Obama to push immigration reform

WASHINGTON (AFP) ― U.S. President Barack Obama will travel to the state of Nevada this week to push for rapid immigration reform, one of his top priorities for the next four years, the White House said Friday.

During the trip, his first since being sworn in this week for a second term, Obama will “redouble the efforts to work with Congress to fix the broken immigration system this year,” the White House said.

Earlier Friday, the president met with leaders of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to discuss the matter, reiterating that he considers immigration “a top legislative priority.”

“The president further noted that there is no excuse for stalling or delay,” according to the White House,“ which said Obama would travel to Nevada on Tuesday.

In his inaugural address Monday on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, Obama pushed the case for an improved process to welcome new immigrants to the United States.

”Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity,“ the president said.

Citing his attempt to pass reforms to shorten the route for undocumented migrants to gain U.S. residency, he called for “young students and engineers” to be “enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country.”

Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney said the new push on immigration is in keeping with an initiative already enunciated by the U.S. leader in May 2011, when he said during a speech in El Paso, Texas that “comprehensive” immigration reform should include a pathway to citizenship for those currently here illegally.

”These are the principles that the president believes we can now move forward on together as a nation,“ Carney told reporters.

“What has been absent in the time since he put those principles forward has been a willingness by Republicans, generally speaking, to move forward with comprehensive immigration reform. What he hopes is that that dynamic has changed.”

A bill backed by Obama that would have legalized the status of many of the estimated 10 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States died in Congress at the end of 2010 because of Republican opposition.

Carney said Obama is looking forward next week to unveiling his latest immigration reform proposals and to “working with Republicans and Democrats to get it done.”

Reforming America’s aging immigration system is the only issue that has generated some degree of political consensus since November elections.

Hispanics voted massively for Obama, flexing their growing political heft in several key states, and since then Republican leaders and well-known conservative commentators have jumped on the reform bandwagon.