Conservative commentator Michael Reagan tells Newsmax that Republicans should not be condemning but listening to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on immigration.
"We need to be listening, not reacting, but listening to people like Jeb Bush and others not throwing everybody under the bus because we disagree with them," Reagan told J.D. Hayworth on
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum" Friday.
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Bush said in April 2014 that while those trying to come across the border illegally are breaking the law, it really is "an act of love" because they are doing it so they can "provide for their families."
The son of the late President Ronald Reagan says that "in some ways it is an act love."
He contends that "if you and I were born and raised in Mexico, I'd be doing everything I could to break the same law and come to the United States of America to in fact get a job."
Reagan argues that if his father were dealing with immigration today he "would find the compromise — one of the compromises would be with those children who are brought here as babies."
He contends that "we need to be working on the immigration problem, not the 'I want to become the United States citizen' problem."
"We have to do something on immigration, we have to sit there and figure this one out," he explained. "We're not going to kick 11 million people out of the United States of America."
The conservative commentator says that he is a fan of the "bracero program" that began in 1942 and ended in 1964, in which Mexican citizens were able to come to the United States to work on a temporary basis, mostly on farms, but were able to return to Mexico when the contract was over.
"When we stopped the bracero program, we didn't stop Hispanics from coming into the country, we stopped them from going home from this country, back to Mexico where they lived," he explained.
"There's a middle ground we really need to work on in America, we need to understand that, we need to listen to all the voices and then come up with an immigration policy that is going to in fact be passed and be able to be signed by the president," he contends.
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