DIAZ-BALART: Good evening. Nice to see you all. Nice to see you all.

I want to talk about a subject that was very dear to the heart of President Reagan, which is immigration reform. As you know, he was the last U.S. President to sign immigration reform in 1986...Correction: It was Bill Clinton and the Immigration Control Act with the rolling amnesty.

HARRIS: Speaker Gingrich, your perception on immigration reform? And you've been, I think, in some ways, a little different on your initial positions.

GINGRICH: I think we have to find a way to get to a country in which everybody who's here is here legally. But you started by referencing President Reagan.

In 1986, I voted for the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which in fact did grant some amnesty in return for promises. President Reagan wrote in his diary that year that he signed the act because we were going to control the border and we were going to have an employer program where it was a legal guest worker program. That's in his diary.

I'm with President Reagan. We ought to control the border, we ought to have a legal guest worker program. We ought to outsource it, frankly, to American Express, Visa, and MasterCard, so there's no counterfeiting, which there will be with the federal government. We should be very tough on employers once you have that legal program.

We should make English the official language of government. We should insist --

And then find a way to deal with folks who are already here, some of whom, frankly, have been here 25 years, are married with kids, live in our local neighborhood, go to our church. It's got to be done in a much more humane way than thinking that to automatically deport millions of people.

The Republican Debate at the Reagan Library
Published: September 7, 2011