On Wednesday’s “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” radio row, an annual event hosted by the anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform, former Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., suggested to conservative radio host Matt Tompkins that in order to vote, all Americans should take the same “simple, stupid” American citizenship test given to immigrants.
Tancredo said gaining U.S. citizenship shouldn’t be easy because “it’s like anything else, you know, if you work hard for something, it maybe has more value to you and you actually can determine if a person really wants it, you know, to become an American citizen. I don’t want it to be like candy you hand out.”
“Here’s what I’d like,” Tancredo continued. “I would like a civics literacy test for everyone in America to vote. Before you can vote, take a civics literacy test, and you know which one it would be? It’s the civics test we give to every single immigrant.”
According to Tancredo, “If we expect somebody to come here from another country, another culture, another language, to pass a simple, stupid test,” Americans should be required to pass the same test … though, he said, most Americans probably would not be able to do so.
