Thread: Jeb Bush champions immigration reform, Canada at conservative conference

Jeb Bush champions immigration reform, Canada at conservative conference

By Rachel Rose Hartman, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – 40 mins ago

Jeb Bush speaks Friday at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington (Mary F. Calvert/Reuters)
Jeb Bush, a former governor of Florida, stood out Friday at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference on the issue of immigration—and not just because he's fluent in Spanish and married a woman born in Mexico.
Unlike the speaker who preceded him—tea party conservative Michele Bachmann—Bush offered full support for immigration reform. He was greeted with tepid and sometimes absent applause from the mostly evangelical Republican audience gathered for the annual event at the J.W. Marriott hotel in Washington, D.C.
"The one way we can build the demographic pyramid is to fix a broken immigration system to allow more people to come to learn English, to play by our rules, to embrace our values and to pursue their dreams in our country with a vengeance to create more opportunities for all of us," Bush said. "This is a conservative idea. And if we do this, we will rebuild our country in a way that will allow us to grow. If we don’t do it … we will be in decline."
Bush—a recurring potential candidate for president—said that immigrants create more businesses than do individuals born in the U.S.; and are "more fertile and they love families," and so can replenish the country's population with young people. At one point he argued that the U.S. ought to look to Canada as a model for immigration.
"Canada is the place that we might want to look to," Bush said, referring to a country often attacked by conservatives as an example of a socialist state. "They have more economic immigrants and they have seen sustained economic growth because of it."
Bush drew the widest applause for his unrelated comments on the value of education.
Bush's speech was in sharp contrast to Bachmann's remarks. The congresswoman stridently argued against the bipartisan immigration effort currently working its way through Congress and warned of what she described as a dangerous fast-tracking of the bill, noting the July 4 target date for the Senate and August target date for the president's signature.
"That's a breathtaking speed to get a bill of this magnitude through the United States Congress. Why is it of such great magnitude? Because we are looking at the legalization of over 30 million illegal aliens," Bachmann said.
The bill, yet to be hashed out by the full Senate, includes a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrations currently living in the U.S.
Bachmann also argued that the system to check for legalization status would be destroyed under the bill, and that black and Hispanic Americans would suffer the most if the bill passed because of increased job competition.
"This is not an anti-immigrant speech," she said at one point.
Republican former Rep. Allen West, who spoke after Bush and Bachmann, also railed against the immigration reform bill, saying it would further "exacerbate problems" in the beleaguered black society of America.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/jeb-bush-champions-immigration-reform-canada-conservative-conference-145326767.html

From reading, several speakers are present who are receiving favorable responses from attendees because they are speaking out against amnesty. Phyllis Schafly of Eagle Forum and as mentioned in the story, Allen West are in that group. One wonders if any of the pro-amnesty backers have even read the 1000 plus page bill to see the truth of it. But then, would they care?