There is a major problem that the left is dealing with in the Immigration debate – they do not understand the type of the enemy that they are going up against. And many here who would favor more restrictions on immigration do not understand the xenophobic and racist biases that many an ti-immigration groups have.
There is plenty of room for reasonable policy debate on the Immigration issue. But the debate must be waged with facts and figures from either Progressive or non-partisan sources. People who use the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) do not understand the prejudices inherent in their studies. The CIS, as well as many other anti-immigrant groups, were founded by one man – a known White Supremacist by the name of John Tanton.
There is a big difference between a right-wing group and their biased assumptions, and a responsible economist like Paul Krugman, who simply looks at the research and takes it wherever it leads him. People like Krugman still argue that we have a moral duty to take care of immigrants and that we need to take our time to develop a good policy which takes into account the legitimate concern that more immigration means fewer jobs and more cheap labor.
On the other hand, CIS is part of a whole network of anti-immigrant groups who were founded and funded by Taunton and who were created for the purpose of making racially prejudiced assumptions on foreigners mainstream. CIS appears like a mainstream organization. But in fact, they show the same kind of inflammatory rhetoric that comes from Tancredo and the rest of the anti-immigration groups that Taunton founded:
They would cut legal immigration, meaning that there would be even more cheap labor than before.
They play off immigrants against Unions instead of trying to develop policies that help both.
They challenge the patriotism of people who disagree with their positions.
They compare people who favor more immigration to Romania’s Ceaucescu’s massive forced pregnancies.
They conflate more restrictions on immigration with fighting terrorism.
So, despite their claims that they are somehow moderate, they wind up spewing some of the same kind of right-wing rhetoric that other anti-immigrant groups have. The CIS was founded by John Tanton, a former left-winger turned White Supremacist. Here are some of his ties to White Supremacy.
Tanton engages in America First rhetoric:
According to Tanton, he is not against immigration but is an opponent of mass or massive immigration because it is not in his self-interest or that of other U.S. citizens. “Most Americans,” writes Tanton, “oppose mass immigration because mass immigration is not in their interests. They are guilty of looking out for themselves and their perceived interests-exactly as the immigrants and their supporters do.” Elaborating on the self-interest argument, Tanton explains. “Americans do not see the loss of their jobs or wages to immigrants to be in their interests. They do not see the crowding of their children’s schools with large numbers of kids who have language and other difficulties to be in their interests. They do not see rapid cultural and linguistic transformations of their neighborhoods to be in their interests.” (11)
Yes, and the racists of the South argued that Whites were not racist for opposing immigration because they were simply looking out for their own interests. All of the difficulties he cites can be worked around. A more generous immigration policy can be linked with a crackdown on companies that bust unions. We could also put in more money for schools, which can be overcrowded even without any immigrants at all. But rather than do the hard work necessary to put in a support system, the Bush administration is actually cutting funding for these things and allowing people to scapegoat immigrants.
Tanton formed a White Supremacist group called WITAN, which makes racist assumptions and stereotypes against Latinos:
Along with a few other FAIR board members, in the early 1980s Tanton founded a nationalist organization called WITAN-short for the Old English term “witenagemot,” meaning “council of wise men.” In 1986, Tanton signed a memo that went to WITAN members that highlighted the supremacist bent of Tanton and FAIR. (7)(8) The memo charged that Latin American immigrants brought a culture of political corruption with them to the United States and that they were unlikely to involve themselves in civil life. He raised the alarm that they could become the majority group in U.S. society. What’s more, he asked: “Can homo contraceptivus compete with homo progenitiva?”
Answering his own rhetorical question, Tanton wrote that “perhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down!” According to Tanton, “In California 2030, the non-Hispanic Whites and Asians will own the property, have the good jobs and education, speak one language and be mostly Protestant and ‘other.’ The Blacks and Hispanics will have the poor jobs, will lack education, own little property, speak another language and will be mainly Catholic.” Furthermore, Tanton raised concerns about the “educability” of Hispanics. (10) In 1988 the media published the Tanton memo, causing a number of former supporters of U.S. English to cut ties with Tanton, including Walter Cronkite. (7)(8)
In other words, he thinks that Hispanics are biologically incapable of educating themselves and inherently corrupt. If that is not racism and xenophobia, then I want to know what is.
And when they are not putting out scholarly-sounding news releases and studies, they are busy hobnobbing with blatantly xenophobic groups like Numbers USA, another group founded by Tanton:
Brian Bilbray, a former Republican congressman from San Diego, Calif., weighed in with horror stories about an impending social catastrophe due to immigration.
“We are creating a slave class that criminal elements breed in,” said Bilbray, who complained bitterly and improbably that he lost his 2000 re-election bid because “illegal aliens” had voted against him.
But all was not doom and gloom, according to Bilbray.
Praising the post-9/11 sweeps of Arab communities by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) that resulted in the indefinite detention of more than a thousand people, Bilbray called for the INS to carry out an enlarged dragnet. “We could have a terrorist coming in on a Latin name,” he said.
The meeting with Tancredo and Bilbray and the entire lobbying operation in mid-February was masterminded by NumbersUSA, an anti-immigration group that had recently opened a “government relations office” in a three-story, red-brick Victorian near the Capitol.
NumbersUSA hosted an afternoon open house at its plush new digs, where the lobbyists relaxed, nibbled on catered food, and conversed with the leaders and other officials of key anti-immigration organizations.
Patrick McHugh of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, which purports to be a squeaky clean think tank that rejects racism, was there pressing the flesh along with Barbara Coe, head of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, who repeatedly referred to Mexicans as she has for years as “savages.”
