Think Progress
Sunday, November 26, 2006

Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), one of the leading voices on immigration for the right, claims President George W. Bush is plotting to merge the U.S. with Mexico and Canada. An excerpt from WorldNetDaily:

Tancredo lashed out at the White House’s lack of action in securing U.S. borders, and said efforts to merge the U.S. with both Mexico and Canada is not a fantasy.

“I know this is dramatic — or maybe somebody would say overly dramatic — but I’m telling you, that everything I see leads me to believe that this whole idea of the North American Union, it’s not something that just is written about by right-wing fringe kooks. It is something in the head of the president of the United States, the president of Mexico, I think the prime minister of Canada buys into it. …

You might think the right would immediately repudiate this kind of conspiracy theory. You’d be wrong. The National Review’s Andy McCarthy came to Tancredo’s defense:

This is not a fringe. It’s a wave. It’s fine to disagree with Rep. Trancredo; it’s wrong to treat him like a lunatic when he is anything but.

More McCarthy:

[I]t’s not unreasonable for people to look at Bush’s immigration policies and worry that he is insufficiently alert to the internationalist pressures (what John Fonte calls “transnational progressivism”) vigorously challenging the traditional understanding of sovereignty on many fronts.

Fox’s Neil Cavuto recently said Tancredo “owns” the issue of immigration predicted that “if he were to run for president, he just might well be president.”