CLICK HERE FOR A COPY OF Senator Altes' email to Bill Vines
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 29, 2007
Little Rock, AR – Today the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas condemned the comments delivered by State Senator Denny Altes in an email to former Fort Smith Mayor Bill Vines, in which Altes compares being “overrun” with illegal immigrants to being “out populated” by black people. “I am for sending the illegals back but we know that is impossible. We are where we were with the black folks after the revolutionary war. We can’t send them back and the more we piss them off the worse it will be in the future…. Sure we are being overrun but we are being out populated by the blacks also.”
Senator Altes’ remarks make it all too clear that the sentiment that too often colors the immigration debate is just your garden-variety racism that is an affront to core American values.
The Senator could not have made it clearer: the truth is that he feels that there are just too many Latinos (and African-Americans) around. It’s this type of racism and fear of being in the minority that propels some of the cruel and irrational proposed immigration policies we’ve seen in recent years.
“America is stronger when it integrates immigrants, and to do that we need rational policies based on facts, not fear.”
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