On Monday’s broadcast of “The Kelly File,” host Megyn Kelly aired her entire interview with former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL), a potential hopeful for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
During that interview, Kelly quizzed him on his immigration stance, part of which had been revealed in a preview on Sunday.
“[I]f you’ve been here for an extended period of time, you have no nexus to the country of your parents, what are we supposed to do? Marginalize these people forever? There’s got to be a point where we fix this system so that legal immigration is easier than illegal immigration and show some respect for people — a kid that might have been here 10 years, that might be the valedictorian of their high school to say, no, you’re not allowed to go to college. I just think there’s a point past which we’re over the line. I do understand and respect people’s sentiments and frustrations about this broken system. And I totally understand why people are upset when Barack Obama, with a stroke of a pen through executive action, takes unconstitutional actions.”
Bush told Kelly he would “absolutely” reverse President Barack Obama’s executive action, and anticipated a legal challenge to Obama’s effort would succeed. But he proposed undoing it through the legislative process by “passing meaningful reform immigration and make it part of it.”
“I would have had a different bill that was based on the, you know, my deeply held views on this,” he continued. “But I would have supported that to get beyond this, sure. It was a bill that I don’t think — I think there should have been more efforts to get something like that passed. The criticisms of the bill in my mind were way too complex, hard to understand, but they made a good effort to narrow family petitioning and expand economic immigrants, which is what we need to do.”
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