Posted on 01/12/2004 9:37:51 AM PST by Happy2BMe
The President's Speech on Immigration Reform given on January 7th, 2004 has many far reaching proposals which if enacted into law, will shape the future of America for generations to come.
It is the first such immigration reform initiative by any president since Ronald Reagan granted amnesty to illegal immigrants living in the United States in 1986.
President Bush's immigration reform initiative would provide immediate and significant legal protections and rights for any illegal immigrants now living in the United States providing they inform the government of their presence here by legally registering it with the .
Significant benefits and privileges, including an opportunity for U.S. citizenship, would be granted to these immigrants as a result of their cooperation.
Since at least ten million illegal immigrants already living in the United States are eligible for the president's proposal, and since deporting that large of a population back to their home countries is largely considered physically impractical, this solution is seen as the "best-case" solution to the immigration problem by many Americans.
Also embedded into the president's proposal are far reaching changes that are considered by many Americans to be "giving away the farm." The cost of absorbing millions of illegal immigrants all at once and the impact and precedent it could create for future illegal immigrations are believed by many other Americans to far outweigh the benefits of legitimizing these millions of immigrants.
The political, economic, and social impact of President Bush's initiatives will affect the United States for at least the remainder of the 21st Century.
The crisis of illegal immigration affects each and every American, and the longer the crisis goes unanswered, the worse it will become.
It is for this reason that the nation must now put their differences aside and work together for the combined good of all Americans, from all walks of life, and from all political and economic persuasions.
Current FR link reference on President Bush's Immigration Reform Initiative will be update on a regular basis.
President George W. Bush's speech on immigration delivered on Jan. 7, 2004 follows:
Supporters of amnesties and guest worker programs and the looser immigration laws in general base their policy proposals on the basic assumption that the flow of people into the United States is an unstoppable force of nature, like the weather, so that the only path left to us is to lie back and pretend to enjoy it, to accommodate it as best we can.This is the intellectual premise of all the various sundry proposals in this area, not only The Wall Street Journal’s repeated calls for a constitutional amendment to abolish America’s borders – I’m not making that up – but even the less ambitious, though still vast, guest worker amnesty bill that Senator McCain and Congressman Kolbe and Flake have introduced, or the smaller farm worker amnesty, devised more recently by Senators Craig and Kennedy and Congressman Cannon.
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