President Bush on Monday ruled out the possibility of deporting America’s 11 million illegal immigrants and said it makes more sense to grant them legal status as guest workers.
“Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic — it’s just not going to work,” Bush told an audience in Southern California. “You can hear people out there hollering, ‘It’s going to work.’ It’s not going to work.
“And so, therefore, what do we do with people who are here? This is one of the really important questions Congress is going to have to deal with.”
Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, which convened this week after a two-week break, said Monday that they will try to resurrect an immigration reform agreement that collapsed earlier this month.
“It was a good, bipartisan agreement, yet it was blocked by some procedural gimmicks by the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid,” White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan told reporters aboard Air Force One.
But Reid, in a letter sent Monday to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, blamed the impasse on “partisan amendments” that were offered by Republicans. Reid said he scuttled the bill because he feared the amendments would end up stripping the Senate version of its guest worker provision during reconciliation with a House bill on border security.
“We can enact legislation that will both make the nation more secure and fix our broken immigration system,” Reid wrote.
Bush agreed, saying stronger border enforcement must be coupled with a guest worker program. He said he opposes automatic citizenship for illegal immigrants, although he seemed to inadvertently suggest that such aliens are already citizens.
“If you’re [a] citizen here who’s been here illegally, you pay a penalty, you learn English and you get in line, but at the back, not the front,” he said.
The president’s remarks drew praise from a frequent critic of the administration, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.
“I am encouraged by the president’s backing of this approach today and hope that his leadership will help bring more Republicans together behind our tough but fair plan so that we can finally fix our broken immigration system once and for all,” he said.
