagan amnesty already forbids the hiring of undocumented workers, so Bush stated that a key requirement for enforcement would be a tamperproof, biometric identification card for every legal foreign worker. “Making it harder for illegal immigrants to find work in our country would discourage people from crossing the border illegally in the first place.”

The President’s fourth part of the plan would not give an automatic path for citizenship to illegals already here. “This is amnesty, and I oppose it.” He said that amnesty would be unfair to those who have immigrated here legally, but he said it was not “realistic to round up millions of people, many with deep roots in the United States, and send them across the border.”

Finally, his fifth goal would be to help newcomers assimilate into our society by having Congress define a path to citizenship (a phrase he did not use in his speech). “All elements of this problem must be addressed together, or none of them will be solved at all.”

The President closed his speech by recognizing the importance of recruiting undocumented young persons into the military, by telling the story of a young man from Mexico who grew up picking crops, then joined the Marines. He was wounded in Iraq, sent to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he met the President, and asked the chief executive for two requests: a promotion for the corporal who rescued him from the battlefield, and “the chance to become an American citizen.

Bush said that he was honored to stand beside the Marine when he took the oath of citizenship. The President described immigrants as “people willing to risk everything for the dream of freedom. And America remains what she has always been – the great hope on the horizon, an open door to the future, a blessed and promised land.”

Democrats in the Congress will be hard pressed to disagree with these goals and priorities of the President’s speech. Republicans will mumble, “Why did he wait so long to get it right?” The big question is whether the administration, now and in the future, will have the willingness to follow through with the key requirements of immigration reform.

Will employers really be forced to hire only legal workers, with stiff penalties for those who ignore the law? Can a total of 18,000 border agents really seal the border, or will there be a necessity of building a wall (a word missing from Bush’s speech)? The answer lies in the priority American voters will place upon this issue, on a long term basis.