Immigration hot issue for Bush in Guatemala

updated 11:19 p.m. ET March 12, 2007

GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala - President Bush's message of goodwill in Latin American ran into a wall in Guatemala on Monday, as he defended his efforts to establish a temporary worker program but gave no ground on the deportation of illegal workers.

"The United States will enforce our law," Bush said during a news conference with Guatemalan President Oscar Berger. "It's against the law to hire somebody who's in our country illegally."

Deportation is a sore issue in Guatemala, and Bush's host bluntly told him: "The Guatemalan people would have preferred a more clear and positive response — no more deportations."

Bush's meetings here with Berger, a conservative leader who has become a strong U.S. ally, were dominated by trade and the difficult immigration issue.

It came after Bush and Berger spent the morning visiting villages in the mountains that ring the Guatemalan capital, as Bush sought to emphasize U.S. largesse.

They toured an American military center that provides basic medical care and physician training. He and Laura Bush handed out hygiene kits at an elementary school. And the president helped to load lettuce headed for the global market onto a truck at a farmers' cooperative.

That, he said later, was "one of the great experiences of my presidency."

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Bush pleased Guatemalans by promising to push hard — and quickly — for changes that would include a temporary-worker program for illegal workers in the United States. He said he thinks it is possible to wrest legislation out of a deeply divided U.S. Congress by August.

He apologized that it has taken so long but said it was hard to find "a coherent Republican position in the Senate."

"If we don't get a consensus in the Senate, nothing will move out of the Senate ... and nothing will happen in the House," Bush said. He said the process was "time consuming, but worth it and necessary."

But he stood firm in the face of questions over deportations of illegal workers, such as a raid in Massachusetts last week.

Federal authorities detained over 300 employees of a leather goods maker — most from Guatemala and El Salvador — for possible deportation as illegal aliens. The raid left dozens of young children stranded at schools and with baby sitters.

"Just so you know, when we enforce the law we do so in a fair and rational way," he said. "People are welcome, but under the law." He tried to dispel suspicions, high here, that application of the law in the United States can be cruel and discriminatory.

Bush said he hadn't expected the level of questions he faced on the subject and tried to put the concerns in a positive light. Enforcing the law will, in turn, help persuade a skeptical Congress to pass a guest-worker program and other elements of a new immigration strategy, he said.

Berger did say he "was very pleased" that Bush sees high levels of deportations as a problem not just for migrants and their home countries, but Americans as well.

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