Former president George W Bush has stepped into the US debate on immigration, saying migrants are “a force for good” and arguing for a gradual procedure to enable undocumented immigrants to earn legal status.
Bush, a previous governor of Texas — a border state heavily impacted by migration — created his points in an op-ed short article in the Washington Post previewing his new book “Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants.”
The book, whose name comes from the nation’s Latin motto “E Pluribus unum,” options portraits of immigrants carried out by Bush himself, who self-deprecatingly says he knows his paintings “may not set the art world stirring.”
But he says that by sharing the portraits of immigrants, every single with “a remarkable story,” he hoped “to humanize the debate on immigration and reform.”
His pro-immigrant message comes as President Joe Biden, who had promised to ease Donald Trump’s serious immigration crackdown, has struggled with an uncontrolled surge of migrants coming via Mexico.
The immigrant portraits drawn by Bush variety from these of the unknown — like a young French man who became an American soldier and won the country’s Medal of Honor — to the considerably far better-recognized stories of two migrants, Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger, who fled prewar Europe and rose to turn into US secretaries of state.
Bush asks in his op-ed how it is that “in a country more generous to new arrivals than any other, immigration policy is the source of so much rancor and ill will.”
The quick answer, he adds, brings “little credit to either party.”
While providing no particular policy prescriptions, the former president advocates numerous “good-faith” methods: a path to citizenship for these brought to the US as young children higher securing of the southern border a modernized asylum method and improved legal immigration to enable “talented people (to) bring their ideas and aspirations here.”
As for the millions of undocumented migrants living in the US, Bush says that a grant of amnesty would be “fundamentally unfair” to these attempting to come legally, but he adds that “undocumented immigrants should be brought out of the shadows through a gradual process in which legal residency and citizenship must be earned.”
Applicants need to have to spend a fine and back taxes, document their work history, demonstrate English proficiency and know-how of US history and civics, and provide a clean background verify.
After all, he adds, their determination to come to the US “is an affirmation of our country and what we stand for.”
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