A. Lincoln reviews Jeb Bush's new immigration book

Jeb Bush's new book, Immigration Wars, has attracted attention for its proposal of a second-class status for the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants, that they could become permanent legal residents, but not citizens. A former Congressman from Illinois, A. Lincoln, received an advance copy of Jeb's book and made the following comments. While not attempting to fully resolve the complex problem of illegal immigration, former Congressman Lincoln commented on the proposal of second-class status:

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that all men are created equal. We now practically read it, all men are created equal except negroes. When the Know-nothings {anti-immigration movement} get control, it will read, all men are created equal except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.

We have....among us, perhaps half our people .. {who} have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equal in all things.....when they look through that old Declaration of Independence, they find that those old men say that "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that ... it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration; and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together; that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists ...