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 services 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.
We've got to have a Government that can be a real partner in making this
new economy work for all of our people, a Government that helps each and
every one of us to get an education and to have the opportunity to renew
our skills.