Bush, His Critics Overreach on Immigration
05/16/2006
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush took credit for a boost in border security that was largely the work of Congress, and boasted about illegal aliens caught on his watch even though those numbers have fallen for much of his presidency.
Bush’s TV address Monday night laid out an immigration policy in broad stokes that obscured the fine print of his record and plans on the subject.
Indeed, all sides in the fast-unfolding election-year debate have overreached in “exploiting the issue of immigration for political gain,’’ as a scolding president put it. Bush, of course, is among those hoping that debate will deliver political dividends.
He asserted in his speech that “we have apprehended and sent home about 6 million people entering America illegally’’ over five years. Indeed, deportations rose sharply.
But overall apprehensions fell for three straight years before rising in 2004 to 1.1 million, still well below the 1.6 million caught in the last year of the Clinton administration, 2000, and in several years before that.
Parts of Bush’s speech will be chewed over in debates over semantics, including what to make of his denial that the U.S. is militarizing the Mexican border. He is proposing to send 6,000 National Guard troops there; they will be armed but not dispatched to arrest illegal immigrants, still the job of the Border Patrol.
Bush’s rationale for sending the guard is that the U.S. is not fully in control of its borders, a point no one seriously disputes. In stating that challenge and asking for more money to deal with it, however, he did not acknowledge any lapses on his part.
“Since I became president, we have increased funding for border security by 66 percent, and expanded the Border Patrol from about 9,000 to 12,000 agents,’’ he declared.
Along the way, the financial needs of that expansion have collided with other priorities, the Iraq war prominently among them. And several attempts in Congress to enlarge the patrol even more have run into resistance either from the White House or GOP leaders.
Last year, for example, Bush’s budget proposal to Congress would have provided enough money only to pay for about 200 new border agents. This despite a 2004 law that required the addition of 2,000 agents a year.
And this month, the White House was standing firm against lawmakers who wanted to divert more money to border protection and hurricane relief from a $67.6 billion White House request for Iraq and Afghanistan military operations.
The tendency to overreach on facts has typified many voices in the debate.
A Spanish-language radio ad sponsored by the Democratic National Committee asserted without evidence that a proposed House crackdown on illegal immigrants would criminalize “even churches just for giving communion’’ to them.
That wasn’t found in the bill, and the bill’s sponsors and the administration said nothing in it could be interpreted to provide for the prosecution of religious leaders or doctors who offer humanitarian assistance to illegal immigrants.
Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton had sounded a theme similar to the ad’s when she asserted the bill would probably criminalize “even Jesus himself.’’
On the other side, those who argue the country is being overrun by immigrants have sometimes overlooked the historical perspective. About 12 percent of people in the U.S. are foreign-born, a rapid increase in recent years and a 70-year high. But in the early 1900s, one-third of the people in America were born in another country.
Bush’s faith in the ability of his proposed temporary guest worker program to stem the spread of illegal immigrants in the U.S. was not fully explained in his speech.
He stated that the program, allowing more workers to come to the U.S. legally but requiring them to leave when their time is up, “would add to our security by making certain we know who is in our country and why they are here.’’
That certainty does not account for what happens if some of those workers drop out of sight and stay in the U.S. past their time.