Center for Immigration Studies
The Right Side of History: Religious Leaders Urge Immigration Reform at Hearing
originally posted by Seth Hoy for Immigration Impact [click here]
Jul 14th
At a House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration hearing today, a panel of conservative religious leaders made the case for common sense solutions to our immigration problems—comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) that secures our borders, follows the rule of law and provides a pathway to citizenship for the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. While the hearing, The Ethical Imperative for Reform of Our Immigration System, started off with ethical and biblical arguments supporting and opposing reform, it later evolved into what most immigration debates eventually boil down to—fairness, justice and the punitive aspects of a reform effort.
The majority witnesses—Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson and VP of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Dean Mathew Staver of the Liberty University School of Law—testified to the moral and biblical mandate to care for “the least of these among us,” the “strangers” who reside in our land, and to act justly and mercifully by enacting comprehensive immigration reform. Faith leaders will continue to reach out and support the undocumented population, Dr. Land said, but “only a proper government response can resolve our immigration crisis.”
“Get tough on immigration” hardliners—Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Rep. Steve King (R-IA)—however, pushed back on religious leaders by citing scripture that quote the “rule of law” and advocate the “punishing of wrongdoers.” “Americans need not repent for wanting to follow the rule of law,” Rep Smith said, “A truly Christian approach would be to end illegal immigration.” Likewise, the single witness for the minority, Dr. James R. Edwards, Jr. of the restrictionist group Center for Immigration Studies, testified that biblical precepts of compassion and mercy “might not apply to civil government of the nation-state of which we are citizens. Sometimes, such application would actually be harmful and wrong.”
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL)—among others—took particular offense to Dr. Edwards’ distinction. Rep. Gutierrez replied, “I want my government to be a reflection of my values, don’t you?” Rep. Charles Gonzalez (D-TX) asked Dr. Edwards if our current immigration laws were just and whether deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living here was considered “justice?” Dr. Edwards replied “no” to both questions.
The underlying tension in the room, however, wasn’t whether our immigration system is broken (everyone in the room agreed on that) but in how to fix it—and a step further, what a “just punishment” might look like. While the majority of committee members and witnesses agreed on CIR as a solution, immigration restrictionists championed the Arizona SB1070 model—enforcement through attrition—that is, create enforcement laws so harsh that people choose to leave the state. Rev. Mathew Staver, Dean of Liberty University School of Law, argued that deportation wasn’t the answer and that the conservative “amnesty” scare tactic wasn’t helping anyone:
I call upon those who label an earned path to legal status as amnesty to stop politicizing this debate needlessly and to honestly acknowledge the difference.
Dr. Richard Land echoed Rev. Staver’s complaint that “amnesty” is, in fact, something very different from proposed CIR proposals.
Some critics, however, suggest that “comprehensive reform” is a code for amnesty, but such action is not amnesty because it does not merely pardon an offender. My proposal requires lawbreakers to pay a fine, learn to read, write and speak English, and follow a rigorous process for legal status. Penalties, probation, and requirements do not equal “amnesty.” Going to the back of the line behind those who have, and are trying, to come here legally is not amnesty. These are principles of justice and fairness that respect the rule of law and treat all parties involved (American citizens, legal immigrants and illegal immigrants) with dignity.
While restrictionist committee members continued to argue that CIR and its prescribed penalties—paying fines, going back to the end of the line, etc.—were simply not enough, religious leaders like Rev. Staver, continued to drive home the point that immigration is not a “right left” issue, but a “right wrong” issue, a moral issue, and that we “should not allow partisan politics to deter us from the ultimate goal of fixing a broken system.”
Photo by Lone Primate.
Conflating Immigration and Climate Change: When Wedge Issues Collide
originally posted by Wendy Sefsaf for Immigration Impact [click here]
Jun 2nd
Today in Politico, hard right, conservative Gary Bauer continues the restrictionist tradition of blaming immigrants for everything from pot holes to climate change. In his editorial, Bauer cites a 2008 report by the restrictionist group Center for Immigration Studies and seeks to link climate change legislation and immigration reform legislation (and a half dozen other ideas for which he advocates) to make the wholly unclear point the immigrants are once again to blame for our environmental problems.
Bauer cites a 2008 CIS report which identified immigrants as the cause of global warming:
Immigrants would ultimately produce less CO2 if they just remained in their “less-consuming, less-industrialized, and less CO2 emitting” home countries.
