Barack Obama pushes for immigration reform

Washington: President Barack Obama asked the US Congress to act fast to offer a “pathway to citizenship” for over 11 million illegal immigrants, including 240,000 from India.

Unveiling his own plan at a campaign style event at a Hispanic majority high school in Las Vegas, Nevada, Obama on Tuesday warned that if Congress does not act “in a timely fashion” he will propose a bill “and insist that they vote on it right away.”Declaring “now’s the time” to replace a “badly broken” system, Obama said the overhaul must provide a “pathway to citizenship” for the illegal immigrants, 6.8 million or 59 percent of whom are from Mexico.

Obama acknowledged as much saying “There’s another economic reason why we need reform” as apart from those coming illegally, even those trying to come legally “have a hard time doing so, and the effect that has on our economy.”The US was “giving them all the skills they need” to “brilliant students from all over the world” in its top universities, he said.

The plan was “very much in line with the principles I’ve proposed and campaigned on for the last few years,” he said specifying three pillars of immigration reform. These were better enforcement of immigration laws, providing a path to citizenship for the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the country, and reforming the legal immigration system.

The mainstream media reaction to the Obama plan was generally positive with influential New York Times editorially calling it “A Better Immigration Plan” that “makes a path to citizenship central, and offers ways to end backlogs and reunite families.

“In the Washington Post’s view Obama “has offered a useful roadmap that closely mirrors the bipartisan accord taking shape in the Senate.”  He was also “right to let Congress take the first crack at an immigration bill.”