BUCHANAN HAMMERS AWAY AT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

JOHNSTON, Iowa (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan
Wednesday linked illegal immigration from Mexico to a serial killer, prison
overcrowding and a flood of drugs in the United States.

"We have now in this (Rafael) Resendez Ramirez character really, if you
will, the poster boy for what is happening in illegal immigration,"
Buchanan said during an interview on Iowa Public Television.

"Here's a character that's gone back and forth across the American border,
illegally, for 23 years. He's believed to have murdered eight Americans.
He's been held by the (U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service) and
border patrol and let go because there's no coordination," Buchanan said.

The 39-year-old Ramirez, one of several aliases used by the Mexican
national, is a suspect in eight murders in Texas, Illinois and Kentucky and
is on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.

The Justice Department was investigating why immigration authorities, who
arrested Ramirez in New Mexico in June, deported him to freedom in Mexico
instead of holding him for other law enforcement agencies.

Buchanan, making his third White House bid, said one-quarter of federal
prisoners are illegal aliens and contribute to jail overcrowding.

He said even in Iowa -- a state far removed from the U.S.-Mexico border --
the issue resonates because around 90 percent of the illegal drug
methamphetamine is smuggled into Iowa from Mexico.

Buchanan went on to claim 80 percent of domestic violence in Iowa was due
to methamphetamine use.

Officials who run Iowa's domestic abuse shelters conducted a survey in
March which found that 15 percent of batterers used methamphetamine.

Buchanan called for installing triple-layer, chain-link security fences
where immigrants are flooding across the border. He named El Paso and
Brownsville, Texas, and Douglas, Arizona, as likely sites, and said a fence
erected near San Diego curbed the tide of illegal immigrants there.

Buchanan said farmers and ranchers along the border were arming themselves
against the slaughter of their cattle and other vandalism attributed to
illegal immigrants.

Buchanan, a fierce critic of the North American Free-Trade Agreement,
hammered away at the threat of illegal immigration in his failed 1992 and
1996 presidential campaigns.