"Massive deportation of the people here is not going to work," Bush said as a Congress divided over immigration returned from a two-week recess. "It's just not going to work."

In addition to speaking here, Bush was meeting Tuesday with a bipartisan group of senators at the White House to press his case.

Bush spoke in support of a stalled Senate bill that includes provisions that would allow for eventual citizenship to some of the illegal immigrants already here. Some conservatives say that would amount to amnesty.

"This is one of the really important questions Congress is going to have to deal with," Bush said. The president said he thought the Senate "had an interesting approach by saying that if you'd been here for five years or less, you're treated one way, and five years or more, you're treated another."

Standing in the center of a theater in the round-type setting with an audience full of business people, Bush spoke sympathetically about the plight of foreigners who risk their lives to sneak into the United States to earn a decent wage. He said the U.S. needs a temporary guest worker program to stop people from paying to be smuggled in the back of a truck.

"I know this is an emotional debate," Bush told the Orange County Business Council. "But one thing we can't lose site of is that we are talking about human beings, decent human beings."

Several hundred demonstrators from both sides of the immigration issue protested outside Bush's speech.

More than an hour before Bush arrived, protesters from the Minuteman Project — the volunteer border patrol group whose co-founder ran for Congress in Orange County — were chanting "Go back to Mexico" and "God Bless America."