WASHINGTON (ABP)—A bi-partisan array of Congress members and evangelical leaders exhorted their colleagues on the moral necessity of immigration reform.
Leaders from across the ideological spectrum—from Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to Southern Baptist public policy agency executive Richard Land—held a Capitol Hill press conference to call on Congress and President Bush to institute immigration reform. They said any such reform should both secure American borders and treat justly the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States.
“At the bottom of this whole debate and discussion, this is a moral issue—a moral question, deeply moral,” said Kennedy, who called the Capitol Hill press conference.
Congress took up immigration-reform legislation last year, but it became bogged down from internal struggles in the then-Republican majority. The party was torn between anti-immigration hardliners and those, including President Bush, who wanted more comprehensive reform.
The comprehensive reform would have included opportunities for undocumented workers in the United States to earn permanent status and start the process toward citizenship. Some conservatives have objected to such provisions in Bush's plan. They call such plans “amnesty” for illegals.
But Land, president of the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Com-mission, told reporters such terminology clouds the debate.
“The idea that you would call having to learn to read and write and speak English and you would have to go through a series of processes … to earn legal status and citizenship—it does great harm to the English language to call that ‘amnesty,'” he said.
Legislators at the press conference expressed hope that a reform bill will make it through the new Congress. Graham, a Southern Baptist, told reporters Congress is closer than he's ever seen to passing immigration reform.