On Tuesday, former Florida Governor and prospective GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush said that he hadn’t “thought about” what to do with parents of children who fell under the DREAM Act, and that it is “hard to imagine” dealing with illegal immigrants in the US aside from “a path to earned legal status.”
Bush began, “We need to control the border, for sure. Legal immigration needs to be easier than illegal immigration, and there are times where that’s not the case. We need to enforce the law as it relates to people coming legally and not staying. We need to have an e-verify system. All of that, there’s broad agreement on. This president hasn’t acted on it. You shouldn’t have a president that signs executive orders that are — not within his constitutional authority as it relates to allowing people to stay. All of those things are important.”
He continued, “But we also need to fix our legal immigration system. Narrowing family petitioning, and allowing for economic immigrants to come would be a catalyst for higher sustained growth. And then finally…I believe that we need a path to earned legal status where you pay a fine, where you get a provisional work permit, where you work, you don’t receive government assistance from Washington, and, over a period of time, you earn legal status. The other options are kind of hard to imagine how we’d go about doing them, to be honest with you.”
Bush added, after being asked, that the border “absolutely” has to be secured as a first step. And that he would undo the president’s executive action on immigration and “replace it with a comprehensive reform that dealt with these DREAM Act kids, not necessarily their parents, I don’t — haven’t thought about that, but there are these kids that have come here through no fault of their own. They — there should be a different path for them than someone who crossed the border last year that doesn’t have a family here. I mean, there has to be some practicality to our immigration laws.”
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