NEW YORK – Testing the waters in New Hampshire for a possible presidential run, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush presented yet another series of nuanced statements on illegal immigration, trying to walk a tightrope arguing for a pathway to "legal status" without sounding like a Democrat endorsing the amnesty President Obama declared last November by executive fiat.
Speaking at the Politics and Eggs breakfast April 10, Bush proposed that issuing provisional work permits to illegal immigrants after all required fines and permits are paid would create a “legal status” pathway that constituted a “rational, thoughtful” way to deal with the millions of illegal aliens already in the United States, Breitbart News reported.
Later that day, speaking at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, Bush expanded on the theme, suggesting that providing legal status for illegal aliens would be “a good driver for economic growth.”
“My suggestion is earned legal status,” Bush stressed. “Not earned citizenship, but earned legal status. You don’t create a system where people cut in line in front of those who have been patiently waiting. But you get a provisional work permit, you work, you pay taxes, you pay a fine, you learn English, you don’t commit crimes, and you earn – over an extended period of time – legal status.”
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In a Bloomberg Politics/Saint Anselm survey released in February, when asked to evaluate the statement “Jeb Bush supports allowing undocumented immigrants to stay in this country,” 41 percent of GOP primary voters rated the statement as a “deal killer.”
An additional 33 percent said it was “something they would have to consider,” contrasted to only 22 percent who considered the response to be “not a real problem.”
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Bush’s problems with illegal immigration is not limited to New Hampshire, as was demonstrated by a Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register poll reported in Iowa on Feb. 1. It showed nearly two-thirds of the state’s likely 2016 Republican caucus attendees consider Jeb Bush’s positions on illegal immigration and the Common Core education standards to be fatal to his chances to winning the Iowa primary.
Speaking in March on his first trip to New Hampshire in 15 years, Bush characterized his position on immigration as “the grown-up plan.”
“It’s easy to say, ‘Well, anything you propose is amnesty,’ but that’s not a plan,” Bush said during a discussion with local business leaders, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
“That’s a sentiment, that’s not a plan,” he continued. “I think the best plan, the most realistic plan, the grown up plan, if you will, is once you control the border and you’re confident it’s not going to be another magnet, is to say, ‘Let’s let these folks achieve earned legal status where they work, where they come out of the shadows.’”
Sore subject
But, no matter how he phrases his immigration policy, Bush runs into the risk of drawing a round of boos from conservative crowds.
At CPAC in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 27, Fox News host Sean Hannity drew “boos” just posing a question to Bush that started, “When you were governor, you supported driver's licenses for illegal immigrants and you supported in-state tuition prices for the children of legal immigrants.”
Attempting to field the question gracefully, Bush smiled and responded, “On immigration, I wrote a book about this and instead of people opining about what I believe, they might want to read the book, it’s called ‘Immigration Wars.’
“In that book, I say a great country needs to secure its borders,” Bush answered.
Then Bush steered the subject away from driver's licenses and tuition, suggesting the nation needed “economic-driven immigrants that come here to work,” without specifying whether they would be in the U.S. legally or illegally.
“So why not secure the borders first?” Hannity then asked as a follow-up, evidently not realizing Bush had side-stepped his original question.
“Let’s do it. Let’s control the border,” Bush responded enthusiastically.
Only at the end of the sequence did Hannity return to the initial question. Bush said driver’s licenses for illegals “didn’t happen” and that the legislature passed the tuition-break benefit, without acknowledging his strong support of both measures.
The Bush position on immigration received a round of “boos” more recently, when Donald Trump reminded a New Hampshire GOP audience of the event held a year ago, on April 6, 2014, at the George W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, when Jeb Bush told an audience that illegal immigration was an “act of love."
Trump, speaking at an Americans for Prosperity “Freedom Summit” event Tuesday in the Granite State, predicted “in the next three or four years, you will see Mexico just draining the United States of jobs."
Trump’s answer to illegal immigration was much less nuanced. He explained, contrasting himself with Bush on the issue, that the U.S. needs border security because “either you have a country or you don’t have a country; it’s that simple.”
In his 2013 book, “Immigration Wars,” co-authored with Clint Bolick, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, Bush argued on page 10 that immigration is needed to stem “debilitating demographics” resulting from a population that “is shrinking and aging.”
His plan is “to increase the number of work-based immigrants without substantially increasing the overall number of immigrants."
“Indeed, reducing illegal immigration by expanding and improving mechanisms for legal immigration would, by definition, capture and maximize the economic and fiscal benefits of immigration while minimizing the numerous negative consequences of illegal immigration,” Bush and Bolick write on Page 116.