MIAMI — President Bush renewed his efforts Saturday to address a major domestic policy challenge -- one that possibly remains in reach -- by telling graduating students that the United States must build new immigration laws around economic needs and border protection, while helping newcomers join American society.
As part of a daylong trip to southern Florida mixing politics with policy, Bush addressed graduates, their families and other guests at the Kendall campus of Miami Dade College, a commuter college in a largely Latino district. Earlier, Bush raised $1 million for the Republican National Committee at a luncheon in Key Biscayne.
The president's choice of topic and locale for his immigration remarks underscored the challenges he faces, as he seeks to avoid a standstill on domestic policy and move toward a long-held goal of building new Republican support among Latino voters -- while talking about something other than the Iraq war.
Bush made only a passing reference to the war in his 19-minute speech.
Along with his weekly radio address Saturday morning -- also on immigration -- the remarks raised the visibility of the issue. They were intended, Deputy White House Press Secretary Scott Stanzel said, to signal to Congress the importance Bush attaches to it, at the end of a week in which radio talk-show hosts and others lobbied in Washington for tougher immigration laws.
The president said the nation's immigration system was "not working" and could not be fixed piecemeal. He called for a comprehensive approach "that will allow us to secure our borders and enforce our laws once and for all, that will keep us competitive in a global economy, and that will resolve the status of those already here, without amnesty and without animosity."
He saluted the diversity exemplified by Miami and the college, pointing out that more than half of its students were raised speaking a language other than English.
"Over the years, America's ability to assimilate new immigrants has set us apart from other nations. What makes us Americans is a shared belief in democracy and liberty. And now our nation faces a vital challenge: to build an immigration system that upholds these ideals -- and meets America's needs in the 21st century."
For Bush, it was a day of organized adulation -- first among Republican contributors; then, in a blue academic gown with black stripes, among students who gave him three ovations before he began speaking and interrupted him more than a dozen times with applause as he praised their struggle to obtain an education and their diversity.
