Rep. Paul Broun, a Republican Senatorial candidate in Georgia, is known for controversial comments like calling President Obama a communist and referring to evolution as a lie “straight from the pit of hell.”
In an interview posted today, Broun broke bad again, in remarks discussing Georgia demographics and his electoral opponents. One particular clip raises eyebrows–in which Broun charges that all undocumented immigrants are takers and immigration reform is nothing more than a Democratic conspiracy to turn them into voters who will entrench the welfare state:
It only helps the Democrats if we legalize all these illegal aliens in this country who the Democrats want to put on federal welfare programs – and actually, they are on federal welfare programs today. The Democrats want to make them all basically dependent on the federal government so they can continue their radical, big government agenda….
The only way Georgia is going to change is if we have all these illegal aliens in here in Georgia, [and] give them the right to vote. It would be morally wrong, it would be illegal to do so, under our current law. Actually, all these illegal aliens are getting federal largesse and taking taxpayer’s dollars. That’s the only way this state is going to become Democratic again, in the next number of decades.
Never mind the facts–that undocumented immigrants are ineligible for social services and that they are contributing, taxpaying residents of America. The CBO score of the Senate immigration bill, remember, projected that legalizing the 11 million would reduce the deficit by nearly $1 trillion over 20 years. But Paul Broun thinks it would be morally wrong to allow people who have been in the country for decades, who are a critical part of our economy, to ever become citizens and vote — because he’s convinced that would be part of some sinister political plot to destroy America forever.
By the way, Broun is deliberately fooling himself if he thinks legalizing immigrants is the only way to make Georgia a blue state again. Georgia (along with Texas and Arizona) is already undergoing a demographic transformation that will soon impact politics, thanks to a number of factors. A changing Georgia is probably–as Benjy Sarlin once put it in a piece on the national electorate–“baked into the demographic cake.” Even Paul Broun working as hard as he can to keep 11 million people in the shadows won’t change that. But Republicans’ failure to recognize this reality will doom them with a growing group of citizens who are already ready to vote.
