In an interview with Janet Mefferd yesterday, Federation for American Immigration (FAIR) spokesman Ira Mehlman, suggested that DREAMers should be forced to “go home” with their families and called Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor a “demagogue” for using the term “undocumented immigrant” rather than “illegal alien.”
When Mefferd asked what he proposed doing about DREAMers, or young undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children, Mehlman responded, “First of all, what we need to do is to encourage families to go home as a unit.” He then turned the blame on their families: “There is no good, happy solution to this problem. But we do have to remember who created the problem. It was the parents who brought them here.”
To Mefferd’s question about Sotomayor’s use of the term “undocumented immigrant,” Mehlman responded, “Throughout history, demagogues have been able to get away with what they get away with by controlling the language. Once you start defining people who have broken the law as people who are not criminals, then you’ve essentially negated the whole concept of the law itself.”
