Change stupid immigration laws.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Soundbite - Interview

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Grover Norquist may be the most influential advocate for lower taxes over the last three decades. He has also pushed the Republican Party to embrace freer immigration, including this year's proposed overhaul of the system. In July, Editor in Chief Matt Welch spoke with Norquist about immigration reform at the Freedom-Fest conference in Las Vegas.

Q: You have been pushing very hard for immigration reform for about 30 years. There's a lot of conservative Republican grassroots opposition in the House of Representatives. Does the opposition have a point about the largeness and unwieldiness of the [current] bill?

A: What you're trying to reform is a big, messy collection of previous legislation. So if you're going to address the stupid things we've been doing, it's going to be a long bill. We could do it piecemeal, except there's a lot of opposition by the labor unions, the left. The reason we're in the mess we're in is that organized labor didn't like the guest worker program we had under Eisenhower. So they killed it.

They put in regulations in the '20s which were discriminatory--and deliberately meant to be. We're trying to extricate ourselves from that history and come up with a reasonable level of immigration.

We have a 55 mile-an-hour speed limit immigration policy, when the cars on the roads are built for 75 and 80. When we had the 55 mile-an-hour-speed limit underCarter, we didn't run around saying: "We must enforce the law first. Before we consider changing the speed limit, we should imprison everybody who was involved in speeding." That's silly. You say: "You change the stupid law, and then you enforce it."

Q: We've heard a lot of discussion from Republican opponents to comprehensive reform--and also from gleeful Democrats--that this issue threatens to rip apart the GOP. Is that true? And why has this become such an emotional question, particularly for opponents of reform?

A: It's very interesting. First of all, this is a...