Jeb Bush Addresses Immigration Issue

SIX-PART PLAN AIMS TO ENHANCE SECURITY, CUT FUNDING TO “SANCTUARY CITIES”

|| By FITSNEWS || Former Florida governor Jeb Bush is jumping into the immigration fray this week … releasing what he says is a six-part plan to “transform immigration from a broken system into one that benefits every American.”

“When Clint Bolick and I published Immigration Wars in 2013, we presented a number of proposals to strengthen America’s immigration policy,” Bush wrote. “Border security and the interior enforcement of immigration laws, including a greater role for states, formed key parts of this package of reforms. We emphasized that finding a practical solution to the status of the people who are here illegally today is a nonstarter if our borders are not secure against future illegal immigration.”

Bush’s plan would …

1. (Create) A forward-leaning Border Patrol with the flexibility to deploy resources to meet threats.
2. Use new technologies to achieve continuous surveillance of the border.
3. Bolster border infrastructure and improve access to federal lands.
4. Require electronic verification of employment eligibility.
5. Identify and send home the people who are entering the United States and overstaying their visas or otherwise violating the terms of their admission.
6. Crack down on sanctuary cities that undermine efforts to enforce immigration laws.

On the last point, Bush wants to withhold federal law enforcement funding from cities which “undermine the nation’s immigration laws.”

Another GOP presidential candidate – Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal – wants to arrest the mayors of these cities as accomplices to the crimes committed by illegal aliens.

Bush – who criticized president Barack Obama‘s record on immigration – nonetheless appears to be trying to find middle ground between Obama’s executive amnesty plan and the aggressive anti-immigration positions outlined Jindal by GOP frontrunner Donald Trump.

“These six proposals, when combined with a rigorous path to earned legal status, would realistically and honestly address the status of the 11 million people here illegally today and protect against future illegal immigration,” Bush wrote.  “While passions run high on this issue, there is no rational plan to deport millions of people that the American people would support. It would disrupt communities and families and could cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.”

We agree with that last part … but once again Bush appears to be middling.  And as Trump’s meteoric rise in the polls is demonstrating, now is not the time for “Republican” candidates to be “middling.”

Also … where are his specifics?  Bush references “a rigorous path that requires individuals to pass a thorough criminal background check, pay fines, pay taxes, learn English, obtain a provisional work permit and work, not receive federal government assistance, and over an extended period of time earn legal status,” but it’s not clear exactly what such status would entail.

This website has never breathed fire on the immigration issue – although we have consistently called for government to appropriate more resources to border security.

“Why not stop subsidizing millions of things government shouldn’t  be doing and start spending tax dollars on one of the handful of things it should  do?” we wrote last summer.

Border security is also a legitimate public safety issue as a recent report (commissioned by a liberal organization, oddly enough) estimated there are 820,000 illegal aliens in the United States with criminal convictions – and 690,000 illegal aliens in our country who have been convicted of either a felony or a serious misdemeanor.

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