An invigorated Jeb Bush defied his party’s lurch to the right over immigration on Monday with a passionate speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, in which he called for a path to legal citizenship for undocumented migrants.
Fresh from a presidential debate that saw him criticised for speaking Spanish, lacking energy and having a Mexican wife, the former Florida governor took the jibes from Donald Trump and appeared to feed off them before an audience of business leaders in Houston.
“Earned legal status is the dignified way, the practical way, the American way of solving the problem of 12 million immigrants,” he said.
“If you embrace a set of shared values, it shouldn’t matter if you have a Z at the end of your name or your accent might be different,” he added.
“There are voices in my party that don’t agree with any of this. The louder voices … I believe that this country is the most extraordinary on the face of the earth, we just have to start acting like it again.”
Though he has long been a supporter of immigration reform, Bush, like his Florida rival Senator Marco Rubio, had been more muted in recent months as the issue appeared to place them on the fringes of the Republican primary race.
But the increasingly shrill attacks on immigration from Trump, together with comments from Ben Carson questioning the role of Muslims in American life, appear to have given Bush a newfound lease of life as the anti-xenophobic voice of his party.
He accused rivals of playing “the game of striking fear in people’s hearts” and singled out Trump for questioning his use of Spanish during a recent school visit.
“Donald Trump apparently said I should not speak Spanish to them for some odd reason,” said Bush, who began and ended Monday’s speech in Spanish. “They spoke in Spanish to me and I spoke in Spanish to them.
“They all speak English, by the way, in case you are worried: they are bilingual. They are going to be extraordinarily competitive.”
The personal nature of the attacks on Bush’s wife, Columba, who Trump accused of skewing his perspective on immigration, appears to have stirred a more emotional side of his often policy-heavy stump speech.
“The notion that some how she’s not [patriotic],” he said. “It’s laughable. It’s so sad that people don’t have any sense of what the immigration experience is about.
“That’s the American way. It’s not when we divide people and call people idiots.”
“I am tired of how we try to figure out ways to break ourselves up in our disparate parts,” added Bush, as he held his hands out wide, rather than wagging his finger.
As with many such events, Bush was briefly heckled by immigration campaigners at the outset of the event. He silenced them by agreeing with many of their demands.
“Here’s what I believe. I believe we need immigration reform. I believe Dream Act kids should have a path to citizenship,” said Bush over the noise of the hecklers.
“I have been consistently for the Dream Act kids to get a path to citizenship and I will continue to be for it irrespective of what the political ramifications of that are.”
Whether the more open embrace of immigration reform can help Bush close his polling deficit in the Republican primary remains to be seen, but he insisted it was a policy compatible with his other campaign pledges on economic growth, taxation and education.
“Immigration reform ought to be part of a strategy for high, sustained economic growth where more people have a chance of earned success,” said Bush.
“This apparently is somewhat out of the mainstream, temporarily, in my party, but it isn’t really: a great of majority of Republicans believe in immigration reform.
“Yeah, we have to secure the border, of course we do … but we don’t need to build a wall. We don’t need to deport every person that is in the country that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. That’s not a practical conservative plan.”
