El Salvador's President Elias Antonio Saca said on Friday that he hoped the U.S. migration reform would favor the Salvadorean migrants in the country.

The U.S. Senate approved the bill by 62 votes to 36 on Thursday.

"The bill approved yesterday could help all Salvadoreans in the U.S.," Saca said.

He estimated that about two million Salvadoreans were living legally in the United States, while 250,000 others were registered as temporary residents.

If the U.S. Senate's proposal was accepted into law, the 250,000 Salvadoreans, who "have already spent five years in the country," would join the citizenship program, he said.

The United States granted 250,000 Salvadoreans permission to live in the country temporarily, after El Salvador was battered by earthquakes in January and February 2001.

Meanwhile, Salvadoreans who have lived in the United States for more than two years "can hope to travel legally, with temporary visas under the guest worker program."

These measures would practically legalize almost 80 percent of the Salvadoreans in the United States, he said.

The initiative is the biggest immigration reform in the past 20 years, including plans to legalize around seven million undocumented migrants, and a guest worker program.

Source: Xinhua