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.

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.

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.

Nothing else can explain its recent response to a comprehensive report on the failure of E-verify. Rather than accept the program’s failures and promote more effective ways to fix the immigration system, the network of anti-immigrant groups led by John Tanton is attacking the report and trying to discredit hard facts. The anti-immigrant trifecta of the Tanton Network – FAIR, Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA – came out swinging against the report which effectively debunks their data on E-verify.

Mark Krikorian of Center for Immigration Studies said, “Nevertheless, it’s certainly true that E-Verify isn’t tight enough yet, but in a glass-half-full sense, this isn’t really bad news,” and “…we know perfectly well what the problems are, and they don’t have much to with with the E-Verify system itself.”

We do indeed know perfectly well what the problems are. The problems are anti-immigrant groups with ties to racist organizations injecting themselves into a mainstream debate and distorting data.

Here is the truth: E-verify encourages discrimination in hiring. The harder it is for employers to properly utilize the system (and it sounds nearly impossible), the more potential employees they will pass over. Don’t be surprised to one day hear reports of employers who admit to resorting to racial profiling because it was easier than E-verify. Anti-immigrant leaders like Krikorian know this. They know that applying for a job while brown is hell and E-verify just makes it worse.

Putting aside undocumented immigrants for a moment, this has serious implications for all workers of color. Think unemployment among communities of color is bad now? Just wait.

Just as the anti-immigrant movement has tried to turn landlords, local law enforcement, and ordinary citizens into the federal immigration police, so too would it like to turn employers into immigration snitches.

We can’t afford it. America is in economic trouble, and lawmakers and employers can’t afford to spend their time tracking down and reporting every single potentially undocumented immigrant. It’s a waste of precious resources and will hurt American businesses.

When anti-immigrant groups make their motives clear, when they renounce all associations with white nationalist organizations, then we can talk about E-verify. Until then, their opinions on the matter simply aren’t valid.

When I first read about this event the immediate question that came to mind was, ‘why is the John Tanton Network, a network of organizations with strong ties to white nationalists, coming into a town that is 95% black and holding a discussion on immigration?’

On the surface, it looks as if the John Tanton Network is reaching out to African Americans, but this is not the case. It is instead trying to divide the African American community over the issue of immigration. In recent months, the Tanton Network has used a populist method to attempt to divide religious leaders from constituents, and business and union leaders from workers over the issue of Immigration. For African Americans, this is a civil rights issue, not an immigration issue. The fact that the Tanton Network has the audacity to come into an African American community and attempt to divide it is unacceptable and cannot be tolerated. The fact is the Tanton Network does not care about the African American community, they are merely using it for political gain.

This impudent attempt by the John Tanton Network to divide the African American community will not end after the discussion in Glenarden tonight. Roy Beck of NumbersUSA will go back to Virginia and Monique A. Miles of IRLI will return to Washington DC, but one group, Help Save Maryland will remain. This group has been extremely active over the past year and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. This group is a danger not only to the African American and immigrant communities, but to all residents of Maryland. Until Marylander’s take a strong stand against it, Help Save Maryland will continue to divide communities at the local level just as the national organizations of the John Tanton Network are attempting to divide both nationally and locally.