Bauer then goes on to write:
As a conservative, I maintain a healthy skepticism of the theory of man-made global warming. I also believe that more people enjoying the fruits of modernity and economic development is a good thing — as long as those people arrived legally and obey the law.
In other words, he doesn’t believe in global warming, but we should stop immigration because immigrants are a huge contributor to the factors that cause it. Besides being a ridiculous argument, Bauer seems to contradict himself—wouldn’t immigrants still be the cause of global warming even if they came here legally?
As the IPC previously stated:
When it comes to the environment, immigrants are not the problem—the US lifestyle , our systems of production and consumption and the policies that shape them are. We need real, rational solutions and leadership on environmental issues, not scapegoats. CIS assumes that we are in a lifeboat with limited resources , and with too many people, we’ll all sink. Yet when it comes to the global warming crisis , we’ll all sink or swim together.
The number of strange correlations Bauer attempts to draw in this piece is confounding. One thing, however, is clear: Bauer and CIS’s intent isn’t environmentalism. They’re only politicizing and exploiting the issue—and highlighting shoddy research—in order to continue a crusade to tar immigrants (and liberals).
The only thing Bauer and his friends at CIS are doing when it comes to these two critical issues is attempting to distract attention from the real solutions to immigration and the global warming crisis. We do need a better, more regulated approach to immigration and the environment, but wishing away immigrants and blaming them for climate change does nothing to that end.
Photo by \<.
Center for Immigration Studies vs. The Truth
Apr 6th
On a recent public radio program in Wisconsin, Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies was confronted about his controversial organization by a local organizer.
Rather than address the concerns being raised, Camarota instead implied that the organizer had a “deep hatred of American workers.”
For more information on CIS go here, here, here or here.
Center for Immigration Studies Picks Up Torch on Greening Bigotry
originally posted by Rebecca Poswolsky for IMAGINE 2050 » Immigration [click here]
Apr 1st
Anti-immigrant groups are eyeing America’s environmental movement in the hopes that it will serve their controversial agenda.
Immigration and climate change might not seem to have much in common, but a bitter battle has been waging between the anti-immigrant movement and mainstream environmental groups for decades. The John Tanton Network is, as usual, deeply involved in this conflict.
The latest example of anti-immigrant attacks on environmentalists comes from Center for Immigration Studies, a controversial anti-immigrant group founded by John Tanton, who also founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
Spearheading the effort is Jerry Kammer, senior research fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies with his memo entitled, “Strategic Negligence: How the Sierra Club’s Distortion on Border and Immigration Policy Are Undermining Its Environmental Legacy”.
Jerry Kammer isn’t just writing about the Sierra Club, he’s also taking his attacks to the Breakdown the Walls conference in Phoenix, Arizona. He intends to speak on a panel today titled, “The Politics of the Environment in the Modern World.” Jerry Kammer and Center for Immigration studies are trying once again to divide and conquer environmentalists in the hopes of bringing climate-concerned activists into their anti-immigrant fold.
Leaders in the John Tanton Network may seem to have a genuine interest in environmental issues, but it is important to remember that John Tanton built his network in part from the $1.2 million he received from the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund is a foundation that has a history of promoting the genetic superiority of white, European-Americans.
Organizations founded by or in connection with Tanton should not be considered legitimate environmental voices. While Tanton has a long history in environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club, his increasing dissatisfaction in the 1970’s with progressive environmentalists led him down an extreme path. He eventually created groups like FAIR and CIS to focus on U.S population control, and forged troubling ties with white nationalists.
In the 1990s, Tanton helped with an effort to pressure the Sierra Club to officially take an anti-immigration position. A major battle ensued, with many Sierra Club members seeing the proposed stance as fundamentally racist. Tanton later wrote that “the Sierra Club may not want to touch the immigration issue, but the immigration issue is going to touch the Sierra Club!”
At the time, Carl Pope, current Sierra Club chairman, considered it a hostile takeover attempt, “The whole idea of people trying to hijack an organization to advance their cause was outrageous,” Pope told a Washington Times Reporter in 2006. “And I found many of the things he [Tanton] had said since I had known him deplorable and unconscionable.”
Jerry Kammer is trying to continue what Tanton started; he is attempting to green hate and force an anti-immigrant voice onto the environmental movement.
Kammer has attacked Carl Pope for trying to protect the integrity of the Sierra Club. Pope said if the Sierra Club comes out in favor of lower immigration levels, “we would be perceived as assisting people whose motivations are racist.” Kammer referred to it as a “smear campaign”.
