A Republican state house candidate from northern Florida is standing by her proposal to build internment camps for undocumented immigrants that would “collect enough illegal aliens until you have enough to ship them back.”

Marg Baker, who’s one of three GOP candidates running for the nomination for Florida’s 48th district, made the announcement earlier this month at a meeting of the 9-12 Project, Glenn Beck’s political activist group.

ADVERTISEMENT

“We can follow what happened back in the ’40s or ’50s [when] I was just a little girl in Miami and they built camps for the people that snuck into the country,” Baker said.

“Because they were illegal, they put them in the camps and they shipped them back,” Baker said, to applause.

Her pronouncement “stunned” the district’s Republican incumbent, Peter Nehr.

“We do have an illegal immigration problem, but we can’t start just putting people in camps,” Nehr told the St. Petersburg Times. “I’ve known Marg for many, many years and I was stunned to hear her say that.”

In an interview with Salon, Baker explained her comments, saying what she was proposing was “something like” the internment camps that housed people of Japanese origin during World War II.

ADVERTISEMENT

“But unfortunately in the Japanese camps they detained American citiziens. The only ones I want to detain are the ones who are illegal,” Baker said.

“You don’t need to think of them as prisons or as luxury accommodations, just regular homes like a lot of poor people live in,” she told the St. Petersburg Times. “Collect enough illegal aliens until you have enough to ship them back.”

Baker added: “Who knows what diseases they are carrying or if they are criminals? They snuck in here and are walking among us. This is wrong.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Baker’s campaign Web site lists five “reasons” to not tolerate undocumented immigrants:

1. They have chosen to ignore our laws. Our country has laws governing the admittance of foreigners into our country including checking for communicable diseases. Illegals have chosen to ignore these laws, which protect the legal citizens.

2. Illegal weapons trade

3. Prostitution

4. Drug trade

5. And more

ADVERTISEMENT

Baker’s proposal on Thursday landed her the dubious honor of being named “Worst Person in the World” by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

The following video was posted to YouTube Aug. 8, 2010 by user saintpeter4 (via Matthew Yglesias).