<p><strong>To the editor:</strong></p>
<p>Finally we have a politician who says what he really believes.</p>
<p>Rep. David Stringer, an Arizona Republican, spoke this month at a public forum. His speech was livestreamed on Facebook and saved to his campaign page. So there can be no question about his being misquoted.</p>
<p>Stringer said "immigration is politically destabilizing" and "immigration today represents an existential threat to the United States." He then went on to say: "If we don’t do something about immigration very, very soon, the demographics of our country will be irrevocably changed and we will be a very different country and we will not be the country you were born into."</p>
<p>Now we have a clear vision of Republican policy toward immigration. There are no code words, no oblique references. It’s plain, outspoken and abhorrent.</p>
<p>Critics and other Republicans will say Stringer’s comments do not represent the party as a whole. If that’s the case, then why are they not speaking up, denouncing both overt and covert expressions of racism? Why have no national, state or even local Republicans spoken out in support of inclusion rather than exclusion?</p>
<p>A failure to condemn is tantamount to endorsement. So until I hear clear words to the contrary, I have to believe these kinds of remarks are what today’s Republican Party has devolved to. I would love to be proved wrong.</p>
<p>There’s an almost delicious irony in the fact that a white Arizona politician talks about demographics. Arizona is a state the United States took forcibly from Mexico after the Mexican War of 1846-1848 and which Mexico and Spain took forcibly from the indigenous people who had lived there for centuries.</p>
<p>Sometimes politicians speak the truth, even when they might not mean to.</p>
<p><p style="text-align: right"><strong>Richard Gotshall</strong></p>
<p><p style="text-align: right"><strong>Franklin</strong></p>
