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All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but
in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of
illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held
by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on
our taxpayers. That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure
our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting
twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal
hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens. In the budget I will
present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal
aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the
workplace as recommended by the commission headed by former Congresswoman
Barbara Jordan. We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of
laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to
permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years,
and we must do more to stop it.
The
most important job of our government in this new era is to empower the American
people to succeed in the global economy. America has always been a land of
opportunity, a land where, if you work hard, you can get ahead. We've become a
great middle-class country. Middle-class values sustain us. We must expand that
middle class and shrink the underclass, even as we do everything we can to
support the millions of Americans who are already successful in the new
economy.
America
is once again the world's strongest economic power: almost six million new jobs
in the last two years, exports booming, inflation down. High-wage jobs are
coming back. A record number of American entrepreneurs are living the American
dream. If we want it to stay that way, those who work and lift our nation must
have more of its benefits.
Today,
too many of those people are being left out. They're working harder for less.
They have less security, less income, less certainty that they can even afford
a vacation, much less college for their kids or retirement for themselves. We
cannot let this continue. If we don't act, our economy will probably keep doing
what it's been doing since about 1978, when the income growth began to go to
those at the very top of our economic scale and the people in the vast middle
got very little growth, and people who worked like crazy but were on the bottom
then fell even further and further behind in the years afterward, no matter how
hard they worked.
