Tancredo

News & Features

America Rallies Behind Cong. Tancredo

Dennis Durband, Editor

"The U.S. State Department website has a section for temporary foreign visas. It asks 'Are you a terrorist? Answering ‘yes’ does not necessarily mean you will be denied access to the U.S.'” -- Cong. Tom Tancredo

Running for elective office against an opponent backed by the White House would normally be grave cause for concern. Not for Cong. Tom Tancredo (R-CO). Tancredo won re-election in 2002 with a 70-percent majority and his national support is so strong that an effort is underway to support the man for president.

In case you’ve dropped in from another planet and you are unfamiliar with Cong. Tancredo, he is America’s leading advocate for controlling the porous borders.

Cong. Tancredo has been called the congressman most after Southern Arizona’s heart. He is uncompromising in his fight against the unchecked border invasion causing so many problems for American taxpayers. Tancredo’s supporters are pushing a write-in campaign for him for president. He has just started a new political action committee, or PAC, to enlist reinforcements for the great battle against the appeasers of illegal immigration.

This new PAC will help candidates who are willing to take a four-point vow to: 1) never support amnesty; 2) advocate for use of the military to get the border under control; 3) support a temporary moratorium on immigration; 4) and join the immigration reform caucus. “I’ll work for them,” Tancredo says.

Almost everywhere Tancredo goes, people help him make the case for opposing the border invasion.

At the office, Tancredo’s Hispanic American staff members are even more opposed to illegal immigration than he is.

At the concession stand at a Colorado Rockies baseball game, the Hispanic American employees working there complained that they had no decent employment alternatives because illegals were taking jobs that they might otherwise have gotten.

The day after Tancredo debated J.D. Hayworth, the Arizona congressman told him that his phone never stopped ringing and he felt he was on the wrong side of the issue.

Bishop Gomez of Colorado told Tancredo, “’Tom, I don’t know why you’re worried about Mexicans coming here. They don’t want to be Americans.’ He made my point for me: that’s the problem. There was a time in history when society forced you to become part of the mainstream and learn English. Failure to assimilate is a huge problem,” Tancredo recently told an Arizona Republican Assembly audience in Scottsdale.

Tancredo went to Mexico and met with the Mexican government official in charge of dual citizenships. He was told that there really is no border; it’s just a region.

In December 2003, Sen. Arlen Specter debated conservative Pat Toomey, his Republican challenger, for a Pennsylvania Senate seat. A question came from the audience about whether or not Specter has White House support. Toomey said the White House always supports incumbents, and Specter said, no, not in Colorado.

“Bring them on!” Tancredo says of his opponents. “If the White House gets involved in a campaign against me, we will make this (border invasion) the focal point of the debate.”

From Tancredo’s perspective, the U.S. is under siege from a state-sponsored invasion, aided and abetted by our own government. As the invasion wears down state, federal and personal resources, President George Bush, Rove and the leadership of both political parties are pandering for votes. Nero fiddled while Rome burned, too. Americans have been murdered, raped, assaulted, land has been trashed, drugs smuggled in, grandmothers are hiding behind iron bars after dark, prisons are filling up and home invasions are becoming more commonplace in some areas near the southern border. But if the president can squeeze a couple more votes out of the situation, it’s worth it.

“If it was a Democrat in the White House doing this, Congress would be screaming impeachment,” Tancredo says. “It’s almost Clintonesque. When Republicans keep taking pages out of their neighbor’s book pretty soon they become their neighbor.”

When President Bush proposed ed in January 2004 his Temporary Worker Program, Tancredo was at first very happy it.

“Now it has become a national debate topic; he started it,” Tancredo said. “Without that, it would not have reached that level. He sparked a reaction they (White House staff) did not expect. They were caught off-guard. Within two days of the president’s announcement, my offices in Denver and D.C. had over a thousand calls and 99.9 percent opposed the president’s plan. People signed on to the cause as a result. We’ve got good momentum moving in our direction. It will determine if we will be a country at all. I don’t know where the Bush plan is going. I’m not privy to White House discussions.”

Tancredo recalls a heated talk he had with Rove after the Washington Times reported remarks he made about the open borders.

“I said if we have another 9/11 without securing the borders, the blood is on the hands of Congress and the White House. Rove was very upset and called me. I asked him who would be to blame -- the Elks Club?”

The United States can employ the military on the border. “They say you can’t shut the border,” Tancredo said. “Baloney! You need manpower and technology. We just do not have the will to close the border.“

Tancredo is not a one-man army in this war of public opinion. He implores Americans to join the fight by contacting elected officials and urging them to support tighter border control, to write letters to the editor and rev up the pressure on the appeasers.