photo source: Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, spoke to a full house in Page Auditorium Tuesday. Melissa Yeo

photo source: AP

“That immigrant culture that has renewed us … has been at the core of our strength,” she said, according to the The Raleigh News & Observer. “I don’t know when immigrants became the enemy.”

In this file photo, then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shake hands with Polish President Lech Kaczynski next to Polish Prime Minister Donal Tusk after signing a deal on basing an American missile shield in Poland, August 20, 2008 in Warsaw.

“America has always been able to attract the most ambitious people who are determined to have a better life,” Rice said during an appearance at Stanford University, where she currently teaches. “If we ever lose that and start to believe that somehow that it is instead a threat to us to have those people come here, we are going to lose one of the strongest elements of not just our national wealth, but of our national soul.”

“I think we need to be really careful about what kind of laws we pass and that, in the effort to get a handle on this problem, we don’t end up making the problem worse,” she told Alabama’s Press-Register, after claiming that inaction at the federal level was catalyzing such measures. “The fact is that, generally speaking, this patchwork approach is not serving us well and we need to find a better solution. State laws are just not going to do it.”