Claim as Mainstream Advocate Melts in Heat of Extreme Rhetoric
Washington, DC – Roy Beck, the executive director of Numbers USA, the immigration restriction group, has removed his mask and eviscerated his long-standing claim to being a “mainstream” activist who shuns immigrant bashing.
First, he showed up at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville this week. Then, during the nativism-riddled speech by Tom Tancredo, the former Congressman and failed Presidential candidate gave a shout out to Mr. Beck and Numbers USA and encouraged convention participants to attend a workshop to be conducted by them both. This was during the same speech in which Beck’s friend Tancredo said: “People who could not even spell the word ‘vote,’ or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House, name is Barack Hussein Obama.”
At the workshop Beck proceeded to blame many major problems in America on immigrants and was quoted as saying, “We imported the health care crisis. Every year we import one to one and a half million immigrants and most of them go on welfare.”
Say what? Most immigrants are on welfare? This from a so-called expert who claims to rely solely on fact-based arguments to make his case? Mr. Beck knows better. Newly-arrived immigrants – legal and not – are prohibited from welfare programs. And all but a few immigrants come to the United States and work.
So why is he at the Tea Party Convention, hanging out with Tom Tancredo, and deliberately misrepresenting the facts? Perhaps he hoped to turn that Tea Party ire towards immigrants, who, it must be said, control neither Wall Street nor Washington.
“By using the Tea Party convention as his coming-out-party, Beck has revealed his true colors as someone who likes his rhetoric strong and his facts wrong,” Sharry said. “Beck confirmed what fair-minded people on all sides of the issue have always suspected, that he and his organization are no different from other like-minded groups who use distortions and dog whistle demagoguery to make their case.”
America’s Voice — Harnessing the power of American voices and American values to win common sense immigration reform.
http://www.americasvoiceonline.org
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