While facing growing Republican concern as his poll numbers continue to drop due to the Iraqi war and now higher gas prices, President Bush is attempting to restart the debate on immigration.
Bush spoke Monday in California on immigration and met with congressional leaders Tuesday to discuss the issue.
Monday Bush said a "massive deportation" of illegal immigrants in the U.S. is not possible. He is right.
If the United States' border softness cannot hold back the current flow of illegal immigrants, how can Americans expect the same government to round up and deport all of those immigrants? Bush pointed out Monday that the U.S. has deported more than 6 million people trying to cross the border since he took office in January 2001.
The Pew Hispanic Center estimates there are between 11 million and 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States. Illegal immigrants from Mexico make up 56 percent or about 6.2 million of those. It is estimated about 850,000 each year have arrived from Mexico since 2000.
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According to the Washington-based research center, about 2.5 million illegal immigrants come from Latin and Central America; 1.5 million from Asia; some 600,000 from Canada and Europe and about 400,000 from Africa and other countries.
The high number of illegal immigrants makes complete deportation virtually impossible and extremely expensive, especially attempting to identify each illegal immigrant and then return them to their country of origin.
Bush's proposals to tighten U.S. borders, provide a legal course for some illegal immigrants to gain citizenship over time and a guest worker plan is a good combination proposal to address the illegal immigrant question.
America has always been a country of assimilation. Much of our history was built on the large immigration of Germans, Irish, Jews, Norwegians, Swedes and Italians, followed by the eventual assimilation of those immigrants and/or their descendants into U.S. citizenship.
Bush is on the right track on solving America's immigration challenges. The question is will congressional Republicans or even Democrats work with him on a bipartisan immigration solution.
