Maddow: White supremacist views still ruling GOP policy on immigration

Wednesday night on "The Rachel Maddow Show," host Rachel Maddow discussed how white supremacist ideology lies at the heart of Republican immigration policy, no matter how vehemently the party may deny it. Maddow suggested to the GOP that perhaps their minority outreach program would go more smoothly if they tried to act just a little less crazy and racist.

Maddow began with the story of Jason Richwine, a Harvard-educated Ph.D. and Heritage Foundation fellow who released a study earlier this year claiming that immigration reform will cost the country trillions of dollars because Latino immigrants have lower IQs that white Americans.

“The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population and the difference is likely to persist over several generations,” Richwine wrote in the report. "No one knows whether Hispanics will reach IQ party with whites but that they’ll have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”

In short, Richwine's argument boiled down to "immigrants are stupid parasites that will drag down the U.S. economy."

Maddow explained Richwine's position as, "Immigration reform could not happen in the United States because it would cost $6.5 trillion. It's more than it costs to go to the moon and back 1,000 times," she said, "but they decided that's what it would cost to let all these low IQ immigrants in the United States get legal status."

"While the racial purification guy ended up getting fired," she continued, "his report stayed. His report that immigration reform would cost a bajillion dollars, that report has stuck around and Heritage is still trying to use it."

This in spite of the fact that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has studied the question and concluded that immigration reform would save the country about $175 billion over the next 10 years and another $700 billion over the decade after that.

It's just one of the many contradictory positions being staked out by members of the GOP as it struggles to come to grips with immigration reform. Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) met with the all-Democratic Congressional Hispanic Caucus on Wednesday, but on the same day stated that he would consider no immigration bills or allow voting on any immigration proposals that did not have the support of the majority of Republicans in the House.

Other Republicans including Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) were conducting an all day long press conference on Wednesday from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. declaring over and over that immigration reform will be disastrous for the country.

Former Fox News Channel personality and professional conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck compared immigration rights crusaders who recently protested at the Kansas Secretary of State's house to the notorious vigilante racist group the Ku Klux Klan.

"Seven hundred protesters got into buses at a church and went to his house to protest," said Beck in his Wednesday Internet-only broadcast. "This, I believe, is the exact same tactics used by the Klan in the 1960s."

"If by tactic, you mean, you know, traveling from point A to point B in a vehicle powered by a combustion engine, then yes immigration reform protesters are exactly like the KKK, Mr. Beck," Maddow quipped.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, she said, reports are coming that a bipartisan bill is in the works and come come as early as this week.

Watch the clip, embedded below via MSNBC:

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