PrintLatino lawmakers hinder immigration enforcement: Truth-O-Meter
June 30, 2011
Earlier this month, Rebecca Forest, co-founder and past president of the Immigration Reform Coalition of Texas, was portrayed as a bigot by liberal Texas Democrats. She was savaged in a YouTube clip and in a newspaper editorial in the Austin American-Statesman titled "Curb the intolerance, por favor."
Her crime?
To the PC-obsessed Democrats, it was Forest's allegedly hateful remarks at a rally outside the Capitol - regarding how most Latino lawmakers vote on illegal immigration issues.
She said:
"If you really want to know why in Texas we don't get immigration legislation passed, it's because we have 37--36--Hispanic legislators in the Texas Legislature. All of the states that have passed legislation have a handful. And I mean literally, some of them have no Hispanic legislators, maybe 3 or 5. So that's part of our problem and we need to change those numbers. We need to do something about that."
She was speaking in behalf of Women on the Wall, a group of conservative women.
Later, Forest amended her remarks amid sharp criticism from liberal Democrats and the Statesman's "curb-the-intolerance" editorial. Forest explained that she'd "strayed from her notes at the rally and had solely intended to single out Hispanic legislators who are liberal Democrats -- traditional opponents of legislation like the sanctuary-city proposal that did not pass into law" in Texas.
"I wish I would have said that," she said.
As it turns out, no apologies were necessary: Forest was right all along.
That's according to a recent "Truth-O-Meter" check run by journalistic fact-checking watchdog PoltiFact Texas (and undertaken - surprise, surprise -- by PoltiFact's staffers at the liberal Austin American-Statesman). PoltiFact operates at several newspapers across the country.
Setting the record straight, Texas's Truth-O-Meter column explains that anti-illegal immigration laws have - as Forest indicated - only been passed in states that have few if any Latinos or Hispanic lawmakers. Or as Truth-O-Meter stated: "Five percent or less of the legislators in four of five states that recently directed law officers to check immigration status are Latino Americans; in the fifth state, none is. We rate Forest's statement True."
PoltiFact's Truth-O-Meter gives a blow-by-blow of states that passed or failed to pass anti-illegal immigration laws. These include laws that -- to the horror of liberals and open-borders activists -- require police officers to run immigration checks on people who are arrested for serious crimes.
Truth-O-Meter's conclusion provides further evidence that the country is splitting in two as Latinos fail to assimilate into American culture, and remake American culture as a consequence -- with plenty of help from Latino lawmakers who, for whatever reason, engage in identify politics in multicultural America. This isn't to say all Latino lawmakers are guilty of this, as Forest herself notes. But according to the statistics cited by Truth-O-Meter, the generalizations Forest made were accurate - and that's cause for concern.
Does anybody want to take bets on whether Forest will be getting any apologies from the Statesman's editorial board or the Democrats who savaged her with their nasty YouTube clip?
