The Senate’s immigration bill is getting a boost from Jeb Bush, the former GOP governor of Florida and a possible future candidate for the GOP’s 2016 nomination.
“Thanks to the bipartisan work taking place in the House and Senate right now, I am encouraged Washington might pass comprehensive reform this year,” he wrote in an article for The Huffington Post.
Bush did not formally endorse the bill — which is mostly unpopular in the GOP base — but did echo the proponents’ arguments.
Also, his article was a contribution to an advocacy effort by the progressive groups and business groups, which are trying to pass the bill.
The groups include The Huffington Post, Organizing for Action and The Partnership for a New American Economy, which was established by New York May Mike Bloomberg.
To push the immigration bill, the allied groups are staging an online “March for Innovation.” The event showcases support from various figures, include Arnold Schwarzenegger, Condoleezza Rice, as well as hip-hop producer Russell Simmons and Newark’s Democratic mayor, Cory Booker.
The economy needs immigrants, Bush wrote.
“We cannot grow our way out of the structural problems we have without young, energetic and productive immigrants [and] without immigration reform, our entitlement programs will overwhelm us,” he wrote.
Foreigners are just like Americans, he wrote.
“Our nation has been an honorable place of refuge for people to escape religious persecution, to exercise their freedom of thought, to flee overreaching regimes. … Those people are just like us — they only happened to have been born somewhere else by chance,” he said.
Bush also highlighted his family links to Latinos.
He is married to a Latino and now speak Spanish.
Their son, George P. Bush, is preparing to run for office in Texas, which has a growing population of Hispanics.
The Senate bill is being pushed by a group of eight senators, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who has been a long-standing political ally of Jeb Bush.
Bush’s immigration pitch is politically risky because it clashes with other conservative groups and with the views of GOP base voters.
Fifty-two percent of GOP voters, for example, strongly oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants, even if “they pay a fine and meet other requirements,” according to a Washington Post released Thursday. Only 17 percent strongly support that policy, said the poll of 1,001 adults.
Also, the poll said that 60 percent of legalization opponents would not “support a candidate for Congress who voted in favor of a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants.”
Opinion was less intense on the pro-amnesty side, with 44 percent of amnesty supporters saying they could not support a candidate who “voted against a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants.”
This base opposition has been fortified by the Heritage Foundation, which released a 100-page report in May, which says the productivity of low-skilled immigrants is far outweighed by the cost of taxpayer-provided benefits.
The Senate bill’s multi-staged legalization to 11 million illegal immigrants would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion over the next five decades, Heritage said.
The bill would bring in up to 30 million immigrants over the next decade, of which only a small minority would have university degrees.
Roughly 20 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed.
Bush’s argument that immigrants “are just like us,” is also being challenged by reports that show slow growth in education levels among Hispanic communities.
In New York, for example, almost two-thirds of Mexican, including native-born and immigrants, live in low-income households, according to a New York Times report in March. That’s higher than the 55 percent rate among all Latinos, the 42 percent rate among African-Americans and the 25 percent rate among whites, said the report.
The public’s support for immigration has also been colored by the post-2000 appearance of Muslim terror attacks in the United States, such as the April 15 bombings in Boston.
A May poll of 1,000 adults by Rasmussen Reports showed that 81 percent of respondents, and 86 percent of Republicans, said that people from “countries with terrorist ties” should be screened more carefully than immigrants from “friendly countries.”
The bombings killed three Americans, and were conducted by two ethnic Chechen Muslim immigrants. Shortly after, the two Chechens killed a Boston policeman.