letter to tom tancredo

Representative Tom Tancredo
6099 S. Quebec Street
Suite 200
Centennial, CO 80111
USA

October 20, 2006
Daejon, South Korea

Congressman Tancredo,

I haven’t been registered in Colorado’s sixth district since the summer of 2000, and it is for this reason that you haven’t yet heard from me in regards to your participation in the public revival of fascism. First of all, I guess I must congratulate you on your successful campaign to bring illegal immigration to the forefront of national political “debate”. Well, congrats Tommy, you’ve managed to stoke the fires of racism in a way that hasn’t been seen in this country in a long time. I see two possible explanations for your irrational assault on illegal immigrants: 1) you actually believe all of the hateful nonsense you spew about the damage illegal immigrants are doing to our country; or 2) you recognize this nonsense as such, but find it politically advantageous to shout this type of Third Reich rhetoric at the top of your lungs. I don’t know whether you’re (1) an idiot, (2) an asshole, or both, so I will address each of these two possibilities separately.

Who do you think built Highlands Ranch, anyway?

I’m going to tell you a little story. I grew up in Castle Rock, and in high school, I bussed tables at a little Italian restaurant about two blocks from your office on Wilcox Street. Some of my best friends at that job were the Latino guys. They worked hard, they were pretty much always in a good mood, and they were happy to help me practice my Spanish. These guys got up and worked landscaping jobs from 6:00 until 3:00, then worked at the restaurant from 4:00 until 10:00 every day of the week, except Sundays. And if you’ve ever seen a landscaping crew working, or been in the kitchen of a restaurant, you know that these guys were not the only Latinos doing this. Contrast these people to any of the restaurant’s patrons, who were 90% fat, lazy, and for some inexplicable reason thought they needed to watch television while in their cars, and it’s not difficult to guess who built the district you are now king of.

This is why your position on illegal immigration is utterly nonsensical. The lifestyle that you and your constituents enjoy is entirely reliant upon the labor source of illegal immigrants. These are the people who build the houses, strip-malls, and sprawling parkways that you tout as Colorado’s “economic development”. I can guarantee that your constituents, on average, consume at least one fast food meal a day. Have you been to a fast food restaurant in Douglas County lately? Not even high school kids will work there anymore. You and your idiotic white upper-middle class constituents can rattle off all the hateful babble you like about Latino immigrants, but without those people, you wouldn’t have a house, you wouldn’t have a three lane parkway to cruise your Tahoe down, and you would probably starve to death, because you wouldn’t have any restaurants to eat at.

Furthermore, aside from the fact that immigrant labor built your district, the immigrants you target have no intention of being permanent residents of the United States, where they may or may not be a drain on our societal resources. They don’t want to be Americans any more than you want them to. For the most part, these people love the country they’re from, they only want to come to the U.S. to make a bundle of money that they can take home and retire on. I spent the past spring in Central America, and just about everyone I met (north of Nicaragua) had lived and worked for some time in the United States. But you know what, they all went back to their homes and families.

Do you put “Professional Hatemonger” on your resume?

Okay, at this point, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume that you (as any reasonable person would) already understand the points made above. Of course, a good deal of the blame belongs to the mindless multitudes of Centennial and surroundings, but you should not be swindling your constituents like this. This is the oldest trick in the book, playing on people’s fears and inciting racial hatred in order to gain a political advantage. While you may be winning so far, you’re not clever, and I hope that your inner shame will drive you to dementia and ruin. I apparently have no understanding of how low moral standards can sink, but I hope that one day you will realize how evil it is to: 1) make people believe false things for your own gain, and 2) insult and injure an entire group of people who have done nothing to you, save build and landscape your house, harvest and cook your food, and give you an excuse to get drunk in early May.

Toward a sensible policy

Despite my (at times) belligerent tone towards you, I do agree with you on one point: in a perfect world, we would not require cheap immigrant labor to build our homes and provide our food, nor would people in other countries need to leave their families and work demeaning jobs in order to make a decent living. The only question left is: how do we achieve that? Well, you and I both know that we can’t achieve this goal by building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. That’s not going to work any better than the “War on Drugs” has worked. We all know that.

If we really want to solve this problem, we need to do two things: 1) improve economic conditions in Central America, so that people do not need to migrate to the U.S. to earn a living wage, and 2) force Americans to pay a little more for their houses, roads, food, etc. To accomplish 1), we need to find a way to encourage economic growth in Central America. Not the kind of growth that free trade agreements bring, but true growth. We need Central American companies to create economic growth there, not U.S. companies exploiting cheap labor. My girlfriend and I developed a plan that will do just this: institute a guest worker program (5-7 years in the U.S., then you go home), add an extra tax on guest worker wages (about 3-5%), put this money in a special business grant fund, and then distribute this money as business grants to people who have returned to their home countries from the guest worker program. This plan allows us to force immigrants to invest in economic development in their home countries. This investment will eventually solve the immigration problem better than a wall ever could, because if people can make a decent living in their own country, they won’t leave. Solving issue 2) is a little more difficult, but I imagine once the source of cheap labor has dried up (through the abovementioned plan), market forces will force Americans to readjust their lifestyles. See, this problem can be solved without invoking racism, or spending billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars on nonsense like fences and a “War on Immigrants”.

Why I’ll be voting all the way from South Korea this November

Obviously, thinking there’s a chance that the 6th district would vote you out of office is slightly less realistic than expecting Isaac Newton to come prancing up on a unicorn to my 26th birthday party. I’ve lived in that suburban wasteland for long enough to know full well that you’ve got that district by the balls. So why did I even bother registering and requesting my absentee ballot? Well, aside from a very important governor’s race, the opportunity to make Colorado the state with the most progressive drug laws in the country, a horde of measures targeting gay people, and the all important local offices, this is my chance to offer my own personal fuck you to Tom Tancredo. I can write as many letters to you as I want; and your interns may or may not read more than two sentences of them. But the electoral system is my one constitutionally guaranteed right with which I can tell you to fuck off, and (whether or not my view wins) it gets officially counted somewhere. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up that right, as futile as it may seem. Not when people like you are running my country. You may represent the evangelical, dimwitted bunch that has invaded my state, but you’ll never represent me.


Regards,

travis h. eddy