Tom Tancredo calls out Ron Paul, Trump on immigration
If Donald Trump and his nascent presidential campaign didn’t have enough to worry about, what with a certain birth certificate being produced and a certain terrorist being brought low, now he has Colorado’s own Tom Tancredo to tangle with.
Not only is Trump soft on immigration, but he’s a flip-flopping fool to boot, to hear Tancredo tell it:
“„But even Barack Obama says he favors border security, and Trump has not given any details like whether he supports a border fence. Trump has also called for increasing at least some kinds of legal immigration, and he qualified his support of SB 1070 by saying “a lot of great people coming in “ to pick crops, mow lawns, and other jobs that” not a lot of Americans” want to do.”
“„There’s nothing worse than a billionaire lecturing Americans about what jobs we’re willing to do.
“„Trump may come around, but I am much more concerned about knowing where Donald Trump stands on amnesty than what grades Obama got in college.
That from a recent email to supporters.
From a column posted on his web site:
“„Like most people, I enjoy a good joke. But Donald Trump for president? With apologies to Karl Rove, it’s not really that funny.
“„The Trump candidacy is not a joke; it’s a scam. But its success with millions of voters shows us we are a nation very susceptible to scams if they are done on a grand enough scale. The successful Obama campaign taught us that, but maybe it’s the Republican Party’s turn to follow the pied piper.
“„In Donald Trump we have a liberal billionaire with a long record of supporting Democratic candidates who is willing to spend unlimited amounts of money to reinvent himself as a populist conservative. Ordinarily, that would be an impossible, even laughable undertaking. Yet Trump is doing well in the polls. Evidently, a lot of people are buying his snake oil.
“„A cynic might suggest the fact that Trump has filed for bankruptcy three times and then rebuilt a real-estate empire has some attraction for citizens of a country with mounting trillions in public debt. However, we have yet to hear Trump ask Social Security retirees to take 30 cents on the dollar in promised benefits. He has recently attacked Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposed Medicare reform, saying Republicans should avoid that issue.
Brian Doherty, writing at reason.com, had this to say about the Tancredo/Paul feud, and Paul’s book, Liberty Defined, which started the whole thing:
“„While Tancredo might be angry that there is no concentrated tone of anger or vilification toward immigration, Paul specifically does in the book tip his hat toward Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s theories that in a fully libertarian world of nothing but private property, free migration would be highly restricted.
“„And when Paul lays out immigration policy in the book, it goes something like this: abolish the welfare state to eliminate incentives to freeload; have a generous visitor work program for those who want to come here to work; also have more border guards to enforce current laws, and permit states to enforce current immigration law. End birthright citizenship. Stop all federal mandates for free education and medical care for illegal immigrants. No legally compelled bilingualism.
“„Do not, however, punish employers for not enforcing immigration laws themselves. No citizenship for current illegal immigrants, but grant them some sort of “in-between status,” which he grants might be problematic but he sees as better than trying to ship millions of them out. And police should be able to determine someone’s citizenship if they have already been “caught participating in a crime.”
“„This all might not be as harsh and angry as Tancredo likes toward people who cross borders without proper papers, but it’s far from the more free-wheeling attitude toward immigration that is often pushed around these parts and that really aggravates the Tancredos of the world. Paul refers to “completely closed borders and totally open borders” as “two rash options.”
