President Bush resumes his push for immigration reform this morning with a speech aimed at extracting a guest worker program from a divided Senate, which convenes this afternoon.
“I’ll press Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform,” Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address. “Immigration is an emotional issue and it’s sparked passionate debate.”
Today’s speech in Southern California comes less than a week after the Bush administration had more than 1,100 people arrested in a nationwide crackdown on hiring illegal immigrants. White House officials hope the raid demonstrates Bush’s commitment to border security and allows him to pivot to a guest worker program.
Such a program is opposed by Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.
“We don’t like guest worker programs,” Dean told reporters last week. “I don’t like guest worker programs.
“I think the president’s guest worker program is essentially indentured servitude,” he said. “It doesn’t help the immigrant, and it threatens wages.”
The nation’s largest labor organization agrees.
“Guest worker programs are a bad idea and harm all workers,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said last month. “They cast workers into a perennial second-class status, and unfairly put their fates into their employers’ hands.”
But many Senate Democrats, including Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, favor a guest worker program. In fact, Reid said he scuttled a Senate immigration bill earlier this month because he feared its provision creating a guest worker program would be excised during reconciliation with a House bill on border security.
Bush has accused Reid of torpedoing the bill in order to create an issue that can be used against Republicans in the November congressional elections.
Some Democrats want to associate Republicans with the House bill, which makes illegal immigration a felony.
Meanwhile, Republicans are every bit as divided as Democrats over immigration. Many conservatives, especially in the House, regard Bush’s guest worker program as amnesty, a charge the president denies.
Although the program would not confer automatic citizenship on the 11 million illegal immigrants, it would nonetheless make many of them eligible for legal status to remain in America. Bush insisted that this does not amount to rewarding lawbreakers.
“America does not have to choose between being a welcoming society and being a lawful society,” he said over the weekend. “We can be both at the same time.”
