Former Florida governor and 2016 potential Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush is remaining firm on his stance regarding immigration, despite his support for the overhaul of existing immigration laws in the United States being perhaps his biggest challenge when it comes to winning votes from his fellow Republicans in the presidential primaries.
In an interview with Megyn Kelly on Monday night on Fox News, Bush again reiterated his stance that he is in favor of giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to legal status in the United States, if not necessarily actual citizenship. Although Bush claims he would undo the deferred action programs instituted by President Obama, his objection is with the way in which the president enacted these policies rather than with the policies themselves. Bush says he would like to see Congress adopt those changes.
Bush also says he supports allowing undocumented young adults to be eligible for in-state university tuition fees, noting that such people often have no connection to the home country of their parents and know no other country but the United States. He does not agree with marginalizing such individuals for the rest of their lives.
Bush’s respectful stance toward undocumented immigrants is a very different attitude to that taken by many of his Republican colleagues; for example, Bush took a very clear shot at Wisconsin governor Scott Walker during the interview with regard to Walker’s recent declaration that he has now changed his views and is against immigration reform. “Do you want people to just bend with the wind, to mirror people’s sentiment, whoever’s in front of you?” Bush asked. “’Oh yes, I used to be for that, but now I’, for this’ ‒ is that the way to elect presidents?”