Thread: Rep. King Creates Furor With Remarks on Immigrants

Wall Street Journal
By Sara Murray
23 July, 2013

Rep. Steve King sings the National Anthem during the DC March for Jobs in Upper Senate Park near Capitol Hill.

Rep. Steve King, a longtime immigration critic, caused a furor Tuesday when a video emerged of him saying many young illegal immigrants are drug mules.

“They aren’t all valedictorians. They weren’t all brought in by their parents,” Mr. King, an Iowa Republican, said of young undocumented immigrants, in an interview with Newsmax last week. “For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that, they weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert. Those people would be legalized with the same act.”

Mr. King’s comments drew a pointed and public backlash during a House immigration hearing Tuesday, where lawmakers were focused on how to deal with children brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents.

Rep. Joe Garcia, a Florida Democrat, denounced Mr. King’s comments as “offensive.” He said there are schools in his district that produce valedictorians who are undocumented immigrants.

“When members of this House use inflammatory language, use offensive language, it does not help the process,” Mr. Garcia said, just before quoting Mr. King’s comments. “It is beneath the dignity of this body and this country.”

So far the House hasn’t produced a bill on how to deal with young, undocumented immigrants and Tuesday’s hearing was designed to broadly explore the subject.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.) have been working on legislation to craft a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. by their parents but they haven’t unveiled their efforts yet.

Other Republicans on the panel appeared amenable to creating a separate status for undocumented young people, but even they made it clear that all young immigrants wouldn’t automatically qualify for legal status.

Some young immigrants who are affiliated with gangs, who have engaged in criminal activity or don’t intend to be productive members of society don’t deserve legalization, Mr. Goodlatte said.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/0...hatsNewsSecond

Congressman Steve King of Iowa is one of the most sincere elected officials addressing illegal immigration and amnesty in America! He deserves all of our full support!

W

“They aren’t all valedictorians. They weren’t all brought in by their parents,”

Mr. King is correct, I've lived on and near the border some 30+ years what came across in the 50's 60's 70's is a far cry from today, Mexico IMO has dumped on us much like Castro did some very rough folks. I'm not certain he is correct on numbers concerning mules however many pay there trip by carrying drugs. The simple truth is most are highly under educated that in itself will assure life long government benefits to survive, paying in minimum or no income tax and low SS payments. What Amnesty does is provide cheap labor for business that is subsidized by the American taxpayer. In time this system will break down and the end results will be seizure of taxpayer property in some form to continue handouts.

http://www.alipac.us/f12/mexico-chil...-gangs-284313/

by Matthew Boyle 24 Jul 2013, 11:04 AM PDT
breitbart.com



President Barack Obama’s White House Press Secretary Jay Carney joined House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Speaker John Boehner in making an inaccurate attack on Rep. Steve King (R-IA) over comments he made about efforts to grant amnesty to illegal aliens who entered America illegally while they were still minors.

In an interview with NewsMax published last week, King had pointed out that some minor illegal aliens are good people, but many are criminals too.

“Some of them are valedictorians — and their parents brought them in,” King said in that Newsmax interview. “It wasn't their fault. It's true in some cases, but they aren't all valedictorians. They weren't all brought in by their parents.”

"For everyone who's a valedictorian, there's another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds — and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” King added in the Newsmax interview. “Those people would be legalized with the same act."

The political establishment has seized King’s comments as an opportunity to try to paint him as unfair to immigrants.

King told Breitbart News on Wednesday afternoon in response to the attacks from the establishment that he thinks this is a sign conservatives fighting against amnesty for illegal aliens are winning politically. “You know when people attack you—in this business, when you’re in this business, you know that when people attack you, and they call you names, they’re diverting from the topic matter,” King said in a phone interview. “You know they’ve lost the debate when they do that. We’ve talked about it for years. Tom Tancredo and I joked about it that that’s the pattern. When people start calling you names, that’s what confirms you’ve won the debate.”

Cantor, who is pushing amnesty for illegal aliens who fit the DREAMer description, rushed to attack King.

”I strongly disagree with his characterization of the children of immigrants and find the comments inexcusable,” Cantor said.

