What are the largest misconceptions about immigration that you find among policy makers today, here in Washington?
The misconception that the issue is so difficult to handle that it cannot be managed, whether it is the immigration formula per se or whether it is illegal immigration. As a result of this feeling politicians have developed what I consider a terribly irresponsible tendency to come up with extreme measures. Think of the last three times that we passed immigration legislation. Each one of those times we produced several hundred pages of “landmark” immigration legislation. Largely, they have been shots in the dark; largely, they have been political kinds of documents. Every time the Congress decides to pass another “landmark” immigration bill, I know that at a certain level, when I read it, I will visualize this image in my head of the collective hands of Congress going up in the air and saying, “We don t know what we re doing! But we ve got to do something!” And this is not the way to conduct our business in what amounts to a policy area that fundamentally affects American society, the A
