RICHARDSON: "MY BLOOD BOILS" OVER "UGLY" IMMIGRATION QUESTIONS. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson opened up about his personal dislike of the present immigration debate in front of an audience of Iowa Hispanics yesterday.
"I don't like the immigration debate," Richardson told a meeting of the Heritage of Latino Americans (HOLA) Wells Fargo affinity group at the Wells Fargo campus in West Des Moines, adding that he gets questions about what he would do about immigration "everywhere I go in this country."
"Deep down, I sense they're asking, that's a Hispanic governor on the border. I hope he's not going to open up the border," he said. "Today at the Iowa State Fair, someone said to me, 'You're pretty tall to be a Mexican.'"
Richardson, who was born in California but raised in Mexico and the U.S., interspersed his English-language remarks with the occasional sentence in Spanish.
"My blood boils when I get these questions," said. "Deport them. Get them out of here....What we have seen is some ugly threads."
Richardson urged tolerance -- "Nobody should be demonized" -- and again praised Sen. John McCain for his "courageous" leadership in putting together the spring's failed immigration bill with Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.
"He did the right thing," said Richardson.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
