Part II:
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Bush Proposes Overhaul of Immigration Laws
Raul Yzaguirre, president the National Council of La Raza, a leading Latino advocacy group, called Bush's plan "nothing more than a warmed-over bracero program, unfortunately." He referred to a guest worker program that operated from the 1940s into the 1960s and was widely criticized as exploitive of temporary workers from Mexico.
"You're asking people to come forward . . . and expose themselves to deportation after a period of time," Yzaguirre told CNN after the president's speech. He said Bush's plan "amounts to sugar-coating what is not a particularly generous proposition and not likely to attract a lot of people coming forth" to enroll in it.
He said the plan was unlikely to pass Congress and "may be no more than a political gesture to earn the vote of the Hispanic community" in the November elections.
Among the staunchest opponents in Congress are likely to be conservative Republicans who oppose giving legal status to illegal immigrants.
Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.) said he expects advocates of the plan to "spin it" as something less than an amnesty. But he added, "If you earn legality through an illegal act, that's bad policy."
Mark Krikorian, who heads the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies and favors reducing immigration levels, said the basic assumption underlying Bush's plan -- that "there are jobs Americans simply won't do" -- is false. "There is simply no economic reason to import foreign workers," he said in a commentary posted on the National Review's Web site and subtitled "Voodoo Economics from the White House."
If the labor market tightened, Krikorian argued, employers would simply have to offer "higher wages, increased benefits and improved working conditions" to recruit and retain workers.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform, another group advocating lower immigration, said Bush's program threatens homeland security and the jobs of American workers, grants amnesty to law-breakers and establishes a "back-door immigration program."
"The truth is that the proposal would be an amnesty with an 'apprenticeship' provision," the group said in an analysis on its Web site. "Calling it something else does not change the reality that this proposal is a massive amnesty program." |
