GOP Immigration Meet Featured Racists

Republican legislators in Colorado are preping their offensive against undocumented immigrants. This is not news, GOP state legislators from Washington State to Texas are doing the same. They seem to have gained a level of bravado that they didn’t show before the mid-term election, a kind of subtle gloating that’s reflected more in their acts than in their faces, a feeling of freedom to show their true selves.

To the point, an informal meeting of Colorado GOP legislators included what the Colorado Independent called “organizations founded by white supremacist John Tanton.” The Southern Poverty Law Center named one of those organizations, The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), as a hate group.

According to the Independent “Tanton has argued that for U.S. culture to survive, the country must maintain a clear white majority. The SPLC refers to him as the ‘racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.’” And he was an invited guest to this fête?

To be fair (ahem!)  the party did include a couple of business people who told the group that not hiring undocumented workers takes from their advantage in the market.

Also, “(Jessica) Vaughn, director of policy studies at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, told the panel that illegal immigration was decreasing. She said that immigration — legal and illegal — was at record levels in both the 1990s and the 2000s, but that it has slowed down. Coupled with the slowdown, she said was the fact that illegal immigrants have been leaving Colorado at a higher rate recently than in the past.”

I’m interested to see if the business-men’s comments or the presentation by Ms.Vaughn will have an effect on the final Colorado immigration bill.