Free Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution by Jeb Bush, Clint Bolick

PREFACE BY JEB BUSH
    IMMIGRATION TO ME IS PERSONAL. It means my wife and family, as it has for countless Americans since our country was founded.
    In 1970, on the central plaza of the town of León, Mexico, I met a beautiful young woman with the beautiful name of Columba Garnica de Gallo. After spending a few weeks in León, I knew I wanted to marry her. It seems crazy in this era of young people waiting for years until they decide to marry, but I tell our children it was what people used to call love at first sight.
    A year later, Columba moved from León to Southern California, where she went to school and worked. We carried on a long-distanceromance for almost four years, until we were married in the Newman Catholic Center at the University of Texas in Austin in February 1974.
    Thanks to my wife, I became bicultural and bilingual, and my life is better because of it. For the first time in my life, I learned what the immigrant experience was, and I grew to appreciate her desire to learn English and embrace American values, while still retaining her love for the traditions of Mexico.
    My wife became an American citizen in 1979, and she was able to vote for her father-in-law for President of the United States. Her citizenship ceremony—and the many I have participated in subsequently—are some of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It is a fundamentally American experience to see people of every nationality, every background, all coming together to swear their loyalty to our great country. Most have tears of joy in their eyes, and all of them aspire to a better life than what they left behind. That has been true of all immigrants to America, from the very beginning.
    I am writing this book because I believe that a good immigration policy is necessary to live up to the values that make our country truly exceptional.
    At the age of twenty-four, Columba and I moved to Caracas,Venezuela, along with our son George, who was eighteen months old, and our daughter, Noelle, who was three months, in order to open a representative office for Texas Commerce Bank. The job required me to travel throughout much of South America, and as a business experience, it was terrific for a guy my age. However, living overseas quickly made me appreciate the United States of America a lot more. It became clear to me that our country’s exceptional nature comes from its openness, its dynamism, and a set of values that allow it to embrace a rich diversity without tearing us asunder.
    And then we moved to our beloved Miami. That amazing city, in and of itself, is another reason I decided to write this book. On January 1, 1981, my family and I moved to Miami to start a new life. Miami is an incredibly diverse metropolitan area with large immigrant communities from many countries. Today, Miami-Dade County has a population of 2.6 million people, 51 percent of them foreign-born. There is no other large community in America close to that percentage. Miami also has a higher than average percentage of participation in military, and I can attest to its patriotic nature. Miami’s immigrants have made my hometown a vibrant, dynamic, and exciting place to live, and that in turn has made it a magnet for even more immigration from inside and outside our country.
    Because I was the son of the vice president, and later, ofcourse, president, George H. W. Bush, and living in an immigrant community, many people came to see me, hoping I could help with their immigration problems. I had never before witnessed the tragedy our immigration system had become. It is incredibly cumbersome, complex, opaque, sometimes capricious, and downright bureaucratic. I know from personal experience how expensive and slow it can be. I did my best trying to help people with legitimate claims, but it broke my heart seeing people languish inside the system with their paper files lost in some far-off place. It angered me that our great country can’t seem to organize itself effectively