Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
John Tanton
Center for Immigration Studies vs. The Truth
01 year ago
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
01 year ago
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
01 year ago
‘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.
Bad Week for Nativist Attorney Kris Kobach
01 year ago
Following up on widespread claims that anti-immigrant attorney Kris Kobach was being paid large sums by the Maricopa County Sheriff’’s Office, Stephen Lemons of Feathered Bastard got a hold of the official contract between MCSO and Kobach.
Kris Kobach, the far right-wing nativist attorney Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s hired to train the MCSO in immigration matters, is receiving $300 per hour, plus expenses, including airline tickets to and from Arizona.
Though Arpaio’s Chief Deputy David Hendershott surmised in his recent deposition in the civil rights lawsuit Melendres vs. Arpaio that Kobach was making anywhere from $250-$300 per hour, to be paid from the MCSO’s RICO slush fund, I just got the official contract with Kobach from the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.
Read the entire article here.
Another blog exposed Kobach’s nativist-for-hire racket and losing tendencies this week. Krazykriskobach.com is dedicated to ensuring “that Kris Kobach does not ever hold an elected office again. We are not a group of Republicans, nor are we partisan Democrats. We’re simply a group of attentive Kansans literally sickened by the thought of Mr. Kobach ever collecting another dime of salary from Kansas taxpayers.”
The last few months have been less than ideal for Kris Kobach, Kansas’ Kraziest politico. First, news surfaced that Kobach’s tenure at the Kansas GOP was marred by serious mismanagement that may eventually result in some hefty fines for the new Administration.
Shortly after that, Kobach’s quest to enrich his personal finances by suing state governments suffered another embarrassing defeat when he lost a major ruling in Idaho. This week brought a fresh blow to Kris’ personal tax-payer funded bank account, when a City Council in Albertville, Alabama decided to pass on Kobach’s legal services.
Why? Because he is too damn pricey, and his track record is awful. One City Council member describes him as being only “46 percent accurate”. That’s like flipping a coin except you have to pay $300,000 to hire a lawyer employed by a hate group and your odds are worse.
The Albertville City Council determined that Kobach’s inexplicably expensive legal services were not worth it to the taxpayers. Which isn’t surprising, because he’s running a racket.
In a post last month, krazykriskobach.com wrote:
Kris Kobach has turned his anti-immigration platform into a quest for personal profit. By way of examples, he was paid more than $100,000 for a failed lawsuit in Pennsylvania, and up to $275,000 for his role in a Missouri lawsuit.
If that sounds like a racket, keep in mind that it costs the taxpayers a lot more to defend against his legal antics. Kansas taxpayers personally had to foot a $175,000 tab to defend against another one of his lawsuits in 2004 (he lost this one too).
Yikes! Looks like the public is starting to put the pieces together on Kobach. The big picture seems to be that of a scummy politician making gobs of money off hate.
Tanton Memo of the Month – The Promotion of Eugenics
01 year ago
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.
Negative Population Growth and the Tanton Network’s Obsession with Population Control
01 year ago
Negative Population Growth, an anti-immigrant group financed by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) recently published its latest forum paper titled “Haiti’s Problems, and their Lessons” by Walter Youngquist. The two page paper essentially argues that the one of the root causes of Haiti’s problems is its population growth.
This is not the first attack on Haiti by the John Tanton Network since the horrific earthquake that ravaged the country earlier this year.
In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, FAIR called the Obama Administration’s plan to give Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian nationals “reckless and overboard.” The John Tanton Network continued its lack of sympathy for the Haitian disaster when Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies stated in his blog on the National Review Online that “My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.”
The attacks on Haiti, a country that is 95% black, by the John Tanton Network are not surprising considering its long history of ties to white nationalist leaders and organizations. What is also not surprising is the fact that Haiti has been criticized by the John Tanton Network for its population size. The Tanton Network is absolutely obsessed with population control, and more specifically who of that population has access and control over resources.
The Tanton Network boasts many groups whose sole purpose is to argue for population stabilization, including Negative Population Growth and America’s Leadership Team for Long Range Population-Immigration-Resource Planning.
Donald Mann, the head of Negative Population Growth once stated, “We should give incentives to low-income people who agree to sterilization.”
The Tanton Network collaborates with groups that also falsely blame immigrants for population growth and environmental problems. Groups like Californians for Population Stabilization and Alliance for a Sustainable USA, just to name a few.
The Tanton Network’s preoccupation with population control is quite frightening considering its disregard for human suffering and dignity. Walter Youngquist’s first sentence in the NPG forum paper is “Few people have as much sympathy as I do for the people of Haiti, especially for the children, for I saw their desperate plight years before the earthquake.”
But his “sympathy” is soon thrown aside as he launches into a tirade against Haiti’s high population.
Krikorian’s comment on Haiti is even worse, but this type of rhetoric has sadly become commonplace from the organizations and individuals who make up the John Tanton Network.
Hardcore Racists Flock to NumbersUSA’s Campaign
01 year ago
NumbersUSA deployed its counter-action to the immigration reform march in Washington D.C over the weekend. The plan, S.T.O.P Amnesty in four days, contained carefully crafted talking points that tea party and hard-core, anti-immigrant activists used to lobby state and federal lawmakers. NumbersUSA’s anti-immigrant rhetoric was used once again to demonize immigrants and create the illusion that Americans are strongly opposed to immigration reform.
