If I thought Bush and the Republicans cared about getting a bipartisan, pragmatic new approach to undocumented workers, I would say Bush's speech today was a good start. But it looks to me like fake posturing to give Bush some "compassionate conservative" trappings for the election year.
It's partially aimed at Latino voters. But my guess is that it's targeted more at white suburban independents who lean Republican yet don't like to think of themselves as the sort of people who share much in common with "crude" Republican loudmouths like Michael Savage or the racist dope-fiend Rush Limbaugh.
Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez of Illinois, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, cautiously praised Bush's speech for its reasonable-sounding definition of the problem, though he cautioned that "the devil is in the details." Gutierrez also gave a very good description of why we have so many illegal immigrants in the United States:
[W]e have undocumented workers in this country. 70 percent of those that work in the apple industry in the state of Washington are undocumented. We can go industry after industry, hotel industry. The reason we have undocumented workers in this country is because as President Bush so eloquently stated, Americans, those of us that were born here in this country, don't want to do those jobs. That's why you have dish washers and people who do our gardening and people who kill our poultry and make it available and pick our fruits in this country, and do the most menial jobs at the lowest wages with the longest hours, as has been the immigrant tradition to this country.
That's why we have undocumented workers. And I think we have to understand one thing very clearly. America is gaining a more intelligent, a more educated work force while we are going to continue to create in the very near future hundreds of thousands of low skill, low paying jobs. We need to match those jobs, and we're going to need to continue to have immigrants come to this country to fulfill those jobs. That's just an economic reality that I think the president was very eloquent about.
1 comment:
Illegal immigrants can have only the jobs that no one else wants? For three years -- which may or not be extended and will not lead to citizenship? If a citizen applies for the job they are doing, will they be fired? Will they then be deported? Sounds like employers will have a lot of leverage over employees. Bush talked about giving them worker protections -- the same protections that are constantly being undermined? Devil in the details indeed!
Post a Comment