Mayor Assails Bill in Congress on Immigration

By ANTHONY RAMIREZ

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in unusually pointed and broad language, criticized Congress yesterday for parts of a comprehensive immigration bill now being debated in the Senate.

Speaking after a Memorial Day parade in Laurelton, Queens, which has a thriving Caribbean community, Mr. Bloomberg said in response to a reporter’s question, “Shame on Congress, who can’t get together” on the immigration issue.

The Senate bill has come under partisan attack even before the House of Representatives can propose its version.

Lawmakers “should all look back on their history,” said Mr. Bloomberg, a small American flag draped on his lectern as he spoke to reporters, “and realize that if we had had the laws that they are proposing in many cases, they wouldn’t be here because their parents or grandparents would not have been here.”

The mayor spoke near what is known as Veterans Memorial Triangle, a patch of green maintained at 225th Street, 143rd Avenue and North Conduit Avenue by the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Post 5298.

The teenage musicians of the Elite Marching Band of St. Albans, Queens, performed an earnest rendition of the national anthem. Cub Scouts fiddled with their kerchiefs during the grown-ups’ speeches. Toddlers covered their ears and cried during a four-gun salute.

Mr. Bloomberg was especially critical of the guest-worker provision of the Senate bill, strongly supported by many in his own Republican Party. Immigrants would enter the country for three stints of two years each, going home for one year between each stint and returning home permanently after the third.

“The guest-worker program is a joke,” he said. “Nobody’s going to go home for a year and come back. Nobody could ever enforce that. Nobody in their right mind would ever try to do it.”

He reiterated his praise for the bill’s rejection of mass deportations of the country’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants. About 400,000 undocumented immigrants are thought to be in New York City.

“We don’t have an army big enough to deport them,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “It would destroy the economy if you deported them. They are here, yes, against the law, but they’re here with the complicity of the U.S. government. The U.S. government deliberately looked away since 1986, the last time we had immigration reform.”

He praised the bill’s citizenship provisions as a promising start. “Having something that gives them permanent status and some road to citizenship is a big step forward,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “You don’t want that road to be so impossible that they can’t do it.

“On the other hand,” he continued, “you don’t want to also make that road something that doesn’t include learning to speak English, learning the culture of this country, the laws of this country and the history of this country.”