Phyllis Schlafly, president of the Eagle Forum and a national conservative leader, focused on the topics of immigration and activist judges as she addressed a group of college students at the Salt Lake Community College Redwood Campus on Friday.
She called immigration and activist judges the two hot issues facing the conservative grassroots in 2006.
Schlafly lashed out at the guest-worker program being sponsored by the Bush administration and a handful of Republican senators, calling it an immoral concept.
“It is a plan to build a serf underclass to do the jobs that Americans think they are too good to do,” she said. “There is no job that Americans won’t do?it’s a matter of pay.”
Schlafly went on to say that she didn’t understand why Bush and other republicans were supporting various forms of a guest worker program. She added that it might be because of their corporate contributors or an attempt to win the Hispanic vote.
“We cannot allow the Republican Party to become the party of big business?we should be the party of the conservative grassroots,” she said. “I don’t know what they’re smoking if they think the republicans are going to get the Hispanic vote.”
She also talked about the financial burden that illegal immigrants create for tax-paying Americans. She gave one example that illegal aliens are often given the in-state tuition discount. She called this unfair because it allows illegal aliens to attend college for far less money than out-of-state American citizens.
J.D. Bowns, a junior business major, said he agreed.
“Allowing illegal immigrants to get instate tuition takes away from the achievements of those who are here legally?Justice is blind, and you have to draw the line,” he said. “[Aliens] end up costing us a lot more in the long run.”
On the subject of activist judges, Schlafly called for congress to pass laws limiting the jurisdiction of the courts. She pointed to decisions over property rights, the pledge of allegiance, the Ten Commandments, the definition of marriage and the Boy Scouts as examples of judicial activism.
The judges are overstepping their constitutional authority and rewriting the constitution, she said.
“Judges are like umpires in baseball-they’re needed-but they cannot change the rules of the game,” she said.
Schlafly also attacked what she calls the “bitter female feminist faculty” and encouraged college students to stand up against the left wing on their college campuses.
“Don’t be brainwashed by your left-wing professors,” she said.