At a town hall meeting in Iowa last night, President Obama was asked about the new Arizona immigration law. He called it “poorly conceived.”
“You can imagine if you are an Hispanic American in Arizona, your great-grandparents may have been there before Arizona was even a state, but now suddenly if you don’t have your papers, and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re gonna be harassed,” Obama said, according to CNN. “That’s something that could potentially happen. That’s not the right way to go.”
He added, though, that illegal immigrants are still breaking the law.
“We are a nation of immigrants,” he went on, “but we are also a nation of laws.”
“The truth is that 11 or 12 million folks, we’re gonna have to make them take responsibility for what they did,” Obama said. “And the way to do that is to make them register, make them pay a fine, make them learn English, make them take responsibility for the fact that they broke the law.”