Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, during a gaggle with reporters in New Hampshire on Friday, came out publicly for the previous Senate’s “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill that would have provided citizenship, public benefits and other goodies such as work authorization for every illegal alien in America.
“The book I wrote is a pathway to legal status, and,” Bush began to answer when a reporter asked him about why he is now talking about how he wants a “pathway to legal status” for all the illegal aliens in America rather than a “pathway to citizenship,” which he previously endorsed.
“But you were for citizenship at one point” the reporter cut him off before he finished answering, and Bush restarted his answer right after.
“That was a comma, not a period,” Bush continued.
And we created a conservative alternative to the dead end conversation as to what was going on in Washington, D.C. Now if you could get a consensus done, where you could have a bill done, and it was 15 years as the Senate “Gang of Eight” did, I’d be supportive of that.
But the position I have, the view that I have, the one I’ve expressed and the one I continue to express is that a path to legal status is more than enough to allow people to come out from the shadows and that’s what they want. They want to be able to come out from the shadows and work, be able to get a provisional work permit. There’s broad support for that and if we could get that done, our country would grow economically far more.
That means Bush is essentially publicly supporting the centerpiece of President Obama’s agenda, an open borders immigration policy where illegal aliens get to take jobs away from American workers. The exact policy he’s describing is the foremost goal of Obama’s second term, and what Democrats in Congress including Sens. Chuck Schumer (NY), Dick Durbin (IL) and Harry Reid (NV) have been fighting to implement for years.
Jon Ward of Yahoo News added more reporting from New Hampshire, in which Bush says his support for amnesty for more than 11 million illegal aliens is the “grown up plan” on immigration.
Ward wrote on Friday, quoting Bush throughout:
Bush kicked off his first pre-2016 trip to New Hampshire with a visit to the Integra Biosciences manufacturing plant in Hudson, where he took questions from local business leaders. The former Florida governor, whose position on immigration reform has come under criticism from members of his party, once again endorsed “earned legal status” for immigrants who entered the country illegally.
“It’s easy to say, ‘Well, anything you can propose is amnesty.’ But that’s not a plan,” Bush said. “That’s a sentiment perhaps.”
Bush seems to be going farther than before toward endorsing the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill. In previous commentaries, Bush has offered support for the ideas behind the defeated Senate bill—saying he was “pleased” with the bill while appearing at an event hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center alongside former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, another pro-amnesty Republican, and saying it was a good start but needed improvements, or more guest workers from the third world to take jobs from Americans, by the House in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in June 2013. But this is a major step, to openly say he could personally support it, a perhaps game-changing development that undercuts his ability to achieve support from Republican voters in the presidential primary election.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), another potential GOP candidate and a member of the “Gang of Eight,” has admitted he made a mistake in pushing through the comprehensive immigration bill that would have granted the more than 11 million illegal aliens in America amnesty and would have brought in 33 million mostly unskilled new immigrants to directly compete with struggling Americans for jobs in the lagging economy.
While Bush is right that the economy as a whole—or Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—would likely increase with a new massive influx of cheap foreign labor and new workers from legalized illegal aliens, the quality of life, or GDP per capita, for those here in America would drastically decrease. What that means is that wages for working Americans would be cut for those lucky enough to keep or find a job and what’s sure to be a huge spike in unemployment thanks to the drastic overflow into the labor supply—a simple calculation to make when it comes to supply and demand in the labor market.
While Bush continues pushing for a wide scale amnesty and open borders policies, now including the “Gang of Eight” bill, he’s clearly taking a beating in the polls, as a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that a minuscule and embarrassing 4 percent of Americans think he represents the values of the middle class.
Bush hasn’t joined nearly all of his potential 2016 GOP presidential candidates, most notably Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), in publicly opposing Obama’s executive amnesty funding via the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill or via the nomination of U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch to replace Eric Holder as Attorney General.
Walker, Cruz and Paul—the three Republicans most likely at this time to beat Bush for the GOP nomination—each came out against the DHS funding bill from congressional GOP leadership that provided taxpayer resources to Obama’s executive amnesty, but Bush’s team despite numerous press requests from Breitbart News remained decidedly quiet.
And even though one of Congress’ most ardent advocates of amnesty and open border policies Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) opposes Lynch’s nomination because of her support for executive amnesty—joining Walker, Cruz and Paul among many, many others—Bush has remained silent on that matter too.