- FrontPage Magazine -
http://www.frontpagemag.com -
Jeb Bush to Conservatives: “Look, I Kind of Feel Your Pain.”
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On February 27, 2015 @ 4:09 pm In The Point | 48 Comments
Hey, who’s ready for some warmed over amnesty?
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on Friday defended his support for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers and Common Core education standards in front of a raucous CPAC crowd filled with scores of disapproving conservatives.
“I know there is disagreement here,” Bush told the annual gathering of conservative activists. “Some of these people are angry about this and look, I kind of feel your pain.”
Bush said the first step to addressing the country’s immigration problem is to secure the U.S. border with Mexico. It is the second step in his plan that has drawn the ire of some Republicans.
“There is no plan to deport 11 million people, we should give them a path to legal status,” he told the jeering crowd.
Years later and the GOP establishment is repeating the same exact thing that it was about amnesty without having learned that it’s not fooling anyone.
The ‘border security first’ theater. The ‘all or nothing’ choice on amnesty. All the good stuff you loved from Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan is still here.
And what better way to sell it than with a watered down version of Bill Clinton’s famous line. Jeb may not feel your pain if you lose your job to an illegal alien. But he kinda does. And isn’t that kind of something. A kinder, gentler post-America.
Jeb’s dissatisfaction with America, and desire to change it to be more to his liking, is a theme he returns to often. Jeb’s enthusiasm for immigration (“the public-policy issue he cares about by far the most,” as Frum puts it) is “not only a positive judgment on the immigrants themselves,” Frum notes, but “it is also a negative judgment on native-born Americans.” Some examples:
“They’re more entrepreneurial, they set up more business, they buy more homes, they’re more family-oriented, they work in jobs that in many cases are jobs that have gone unfilled” (at 39:40)
“We have people that mope around thinking ‘my life is bad, my children will not have the same opportunities that I had.’ What a horrible notion in America, the most optimistic of places, and I think an economically driven immigration plan . . . would lift our spirits up dramatically.” (19:25)
“The one way that we can rebuild the demographic pyramid is to fix a broken immigration system. . . . 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, because the productivity of this country is dependent on young people that are equipped to be able to work hard… Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans over the last 20 years. Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families and they have more intact families.” (12:25)
Immigrants… so much better than conservatives.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine:
http://www.frontpagemag.comURL to article:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/jeb-bush-to-conservatives-look-i-kind-of-feel-your-pain/
