I met with my task force, at the bar last week. We said this will never happen.
As far as whether you believe they can be effective, history proves they can.
Which is why the NAU was secretly implemented in 1947.
This is the same group that pushed for NAFTA.
And we all know how badly all that trade, economic growth and low unemployment turned out.
Ok. So now you changed your argument. Before you claimed it could never be implemented because the Task Force has no power. Now you are saying that it won't be bad if it is.
He is what William Weld, a member of the task force, said about implementation.
DEPALMA: If I can just ask Governor Weld, how you flip the situation around and get from the sort of top-down recommendations to some sort of a bottom-up demand for these changes— I mean, it’s one thing for the Task Force to suggest and recommend, but who out there is demanding that these things happen?
WELD: Well, there’s surely demand for spreading the benefits of economic development. There’s surely a demand for addressing the situation of unauthorized immigration, principally from Mexico and the United States now. That’s a huge issue in Washington. And in answer to your next previous question, I always said these dreadfully politically incorrect things even when I was in office. [Laughter] That’s why [inaudible] an enfant terrible. I declared— at one point, I declared myself a liberal on immigration and my interlocutor said, gasp, “What?” So it’s— my answer was: “Melting pot, love it or leave it, baby.” And that’s the divide that’s going on principally within the Republican Party right now between the social conservatives, to whom I had reference twice in my earlier remarks, and the enterprise wing of the Republican Party.
DEPALMA: But isn’t that wall a response to that bottom-up—
WELD: Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s— as I say, I think it’s just dead wrong. It has a constituency in the Congress, but if people who think it’s dead wrong don’t rear up on their hind legs and say so, it will get more momentum than it deserves, but I don’t think there’s going to be any problem getting these issues front and center in Washington, because they’re already there.