At a campaign stop in Puerto Rico Rick Santorum said that while serving in the U.S. House of Representatives representing the state of Pennsylvania, his former colleagues in Congress jokingly referred to him as “Senador Puertorriqueno.” I find that hard to believe.

If Santorum knows and cares so much about the island of Puerto Rico and it’s citizens, how could he then turn around and insult them by saying that the people of the island need to learn English if they want their island to become a state? From HuffPo:

“This needs to be a bilingual country, not just a Spanish-speaking country. Right now, it is overwhelmingly just Spanish,” Santorum told reporters Thursday.

Those who attended Santorum’s events here – he’s spent two days in Puerto Rico, meeting with the governor and holding town hall meetings in addition to visiting an evangelical church – were overwhelmingly concerned about statehood and English. At a town hall Wednesday focused on veterans’ issues, Santorum was asked about statehood. And during a Thursday morning visit to a special needs school, one of the invited parents changed the subject away from caring for a special needs child to the island’s political future.

Puerto Rico considers English and Spanish as its official language, but Spanish is the dominant language. Many of the island’s citizens speak virtually no English.

The problem with the “Puerto Rican’s need to learn English if they want to be citizens” line of thinking is that this same line of thinking has never been used to discourage Europeans from emigrating to the United States. European emigrants were allowed into America by the millions in the 1800’s and early 1900’s in order to reduce the percentage of the population that was of black origin, which reached as high as 30-some percent.

The United States of America, unlike Puerto Rico, has never had an official language, although English has always been the dominant language.

In an attempt to appeal to the Tea Party crowd with rhetoric about the need for people to learn English if they want to be Americans, Santorum has probably made himself even less popular in a territory where the governor has already endorsed Mitt Romney.

Lo siento Rick, you messed up and I doubt Puerto Rican voters are going to have forgiven you before their primary.