Albright visits EWU campus

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Wednesday that illegal immigrants ought to have a “pathway to citizenship” in America, and the country needs to honor its legacy of welcoming people who came from somewhere else.

“I think building walls and sending the National Guard to the border is not the kind of America that I want,” Albright, whose family fled Czechoslovakia when she was an infant, told a standing-room-only crowd at Eastern Washington University.

She spoke to an estimated 3,000 people on EWU’s Cheney campus on Wednesday afternoon as part of the school’s Presidential Speaker Series. Earlier in the day, she answered questions from students and held a brief press conference.

In her appearances, she discussed a wide range of world affairs, from the nuclear threat in Iran to the need for peacekeeping efforts in Darfur. She was also critical, as she has been in many appearances lately, of the Bush administration’s handling of the war in Iraq and said that it has made world terrorism worse.

One theme of her speech was the need to challenge your assumptions – something she does by listening to Rush Limbaugh. The war in Iraq, she said, arose from unchallenged assumptions.

“The sad truth is that nearly all major assumptions made by the administration prior to the Iraq invasion were wrong,” Albright said.

Based on the past six years, she said, “I don’t trust everything that I hear from our government.”

She said Americans have too little information about the war in Iraq, and she included herself among them, though she’s recently been briefed about the war at the White House.

“I have to say this, I don’t really know what’s going on in Iraq,” Albright said during her press conference. “I think we’re kind of operating a little bit in a parallel universe here, because none of us has real information about what’s going on.”

One unintended consequence of war, she said, is the rise of the Iranian threat, driven by connections between radicals in Iran and Iraq. With Iran insisting on its right to develop its nuclear program, she said, the United States should engage in direct talks with the country and leaders should publicly draw the line against nuclear arms there.

Albright said the recent victory of Hamas in the Palestinian Authority was a huge blow to the Middle East peace process, and the group with terrorist ties can’t be given legitimacy. Still, she said, the group was elected by many Palestinians who support the organization for reasons other than its terrorist activities, and people shouldn’t assume the peace process is dead.

“To seize the sword instead of the olive branch is a choice,” she said. “What people have the capacity to choose, they can also change.”

During her press conference, she said that the United States and international community have paid too little attention to the bloody conflict in Darfur, a region of western Sudan. Over the past several years, hundreds of thousands have died, and many others have been driven from their homes. The U.S. government has defined it as genocide, and Arab militias have been accused of atrocities against black Africans in Darfur.

Though a peace agreement was signed recently, two rebel groups did not sign on. She said achieving peace there will be “incredibly complicated.”

“It is ironic that 10 years after the genocide in Rwanda, not enough world attention has been paid to this,” she said. “People sat around too long watching it.”

Albright was the first woman to serve as U.S. secretary of state, taking office in 1997. Before that, she was a representative to the United Nations and led the U.S. delegation to the U.N.’s World Conference on Women in Beijing.

She’s touring the country to promote her book, “The Mighty & The Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs,” and was paid $80,000 out of a special endowment for the speaker series.

She said her history as an immigrant has made her appreciate America deeply.

“Because of this nation’s generosity, I was given a chance to grow up in freedom and serve in the best job in the world,” she said.

The issue of illegal immigration has been among the hottest international questions for the United States recently, with demonstrations all over the country by supporters of immigrants and calls to crack down on illegal immigration, especially at the Mexican border. President Bush proposed using National Guard troops and some high-tech fences to secure the border, as well as implementing a guest worker program.

“I can’t be clearer about the fact that this country has been enriched by so many immigrants and immigrant families,” she said. “I am an immigrant – a legal one, but an immigrant.”