Last Wednesday, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, joined Iowa radio host Simon Conway at anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform’s “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” radio row, where he said that it was wrong for the Republican Party to “pander” to Latino voters “because we’re all God’s children.”
“[Republicans] like the cheap labor and Democrats like the expansion of the politics, as you say,” King told Conway while discussing his opposition to immigration reform. “It’s about their ability to document undocumented Democrats, bring more undocumented Democrats in and then document them so that they can vote.”
King continued, “From the time I arrived in this town, my own leadership on the Republican side went to great lengths to try to suppress my verbiage because they said, ‘Don’t talk about that, don’t assign them a motive of it being politically motivated, we really want it to be humanitarian and we want to be open-minded,’ and you know how that all goes.”
King pointed out that Hispanics in South Texas voted Democratic in 2000 and, as a result, the GOP “concluded that they needed to do outreach to Hispanics, and the way to do that was to pander, and it’s a mistake to do that because we’re all God’s children, we’re cut from the same image, and he gives us distinctions so we can tell each other apart, and he gives us inspirations. And so we shouldn’t do identity politics and we shouldn’t pander.”
Conway interjected that “identity politics is racist,” to which King agreed.
