Here’s a round-up of last week’s Right Wing immigration hysteria:
- The bill that passed Friday was “tweaked” by House Republicans to be more to the taste of hard-right members like Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who said the final bill looked “like I ordered it off the menu.”
- The alterations are in line with King’s views that the U.S. needs to crack down on immigration because, according to him, our nation’s borders were established by God, and disrespecting said borders is disrespecting God’s will. (He also called President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program the “deferred action for criminal aliens,” and added that “a significant number” of the migrants arriving are actually drug smugglers.)
- Naturally, one way to contain them all, King believes, is to house them all in a tent city along the border.
- At least he doesn’t believe that child migrants should be gassed to death, though Minuteman Project leader Jim Gilchrist did sympathize with a caller who made that suggestion last Thursday.
- Gilchrist also accused religious groups that support immigration reform of being “non-violent cartels” aiding the “21st century slave trade.”
- Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., on the other hand, believes the children fleeing violence in Central American in large numbers are going to be put into the foster care system and used for medical experimentation.
- However, just a few days before, Bachmann claimed that the children coming in from the southern border are actually people from “terrorist nations” making their way up and bringing with them “very dangerous weapons” and “life-threatening diseases” like Ebola.
- Sandy Rios compared undocumented children to adulterers.
- According to Pat Buchanan, Obama’s possible executive action on immigration is part of the president’s effort to evolve the United States “from a Western and predominantly Christian country into that multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic, borderless land Teddy Roosevelt inveighed against as nothing but a 'polyglot boarding house for the world. Obama did not like the America we grew up in… How much more diversity can we handle before there is no unity left?”
- Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, agrees, saying Wednesday that Obama is using the crisis to enforce a “Third World view” demanding that “not only we allow these people to remain, but [also] suggesting we should start teaching our children Spanish.” This “open-border” attitude, according to Stockman, demonstrates how “Obama devalues the principles upon which this country was established.”
- Larry Pratt, head of Gun Owners of America, added to the sentiment saying that the country is going to go “communist” if Democrats are allowed to pass immigration reform. So get ready to “kiss our republic goodbye.”
- Anti-immigrant rally speaker and Boston radio host Jeffrey Kuhner also warned that this nation will cease to exist as it is because if we take in the children fleeing violence, we will “be transformed into a socialist third world banana republic,” and Central American children will destroy our country and turn “Massachusetts into Mexichusetts.”
- Ultraconservative columnist Sher Zieve wrote that Obama is trying to stack the deck by replacing “the current population in the US to incorporate non-English speakers who will vote for anyone who gives them free stuff.” The people coming in, Zieve believes, are “hundreds if not thousands of MS-13 gang members and Islamists… including ISIS/ISIL members.”
- William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) warned on Wednesday that an executive order to prevent deportations of some undocumented immigrants would amount to “martial law” and Americans’ response may be actions “outside of the purview of my peaceful and political efforts.”
- Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, claimed that young migrants escaping gang violence in Central America are lying and we are “being invaded and we’re in danger.” Not only is the immigrant “invasion” dangerous because these undocumented immigrants are responsible for thousands of crimes in Texas, he said, but also because Obama’s immigration policy is the real “war on women” since these immigrants cross the border to rape women.
- Gohmert added Friday that he feels victimized by immigration reform proponents because “all these forces against you” are “belittling you, questioning your manhood.” Because comprehensive immigration reform is really about him.
- Pundit Glenn Beck argued that the impeachment “scam” is really being brought up to help pass immigration reform.