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Rep. Tancredo: Tough on Illegals and GOP
Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo has become the loudest, angriest voice against the estimated 11 million illegal aliens now living in the United States. They are "a scourge that threatens the very future of our nation," he says. He laments "the cult of muliticulturalism," and worries about America's becoming a "Tower of Babel." If Republican presidential candidates don't put the problem atop the agenda in 2008, he says he'll run himself, just to force the front runners to talk about it, reports White House Correspondent Holly Bailey in the current issue of Newsweek. Not that he thinks he'd win the White House. He declares himself "too fat, too short and too bald" to be president. If the Republicans lose the election because he's too tough on the issue, he says, "So be it."
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Tancredo says that all he wants is to see the law enforced. "I don't like it when people call me a racist or xenophobe," he says. "In my heart, I know that I'm not." A 60-year-old grandson of an Italian immigrant, Tancredo grew up in a working-class family. He ran for Congress on a whim in 1998, and won by pushing immigration reform. He says he became passionate about the issue back in the 1970s, when he was a Denver junior-high-school teacher. At the time, Colorado had just passed a bilingual-education bill. He says students with Latino-sounding names were put into Spanish-language classes, even if they spoke English only. "It was ridiculous, and a total waste of time and money," he says in the April 3 issue of Newsweek.
Tancredo has remained unapologetic about his views. In 2002, The Denver Post ran a human-interest story about a high-school honors student who couldn't get college financial aid because he was in the United States illegally. Tancredo tried to have the boy and his family deported. (He was unsuccessful.)
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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