Immigration reforms to attract the highly-skilled entrepreneurs and engineers who will help create jobs

Updated on: Monday, May 06, 2013

President Barack Obama today said the ongoing effort to fix the existing "broken immigration system" will not only provide a pathway to earned citizenship for the illegal immigrants, but would also attract the highly-skilled entrepreneurs and engineers who will help create jobs.

In his weekly address to the nation, Obama said the "commonsense immigration reform bill" introduced in the Senate is a compromise, which means that nobody got everything they wanted - including him.

"But it's largely consistent with the principles I've laid out from the beginning," he said.

"It would continue to strengthen security at our borders and hold employers more accountable if they knowingly hire undocumented workers. It would provide a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million individuals who are already in this country illegally," Obama said.

"It would modernise our legal immigration system so that we're able to reunite families and attract the highly-skilled entrepreneurs and engineers who will help create good paying jobs and grow our economy. These are all commonsense steps that the majority of Americans support. So there's no reason that immigration reform can't become a reality this year," he said in his weekly web and radio address to the nation.

Addressing the nation, in the midst of his ongoing trip to Mexico and Costa Rica, Obama said he is there because Latin America represents an incredible opportunity for the United States, especially when it comes to his top priority as President: creating good, middle-class jobs.

"On Friday, we learned that our businesses created another 176,000 jobs last month. That's 2.2 million new jobs over the past year, and 6.8 million new jobs over the past 38 months. But as I've said before, I won't be satisfied until everyone who wants a job can find one. So I'm going to keep doing everything I can and going everywhere I need to go to help our businesses create jobs," he said.

Immigration reforms to attract the highly-skilled entrepreneurs and engineers who will help create jobs

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