WASHINGTON, June 14, 2013 – The agriculture industry could
force conservative lawmakers to vote for immigration reform, former Mississippi
Governor Haley Barbour said yesterday at a Bipartisan Policy Center event.
When asked how lawmakers
representing increasing white, Republican districts would stomach immigration
reform, Barbour pointed that “those districts are largely rural, and their
businesses have an overwhelming dependency on agribusiness.”
Barbour used his own state as an example. Mississippi is
home to a large, $2.5 billion poultry industry, and one would be hard-pressed
to “find someone on the floor” of a factory “who speaks English,” he said.
“[Immigrants] are all here to work – they’re willing to do
nasty work,” Barbour pointed out. Even Mississippi’s local prisoners, who
Barbour said are sometimes permitted to work in their communities, balk at
“coming home covered in blood, and guts, and veins, and feet and feathers,” as
immigrant workers currently do.
So there are “huge constituencies that are dependent on this
(immigrant) labor.” Barbour says powerful agriculture industries, like the poultry
sector, could force the hands of conservative politicians otherwise unwilling
to clear a path to citizenship.
Both Barbour and his fellow panelist, former Governor Jeb
Bush, pushed Republicans to take advantage of the current pro-reform climate.
The U.S. immigration “will continue to get worse,” Barbour
said, but there is an “appetite” for solving the thorny issue now.
Reforming the immigration system would be an “(investment)
in our own country,” Bush said. “This is an opportunity to fix it.”
#30
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