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Tancredo pushes sole citizenship during campaign stop
By William Dillon
07/31/2007




By Nirmalendu Majumdar/The Tribune

Republican candidate for president Tom Tancredo said he wants to require immigrants to obtain a signed letter from their country's embassy denouncing their citizenship before they can become a citizen of the United States.

It's a move that would help ensure loyalty and cut back on dual citizenship in the United States, he said.

"My advice to people would be, if you cannot figure out yet which country you hold allegiance to, I would like you to go back to the other one until you get that clear," he said during a campaign stop Monday at Prairie Moon Winery in Ames.

Tancredo, a congressman from Colorado, said he believes multiculturalism is dividing the United States, and he fears it threatens the country's status as a nation. He has said he wants to eliminate illegal immigration entirely and limit legal immigration to allow those immigrants already here the opportunity to assimilate into American culture.

"It does matter to know and understand what western civilization is all about," he said. "If we keep dividing ourselves up, if we keep down this path of radical multiculturalism, I will tell you, it's not just what kind of nation we will be in the future, it's whether we will be a nation at all."

Tancredo staunchly advocates for English as a common language among all Americans. On Tuesday, he displayed a recent copy of the Ottumwa Courier to show that a newspaper even outside of a border town in Texas and Arizona is being printed in both Spanish and English. Language is a split, he said, not just along linguistic lines, but along lines that deal with loyalty and a commitment to certain ideals.

"Bilingual individuals: great; bilingual countries: lousy," he said.

With the Aug. 11 GOP straw poll in Ames less than two weeks away, Tancredo and several Republican counterparts are pushing hard to gather voters.

Tancredo said his staff already has signed up more than 2,000 people to vote for him during the straw poll. He said he hopes all of those voters show up and use their complimentary ticket from Team Tancredo to cast a vote for him.

"I don't know what that will mean in the total scheme of things, but it is not bad," he said.

Tancredo said if he doesn't finish among the top half of the straw poll ballot, which includes 11 candidates, his campaign will be over. He is confident, however, he has enough support.

"I think we are going to be pretty good," Tancredo said. "I think we are going to be surprising."