U.S. 'a welcoming society'

Editor's note: Each week, WorldNetDaily White House correspondent Les Kinsolving asks the tough questions almost no one else will ask. And each week, WorldNetDaily brings you the transcripts of those dialogues with the president and his spokesman. If you'd like to suggest a question for the White House, submit it to WorldNetDaily's exclusive interactive forum MR. PRESIDENT!

At today's White House news briefing, WND asked presidential press secretary Scott McClellan about the Bush administration's record on illegal immigration.

WND: Senator Robert Byrd said yesterday, "We cannot expect intelligence reform without closing these gaps in illegal immigration," while The Washington Times editorial today said, "Three years after September 11 and still our immigration system is in tatters." And my first question: How many illegals are in the U.S. and how many are arriving in this country every day in the Bush administration's estimate?

McCLELLAN: You can check with the immigration people on the latest statistics, but I think there have been a number of estimates around the 8 million range of people. But the president, what he is working to do is to strengthen our border security and to strengthen our controls along the border to prevent people who should not be entering the country, like terrorists or criminals, from coming into the country, while also making sure that we remain a welcoming society. We are a nation of immigrants, and the president believes in those core principles that we should remain a welcoming society, but we also need to take steps to strengthen our border enforcement.

And this legislation the president will be signing into law takes a number of steps to do that, by increasing the number of border control agents, increasing the number of agents in the immigration and Customs services over the next five years by a certain amount on each of those. And there's more that we can do, and the president talked about how he looked forward to continuing to work with Congress.

The president has also put forward a plan based on some specific principles for moving forward on a temporary worker program that would address some of the economic need in this country, while also addressing the issue of people coming to this country from Mexico and other countries to our south who are seeking a better way of life. Ultimately, what we need to do is continue to expand trade opportunities so that we can raise the standard of living in other countries so that people will be less inclined to want to come here to seek a better way of life. Many of these people are just coming to the United States to seek a better way of life.