Jeb Bush on tough immigration laws: ‘My children could be picked up just because of the way they look’
Jeb Bush said today that if his children walked the streets of Phoenix they might look awfully suspicious to police. His wife Columba is from Mexico.
Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam told the same crowd of city officials from across the country at the Denver Convention Center that his grandchildren might likewise draw suspicion. His daughter married a Latino man, he said.
“I think it’s not right that they could be picked up just because of the way they look,” Putnam said.
Bush and Putnam spoke and then fielded questions at a National League of Cities convention about immigration issues including the controversial Arizona immigration law.
The law aims to detain, prosecute and deport illegal immigrants. The federal government has won an injunction blocking parts of the law, including a section requiring police to question the immigration status of those they suspect are in the country illegally. Arizona has appealed.
A group of conservative lawmakers in Colorado is considering introducing an Arizona-style immigration bill in the legislature in January.
Bush, the brother and son of former Republican presidents, quipped that it was obvious he was not running for office, noting that his views differed from most of his Republican colleagues.
While he is sympathetic to the plight of Arizona officials forced to deal with all the problems linked to a porous frontier, he believes there are solutions other than a law criminalizing illegals, he said.
“It’s the wrong approach,” he said. “The net result is not much has been done.”
He said if the U.S. deported 12 million illegals from across the country it would cost billions and not be very effective.
Instead he recommended tightening the border and improving programs to more smoothly integrate immigrants into American society.
Both Putnam and Bush agreed that teaching English to immigrants is one way to improve integration and ensure success for new generations of immigrants. Continue reading this article, especially for an interesting anecdote about the history of immigration in American, here.
This is why Jeb will never be president; he more open-border than his brother. America says no!
Hey, I really enjoyed this thread. There are a lot of great throughts here. I am going to do a little research on this and come back and contribute a relavant post.
I will be checking back soon to check out more articles like this and this website as well.
In the meantime…. Don’t Stop blogging!
I love this.
JEB as a Bush is one of the leaders of the Republican Party, the party that has embraced Hispanic-hating and he is worried that HIS children will get profiled. Where has this freak been these past couple of years? Why didn’t he speak up before? This is like Cheney becoming a “champion” of gay rights because his daughter is gay. JEB will probably get credit for some sort of objection to this, but his protests will never yield any fruition.