Posted on 06/20/2002 7:08:02 PM PDT by WakeUpChristian
Immigration gadfly at odds with Bush
By JULIA MALONE
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer
WASHINGTON -- Former civics teacher Tom Tancredo never bought into the adage that newcomers in the U.S. House of Representatives had to go along to get along.
In just his second term, the Colorado Republican has emerged as the most outspoken congressional advocate for tightening American immigration policy.
Along the way, he has clashed not only with liberal groups but also with leaders of his own party, all the way to the White House.
To supporters, Tancredo has the daring to point to the costs and challenges of historically high numbers of legal and illegal immigrants.
To detractors, Tancredo, the grandson of Italian immigrants, is a xenophobe.
In any case, he has energized the opposition to President Bush's attempts to legalize some of America's estimated 8.5 million illegal immigrants.
While the White House is drawing closer to Mexico, Tancredo draws attention to Mexico's failure to halt the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States.
And even as officials announce they are closing immigration loopholes exploited by foreign terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks, Tancredo says it will be two years before the measures take effect.
"I've been twice to the borders" since Sept. 11, Tancredo said in an interview this week. "I'm convinced that they absolutely are no more secure today than they were then."
Tancredo and fellow members of his congressional Immigration Reform Caucus launched a petition drive this week to urge the president to send as many as 20,000 U.S. troops to guard America's 6,000 miles of land borders.
The idea was quickly rejected at the White House. "It is not the plan or the intention to militarize our borders," homeland security spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.
Nearly 1,400 National Guard troops dispatched to help manage the borders in the past nine months will not be replaced, Johndroe said. In the future, additional Border Patrol agents and Customs Service inspectors will be reinforcing the borders.
Going against the grain is nothing new for Tancredo, who first became concerned about the rising numbers of newcomers when Colorado began requiring bilingual education for non-English speakers in the mid-1970s.
"No matter what you say, you end up at a time where the child is not fluent enough," he said. "So their educational progress is always retarded."
Tancredo left his junior high teaching job to run for the state Legislature, where he tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to repeal the bilingual program. So heated were the debates, he said, that his tires were slashed and hate notes were left on his car windshield.
He later took a job as regional director for President Reagan's U.S. Department of Education, where he proceeded to cut the staff by two-thirds, a move that brought Democratic demands that he be fired.
Later, he drew fire as president of the Independence Institute, a conservative think tank in Golden, Colo., that published a study concluding that low-skilled immigrants cost taxpayers more in services than they contribute in revenues.
As a candidate for Congress in 1998 in his well-heeled Denver suburban district, he ran on a platform of individual freedoms and lower taxes. But on Capitol Hill, he is best known for galvanizing a handful of lawmakers into the Immigration Reform Caucus.
"We had a loose-knit organization till Tom came," Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.) said. Deal said a decade of legal and illegal immigration has strained his North Georgia district's school and health care services.
Membership in the immigration caucus has surged from 15 to 64 since the terrorists struck.
Deal credits Tancredo with forcing Congress to face an issue that many politicians would prefer to avoid, as both parties seek to win favor with immigrants and their millions of current and future voters.
Cecilia Muñoz, vice president of the National Council for La Raza, a Latino advocacy group, has watched the GOP attempts to woo newcomers.
"I think there is a tug of war going on in the Republican Party over immigration issues," Muñoz said.
"On the one hand, there is this major effort to re-characterize this party as a party that believes in a nation of immigrants," she said. "On the other hand, we have voices like Mr. Tancredo's."
"It's not a vote-winning strategy to be anti-immigration," said Grover Norquist, president of the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform.
Tancredo's outspoken remarks apparently have earned the wrath of Karl Rove, the top White House political adviser. The congressman told The Washington Times that the president was an "open borders" advocate because of his amnesty plan for illegal aliens.
According to Tancredo, Rove told him, "Don't ever darken the doorstep of this White House."
The White House did not return a call seeking comment on the dispute.
The congressman said he regrets that it means he will not get to know Bush "because my impression of him is that he's a very compassionate fellow."
Tancredo argues that the public sides with him on the immigration issue. He points to a Zogby International poll taken last month that indicates that 68 percent of the public favor putting troops on the borders, 58 percent favor reducing the number of immigrants accepted annually and only 23 percent favor amnesty for residents who are here illegally.
Such polling numbers have not assured legislative victories for Tancredo. Muñoz notes that his proposal for a temporary moratorium on immigration, which she labels "xenophobic," has gone nowhere.
Tancredo challenges his opponents to find anything racial or xenophobic in the many words he has written or spoken. "I believe that my heart is pure when it comes to this issue, especially when it comes to race," he said.
He acknowledges that some of his proposals have hit a brick wall. But he asks an aide to bring in a poster board with the agenda items that his immigration caucus has been urging since fall.
First on the list is formation of a consolidated border security agency, an idea that the president at first rejected but now has embraced fully.
"Was this because of my caucus? No," Tancredo said. "But was it partly because of the pressure we put on him? Yes."
Someday that statement will go down in history. Right next to "Man will never fly" and "Who needs a personal computer?"
Yeah, that's the ticket.
There's A LOT of money behind this fear of Tancredo.
His reply was: "It doesn't matter if it hurts me or not. Sometimes you just have to do what's right."
"This is not the employment center of the world, this is our homes, we live here".
Then I'm one, too, for the same reasons - and proud of it! Like Tancredo, I'm the grandchild of (legal) immigrants. But, when my mother's parents came early in the 20th century, "immigration" meant Europeans arriving at Ellis Island, health checks - not Third Worlders either walking across the border or overstaying visas. And, when his grandparents and mine came, it also meant you learned English - rather than try to Quebecize the U.S. by demanding it cater to you in the language of your homeland.
IMMIGRATION resource library - with public-health facts of immigration!
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