"If our answer to the fastest-growing demographic in this country is that we want to make felons of your grandparents and we want to put people in jail who are helping your neighbors and people related to you, then [the Republican Party] we're going to suffer mightily [ for votes ]."
"How can you send 11 million people back to the country they came from?" Sen. John McCain
cnn.com
"You cannot enforce the border without having a temporary guest worker program," Bush said this week. "The two go hand in hand"
[ I agree with Bush about making every person count, so the truly criminal people are more easily detected. But I disagree with rewarding illegal behavior by granting citizenship without returning to their country to get in line behind people of legal behavior, because to do otherwise simply creates a magnet for more illegals to come. Of course, if they got rid of the baby-gets-citizenship, you'd probably have a solution to the underlying motivation for illegal immigrants - making their child's life better by having them born in the USA - not sure why no one discusses changing that law in order to remove the underlying incentive? ]
But Sen. Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, told CNN the country must "find a way, without rewarding violating the law, to bring [illegal immigrants] out of the shadows, impose fines, criminal background checks, paying back taxes, learning English, those kinds of things. ... But then have some kind of regular status here. Because the truth is that's in our national security interest, too." |