The only ‘smear’ that is evident here is the one anti-immigrant groups are trying to pull on legitimate environmentalists.
Top to Bottom, FAIR is Steeped in Extremism
originally posted by Jill Garvey for IMAGINE 2050 » Immigration [click here]
Mar 29th
‘What’s in a name?’ is an especially relevant question when it comes to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). For an organization with such a benign moniker, it has a whole lot of hate propping it up. Go to FAIR’s website and at first glance it may seem like just another conservative, beltway organization; relatively boring, chock full of links to articles and “factual” data on immigration, but lurking a few clicks away are clues to FAIR’s more sinister core.
FAIR was founded 30 years ago by John Tanton to address his obsession with racial eugenics, population growth, scarcity of resources, and more specifically which population group would have control of said resources. Tanton believed that the majority of immigrants were and would continue to be non-white, hence immigration became a convenient intersection and entry point for his agenda three decades ago. Immigration was a threat to Tanton’s vision for America and he set out to stop it.
Despite rooting it in racially extreme ideas, Tanton has increasingly mainstreamed his organization to achieve maximum political impact; however, FAIR’s reputation took a turn for the worst when it solicited and received 1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund in the 1990s. The Pioneer Fund was founded to promote the genes of white European Americans and funds groups who promote “race-betterment” – a controversial theory that supports the biological IQ difference between white and non-white people. In the 1930s the Pioneer Fund distributed propaganda films developed by the Nazi Party in Germany to public schools.
With that kind of financial support Tanton was able to build his empire of anti-immigrant groups that naturally attracted individuals with politically extreme ideologies that fit its own, mostly white nationalists.
Case in point, Concerned Citizens and Friends of illegal Immigration Law Enforcement (CCFIILE) is a Massachusetts-based group promoted on FAIR’s website as a state contact. One of FAIR’s main objectives is to foster anti-immigrant action at the local level. So it lists, promotes or supports dozens of state-level groups in an effort to network anti-immigration activists.
Just one problem, not only does CCFIILE crudely bash immigrants, but most of its content is dedicated to anti-Semitic videos and holocaust revisionism. It’s an unapologetic and ugly display of neo-Nazi propaganda.
The Anti-Defamation League has this to say about CCFIILE’s leader, Jim Rizoli:
Jim Rizoli, an anti-immigrant activist and anti-Semite based in Framingham, Massachusetts, delivered a lengthy diatribe promoting Holocaust denial during the October 20, 2009 segment of his public access television show. Along with his twin brother Joe, Rizoli runs Concerned Citizens and Friends of Illegal Immigration Law Enforcement (CCFIILE), a group founded in 2003.
Mainly known for demonizing Brazilian immigrants in Framingham, Rizoli took more than ten minutes of his hour-long show to defend Iranian President and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and to promote his own anti-Semitic views. Before launching into his diatribe, Rizoli spent the vast majority of his show discussing undocumented immigrants as “crimaliens” who “God doesn’t really care much about.”
This is hardly new territory for FAIR; Tanton has funded and promoted the work of white nationalist leader Jared Taylor. Taylor is both a member of the old White Citizens Council, and founder of the racist eugenicist publication, American Renaissance. In 2005, Jared Taylor would write that when black people are left on their own, “any kind of civilization disappears.” in response to Hurricane Katrina.
Even FAIR’s own staffers and board members have let slip their extremely bigoted beliefs. In 2000, Tanton’s Advisory Board Member Donald Mann was quoted as saying, “We should give incentives to low-income people who agree to sterilization. We should make available free abortions to low-income people on demand.”
Another of Tanton’s D.C.-based anti-immigrantion groups, Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), promotes the white nationalist website VDARE, which publishes the works of numerous white nationalists, including Jared Taylor and the late Sam Francis. The website also features Kevin MacDonald, the anti-Semitic California State University-Long Beach Professor.
FAIR’s close associations with extreme bigotry are inexcusable. It is time for FAIR’s leadership to come clean on their racist agenda.
Tanton Memo of the Month – The Promotion of Eugenics
originally posted by Sarah Viets for IMAGINE 2050 » Immigration [click here]
Mar 26th
This month’s Tanton Memo of the Month focuses on John Tanton’s eugenics project, Society for the Advancement of Genetics Education (SAGE).
In the mid 1990s, John Tanton, the founder of a host of anti-immigrant organizations, including NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies, decided to develop a platform to educate the public on eugenics without using the term “eugenics.”
