Rice says no immigration reform is deep regret
By JULIANA BARBASSA Associated Press Writer
Posted: 03/13/2009 11:29:01 AM PDT


PALO ALTO, Calif.—Condoleezza Rice said Friday that one of her deepest regrets from her time as secretary of state was the failure of the Bush administration to achieve real reform of immigration laws.
"We need immigration reform. I don't care if it's for the person who crawls across the desert to earn $5 an hour, or for Sergey Brin, who came here from Russia and founded Google," she said at an economic summit at Stanford University. "As a country, we can't have people living in the shadows. It's just wrong. It's not only ineffective, it's wrong."

She said immigrants were critical to the country's financial health, and that reform was needed to fuel the next round of economic growth.

"If we ever lose that and start to believe somehow that it is instead a threat to us to have those people come here, we are going to lose one of the strongest elements not only of our national wealth, but also of our national soul," she said. "One of my biggest regrets was that we were not able to get immigration reform."

Rice's remarks came as she kicked off a daylong conference on the challenges facing the U.S. and global economies. Rice returned to Stanford earlier this month as a political science professor and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution after exiting the Bush administration in January.

Speaking to a crowd that included George Shultz, also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former secretary of state, Rice said the global fiscal crisis
could shake international confidence in free trade, fiscal discipline and other hallmarks of the financial system the United States has promoted abroad.

She urged leaders to continue providing financial and political support to countries in Africa, Central America and Eastern Europe that have placed their bets on that path of economic development.

"This is a crisis going to the heart of issues of governance, of how to provide for a population," she said. "It will most certainly have an effect on the willingness of countries around the world to affirm the model of economic development that has been most dominant since the collapse of the Soviet Union."

A handful of students protested outside Rice's speech, handing out leaflets denouncing her support of the war in Iraq and her role in authorizing harsh interrogation techniques of terrorist suspects.

Rice was among top administration officials who approved some of the some of the CIA's most controversial interrogation methods, including waterboarding, a former Bush senior intelligence official recently told The Associated Press.


http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_11906068