Illegal immigrants mostly enter the United States through the border with Mexico and settle in California, Texas, and Florida. There they are employed mainly in agricultural work, construction, and transportation.
The president proposed the legalization of a significant portion of immigrants along with a tightening of the regime on the US-Mexican border stretching 3,200 kilometers. Plans call for the creation of special barriers equipped with sensor detectors and infrared cameras, which in the president's speech was called 'the most technologically advanced initiative in border security.' According to the president, the authorities 'still do not have full control' of the border. Therefore, 6,000 more will be added to the 12,000 National Guardsmen by the end of 2008. The goal of these measures is 'to close the border to illegal immigrants, criminals, drug couriers, and terrorists.'
Those who end up on this side of the wall will be dealt with individually. George Bush has proposed that immigrants wishing to legalize apply for temporary status as a 'guest worker,' which could eventually grow into 'earned citizenship.' To do this, one must work in the United States for a certain number of years, pay fines and taxes, undergo a background check, and learn to speak English. Immigrants under the law will be issued an identity card with biometric data, allowing employers to learn everything about the candidate before them. The total cost of the presidential measures is nearly $2 billion.
George Bush's proposals are 'an attempt to find a compromise between two directly opposite positions on the immigration issue existing in the American elite,' Nikolai Zlobin, director of Russian and Asian programs at the Washington Institute for Global Security, told Vremya Novostei. He recalled that in December 2005, the US House of Representatives passed a bill declaring all illegal immigrants criminals subject to deportation for the mere fact of illegally crossing the border, and also introducing sanctions against their employers. It was against this bill that hundreds of thousands of protesters demonstrated in early May throughout US cities.
On the other hand, the Senate is currently considering a bill of directly opposite nature, introducing a full amnesty for illegal immigrants provided they have not violated US law after crossing the border. 'Such an amnesty is carried out in the United States every 10-15 years because the immigration system cannot cope with the situation. But amnesty alone cannot change the system, and the problem arises again,' Nikolai Zlobin noted.
'The presidential initiative is an attempt, first, to find a compromise, and second, to solve the problem a little more fundamentally than simply a one-hundred-percent amnesty or one-hundred-percent punishment,' emphasized our interlocutor. Mr. Bush's gesture is also aimed at those who are only planning to come to the United States to work. They have been given a signal that from now on it will be more advantageous to do so legally, in order to obtain a temporary worker card.
As for the construction of a wall on the border with Mexico, this part of the presidential address, according to Nikolai Zlobin, has drawn the most animated comments. After all, the authorities had traditionally turned a blind eye to the social infrastructure created in the border area, designed specifically to serve illegal immigrants. 'America needs immigrants, it needs cheap labor capable of doing the work that Americans will not do,' the expert recalls. 'So no one here believes that the United States actually wants to completely seal off the border with Latin America. A joke has already emerged: to build the border fortifications, Bush will have to turn to the very same illegal immigrants,' the newspaper's interlocutor noted.