Haley Barbour
BOCA RATON, Fla. — Congress should reform the immigration system because even prisoners do not want to work in chicken plants, former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour told the International Dairy Foods Association in a wide-ranging speech here Sunday.

Barbour, who served as governor of Mississippi from 2004 to 2014, said that when he was governor, the state had a program to get jobs for inmates before their release.

But when the state placed inmates in the state’s chicken plants “none of the prisoners made it two days. They would rather be in the penitentiary than work in a chicken processing plant.”

That experience, Barbour said, convinced him that the country needs not just immigrants with high- tech skills but also people to perform jobs like those in chicken plants.

Of the proposals that all immigrants who came to the United States without proper papers should be deported, Barber said “I can’t think of anything stupider than to take the 3, 4, 5 million people who have been here legally and had the same job and [deport] them and then try to figure out who is going to take those jobs.”

Barbour acknowledged, however, that it will be difficult for Congress to deal with the immigration issue “because there are some of my friends who think anything less than beheading is amnesty.”

The answer, Barbour said, is to make undocumented immigrants pay a fine and go on probation just as many American do for crimes. Then the immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country and, if in 10 years they work and send their children to school, “we taken them off probation.”