President Barack Obama called for a 21st century immigration system during a trip to the border city of El Paso, Texas on Tuesday.
According to the White House website his administration has dedicated unprecedented resources to secure the border.
Obama said the U.S. needs to strengthen its economic competitiveness by creating a legal immigration system that meets the country’s needs.
“We should make it easier for the best and the brightest to not only study here, but also to start businesses and create jobs here. In recent years, a full 25 percent of high-tech startups in the U.S. were founded by immigrants, leading to more than 200,000 jobs in America,” he said.
The president said that businesses should not take advantage of undocumented workers, which he said could undermine the economic opportunities of American citizens, adding that undocumented immigrants live in the shadows and are vulnerable to exploitation.
As he said in the State of the Union address, “To secure prosperity for all Americans, we must out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world, and fixing our immigration system plays an important part in that plan.”
He reiterated his support for the Dream Act, which would give undocumented immigrants whose parents brought them to America as children a path to citizenship.
Texas governor Rick Perry, a Republican, declined an invitation to meet the president in El Paso.
According to Press Secretary Jay Carney, Perry would have needed to travel 800 miles from Austin to El Paso for the meeting, and would not have had a chance for substantial discussion with the president. It is actually 527 miles from Austin to El Paso.
The speech comes a day after Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said that the state is making an appeal to the Supreme Court to potentially overturn a ruling made by a lower court regarding the controversial immigration law. The lower court placed an injunction on the state from enforcing several aspects of the law.
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