State Rep. Alvin Holmes Says Obama’s Immigration Speech Racist
President Barrack Obama is using what he calls his executive powers to shield about five million undocumented immigrants from deportation. In a speech given last night, the President unveiled his plan to overhaul America’s immigration policy. But one Alabama state representative is not pleased with Obama’s plan, going so far as to call it racist.
Alabama News Network received several statements from Alabama elected officials with reaction to the president’s speech, many of them taking issue with the president for using executive action. But State Representative Alvin Holmes, who’s a democrat like Obama, called us to say he thought the speech was racist because Obama did not specifically mention Africans.
“They’re leaving out Africans because they don’t want Africans over here,” Holmes says. “If they hear that Africans are coming to the United States, they intercept them at sea and turn around the boat and send them back to their original country.”
Holmes says he believes Obama’s administration focuses too heavily on fairer-skinned immigrants.
“They don’t permit Haitians to come to this country, they don’t permit Nigerians to come or no people from Africa.”
But Sam Brooke of the Southern Poverty Law Center says he doesn’t think the president is excluding Africans, or any group of people.
“I’m sure that President Obama is largely addressing Latinos because that’s the largest percentage of immigrants that we have that could potentially be affected by this, but there’s nothing in what he announced that would favor one group or another.”
And in a statement, Congresswoman Terri Sewell says she believes the president’s “executive actions ensure accountability and that everyone plays by the same rules.”
But Holmes says the policy isn’t fair toward all immigrants, and he says until it is, none should be allowed to stay in the country.
“As far as I’m concerned, they can take down the Statue of Liberty,” Holmes says. “We got enough people in the country already. That was during the time when this was a new country and they had to have people here to build up a country…so we got enough now.”
Although President Obama is delaying deportation for millions of undocumented immigrants, it doesn’t make them U.S. Citizens.
