Bush proposes legal status for illegal workers

US: US President George Bush has announced a far-reaching plan that would grant legal status to an estimated 8-10 million undocumented…

US: US President George Bush has announced a far-reaching plan that would grant legal status to an estimated 8-10 million undocumented foreign workers but that stops short of any guarantee of permanent residence.

Under Mr Bush's new temporary-worker programme, an undocumented worker could register for an unspecified fee for three years' legal residence, renewable for a further three years.

During this time, the worker could apply immediately for a green card or citizenship, a right currently denied to undocumented immigrants identified by US authorities. Otherwise, the employee must return home at the end of the period, along with any children born in the US.

If the immigration overhaul is approved by Congress, it "has the potential to be very beneficial" in solving the problem of thousands of undocumented Irish in the US, an Irish consulate official in New York said. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, last night welcomed the plan.

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The plan, which amounts to a limited amnesty, would allow undocumented workers to emerge from the vast underground economy without fear of deportation. They would also be able to visit their home country without fear of being barred from re-entry and enjoy the rights of American citizens, including the minimum wage.

Introducing the measure in the White House, Mr Bush said that it was a basic fact of life and economics that "some of the jobs being generated in America's growing economy are jobs American citizens are not filling." Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy criticised the plan as "woefully inadequate".

Mr Bush proposed making a "reasonable" increase in the number of green cards issued each year, now running at 140,000, to cope with an expected increase in applications. Green cards allow workers to reside permanently in the US without citizenship. Mr Bush outlined three principles behind his announcement, which comes in an election year when the Hispanic vote could be crucial.

Some 60 per cent of undocumented workers in the US are believed to be from Mexico. The number of Irish undocumented workers is unknown but there are thought to be tens of thousands.

Mr Bush said that the first principle was to protect the homeland, enabling the government to know who was in the US and what their status was. The second was to provide an efficient method of supplying labour for American employers. The third was to fix a broken system for undocumented workers.

In a concession to conservatives who oppose rewarding people who entered the US illegally, Mr Bush is including incentives to entice workers back to their countries of origin, including payment of US social security. Current law demands 10 years of work history before benefits can be paid.

The system, which faces an uphill fight in the Republican-dominated Congress, would also allow for someone living abroad to apply for the right to work legally in the US for a three-year term that could be renewed. Dependants of temporary workers would be allowed to live with them in the US.

A senior administration official warned that being part of the temporary-worker programme would not give foreign workers any automatic advantage in applying for green cards.

The proposal was described as a "two-step amnesty" by Mr Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Centre for Immigration Studies, which advocates stricter immigration rules. "It's not what the folks on the left want, which is a quick green card, but it is an amnesty nonetheless," he said. "It legalises illegal immigrants and is going to increase the number of green cards so that people will be able to move through the system faster."

It was "extremely disappointing," said Cecilia Munoz, vice president of the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic immigrant advocacy group. "It appears to be all about rewarding employers who have been hiring undocumented immigrants while offering almost nothing to the workers themselves," she said. "It's a serious backtracking to where the president was two years ago, when the administration was prepared to provide some kind of path to legal status."