US President Barack Obama said yesterday that immigration reform should attract the world’s “best and brightest” in a legal manner and that those employers who are gaming the system need to be cracked down on.
In a press conference at the White House Obama declared that the US needs to make its immigration system work in a much more effective way than has previously been the case to make sure that the bureaucracy is less complicated, the weights less burdensome and that the US can continue to attract the brightest and best people from all over the world to be able to legally work in the country.
Obama noted that he has been very impressed by the work done by the bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Eight. “The bill that they produced is not the bill that I would have written,” he conceded. “There are elements of it that I would change, but I do think that it meets the basic criteria that I laid out from the start, which is we’ve got to have more effective border security, although it should build on the great improvements that have been made on border security over the last four to five years.”
Obama added that they need to make certain that there is a pathway to US citizenship that is difficult but enables people to earn legal status in the United States over a period of time. Obama described the bill as a testament to the eight senators involved in its creation.