In order to facilitate its efforts, NumbersUSA re-tooled its home page to include webcasts, detailed action alerts, and a social media feed. Not surprisingly, its attempt to create a web-based community backfired as its action alerts and website brought out racists, bigots, and the worst of the anti-immigrant movement. Even though NumbersUSA and the John Tanton Network claim its anti-immigrant agenda does not fuel hateful rhetoric, here are some recent examples of how NumbersUSA’s message once again created an environment where individuals and groups have felt comfortable using hate speech.
Near the end of last week, a disturbing tweet was seen on the NumbersUSA web-site. The tweet read, “Thanks@NumbersUSA we need somebody to stand up for the rights of white people. JUST SAY NO TO DIVERSITY.” This tweet echoes a common message found in the white nationalist community which claims that diversity and multiculturalism is the root of all our nation’s problems. NumbersUSA removed this tweet from its feed but failed to publically disavow the message.
In a members-only section of its website that evaluates members of Congress, NumbersUSA assigned Senator Dick Durbin an F and Senator Roland Burris an F minus on their immigration record. Under a picture of Illinois Congressman Roland Burris, a NumbersUSA member wrote, “You have disgraced yourself and the (sic) all the people of IL, especially the Black citizens. We should welcome you home with Tar and Feathers.” Another member wrote, “Only when the people show up to REMOVE these treasonous crooks will justice be served! Bring back the rope!” Despite the fact that Roland Burris is African-American and the history lynching and torture has played in our country, these horrible threats remained on NumbersUSA’s website for nearly a month before being removed.
NumbersUSA seems to be popular throughout the white nationalist and skinhead communities. At the beginning of the week NumbersUSA’s campaign was promoted by white nationalist David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. On Vinlanders Social Club, NumbersUSA is promoted on the home page with a direct link to its website. Vinlanders Social Club is a midwest coalition of racist skinhead groups with a history of violence against members of the black community.
On Stormfront, in a thread entitled, “Obama Begins Immigration Reform and Amnesty” a posting which reads like a NumbersUSA advertisement cites the details of the S.T.O.P Amnesty campaign and directs Stormfront members to the NumbersUSA website. Stormfront is the leading white nationalist, white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and skinhead social networking forum. The website was started by former Ku Klux Klan leader, Don Black, in 1995. NumbersUSA’s campaign was promoted on Stormfront the same week that a member of Stormfront wrote of his plans to carry a concealed weapon to a similar immigration reform rally in Utah.
Although NumbersUSA has actively tried to distance itself from the extreme far right, its message stills resonates deeply with these communities. Even the group’s own Executive Director, Roy Beck, has spoken to a white supremacist organization, the Council of Conservative Citizens in the past. Therefore, until NumbersUSA strongly condemns the comments made on its web-site and the promotion of its messaging on skinhead and white nationalist sites, they are not a credible voice on the important issues surrounding immigration in our country.
Controversial Anti-immigrant Group Attends Immigrant Rights March
01 year ago
by Stephen Piggott
in American Renaissance, Americans For Immigration Control, Council Of Conservative Citizens, Federation For American Immigration Reform, Hate Campaign, Immigrant Rights, Immigration, Jared Taylor, John Tanton, Numbers Usa, Numbersusa, Politics, Roy Beck, White Nationalists, White Supremacist
Today in Washington D.C., Roy Beck, the executive director of the anti-immigrant organization NumbersUSA will be on the National Mall debating with immigration reform marchers who are flooding to the capital from all across the country.
NumbersUSA will be streaming the event live on its website as part of a four day anti-immigrant hate campaign which began on Friday. NumbersUSA’s campaign has so far failed to live up to its own high expectations with less than one percent of its alleged 900,000 members signing its most recent “anti-amnesty” petition, a key part of the four day campaign.
Throughout the campaign, NumbersUSA has updated its twitter page constantly. On many of the tweets there is the term “#AFIRE.” This term refers to Americans for Immigration Control and Enforcement, a “National DC based office in conjunction with Americans for Immigration Reform and Enforcement (AFIRE) made up of FAIR and Numbers USA.” According to this statement on the Utah chapter of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), we can see that NumbersUSA and FAIR are actively working together. This is just another example of two John Tanton Network groups teaming up to bash immigrants.
NumbersUSA’s finances and ties to white nationalists are very disturbing. Roy Beck, the group’s executive director spoke at a 1997 Council of Conservative Citizens conference, something that has haunted Beck ever since. Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) is a white supremacist hate group. Its conferences have hosted a who’s who of the white nationalist hierarchy over the years, including Jared Taylor, founder of American Renaissance.
Beck is paid a colossal amount of money each year by NumbersUSA to spew anti-immigrant rhetoric. Beck was compensated a whopping $274,500 in 2007 alone, Beck’s paycheck is more than five times the net income of an average American.
Beck has also begun to think about the future of NumbersUSA and who will replace him at the helm when he finally retires. One of Beck’s right hand men at NumbersUSA is Chad MacDonald, the Director of Social Media Marketing for NumbersUSA. Chad recently spoke with Roy Beck and Tom Tancredo at the National Tea Party Convention, telling the crowd that each tea party group should have an “immigration expert.”
MacDonald has been busy in recent weeks in preparing for the four day anti-immigrant campaign. He has appeared in many videos, on both NumbersUSA’s website and YouTube page, discussing the immigration reform march and NumbersUSA’s anti-immigrant response to it. MacDonald is a much younger and more likable alternative to Beck, making him an ideal candidate to be the new face of NumbersUSA.
An Open Letter to Mark Krikorian
01 year ago
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
01 year ago
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.