Boehner seconded Cantor’s attack.

“There can be honest disagreements about policy without using hateful language,” Boehner said in a statement. “Everyone needs to remember that.”

According to the Associated Press, Carney joined in on the attacks on Wednesday, calling King’s comments “unfortunate.”

The major problem with the arguments made by those in the political establishment pushing amnesty, and their specific attacks on King, is that the facts back King up.

Just last week, the Christian Science Monitor ran a feature story by Lourdes Medrano headlined: “Along key stretch of US-Mexico border, more kids running drugs.”

“On a balmy Monday afternoon, authorities at a highway checkpoint a few miles north of the US-Mexico border pull over a commercial shuttle for inspection,” Medrano wrote in the lead of the story. “A teenage girl sitting inside appears rattled and, as it turns out, with good reason. Several bundles of heroin are weighing down her bag.”

That teenage girl and three of her friends ended up in the custody of Border Patrol, as they all “had heroin packets tucked in their waistbands.”

“This incident from April was the latest in a string of recent cases in Arizona where juveniles have been arrested trying to smuggle drugs into the United States,” Medrano wrote. “While luring teens to act as drug mules for a few hundred bucks is not a new practice, the Tucson sector of the US-Mexico border – the nation's busiest – has seen an alarming jump in the past two years.”

Medrano is right. In fact, if Boehner, Cantor and Carney, among the others who have attacked King, did a quick Google search, they could find a flurry of news reports over recent months and years about how those young illegal aliens under the age of 18 are being used as drug mules.

San Diego’s 10News.com ran a story in March 2012 under the headline: “ICE: Number of Young Drug Mule Arrests Rising.”

“The number of children being arrested trying to smuggle illegal drugs across the border continues to rise, according to new numbers released by the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement,” 10News.com wrote. In fact, that local San Diego news outlet shows that President Barack Obama’s own Department of Homeland Security’s agencies are confirming what King wrote.

Fox News Latino reported similar information from Obama’s administration’s own agencies back in January 2012. “Children between the ages of 11 and 17 are being recruited by Mexico's drug cartels to smuggle narcotics and work as spies, the Mexican press reported Sunday, citing information from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE,” Fox News Latino wrote.

Obviously, if those children were not caught by law enforcement--drug mules often do not get caught--they would qualify for amnesty under the DREAM Act being pushed by Cantor and being implemented by Obama via executive order.

The Associated Press, in March 2012, reported those same Obama administration ICE statistics and included anecdotal stories of young Mexicans under the age of 18 who are addicted to drugs and now selling them on behalf of the cartels.

Drug dealing is not the only criminal activity some DREAM Act-qualified illegal aliens engage in inside America’s borders once they are here. Jamiel Shaw, Jr., a young 17-year-old black male destined for Stanford University, was murdered by an illegal alien who would have qualified for amnesty under the DREAM Act. Shaw's father testified, in the House Judiciary Committee, just last month, about how the DREAM Act-qualified illegal alien killed his son in 2008 and that illegal alien now awaits execution on death row.

Given the fact the Speaker, Majority Leader and White House Press Secretary all got their facts wrong in these attacks on King, King told Breitbart News “it looks like” it all part an effort by those in the political establishment to push amnesty.

“I’ve never seen such lack of restraint on the part of the team of people that have been elected to lead us,” King said in his interview with Breitbart, referencing Boehner’s and Cantor’s remarks. “The only thing that is logical is that they are seeing their dream of a component of amnesty slip away.”

King added that the leadership in Washington in both parties has “now been confronted with the reality and instead of accepting it, and addressing it, what they have done is just wiped out.”

“When I read their quotes, I have to believe they didn’t read mine,” King said. “They completely missed the mark. I don’t yet know of anyone who has raised a logical argument against my statement.”

King added at the end of the interview with Breitbart News that “any of my critics out there should review the video, watch the video, and they should review the entire quote. And they will understand that what I said is objective, it’s true and it cannot be logically challenged. If we can’t deal with reality when we’re writing legislation that sets the destiny of the United States forever, then this nation will eventually fail.”

