Bill Winter is running for Congress against Rep. Tom Tancredo. Like other Democrats, he supports the Senate amnesty, and thus everything said about that horrible bill applies. Moreover, his page on immigration has several questionable or misleading statements:

1. His page twice refers to the "INS", an agency that hasn't existed since March 2003. While this might seem like a minor error, if whoever wrote that page doesn't even know that the INS no longer exists it tends to raise questions whether the other proposals on that page have been thought through as well.

2. He complains about the Republican leadership cutting funding for the Border Patrol and ICE, without disclosing that the Republicans are split into two camps on this issue: the more open-borders Bush camp (which is aligned with the Democrats) and the pro-borders camp, including Rep. Tancredo.

3. The page includes a picture of - and references - China's Great Wall, without stating that what Winter calls a "wall" is not a wall but a fence, and the fence is similar to fencing already in place on the border.

4. The page falsely states that "Tancredo maintains that we need to corral all 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States and deport them". As Tancredo has pointed out, he prefers attrition and not mass deportations. In fact, the article that section links to ("CBS4 Examines Illegal Immigrant Costs In Colorado") does not state what Winters claims, and instead refers to Tancredo's attrition plan. Under that plan, increased border and workplace enforcement would lead to a large number of illegal aliens leaving voluntarily as well as prospective illegal aliens deciding not to come.

5. The page refers to a study concerning the costs of deporting all illegal aliens from the liberal Center for American Progress. The page does not discuss the ludicrous methodology used in the study, which assumed that the deportations for one year represented a best-case effort, and then divided the number of aliens deported by the agents' salaries. Obviously, the enforcement being done now is not in any way a "best-case effort".

6. The page claims that failing to pass "comprehensive immigration reform" - what most refer to as an amnesty and which would result in somewhere between 20 and 60 million new legal immigrants over 20 years - makes the U.S. more vulnerable. However, the GAO admits that the USCIS is already stretched to the limit and won't even have a fraud management program in place until 2010. And, considering that most of those former illegal aliens who would be made legal workers under the plan Winter supports come from countries with high levels of corruption and low-tech record keeping, the "reform" he supports is a massive recipe for disaster not just because of fraud but also because of the possibility of terrorist infiltration.

7. Winter claims that raising the minimum wage "will take away the incentive to hire illegal workers in the first place". In practice, that's false because that will make illegal labor more attractive and allow current and future illegal aliens to underbid legal workers. (Maybe he got this idea from the Drum Major Institute or from... Michael Dukakis.)

Winter also blogs at... bill-winter.dailykos.com.

Tags: Bill Winter, Tom Tancredo, Tancredo