President Barack Obama has asked the people of the United States to make use of any and all of the communications means at their disposal in order to push their Republican lawmakers into passing the landmark bill for immigration reform that would boost the US economy and create a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants who already live in the country, including more than 240,000 Indians.
In his most recent weekly radio and internet address, Obama said that the vote in the Senate to pass commonsense comprehensive immigration reform by a large bipartisan group of senators was an important step towards the fixing of an immigration system that everyone knows is broken.
“This bill was a compromise and neither side got everything they wanted,” Obama says. “But it was largely consistent with the key principles of commonsense reform that most of us in both parties have repeatedly laid out. If passed, the Senate’s plan would build on the historic gains we’ve made in border security over the past four years with the most aggressive border security plan in our history.” Obama added that the bill would help to modernize the US immigration system in order to make it more much more consistent with the country’s values.
While some Republicans in the House have been resistant to the idea of passing the Senate’s US immigration bill, Obama says that they need to act now on the issue and he has encouraged Americans to use email, social media and telephone calls to tell them that the time has come.