On Thursday’s “NOW w/Alex Wagner” on MSNBC, MSNBC contributor and managing editor of The Grio Joy Reid charged that Republicans oppose elements of the controversial immigration reform bill out of desire for indentured servitude and to prevent what she called “brown people” from becoming U.S. citizens.
“I mean, didn’t we do this before?” Reid said at the opening of the show. “Wasn’t it called indentured servitude, right, where you come and pay all this money out and you are not a citizen, but you’re legally allowed to work on the farm? Like, this sounds like indentured servitude is what they want because as Josh [Barro] said, what Republicans are afraid of is — they don’t want to make these folks citizen because they don’t think they’ll vote for them in 13 years from now. They don’t think they can get there. But it is also a very sort of ugly ethnic argument that they don’t want to add more brown people to the population of the United States underlying the argument.”
“NOW” host Alex Wagner concurred, accusing Republicans of shutting out certain immigrants because they viewed them as unlikely to vote for GOP candidates in the future.
“And it’s this whole thing is sort of a goodwill effort to make inroads with brown people,” Wagner added. “I’m not sure that saying, ‘Hey, you can be here but you’re not going to be actually a citizen,’ really works. And the other thing, Kurt [Andersen] — this is unbelievable to me — is the Republicans are out in the open arguing we can’t let these people in because they’re going to be Democrats, as if citizenship should be contingent upon your voting record.”
Reid’s and Wagner’s remarks come the day after Idaho Republican Rep. Raul Labrador took on the show’s entire panel on similar grounds on the immigration issue.