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...AM-Act-amnesty

Thursday, 25 Jul 2013 11:05 PM
By Todd Beamon
newsmax.com

Remaining defiant and unrepentant Rep. Steve King on Thursday challenged his critics to debate him on immigration reform.

"I challenge people to debate with me because I believe one of two things," the Iowa Republican said in a 20-minute speech on the House floor, The Hill reports. "If I can't sustain myself in debate, I need to go get some more information, I need to get better informed, or could it be that I'm wrong?"

King has been under fire by both Republicans and Democrats since last week, when his controversial comments about immigration reform were published in a Newsmax TV interview.

He had charged that supporters of reform depicted immigrants as law-abiding achievers, when in reality many criminals would also benefit from a pathway to citizenship.

"For everyone who's a valedictorian, there's another 100 out there that they weigh 130 pounds — and they've got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert," King said in the Newsmax interview. "Those people would be legalized with the same act."

Even House Speaker John Boehner called King's comments “deeply offensive and wrong,” saying they would make immigration reform tougher to address in Congress.

Still, King stood behind his position on Thursday.

"Our southern border is porous," he said, according to the Hill. "It's not as porous as it was seven or eight years ago, mainly because the economy has grown in Mexico at about twice the rate that it's grown in the United States over the last four and a half or five years."

"Eighty to 90 percent of the illegal drugs consumed in America come from or through Mexico," King said. "I can tell you that in Mexico they are recruiting kids to be drug smugglers, between the ages of 11 and 18.”

Mexico, the congressman said, jails about 800 children for trafficking drugs every year. The U.S. captures some, too, he said.

"Every night, some come across the border, smuggling drugs across the border," King said. "The media is replete with this."

He urged legislators to think critically on the issue, the Hill reports.

"No nation like the United States of America can continue to grow and be a strong nation if we are going to judge people because they disagree with our agenda rather than the content of their statement," King said. "We have to be critical thinkers. We have to be analytical. We should understand facts from emotion."

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/ste...7/25/id/517156

Added an article from above to the Homepage:
http://www.alipac.us/content.php?r=2...ack-Steve-King

http://www.alipac.us/f12/along-key-s...-drugs-284367/

By CHQ Staff | 7/26/13



Principled limited government constitutional conservative Congressman Steve King of Iowa has been taking heat from the Republican establishment, especially the House Republican leadership, for his comments last week about the so-called DREAMers, young illegal immigrants, in which he suggested that many of them were drug mules.

“For everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” King said in an interview with Newsmax.

King is a big boy, so he is perfectly capable of defending his choice of words in this matter.

What we are interested in is the Republican establishment’s insistence on blanket amnesty for the so-called DREAMers, which in order to work requires Republicans to make them into a new class of secular saints.

Which they aren’t.

But might there be a valedictorian or two among them?

There have been young illegal immigrants who excelled in school and we know, because it hit the newspapers, that one young illegal immigrant in Miami was the valedictorian of her high school class back in 2012.

However, we don’t know anything about or even who the potentially millions of others are who might qualify for some Republican-sponsored iteration of the Dream Act.

We know who the relative few who have applied for Obama’s “prosecutorial discretion” program to allow them to stay here legally are, or at least who they say they are.

In fact, no one knows exactly who most of these young illegal immigrants really are, who might qualify for Dream Act-like legalization, how they got here, who brought them and under what circumstances.

And this is where the so-called Dream Act and similar proposals run smack up against hundreds of years of American law and legislative tradition – because our system is designed to gather evidence and weigh the facts about individuals, not groups, so we don’t do blanket amnesty, at least until now.

And that was Steve King’s point.

You may not like the way King put it, you may disagree with the details of his analysis, but the fact remains that blanket amnesty for the so-called DREAMers will grant amnesty to many more gang members than it will valedictorians – it is just reality that the percentages say one kid in a class can be the valedictorian and dozens can and will get in trouble.

Steve King was right, and absent some plan for weighing the fitness for citizenship, on an individual basis, of millions of young illegal immigrants the DREAM Act, or any Republican iteration thereof, remains a bad idea.

http://www.conservativehq.com/articl...igration-again