Interview of President Barack Obama About Trip to Mexico and Costa Rica, Immigration Reform

President Barack Obama agreed to an interview with Americas Quarterly about his May 2-4 visit to Mexico and Costa Rica. President Obama is using the occasion of his trip to meet with the new Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla; while in Costa Rica, he will also meet with the other presidents of Central America. Comprehensive immigration reform in the United States is a topic covered in the interview.  Here is an excerpt of the interview:

“I was proud that we lifted the cloud of deportation from young people brought to the United States as children who have come to be called DREAMERS. But that’s no substitute for permanent reforms to the law. We need to fix our broken immigration system to make sure that every business and every worker in United States is playing by the same set of rules. After all, it’s just not sustainable to have 11 million undocumented immigrants from all over the world who are living in the United States. Like the rest of us, they work hard to provide for their families. They make tremendous contributions to our country and our economy. And their status needs to be resolved in a way that’s consistent with our heritage as both a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.

The bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill introduced in the Senate represents a compromise, and no one will get everything they want, including me. But it is largely consistent with the principles that I have repeatedly laid out. We need to continue to strengthen security at our borders and hold employers more accountable if they knowingly hire undocumented workers. We need to provide a pathway to earned citizenship for undocumented individuals in our country. We need to modernize our legal immigration system so that we’re able to reunite families and attract the highly-skilled entrepreneurs and engineers who will help create good paying jobs and grow our economy. I’ll continue to do whatever it takes to make sure that we pass bipartisan commonsense immigration reform as soon as possible, and I look forward to signing it into law.”

KJ