September 26, 2012 07:45 PM UTC

Talk show hosts encourage guest who says undocumented immigrants "want to cut your throats"

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• by: Jason Salzman

“I spent three days living in the dirt on the Mexican-Arizona border, and there are more than people crossing the border who want to cut your lawn. They want to cut your throats,”  filmmaker Dennis Lynch told radio hosts Devon Lentz and Tom Lucero on Greeley’s KFKA radio Sept. 10, adding that “the border is wide open.”

“Another 9-11 can happen at any time,” Lynch said, on the eve of the 11th anniversary of the tragedy. “They can be in any city in three days.”

(Someone like Timothy McVeigh could get there faster, but let’s not think about that right now.)

My question is, why would Lucero and Lentz, both former executives with the Larimer County Republican Party, sit there and let an angry filmmaker trash millions of hard-working people?

What about the taxes they pay? What about the work they do?

If there’s one thing we all know about illegal immigration, it’s that simplistic swipes like Lynch’s don’t contribute to solving the problem. They make it worse and breed sadness and hostility.

But Lucero and Lentz didn’t see it that way, at least on the radio September 10.

“That was phenomenal,” Lucero gushed at Lynch, minutes after Lynch told Lucero that he and Lentz will have to change the language of their radio show when tens of millions of illegal immigrants flood across the border in the coming years as the economy improves.

“You’re going to have to learn how to do your radio show in Spanish, and that’s not me being a racist,” said Lynch, whose fear-mongering underground film is titled “They come to America.”

Lynch’s solution is to vote for (hold your breath) Mitt Romney!

Why? Partly, Lynch said on the radio, because Obama has authorized giving work permits to illegal-immigrant children, who are excelling in school and who were brought to this country through no fault of their own.

And Obama supports the Dream-Act idea of giving a path to citizenship to these children, if they excel in school.

Why is it so horrible to give these children a break? Why is it so bad to support comprehensive immigration reform, like Obama does, increasing border security, while offering illegal immigrants in our country an arduous path to citizenship??

If you were listening to the radio show, you have no idea what’s wrong with these policies because they weren’t debated.  Lucero and Lentz took the low road and offered not a flash hope for a person with a questioning mind.

All they did was trash undocumented immigrants, and that approach doesn’t help us deal with the problem of illegal immigration.

Lentz told her radio audience that Lynch’s video made her think about illegal immigration, and now she was “mad.”

“I went to Wal-Mart the other day,” she told listeners. “Nearly everything I saw in the package department at Wal-Mart is in Spanish too, right under English.”

And Devon, were you worried, as you left the store, that the Hispanic man cutting the lawn was going to try to cut your throat?