Despite the impossible odds, Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., is wasting our time and reporters' ink with his hopeless run for the presidency. But as it turns out, Tancredo may understand there is more to running the country than giving the boot to 12 million undocumented immigrants and sealing the southern border with a 2,000-mile steel fence.
Over the weekend, Tancredo campaigned in Iowa and touched on school vouchers, healthcare and gasoline taxes between rants on the great peril of the Latin American immigrant invasion of the U.S. However, his rhetoric about how to tackle America’s other domestic quagmires is totally uninspired compared to the ferocity he reserves for the issue of illegal immigration. Karen Crummy, of The Denver Post, was with Tancredo in Iowa and quoted him regarding health care reform, considered a pressing need by many within the medical profession.
“Health care is an individual decision to a large extent. You need to stop looking at the government,” Tancredo said. “I will not propose any huge programs.”
Lucky for us (and especially for the millions of Americans that can’t afford health insurance under the present system), Crummy points out that Tancredo’s odds at becoming president are, at best, a million to one.
To me it is curious that Tancredo, who offers little in the way of fresh ideas on any issue, is considered a respectable voice in the immigration debate. Tancredo bills himself as a tireless advocate of tighter border security and tougher immigration laws, but his comments often reveal a baffling ignorance on the issue he has adopted as his own. For example, if Tancredo were to examine the statistics from Princeton's Mexican Migration Project, as many scholars have, he would find that the border security he lauds is largely responsible for the massive population of permanently settled undocumented immigrants present in all 50 states.
Before the IRCA immigration reform of 1986, MMP data showed that incoming migration from Mexico was set off by the outgoing migration of roughly equal numbers. The tightening of security along the border had an effect, but not the desired one. Rather than keeping people out, the increased security just prevented people from going home. The nature of the work performed by many Mexican migrants has traditionally been seasonal in nature, and in the past, most migrant workers would return home in between jobs in the U.S. But the IRCA reforms put a stop to that practice for most people. The border cross became too hazardous. So rather than risk not being able to get back into the U.S., migrants stayed and worked to bring their families north. Whereas undocumented immigrants were once mostly male and residents in a few southwestern states, the result over time has been a huge increase in settled populations of undocumented immigrants all over the nation.
A studied, nuanced view of the immigration issue is something Tancredo is simply not capable of. I believe at the root of his vehemently anti-immigration stance is a strong desire to keep America a predominantly white nation of European descendants. Xenophobia drips from Tancredo’s lips when he speaks, and unfortunately, it’s a stance that has earned him plenty of friends and admirers. Luckily, there aren’t nearly enough “Tancrazies” out there to give him even a snowball’s chance of getting elected president.
