Respecting Immigrants' Vital Role In Rebuilding The American Community
America is an immigrant nation. As President, I will recognize and respect the vital role immigrants have played in building the American community.
Candidate Bush promised that he would be a different kind of Republican, supportive of immigrants and their desires to achieve the American Dream. Candidate Bush promised to revamp the naturalization process so that immigrants who met the requirements could obtain their citizenship in six months or less. In 2001, President Bush said he would work with President Fox of Mexico to develop a new immigration policy that recognized the economic contribution of immigrants, particularly those from Mexico, and that would respect the human rights of these migrants.
Unfortunately, President Bush has not kept these promises.
While he made these promises and invited mariachis to play at the White House, his Attorney General, John Ashcroft, was deputizing local police authorities as junior INS agents to track down undocumented immigrants. Instead of exercising leadership to achieve comprehensive immigration reform, President Bush has turned his back on Mexico and other Latin American countries. He has ignored the dreams of millions of immigrants to become a legitimate part of our society, and not simply its unseen workforce. Instead of revamping and streamlining the immigration agency and its processes, the President has allowed the agency to be swallowed up into the Department of Homeland Security, where immigrants are routinely treated as terrorists until proven otherwise.
We need a White House that will lead Congress to enact real immigration reform. As President, I will work tirelessly to achieve that goal.
I will work to ensure that people who work hard, pay taxes, and otherwise obey the rules can become full participants in our society, including becoming citizens.
I will work to regularize the inevitable future migration of labor in a way that makes economic and humanitarian sense. Deaths in the desert do neither.
I will propose reforms that ensure we can meet our economy?s need for workers at all skill levels, without pitting foreign workers against U.S. workers and while respecting workers' rights including the right to organize.
I will work to forge stronger partnerships with countries from which immigrants migrate -- especially Mexico -- so that in the long run, fewer people will be driven by desperation to break laws and risk their lives for basic opportunities that every human being deserves.
I will work to ensure that immigrants who are detained by the Department of Homeland Security are afforded their basic civil rights and that our concern for national security does not become another excuse for racial profiling.
I will build on our country?s long history of welcoming immigrants in ways that reflect our need for security but do not sacrifice the basic ideals upon which this nation was founded.