Karl Rove on Immigration

As influential White House strategist Karl Rove steps down, what was his position on immigration policy?

This question was asked of Karl Rove at the 21st Annual John M. Ashbrook Memorial Dinner on April 21, 2005.

Q: Would you please comment on the Bush administration’s positions on the border immigration problem?

Rove: We have two problems on the border. One is, it’s awful long and we have to do a better job of securing it because we now have not only the normal problem that we’ve got of people wanting to come across the border for work, but we’ve got to be very careful of people coming across the border carrying bad things. We have dramatically beefed up the border. In part by, before the passage of the Homeland Security in 2002, we had a customs and a border patrol and they didn’t talk to each other and they duplicated functions and we had roughly the same number of people, slightly fewer in the customs service than we had on the border patrol. They sort of stood right behind each other. Now what we have done is integrated them into one and beefed up their numbers. And we’re going to keep beefing up their numbers and we’re going to keep doing things like internal repatriation. That may seem like a mouthful to you but, for example, when people cross the border from Nuevo Laredo, the old practice was if you caught them, you sent them back to Nuevo Laredo and said, “Hey, don’t come back again.” Of course, they came right back. What we’re doing now is we’re finding out where they’re from, if they’re from Oaxaca 400 miles into Mexico, and flying them back to Oaxaca. And if they’re from Nuevo Laredo, we’re flying them over to Nogales, over to Douglas, Arizona and dropping them off in Nogales, and say, “Find your way home.” Because we want to raise the risk/reward ratio for people coming across our border.

But let me tell you, the border is long enough, and as a Texan, I can tell you, it is hot and thorny and desert enough that we’re not going to be able to protect our border by that alone. What we’ve got to do is recognize that a significant amount of pressure on our borders is coming from people that are making 50 cents a day in Mexico, Guatemala or Nicaragua and can make five bucks an hour coming to the United States. And until we have a willing worker program that says, hey, if you want to work here in America slinging tar on some roof in August in a job that nobody else wants and picking apples in Washington in a job that most Americans don’t want to have, until we have a program that says we’ll recognize you coming into the country and doing the work, allowing us to protect you, keep you from being exploited, protect your rights, let you put together a little money and then go home, we’re not going to stop the pressure on our borders.

These people, when they come here, they’re coming here to take care of their families but they aren’t coming here necessarily to live in America. It’s just that once they get here, it’s impossible to get home. They can’t go home and visit their families. They can’t go home for mama’s birthday. They can’t say, “I’m going to go get on a Greyhound bus and ride down to the border and then catch the Mexican bus and ride four hundred miles for mama’s birthday.” No, they’re stuck. Why should we be surprised after five or ten or fifteen years, they wake up and say, “You know what, I’m no longer a Mexican. I’m a Mexican-American.” We have to recognize that it is a powerful impulse to feed your family. And that’s what we’re talking about here.

So we’ve got to match border security with a willing worker program so look I have a hunting lease in Kennedy County, Texas. It’s half the size of Connecticut and 973 people live in the county. My hunting lease is the size of the island of Manhattan and nobody lives there. And I could be out there and it could be cold in the winter or hot as Hades in the summer, and you’re just—either time of the season, you’re likely to find ten or fifteen Mexicans coming across the—I mean it is a 70 mile walk from one end of the county to the other, and these guys are carrying a little water jug, a milk jug, and a plastic bag with twinkies in it. And, I’ll tell you, I found a couple of them where the plastic bag and the water didn’t hold out and what is left there is moldering bones and a carcass. And yet, they keep coming because the impulse is that strong, and we’d better figure out how to deal with it and regularize it to reduce the pressure on the borders so that we don’t have to have a guy twenty-four hours a day standing all along the Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California borders standing shoulder-to-shoulder in order to keep these people from coming in because we’ve got to do it on both sides of the border; both the border in the south and the border in the north. In White River Junction, Vermont, we set up a border patrol crossing in Vermont. White River Junction, Vermont. Last six months to the last year, you want to know how many illegal aliens we caught cross the border from Canada to Vermont? At White River Junction? Six hundred. We’ve got big borders with Canada and the United States and in order to be able to plug—we’ve got to work both sides of the equation: security and willing workers.

SIMILARLY, AT A NATIONAL SMALL BUSINESS SUMMIT ROVE’S COMMENTS WERE REPORTED by the National Federatin of Independent Business:

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 20, 2006—Of all the issues that delegates at the National Small-Business Summit plan to address with lawmakers on Capitol Hill today, Karl Rove, deputy chief of staff and senior advisor to the president, urged them to add one more to the list: immigration reform. Millions of legal and illegal immigrants come to the United States each year looking for work, opportunities and a better life—and it affects small businesses in big ways, Rove said, during a breakfast speech at the Summit. rove150.jpg

“We have always been a nation of immigrants and have had success at integrating and assimilating them all,” Rove said. “But immigration is turning into a big problem. The more you look at it, the more clear it is that every single part of the system is broken.”

Though many must scheme to get past border patrols to get here, they come mostly for noble reasons, Rove said.

“They have mouths to feed at home and no way to feed them. They know they can take a job here making $8 an hour instead of 50 cents, so they come for jobs every time they can.”  Click here.

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