In “Immigration Wars,” [Jeb] Bush and Bolick recommend four major changes to US immigration law:
1) a gradual tightening of eligibility for family unification immigration;
2) tougher enforcement of immigration law in future, especially for visa overstayers;
3) a pathway to legality for the currently illegal;
and
4) a big surge in migration by skilled workers.
In interviews, however, Bush tends to touch lightly on the first two recommendations. It’s the latter two recommendations that most engage him. …
The way I look at this—and I’m going to say this, and it will be on tape, and so be it—is someone who comes to our country because they couldn’t come legally, because a dad who loved their children was worried that their children didn’t have food on the table, and wanted to ensure that their family remained intact … and they crossed the border because they had no other means to work to be able to provide for their family: Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony. It’s an act of love, it’s an act of commitment to your family. I honestly think that is a different kind of crime. There should be a price paid, but it shouldn’t rile people up that there are people coming to our family to provide for their families.
Bush added that he thought such migrants could also “make a great contribution to our country if we organized ourselves in a better way.” That national-interest concern seemed very much a secondary thought—and the whole discussion of enforcement in general seemed subordinated to the larger message of urgency in favor of more and wider immigration than the country receives now. It’s a point he’s made on other occasions, albeit in somewhat-less quotable language.
Jeb Bush’s enthusiasm for immigration, even when the immigrants are unskilled, even if they break the law, goes so deep that he even sometimes ventures to suggest that the personal characteristics of immigrants are to be preferred over those of the native-born. Here for example is an informal Jeb Bush speaking to a friendly interviewer, National Review’s Jay Nordlinger, early in 2014. “If we’re going to grow at 4% a year, we have to have young, aspiring people be able to create dynamic activity. And we can’t do that with our existing demographics.”
… This is not only a positive judgment on the immigrants themselves. It is also a negative judgment on native-born Americans.
This belief is premised both on a positive judgment about immigrants—and on an implicit assessment of American society as it exists today. Jeb Bush delivered an elaborated form of that negative assessment in a 2013 speech to the Faith and Freedom conference in Washington DC:
“Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans over the last 20 years. Immigrants are more fertile, and they have more intact families. They bring a younger population. The one way that we can rebuild the demographic pyramid is to fix a broken immigration system to allow for people to come, to learn English, to play by our rules, to embrace our values, and to pursue their dreams in our country with a vengeance—to create more opportunities for all of us. This is a conservative idea. If we do this, we will rebuild our country in a way that will allow us to grow. If we don’t do it, we will be in decline—because the productivity of this country is dependent on young people that are able to work hard.”
It may seem a strange comparison, but Jeb Bush has a lot in common with Barack Obama.
