Dick Armey on immigration reform: ‘no wonder they’re running red lights’

As I mentioned in a previous post today, former House Majority leader Dick Armey is getting a lot of attention for his organization FreedomWorks and its closeness to the Tea Party movement, which is beginning to get more involved in immigration politics.

Armey, a Texas Republican, has an interesting, reasoned position on immigration, and seeks to understand the motivations behind illegal immigration in order to grapple with it as a problem. The full YouTube video of his words on immigration at an October 2007 conference should be viewed (it has been overlaid with critical text by the uploader who disagrees with Armey), but I’ll also sum it up below.

Armey basically discusses how he understands the reasons behind the phenomenon of illegal immigration. This point is a sensitive one, since most outrage directed at undocumented immigrants starts with the fact they entered the country illegally. But Armey sees it from another angle. He says he doesn’t like illegal immigration, but says the government’s immigration system isn’t efficient enough to offer people a real shot at coming into the country legally. Hence the “running of red lights,” or the practice of crossing into the United States without authorization.

He asks: What if your child was sick at 2 AM and you were on the way to the pharmacy to get them medicine?

“Give me a stoplight that is stuck on red, and no traffic in sight and I’m going to go through that red light, cause feeding my babies or taking care of them is more important than obeying the law.” Armey says. “If you take a look … at the good people here, they’re trying to feed their babies.”

He adds toward the end: “There is a meanness about this border discussion that is unsettling to me.” He suggests the whole immigration system could be privatized.