In the wake of President Obama’s re-election due in part to historic levels of support among Latino voters, former Mississippi governor and Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour expressed support for immigration reform and urged his party to embrace the measure as “good policy.”

Responding to the recently ubiquitous critique that changing demographics are hurting the Republican Party, Barbour stated: “We certainly don’t have to change ideology. Here’s the point: We ought to be for good policy. My old boss Ronald Reagan used to say, ‘At the end of the day good policy is good politics.’ And good policy on immigration in the United States is, we are in a global battle for capital and labor, and we need to have what is good economic policy for America on immigration because we do need labor. We not only need Ph.D.s in science and technology, we need skilled workers and we need unskilled workers. And we need to have an immigration policy that is good economic policy, and then — and then the politics will take care of itself.”