McCain, Obama ignoring alien issue, advocate says
Posted on Saturday, September 6, 2008
Immigration is being “deliberately ignored” by the presidential nominees, Jim Gilchrist, founder of the anti-illegal-immigration group, Minuteman Project, said Friday.
Before his speech at the Clinton School of Public Service, Gilchrist said nominees Barack Obama and John McCain neglect the issue in public because it’s “too controversial,” and they “don’t want to deal with it.”
Gilchrist, a registered Republican in California, said he had “zero percent” confidence in McCain’s ability to enact immigration laws.
“Here’s a man where I had to go protect his borders for him,” Gilchrist said, referring to an excursion in which he led hundreds of Minutemen volunteers to guard Arizona’s southeastern border in April 2006.
Although it was only Gilchrist’s second visit to Arkansas, he knows well one of its exgovernors: Mike Huckabee.
Gilchrist met the former Republican presidential candidate in October 2007. The Minuteman Project mailed immigration law questionnaires to nine of the candidates, he said, and only Huckabee responded.
Huckabee was sympathetic to the Minuteman Project’s agenda.
Gilchrist said Huckabee signed a pledge that he wouldn’t support amnesty legislation for illegal aliens, and Gilchrist decided to endorse him.
Still, Gilchrist said that on the whole, federal government isn’t pursuing legislation to limit illegal aliens.
He said the federal government is sponsoring “an in-house global welfare system” from which millions of illegal aliens — specifically those crossing the U. S.-Mexico border — benefit.
“Except for lifesaving treatment, under what authority are we required to house, shelter, feed, educate and medicate the world’s impoverished population ?” he asked more than 100 in the Little Rock audience.
“Those funds that are used by the illegal-alien programs should provide more medical and quality-of-life support for our disabled, elderly residents and retirees.”
Gilchrist said the federal government, especially the Senate, deserved blame for the influx of illegal aliens from Mexico.
According to the U. S Census Bureau, in 2006, 5 percent of Arkansas’ more than 2. 8 million people were Hispanic.
Charles Cervantes, Arkansas director of the League of United Latin Americans Citizens, said Friday that the state’s estimated population of illegal aliens in 2007 was 150, 000-175, 000. He noted that the number has likely fallen by 2 percent to 5 percent since then partly because of decreased immigration rates.
Gilchrist referred to the “invasion” of illegal aliens as “a Trojan horse organization that is being carried out over a few decades,” allowed “by the lack of willingness, including your senators from Arkansas and my senators from California who cavalierly neglect the fact that we are a nation not only governed by its people but governed by the rule of law and that is what has kept us a cohesive, unified, civilized nation.”
Michael Teague, Arkansas ’ U. S. Sen. Mark Pryor’s communications chief, disagreed. He said Pryor had been active in recent immigration legislation.
In 2007, U. S. Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina introduced the Secure America through Verification and Enforcement Act. The act entails a strict emphasis on border security, including the hiring of 8, 000 new Border Patrol agents, mandatory electronic verification of an employee’s legal status, and increased enforcement of laws.
At Shuler’s behest, Pryor sponsored the act on the Senate floor, Teague said. It has not passed yet.
Gilchrist ended his speech by praising his audience’s civility.
In an interview, he recalled student protests at five universities, including Columbia University in which a 2006 stage rush and attack by members of minority-group student organizations culminated a week’s worth of tension.
He said he was indebted to the Clinton School because it was the first school in which he hadn’t been “shouted down, forced off the stage or had something thrown at me.”
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