Bush Says Congress Should Act on Immigration

Former President George W. Bush, who normally stays out of current political issues, waded briefly into the immigration debate in an interview broadcast Sunday, urging Congress to pass legislation to overhaul the system.

“It’s very important to fix a broken system, to treat people with respect and have confidence in our capacity to assimilate people,” Mr. Bush said on “This Week” on ABC News. “It’s a very difficult bill to pass. The legislative process can be ugly. But it looks like they’re making some progress.”

Mr. Bush was a champion of immigration changes during his presidency and his failure to pass such legislation was one of his biggest disappointments. President Obama has effectively picked up the baton in pressing for a similar plan to create a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants in the country illegally, aided by new-found support among Republicans worried about the electoral implications of alienating a growing Latino vote.

Mr. Bush said that politics should not be the primary motivation for reshaping immigration laws. “The reason to pass immigration reform is not to bolster a Republican Party,” he said. “It’s to fix a system that’s broken. Good policy yields good politics.”

The former president was interviewed during his trip last week to Africa, where he has been working to fight cervical cancer among women. He dismissed assumptions that he spends so much time on Africa now to redeem mistakes in Iraq, calling such talk “absurd psychobabble.”

While he offered thoughts on immigration, he declined to speak out on other urgent issues of the day, like same-sex marriage. He urged patience as Egypt goes through its tumult, saying that the Arab Spring in general is still “a good thing because people are demanding their rightful place.”

Mr. Bush, who overlapped with Mr. Obama in Tanzania, declined to offer judgments about his successor. Asked about Mr. Obama’s decision to continue some of the counterterrorism programs he inherited, Mr. Bush said, “I think the president got into the Oval Office and realized the dangers to the United States and he’s acted in ways he thinks are necessary to protect the country.”