NY candidate Jack Davis: Bus blacks to farms to pick crops

Congressional candidate Jack Davis said in a Republican Party endorsement meeting that Latino farmworkers should be deported and that inner-city African-Americans should be bused to farms to pick crops.

Several sources who attended the endorsement interview confirmed Davis' statement to Buffalo News.

The remark echoes a similar comment he made to the Tonawanda News in 2008.

"We have a huge unemployment problem with black youth in our cities," Davis said. "Put them on buses, take them out there and pay them a decent wage; they will work."

Davis is seeking to represent New York's 26th Congressional District, a seat vacated by Republican Rep. Chris Lee hours after it was reported the congressman, who is married, advertised himself on Craigslist as divorced, single and looking for a woman.

"It may not be politically correct and it may not be racially correct, but when you have African American people in Buffalo who do not have jobs and are out of work, why are you bringing people into this country illegally to take jobs?" Davis spokesman W. Curtis Ellis said.

The Republican Party has endorsed Assemblywoman Jane L. Corwin of Clarence and Davis is now collecting signatures in hopes of appearing as the Tea Party candidate in the May 24 special election. He has previously ran for Congress as a Democrat.

In a column at Buffalo News, Rod Watson suggested the idea of busing jobless young blacks to farms should be separated from its source, noting that what Davis said was not as offensive as what Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and other GOP presidential hopefuls have recently said.

But, Watson added, "It’s also fair to ask how many blacks Davis has hired, or how many jobs he has funded in light of his expressed interest in unemployed African-Americans."