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Offer undocumented citizenship, says prominent priest

By Noreen Bowden | October 2, 2008

Fr Theodore Hesburgh, president emeritus of the University of Notre Dame in the United States, is featured in the September 30 edition of Wall Street Journal, reflecting on  his life of scholarship and activism. He proposes a very succinct and simple answer to the problem of the undocumented.

When asked the question, “Is there a problem today you’d love to get your hands on?”, Hesburgh answered:

I think we ought to solve the problem of immigration. It’s one of the key problems today. I think I had the answer because, remember, I was chairman of the Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy. I had two wonderful guys on the commission: Sen. Teddy Kennedy and Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming. We became very good friends, and they were with me, and we had the solution.

I proposed a simple process: We say to everyone illegal here in America, if you’ve been here five years or more and you’ve had no problem with the law, you’re working steady on a job, and you don’t get any benefits because you have a false Social Security number and you’ll never get the benefits you’re contributing to, all you have to do is show up to the local authorities wherever you live and say, “I would like to be an American citizen.” Then we will immediately put you on the track for citizenship. You’ll have to take the courses required, and you’ll have pass the exams.

I would say that if you put that program in, you can even cut back on the number coming in for a while until you get that problem solved. Once that problem is solved, I think I’d be a little more liberal on the number coming in. But you solve that problem first.

Read the entire interview on the Wall Street Journal website.

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