Washington — Speaking at a Nevada school with a student body that is more than half Hispanic, President Obama said he is upbeat about the prospects for U.S. immigration reform.

“The good news is that for the first time in many years, Republicans and Democrats seem ready to tackle this problem together,” Obama told his audience January 29 at Del Sol High School in the city of Las Vegas.

Partisan politics have prevented any concrete proposals for dealing with the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants thought to be living in the United States. But in recent weeks, Obama said, members of both parties, in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, have been actively working on a solution.

“Yesterday,” Obama said, “a bipartisan group of senators announced their principles for comprehensive immigration reform, which are very much in line with the principles I’ve proposed and campaigned on for the last few years. At this moment, it looks like there’s a genuine desire to get this done soon. And that’s very encouraging.”

But Obama also promised that “if Congress is unable to move forward in a timely fashion, I will send up a bill based on my proposal and insist that they vote on it right away.”

Obama said his plan for immigration reform involves enforcing border security and cracking down on employers that knowingly hire undocumented immigrants. “To be fair, most businesses want to do the right thing, but a lot of them have a hard time figuring out who’s here legally, who’s not,” Obama said. “So we need to implement a national system that allows businesses to quickly and accurately verify someone’s employment status. And if they still knowingly hire undocumented workers, then we need to ramp up the penalties.”

The president emphasized the importance of immigrants to the well-being of the American economy, noting that in recent years one in four high-tech startups and one in four small businesses in the United States have been founded by immigrants. He wants to make it easier for bright entrepreneurs and immigrant students of science and technology to stay in the United States, he said. Immigration, he said, “keeps our workforce young. It keeps our country on the cutting edge. And it’s helped build the greatest economic engine the world has ever known.”

Obama decried the exploitation of undocumented workers and said that in many cases their unfair treatment by employers and low pay threaten citizen workers as well. Immigration reform, he said, is critical to strengthening the middle class. “We have to make sure that every business and every worker are playing by the same rules,” he said.

Obama said immigration reform must provide “a clear path” to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already living in the United States. This, Obama said, involves registering and undergoing national security and criminal background checks, paying taxes as well as penalty fines for entering the country illegally, learning English and moving to “the back of the line” for consideration for citizenship.

“So that means it won’t be a quick process, but it will be a fair process,” he said. "And it will lift these individuals out of the shadows and give them a chance to earn their way to a green card and eventually to citizenship.“

Immigration reform must allow for preserving families, Obama said. “If you are a citizen,” Obama said, “you shouldn’t have to wait years before your family is able to join you in America."

Although heartened by Congress’s focus on immigration reform, Obama predicted that as reform proposals move closer to becoming reality, the debate will become more heated. “Immigration has always been an issue that enflames passions,” he said, and often engenders an “us versus them” mentality. But he reminded his audience that “most of ‘us’ used to be ‘them.’”

“When each new wave of immigrants arrived,” Obama said, “they faced resistance from those who were already here,” including racism and ridicule. But, he added, “they all came here knowing that what makes somebody an American is not just blood or birth, but allegiance to our founding principles and the faith in the idea that anyone from anywhere can write the next great chapter of our story. “