(Johnston, IA) Republican candidate Pat Buchanan is returning to a major theme of his past two campaigns for the presidency and contending that illegal immigration is causing prison overcrowding, is an underlying cause of the “meth” epidemic and has unloosed a serial killer on the United States.
“We have now in this Resendez-Ramirez character really, if you will, the poster boy for what is happening in illegal immigration. Here’s a character that’s gone back and forth across the American border, illegally, for 23 years. He’s believed to have murdered 8 Americans. He’s been held by the I.N.S. and border patrol and let go because there’s no coordination,” Buchanan said during taping of the Iowa Public Television program, “Iowa Press.”
Ramirez is the so-called “Railroad killer” who’s on the F.B.I.’s most wanted list. Buchanan claimed one-quarter of federal prisoners are illegal aliens and that even in Iowa — a state far removed from the U.S./Mexico border — illegal immigration is an issue which concerns voters because the illegal drug “methamphetamine” or “meth” is pipelined into Iowa from Mexico.
“These methamphetamine, my understanding is while some of ’em are made here, something like 90 percent, maybe 90 percent, come up this highway from Mexico right into Iowa. Iowa is second in the nation in these methamphetamine problems,” Buchanan said.
Buchanan went on to claim “80 percent of your domestic violence in Iowa is due” to the methamphetamine epidemic, but officials who run Iowa’s domestic abuse shelters conducted a March survey which found just 15 percent of batterers used “meth.”
Buchanan said there’s a “bleeding, open border” to the south and he called for installing triple-layer, chain-link security fences at six border sites where immigrants are flooding across, places like El Paso, Texas, Douglas, Arizona, and Brownsville, Texas. Buchanan said farmers and ranchers along the border were arming themselves to protect against the slaughter of their cattle and other vandalism attributed to illegal immigrants.
“This country has treaties to defend the borders of 50 countries around the world and we’re not even defending the borders of the Unites States of America. If government has any obligation, any duty, it is first and foremost to defend the rights of American citizens and that southern border is not being protected,” Buchanan said.
Buchanan hammered away at the threat of illegal immigration in his 1992 and 1996 campaigns and said a security fence which has been installed near San Diego, California, has curbed the tide of illegal immigration in that area. Buchanan warned that crime will rise if more and more immigrants are allowed to sneak across the southern border. “What I am saying is the great threat to America, the great crime problem in this country, a growing crime problem, comes from illegal immigration and the Administration has done little or nothing about it and Republicans won’t talk about it and I intend to make it a major issue,” Buchanan said.
Buchanan said he intends — in particular — to challenge Texas Governor George W. Bush to address the issue. Bush won re-election with nearly half of the Hispanic vote in Texas.