Eugenics was used to justify slavery in the U.S. and Nazi Germany’s crimes against Jews, and Tanton recognized that the American public had come to reject pseudo-scientific arguments that certain racial or ethnic groups were inferior to others.
To hide his promotion of eugenics, Tanton decided to use the word “genetics” instead of “eugenics,” and to focus on plant life as a gateway topic to promote his belief in inherent biological IQ differences. These racialized arguments are still popular in many of today’s white nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations.
In a letter to Dr. Robert K. Graham of the Foundation for the Advancement of Man, Tanton said the project would emphasize:
“mankind’s use of eugenic principles on plants and the lower animals as a way to condition the public to the idea of genetic manipulation, and raise the question of its application to the human race. In fact, we report on ways it is currently being done, but under the term genetics rather than eugenics.”
Graham is the founder of the controversial project, “Repository for Germinal Choice,” a sperm bank which gained infamy by trying to only recruit Nobel Prize winners as donors. Only one Noble Prize winner ever admitted to donating his sperm and that was William Shockley, who was outspoken about his belief that American Blacks were of low intelligence. All of Graham’s donors were white.
Tanton’s activism with regard to racial eugenics is based on the disturbing belief that those identified as the most productive “gene pool of the human stock” should be the ones with access to and control over scarce resources.
The same American eugenics movement of the early 20th century that informed Nazi Germany’s practices also advocated against immigration in the 1920s. It is believed that eugenicists helped pass laws that ranked immigrants based on ethnicity – at the time Nordic and Anglo Europeans being the most desirable and Asian immigrants the least. Eugenics movements have found genetic fault with nearly every physical trait and ethnic group outside of the “Nordic race”. These have been considered the “undesirable” immigrant masses over the past 100 years.
Today’s anti-immigrant movement focuses on criminalizing, detaining and deporting primarily non-white immigrants.
While it’s hard to find anything left of SAGE’s website, www.genetics-ed.org, the goals and objectives were clear. The project would start “formally as a membership organization, doubtless with a self-perpetuating board to help guarantee that it stays on course” and would attempt “to reach the young, the well-educated, and the affluent.”
Tanton’s obsession with eugenics shines a light on his motivations for associating with white nationalists and controversial anti-immigrant views.
*The John Tanton letters and memos are a public collection at the Bentley Historical Library.
Anti-Immigration Group Calls Immigrants ‘Third-World Gold Diggers’
originally posted by Imagine 2050 Editors for IMAGINE 2050 » Immigration [click here]
Mar 20th
This post by Erin Rosa at Campus Progress describes the agenda of anti-immigrant groups that are attempting to disparage civil rights organizations.
Embattled by numerous reports of its ties to white nationalists, The Center For Immigration Studies (CIS), a Washington D.C.-based think thank that strongly opposes immigration reform, lashed out today against advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the National Council of La Raza for participating in “smear” attacks and “manipulating the press” on the immigration issue.
But in the end, it was CIS executive director Mark Krikorian who justified his own smears, defending his groups’ labeling of immigrants as “third-world gold diggers” by calling such rhetoric “colorful language that was too colorful.”
The CIS event, held this morning in Washington, was organized to premiere CIS’s newest report, “Immigration and the SPLC,” a quasi-investigative look at the watchdog group’s research and financial records.
It’s no secret why CIS had dedicated a 27-page report to disparage the SPLC and other entities like the NCLR, a Latino advocacy organization. Both of the targeted organizations have been steadfastly producing research that ties the Center and other anti-immigration groups to white nationalism and racist rhetoric.
But rather than actually responding to anything said about CIS, the report focuses on times when SPLC allegedly took quotes from other anti-immigration groups out of context. The report also blames the media for being too “cooperative” when citing SPLC, and questions the objectivity of the watchdog group for working with pro-immigration groups like the NCLR.
In an effort to get to the bottom of some of these claims, I asked Krikorian a question, about an instance, cited by SPLC, where one of CIS’s reports (no longer on the Web site) referred to immigrants as “third-world gold diggers.”
To read the article in its entirety, click here.
Anti-Immigration Group Calls Immigrants ‘Third-World Gold Diggers’
originally posted by Imagine 2050 Editors for IMAGINE 2050 » Immigration [click here]
Mar 20th
This post by Erin Rosa at Campus Progress describes the agenda of anti-immigrant groups that are attempting to disparage civil rights organizations.
Embattled by numerous reports of its ties to white nationalists, The Center For Immigration Studies (CIS), a Washington D.C.-based think thank that strongly opposes immigration reform, lashed out today against advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the National Council of La Raza for participating in “smear” attacks and “manipulating the press” on the immigration issue.
