In a speech to a Texas Tea Party group last week, Center For Immigration Studies senior policy analyst Stephen Steinlight warned that comprehensive immigration reform “amounts to a plot against America” that will kill the Constitution and cause Americans to “lose our liberty.” He called GOP reform supporters “psychotic,” joked that he’d like to attack pro-immigration religious leaders with “a baseball bat,” and speculated about a potential war between Texas and the federal government over immigration enforcement.
In a speech to the Pearland Tea Party on March 18, Steinlight posited that the Gang of Eight’s immigration proposal “amounts to a plot against America,” warning that it if it were to pass, “America will become California and the GOP will wither and die.” Republicans who support the bill, he said, “are psychotic, so greedy as to be politically blind, or just stupid.”
He went on to warn that if comprehensive immigration reform passes, “we will lose our liberty and become a one-party state" and the nation will “be balkanized along ethnic and cultural lines and lose its cohesion,” bringing about “the erosion of the middle class and the emergence of a vast, restive permanent underclass” (a theory straight of the Heritage Foundation’s infamously biased immigration study). He added that for good measure, “We will watch the Constitution become a dead letter, as the rule of law is overthrown.”
But Steinlight saved his greatest contempt for the many religious leaders who support immigration reform, saying, “God help me, find a baseball bat, there would be a whole lot fewer of them around.”
We’ll scrutinize the Gang of Eight’s draft bill, S744, because it’s the establishment’s policy template on both sides of the aisle, they’re all the same. Irredeemably flawed, it amounts to a plot against America
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This [inaudible] guest worker program, what it means is an exponential increase in a constituency that will make the Democratic party the permanent ruling party in America. It will make the Democrats the PRI of the United States. All America will become California and the GOP will wither and die. The center of American politics will lurch far to the left. Republicans who support amnesty are psychotic, so greedy as to be politically blind, or just stupid.
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If comprehensive immigration reform passes, we will lose our liberty and become a one-party state, we will watch our nation be balkanized along ethnic and cultural lines and lose its social cohesion, as we witness what is an essence a population transfer from another country with a different language, a different culture, which will become the dominant demographic in this country. We will witness the erosion of the middle class and the emergence of a vast, restive permanent underclass. We will watch the Constitution become a dead letter, as the rule of law is overthrown.
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We did a study, a huge study, we got a lot of money from our main donor. And, by the way, we divided the study along religious lines, because we were interested in watching, because religious leaders – God help me, find a baseball bat, there would be a whole lot fewer of them around – but they are all of them, right across the spectrum, are the leaders of the amnesty. From the Conference of Catholic Bishops to every Jewish organization to the National Conference of Churches, all of them are all in the same league.
During the question-and-answer session of the presentation, an audience member asked Steinlight if the federal government would “go to war” with Texas if people in the state were to start “taking care of our own border.”
Steinlight replied that if that happens, “The federal government will send the United States Army into Texas and disarm you, violently or nonviolently.”
He compared such an event to the National Guard enforcing desegregation in the South, but told the audience member not to be offended by the comparison to segregationists.
Questioner: Now what would happen if the state of Texas, the Texas militia, just decided to heck with the federal government, put our militia on the border, started taking care of our own border? Would the federal government come after us?
Steinlight: Yeah.
Questioner: Would they actually bring in the military to do it?
Steinlight: I believe they would.
Questioner: So they would go to war with their own people to keep these people…
Steinlight: That’s correct. I mean, obviously, I’m not talking about the same context at all, so don’t be offended. If you think about what happened, say, in the South, during desegregation, when governors who wanted to defend integration used the National Guard – the federal government sent the 101st Airborne Division out. What I’m telling you right now is that if Texas militia, in Washington language, ‘takes the law into its own hands,’ that is to say tries to enforce the law that the federal government will not enforce, right? The federal government will send the United States Army into Texas and disarm you, violently or nonviolently. They will not permit it. They will regard it as an act of sedition. I’m not saying it in a supportive way, I’m saying there’s no other path they would take.
