By Sean O’Driscoll

Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern has described President Bush’s proposed guest worker plan to have undocumented immigrants return to their native countries before reapplying for work visas as “unworkable” and “just impractical.”

Speaking in New York where he met with Irish immigrant groups on Monday, Ahern said that the Irish government and opposition parties still strongly supported a bill by Senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain that would allow illegal U.S. immigrants to apply for obtain full legal residency after first getting a six-year work permit.

Applicants under the McCain Kennedy proposal would not have to return to their home countries before reapplying for a new permit, as Bush administration has proposed.

Ahern said that it would be impossible to get 11 million people living illegally in the U.S. to return to their home countries after six years and then reapply for residency.

Last week, President Bush warned that there would be “no exceptions” and said that his government would be cracking down on illegal workers under a separate security bill.

Ahern said that he had tentatively seen some of the Bush proposals on immigration reform and welcomed the positive points.

However, he said that the Bush administration’s proposals to make immigrants reapply for entry to the U.S. after six years was unworkable.

“That’s something that I think most people would recognize as just impractical. How can you tell 11 million people, without whom the U.S. economy would be in trouble, that they have to go home?” he said.

Ahern described undocumented workers in the U.S. as “a huge resource to the U.S. economy.”

Ahern said that the situation was particularly difficult coming up to Christmas as many undocumented workers could not return to their families.

“It’s very difficult because every one of us in our political life have families in these circumstances. I myself have constituents who are in this difficulty,” he said.

Last month, the Dail unanimously backed Ahern’s motion to back the Kennedy McCain bill, which was introduced to Congress in May as the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act.

Ahern said he had to be very careful in wording the motion so as not to offend members of Congress.

“First of all to get all party approval, but secondly, here was one parliament saying to another parliament, ‘We think you should pass this piece of legislation,’” Ahern said.

Ahern said that the motion came from a Dail delegation meeting with Senator John McCain in Washington.

“They asked how they could help and he replied quickly that if we could get an all party motion,” Ahern said.

The minister is on a week-long visit to the U.S. to discuss immigration issues. He visited the Emerald Isle Emigration Center in Queens and the Irish Center in Long Island City. Ahern will also meet Irish immigrant groups in Boston.

On a separate issue, Ahern said he was satisfied that the U.S. was not using Shannon Airport to transport kidnapped terror suspects, as the TV show 60 Minutes and Irish opposition groups had suggested.

60 Minutes claimed earlier this year that the CIA was using front companies to register planes that were passing kidnapped or “rendered” terror suspects through Shannon to Guantanamo Bay and to countries, where authorities were free to torture during interrogation.

“No evidence has been brought to us by the 60 Minutes show or by anyone else that these planes are landing in Shannon,” he said.

Ahern said that there were no “hidden facts” that the Irish government was hiding from the public about the Shannon controversy and said that the government accepted the word of the U.S. government.

“We accept their word and as a sovereign government,” he said.