But in the end, it was CIS executive director Mark Krikorian who justified his own smears, defending his groups’ labeling of immigrants as “third-world gold diggers” by calling such rhetoric “colorful language that was too colorful.”
The CIS event, held this morning in Washington, was organized to premiere CIS’s newest report, “Immigration and the SPLC,” a quasi-investigative look at the watchdog group’s research and financial records.
It’s no secret why CIS had dedicated a 27-page report to disparage the SPLC and other entities like the NCLR, a Latino advocacy organization. Both of the targeted organizations have been steadfastly producing research that ties the Center and other anti-immigration groups to white nationalism and racist rhetoric.
But rather than actually responding to anything said about CIS, the report focuses on times when SPLC allegedly took quotes from other anti-immigration groups out of context. The report also blames the media for being too “cooperative” when citing SPLC, and questions the objectivity of the watchdog group for working with pro-immigration groups like the NCLR.
In an effort to get to the bottom of some of these claims, I asked Krikorian a question, about an instance, cited by SPLC, where one of CIS’s reports (no longer on the Web site) referred to immigrants as “third-world gold diggers.”
To read the article in its entirety, click here.
An Open Letter to Mark Krikorian
originally posted by Eric Ward for IMAGINE 2050 » Immigration [click here]
Mar 19th
Mark Krikorian
Executive Director
Center for Immigration Studies
1522 K Street N.W., Suite 820
Washington, DC 20005-1202
Dear Mr. Krikorian,
Thank you for your recent response regarding a post on the blog Imagine2050, entitled “Tanton Network Caught in Bed Again with Anti-Semites and Holocaust Deniers,” which ran September 13, 2009 at www.imagine2050.org. Feedback from readers is very important, particularly from individuals like you, who have “never heard of our site . . .”
Your comments on “Tanton Network Caught in Bed Again with Anti-Semites and Holocaust Deniers” indicate that you have given much thought to this particular blog post and I appreciate your frank appraisal of it. To be accurate, this blog post referenced an article under the byline of Steve Camarota, the Center for Immigration Studies Director of Research, which appeared in not one, but two editions of the anti-Semitic American Free Press. It was first published as an article on August 31, 2009 and then—of all things—as part of a fundraising appeal on September 7, 2009.
At this point it is unclear to me if you are suggesting that this article was submitted by Steve Camarota to American Free Press without your permission, or if you are suggesting that American Free Press ran the article without approval of the Center for Immigration Studies. Either way, we are glad to have been of assistance in bringing this matter to your attention, and in helping you determine the origin of Mr. Camarota’s article in a white nationalist newspaper. I look forward to your clarification on this matter.
I regret that you are unable to obtain a copy of the articles on the web, but as you surely know everything that appears in print does not necessarily appear on the web. You might contact American Free Press directly for copies of its publication, rather than requesting them through us. However, if CIS would like to obtain copies of the American Free Press articles through Imagine2050 we would be happy to provide them. Please do not hesitate to contact me about a pricing guide for research and material requests if you decide to go this route.
Frankly, I am a little confused as to why the religious background of your senior staffer, Stephen Steinlight, is relevant to your letter to Imagine2050. Are you suggesting Mr. Steinlight’s background serves as some “totem” against political extremism?
Would you also argue that because blacks fought on the side of the South during the civil war, the Confederacy had nothing to do with white supremacy? Does your employment of Stephen Steinlight somehow change the anti-Semitic background of American Free Press?
Rather than distortion, as you claim, the blog post is based on the Center for Immigration Studies’ controversial history, including:
- Over the last year CIS has distributed nearly fifty articles to its members and supporters from the website VDARE. VDARE is a white nationalist website that is named after Virginia Dare, allegedly the first white child born in North America. VDARE contributors include anti-Semitic writer Kevin McDonald.
- CIS seems unable or unwilling to distance itself from white nationalist John Tanton. According to correspondence, James Edwards, author of the latest report by the Center for Immigration Studies and a CIS Fellow, appears to have been a paid lobbyist for John Tanton.
- Your own byline, along with that of CIS Fellow James Edwards, and former Chairman of the CIS Board David Simcox, appears in John Tanton’s The Social Contract Press, a publication that routinely publishes works by white nationalist writers, including John Vinson.
- Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) was founded in 1985 as a project directly under the control of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). John Tanton raised millions of dollars for the Center for Immigration Studies. John Tanton has made comments that have been deemed racist. John Tanton also wrote that hate crimes laws in Europe “. . . have generally been pushed by Jewish interests who are offended by those who have challenged the received version of the Holocaust.” The “those” in Tanton’s statement are also generally known as Holocaust Deniers and Holocaust Revisionists.
I welcome the opportunity to hear your responses to these matters. Until then, thank you for writing. Good luck getting to the bottom of how Mr. Camarota’s article appeared in not one, but two issues of the despicable American Free Press.
Restrictionist Group Strikes Back
originally posted by Walter Ewing for Immigration Impact [click here]
Mar 18th
Today, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released a report which attacks the decision of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to designate the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) a “hate group,” and thereby impugn the reputation of two FAIR spin-offs: CIS and NumbersUSA. The report offers a defense of FAIR and its founder, John Tanton (a man who has expressed sympathy for eugenics—that is, selective human breeding), and attacks SPLC and its work with the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) and other organizations belonging to the “Stop the Hate” campaign. Leaving aside SPLC’s rebuttal of the report, or the question raised by the report of why it took so long for FAIR’s (hateful) past to catch up with it, the fact remains that FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA have engaged in an intellectually dishonest analysis of immigration that sometimes devolves into name-calling.
Here are three examples:
- Federation for American Immigration Reform: In a 2009 report, FAIR claims that “Maryland’s illegal immigrant population costs the state’s taxpayers more than $1.4 billion per year for education, medical care and incarceration.” However, the statistical contortions in which FAIR engages to produce this number render it virtually meaningless. FAIR dramatically exaggerates the fiscal “costs” imposed by unauthorized immigrants by including schooling and medical care for their native-born, U.S.-citizen children in its estimate (even though they are neither immigrants nor unauthorized), and completely discounts the economic role that unauthorized immigrants play as workers and consumers.
- Center for Immigration Studies: In a 2008 report, CIS takes aim at what it views as an under-appreciated threat to U.S. national security and the integrity of the U.S. immigration system: the alleged ease with which foreigners married to U.S. citizens can become Lawful Permanent Residents (LPRs) and receive “green cards.” CIS scrapes the bottom of the intellectual barrel in terms of relying upon anecdote rather than evidence to derisively claim that “if small-time con artists and Third-World gold-diggers can obtain green cards with so little resistance, then surely terrorists can (and have done) the same.” Even the title of the report, “Hello, I Love You, Won’t You Tell Me Your Name,” suggests that it is intended more as mockery rather than a substantive analysis of immigration policy.
- NumbersUSA: According to NumbersUSA, immigration to the United States is all about arithmetic: immigration increases the U.S. population, and more people presumably means more pollution, more urban sprawl, more competition for jobs, and higher taxes for Americans who must shoulder the costs of “over-population.” At first glance, this argument is attractive in its simplicity: less immigration, fewer people, a better environment, more jobs, lower taxes. However, as with so many simple arguments about complex topics, it is fundamentally flawed and misses the point. “Over-population” is not the primary cause of the environmental or economic woes facing the United States, so arbitrary restrictions on immigration will not create a cleaner environment or a healthier economy.
It is hardly surprising that FAIR became a focus of SPLC’s attention given the angry and inflammatory rhetoric it has spouted for many years. The often bizarre comments of its founder John Tanton, and the organization’s willingness to partner with white supremacists, make it an easy target. On the surface, CIS has made an effort to distinguish itself from FAIR. CIS claims to be driven by a “low immigration, pro-immigrant” vision of an America that “admits fewer immigrants but affords a warmer welcome for those who are admitted.” However, CIS has yet to issue a single report that criticizes how immigrants are treated in the United States, or offer a single policy proposal that would actually create a “warmer welcome” for immigrants—which raises doubts about their commitment to anything other than stopping immigration and deporting immigrants. The NumbersUSA argument that the sheer number of immigrants will forever transform the country for the worse is an age-old claim that has always proven to be wrong.
This particular CIS report is not about immigration; it’s about settling scores with political enemies. Unfortunately, when you’re trying to defend John Tanton and his network of restrictionist organizations, your position is pretty much indefensible. If CIS truly wanted to establish an identity distinct from FAIR, then it would disavow the more outrageous actions and arguments of FAIR and Tanton. However it would seem that CIS Director Mark Krikorian has no desire to do so, judging from his recent comment “that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.” These are not the words of someone looking to distance his organization from an entrenched history of hateful rhetoric.
Photo by Sydigill.