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Tan Nguyen -- worse than I thought

A comment on my post about Tan Nguyen prompted me to track down the original Spanish-language version of the letter and translate it myself. People have been insisting that it's pro-citizen-voting, but I found it worse than I actually expected.

In short, after opening with a throwaway "we encourage citizens to vote" line, it not only misleadingly says that immigrants can't vote, but also that a national computer system is collecting everyone's information, and that anti-immigration groups will be able to access it. There is no national system accessible to anti-immigration groups. If I were a naturalized citizen of Latino descent living in an area with a Minuteman group, I'd be pretty freaked out by the concept of my registration information being handed out freely to militants who oppose my presence in the country. The letter ends with another nonsequiter threat of jail time, and urges the reader not to listen to any other politicians who might tell them they're allowed to vote.

I've posted the full Spanish text, with my translation, here.

Of course, all of this can obfuscate a key point -- this was sent to 14,000 registered Democrats. Why wasn't it sent to registered Republicans? Why wasn't it sent out in English? In Vietnamese? Surely Tan knows an illegal immigrant or two...

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on October 23, 2006 04:44 PM.

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