November 30, 2010 08:07 PM UTC

Colorado Republicans Continue Brilliant Latino Alienation Strategy

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• by: Colorado Pols

As most of you know, the conservative Republican Study Committee of Colorado held a hearing yesterday on illegal immigration, following up their trip in August to Arizona to “study” that state’s embattled new anti-immigrant law SB1070. Kicking off surprisingly widespread coverage of this hearing, the Colorado Independent’s Scot Kersgaard reports on some of the attendees:

Republican legislators Monday hosted an informational meeting to discuss immigration in Colorado, but the Colorado Independent has learned two of the presenters invited to speak were from organizations founded by white supremacist John Tanton. One of those organizations, The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), has been named a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

In addition to FAIR, The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) – which also presented at the meeting – was founded by Tanton.

Tanton has argued that for U.S. culture to survive, the country must maintain a clear white majority. [Pols emphasis] The SPLC refers to him as the “racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.”

“My contact with both those organizations can be boiled down to what we heard today,” the meeting’s host, state Sen. Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, said after the meeting. “I was quite impressed with both those people…”

And in today’s Pueblo Chieftain, Patrick Malone reports on just how absurd this hearing got:

Jack Martin of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for greater limits on immigration and strengthened enforcement against illegal immigrants, said Colorado taxpayers at the state and local levels spend $1.4 billion annually to provide services to 270,000 illegal immigrants living in the state…

[Rep. Jim] Kerr said these factors are the basis for his support of an Arizona-style law in Colorado.

“If we’re facing a $1 billion deficit in the state budget, and there’s $1.4 billion to be saved through better enforcement, that’s a zero-sum gain if we take care of the problem,” he said.

Wow, folks. Let’s take just a moment here to explain how totally ridiculous this “$1.4 billion a year on illegal immigrants” is. According to the representative from FAIR as quoted by the Chieftain, fully two-thirds of this $1.4 billion is spent educating the children of illegal immigrants–that’s $933 million dollars. Now, let’s leave aside the fact that federal law, upheld by the Supreme Court, mandates that Colorado educate all children in the state, including illegal immigrants, and nothing they can do in the Colorado General Assembly will ever change that. Does anyone out there seriously believe that we spend nearly a billion dollars a year in Colorado educating illegal immigrants or their children? It’s just crazy on its face, and even the FAIR representative admits their estimate is based on worst-case assumption after assumption.

Not to mention that Rep. Jim Kerr–who intends to sponsor whatever legislation comes out of this process–is completely out of his mind to suggest that these fictional numbers could actually represent a “zero-sum” solution to the state’s $1 billion budget shortfall. For one thing, even FAIR says this is what the state and local governments spend combined, so the real savings to the state of Colorado would be a small fraction of their already inflated number.

But that’s not going to slow him down!

To summarize: the RSCC’s “hearing” yesterday consisted of one-sided testimony from groups founded by a known white supremacist, spouting nonsensical figures, which were immediately seized upon by clueless GOP lawmakers as a panacea for the state’s very real budget crisis. You can read at the Denver newspaper’s blog complaints from Sen. Dave Schultheis that state broadcasting equipment was not allowed to be used for this hearing. This seems to us to be the only mistake that Democrats may have made–if we were them, we would have wanted this disgraceful proceeding broadcast as widely as possible. With translation en Español (see title).