Sunday, November 15, 2009

White House Plan on Immigration Includes Legal Status

by Julia Preston, New York Times
November 13, 2009

The Obama administration will insist on measures to give legal status to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants as it pushes early next year for legislation to overhaul the immigration system, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Friday.

In her first major speech on the overhaul, Ms. Napolitano dispelled any suggestion that the administration — with health care, energy and other major issues crowding its agenda — would postpone the most contentious piece of immigration legislation until after midterm elections next November.

Laying out the administration’s bottom line, Ms. Napolitano said officials would argue for a “three-legged stool” that includes tougher enforcement laws against illegal immigrants and employers who hire them and a streamlined system for legal immigration, as well as a “tough and fair pathway to earned legal status.” [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/us/politics/14immig.html?_r=1&ref=us

Napolitano's "three-legged stool" is similar to the "three pillars" Tamar Jacoby outlined in a New York presentation last spring, except that Jacoby made it clear that the "most important" of the three pillars was a guest worker program:

http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/2009/04/grow-our-economy-with-guest-workers-nyc.html

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