Leadership Quote by Tom Tancredo

Tancredo’s line reads like a budget memo, but it’s really a framing device: turn a human migration story into a balance sheet that feels vaguely incriminating. By leading with “the issue of remittances,” he primes the audience to treat money sent home not as wages earned, but as a policy problem - a leak in the national container. “Millions of Mexicans” functions less as demographic detail than as scale-as-threat, a rhetorical swell that makes the later number land with more force.

The “sending back dollars” phrasing is doing quiet ideological work. It implies an improper direction of flow, as if the natural, rightful destination of that pay is permanent circulation inside U.S. borders. That’s the subtext: immigrants are not fully participating in the American project because their loyalties - financial, familial, emotional - remain elsewhere. Remittances become a proxy accusation: they’re here, but not for us.

Then the number: “10 billion dollars a year.” Even without context (it’s a small fraction of the U.S. economy, and remittances are typically drawn from already-taxed earnings), the figure is meant to feel enormous, a headline statistic that converts a complex system into a single, portable grievance. The “He said” hedge is telling, too. It lets Tancredo amplify a claim while keeping distance from its accuracy, the way politics often borrows certainty without assuming responsibility.

Contextually, this sits inside mid-2000s restrictionist politics, where economic anxiety and cultural boundary-making fused. Remittances aren’t just money here; they’re a stand-in for the fear that national membership can be temporary, transactional, and ultimately uncontainable.