Formation of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus and Rep. Tom Tancredo

Tom Tancredo founded the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus (hereinafter the Caucus or HIRC) in May 1999, soon after he began his first term as a Republican congressman from Colorado's Sixth District. During its first years, the Caucus had few members and served largely as a platform for Tancredo's views on immigration. He had started his career in elective office as a state representative in the 1970s associated with the Christian right.7 As an official in the Reagan Administration's Education Department during the 1980s, Tancredo advocated abolishing the Department of Education. In 1994, he began working at a think tank funded by Coors family money. At that time he described California's Proposition 187, as a "primal scream."8

Although Tancredo described himself as a candidate from the "religious right" during his 1998 campaign for congress, he had already shifted his main focus to immigration issues. It was a switch that many of those who later joined the Caucus would make as well.

On August 1, 2001five weeks before the events of 9-11Tancredo introduced H.R. 2712, a bill intended to begin a moratorium on legal immigration, according to the Library of Congress' THOMAS website. Much of the recent public discussion on immigration policy has been voiced about "illegal" immigration. The particulars of this bill, however, demonstrate that opposition to legal entry remains an integral part of so-called immigration reform. This initial proposal would have cut the number of visas issued for family-sponsored immigrants to zero. And it would have cut the visas for "priority workers" to zero. The bill was referred to committee, however, and went nowhere. Undeterred, Tancredo introduced H.R. 3222 on November 1, 2001 with the intention of sharply reducing the number of H1-B visas issued to high-tech professionals. That bill also was referred and died in a subcommittee.

It is useful to remember that questions related to immigration have always been intertwined with questions of national identity. As Rep. Tancredo told one interviewer, "&if we don't control immigration, legal and illegal, we will eventually reach the point where it won't be what kind of a nation we are, balkanized or united, we will have to face the fact that we are no longer a nation at all&"9 His is a sentiment which has been oft repeated by members of the HIRC.