Congressman Steve King, a politician so maniacally xenophobic that he very likely believes people waiting in the drive-through lane at Taco Bell should be called before tribunals to have their patriotic bona fides evaluated, did something interesting the other day.
He actually suggested we look to another nation, Singapore of all places, for solutions to the exhaustively reported population or brain-drain problem in Iowa.
Rather than taking the obvious route of fast-tracking to citizenship some Latino immigrants already here and in the workforce, some legal, some illegal, King says Iowa needs a “fertility” plan.
Former Lt. Gov. Art Neu of Carroll in a recent Rotary meeting asked the visiting King to elaborate on references the GOP congressman has made in the media to a “fertility” program King contends could plug a void now filled with immigrant labor.
“I gave them a whole list of things that we could do,” King said. “There are nations out there that encourage a greater birthrate.”
King singled out Singapore, a nation King said has had some privacy issues at the root of its birthrate problems.
He said the government of Singapore came up with the following plan to increase pregnancies: “We think you ought to put newspapers in your car (windows) to get more privacy.”
Added King, “I remember those things when I read them. They kind of stand out in my mind.”
King didn’t say more about his fertility plan. But for future reference he may want to note that Singapore also launched a “speed dating” program to encourage young professionals to meet and marry with dispatch.
The congressman correctly noted that President Theodore Roosevelt also sought to promote fertility.
Roosevelt’s take in the early 20th century was decidedly more modern than King’s present-day stance, though.
Republican Roosevelt strongly supported “new” immigration and noted that the descendants of Puritans lacked the courage to live, and should be replaced by those willing to reproduce.
We face a different problem in Iowa today. Educated young white people lack the will to live in Iowa.
It should be noted that King left at least one Rotarian, attorney and Iowa Savings Bank financial professional Michel Nelson, thinking about his own family links to illegal immigration.
“My great-grandfather Albert Nelson was a merchant seaman who spent years traversing the North Atlantic and Baltic Sea for Swedish ship owners,” Nelson writes in his popular monthly newsletter. “Tiring of the hard life, he jumped ship in Boston harbor and illegally entered America by stealth. Not until 1883 did he swear off allegiance to King Oscar II and become an American citizen. Please don’t tell Congressman Steve King. He may want me to leave and I’m too old to learn Swedish.”
After his remarks on papering car windows to allow for back-seat intercourse, and presumably more white babies, King moved on to other topics in an interview with the Daily Times Herald, pressing issues like the potential for taxing hookers without legalizing prostitution.
“I want to tax them,” King said. “If we go to a national sales tax they’re going to have to buy their high-heeled shoes and their hoes and their dresses.”
Hookers, you see, don’t generally report their incomes and file things like W2s. But King makes the point that they do go shopping. (Remember Julia Roberts’ character in “Pretty Woman” in the Rodeo Drive shopping spree?)
“Yeah,” King said. “Sooner or later the profit they get out of there, they’re going to spend, and when they spend it we’ll get a chance to tax it so we’ll be taxing coyotes (immigrant smugglers) and prostitutes and drug dealers and pornographers.”
During his Rotary speech and follow-up interview King repeatedly insisted that race doesn’t play a role in his thinking about immigration or anything else — in spite of the disturbing correlations between the eugenics movement of the previous century and King’s not-so-subtle message that more of the right kind of people need to be having kids, people, ironically, that are a lot like me, white former fraternity guys with decent golf swings.
King told me he’s so color-blind that he tells his staff not to be racist.
“It doesn’t matter what they look like,” King said. “In fact, I sent one of our staff people down to New Orleans to identify people that could be brought up and welcomed here to Iowa and I gave him a direct order: you find people in need, you help people in need and I do not want to know what color they are.”
If King has to tell staff not to be racist, it doesn’t take a psychology degree to figure out that he’s inclined toward prejudice himself.
That being said, one probably needs a doctorate and tenured professorship to understand King’s bizarre fascination with Singapore’s car-window-papering scheme and his thoughts on taxing hookers’ shoes.
