Sign up for 5280's weekly e-newsletters. Want the latest restaurant scoop? The latest happenings around town? Access to exclusive events and deals just for 5280 readers? Leave it to Tom Tancredo to resort to fear-mongering, hyperbole and disingenuity in his National Review column on today’s immigration rallies.
Among the most blatant of his attempts to push emotional buttons through mischaracterization:
If the “Day-Without-an-Immigrant Boycott” had been held a year earlier on May 8, 2005, and illegal alien Raul Garcia-Gomez had stayed home and did not work or go to a party that day, Denver police officer Donnie Young would still be alive and Garcia-Gomez would not be sitting in a Denver jail awaiting trial.
Officer Young was shot and killed in the early morning hours, i.e, late at night. The rallies and boycott today are during the workday. Even if Gomez-Garcia had stayed home the day of the shooting to support the boycott, it would have no bearing on whether he attended a baptismal party that evening.
Garcia-Gomez is suspected of shooting detectives Donald Young and John Bishop in the early morning hours of Sunday May 8. The two detectives were working security at a private baptismal party at which Garcia-Gomez attended. Young died from his injuries. Bishop survived, police say, because he was wearing a bulletproof vest.
It’s politicians like Tancredo who use the immigration issue to push their own xenophobic agenda that prevents us from having serious, rational discussions about the need for comprehensive and humane immigration reform.
I don’t expect everyone to agree with my position on immigration reform. But at least I address the issues rather than spout sourceless statistics or resort to fear-mongering in the style that has become so prevalent with Tom Tancredo.
Posted 5/1/2006 at 11:14 am by Jeralyn Merritt
Politics :: Permalink :: Comments (3)
“We Are America” Day in Photos
Here’s downtown Denver this morning, taken by 5280’s Jeff Panis. Larger version here. Tom Tancredo is stewing today. As I wrote over at 5280 this morning:…
Two other thoughts: First, Tancredo is forgetting that in this country one is still innocent until proven guilty. Second, Tancredo is guilty of the worst type of guilt-by-association: here is one illegal who committed a crime, so all illegals are similarly guilty.
Just which nation of Native Americans does Tancredo belong to? Or is he one of the vast majority of people (including those from south of the US) who are descended from Europeans who may or may not have been legal immigrants? (Some countries had laws making it illegal to leave without government permission.)
[I have at least one gret-grand- and four great-great-grandparents who were immigrants. I doubt that I'm unusual in that respect.]