So, while they claim to be non-partisan and objective, they associate themselves freely with Tom Tancredo and other openly xenophobic people, including people who conflate the Latinos with terrorists and who call them savages. In addition, people from the pro-segregationist Conservative Citizens’ Council were at the same gathering:
The Citizens Informer, a white supremacist tabloid put out by the Council of Conservative Citizens hate group, was available.
NumbersUSA executive director Roy Beck, a long-time friend of Coe’s, adopted a more moderate tone when he addressed his guests and told them what they should be doing to end the current immigration regime.
It would be better, Beck counseled, if their attempts to lobby legislators that week did not appear to be orchestrated by NumbersUSA. For their campaign to be effective, he said, it “needs to look like a grassroots effort.”
In addition, the vast majority of anti-immigration groups were founded by Tanton:
In fact, the vast majority of American anti-immigration groups ý more than a dozen in all ý were either formed, led, or in other ways made possible through Tanton’s efforts.
The principal funding arm of the movement, U.S. Inc., is a Tanton creation, and millions of dollars in financing comes from just a few of his allies, far-right foundations like those controlled by the family of Richard Mellon Scaife.
Moreover, tax returns suggest that claims of huge numbers of members in the case of one group, more than 250,000 are geometric exaggerations put forward to create a false picture of a “movement” that politicians should pay attention to.
Tanton’s conversion was brought about by reading a racist novel by the Frenchman Jean Raspail, who wrote a lurid hate novel about the West heroically defending itself against a brown horde:
Tanton had something akin to a conversion when he came across The Camp of the Saints, a lurid, racist novel written by Frenchman Jean Raspail that depicts an invasion of the white, Western world by a fleet of starving, dark-skinned refugees.
Tanton helped get the novel published in English and soon was promoting what he considered the book’s prophetic argument.
“Their [Third World] ‘huddled masses’ cast longing eyes on the apparent riches of the industrial west,” Tanton wrote in 1975. “The developed countries lie directly in the path of a great storm.”
Tanton, for nine years, accepted funding from the Pioneer Fund, a pro-Nazi, pro-eugenics group:
Between 1985 and 1994, FAIR accepted $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund an outfit once described by eugenics expert Barry Mehler as a “neo-Nazi organization, tied to the Nazi eugenics program in the 1930s, that has never wavered in its commitment to eugenics and ideas of human and racial inferiority and superiority.”
When the Pioneer link was disclosed in 1988, Tanton, who was then president of FAIR’s board, said he knew nothing of Pioneer’s unsavory history. Yet his group continued to accept Pioneer grants for another six years, until 1994.
Beginning in 1998, Tanton abandoned all semblance of mainstream politics and began courting racists openly:
More and more key leaders in the Tanton network seemed to abandon all caution when it came to joining forces with like-minded white supremacist activists.
That summer, The Social Contract Press released a special issue of its journal, The Social Contract (published by Tanton), that was entitled “Europhobia: The Hostility Toward European-Descended Americans.”
The lead article was written by John Vinson, head of the Tanton-supported American Immigration Control Foundation, and argued that “multiculturalism” was replacing “successful Euro-American culture” with “dysfunctional Third World cultures.”
Tanton himself elaborated on Vinson’s remarks, saying an “unwarranted hatred and fear” of white Americans was developing. The main culprits, in Tanton’s view, were immigrants and their ideological allies, the “multiculturalists.”
Among other hatemongers he recruited:
Sam Francis, who would later become editor of the Citizens Informer, the racist publication of the Council of Conservative Citizens;
Lawrence Auster, who also spoke at conferences of American Renaissance, a pseudo-scientific magazine devoted to racial breeding and the idea that blacks are less intelligent; and
Joseph Fallon, who writes for American Renaissance.
Another hatemonger Tanton recruited opposes interracial dating:
Last year, Virginia Abernethy, a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt’s medical school and leader of the Tanton-influenced Population-Environment Balance, became the latest in the Tanton network to join the Citizens Informer editorial board.
“My view of the Council of Conservative Citizens,” she told the Intelligence Report, “is that they support traditional values and the freedom of people to associate with people that they want to associate with.”
She spoke on the same day that the CCC’s website carried a comparison of black pop singer Michael Jackson and an ape a comparison that Abernethy suggested may have reflected “bad taste,” but not racism.
“What is the point of a society that pushes [racial] mixing?” she asked when told of another CCC web item that derided the wife of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl as a “mixed race” woman who is “committed to racial and ethnic amalgamation.”
“Our society pushes mixing,” the retired Vanderbilt professor added. “I think this is probably not a good thing for the society.”
By 2003, Tanton’s people were claiming that the Mexicans would spark a civil war here in this country. They had added Neo-Nazis, holocaust deniers, and Republican extremists like Glenn Spencer:
Joining Spencer, who warned his audience that a second Mexican-American war would erupt in 2003, was an array of key extremists:
Mark Weber, a principal of the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review;
White power web maven, former Klansman and ex-con Don Black;
Gordon Lee Baum, “chief executive officer” of the CCC; and
several members of the neo-Nazi National Alliance.
Neo-Nazis like those of the National Alliance were not among those who lobbied Tancredo and the other politicians during the NumbersUSA event two weeks earlier.
And some one-time staffers of the CIS have graduated to work for Tancredo:
Rosemary Jenks, who used to be a researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies, and Linda Purdue, who has worked with Tanton for years, are now both lobbyists with NumbersUSA.
Addressing her fellow lobbyists with Tancredo still in the room, Jenks said that she and Purdue could be reached any time in Tancredo’s offices where, she said, they were “virtual staffers.”
This kind of strategy was explicitly foreseen in the WITAN memos, described under subtitles like “Infiltrate the Judiciary Committee” and “Secure appointments of our friends” to key governmental positions.
Given all this, you cannot simply consider the CIS in isolation. You have to consider who founded them, who funded them, and who their people associate with on a regular basis. They associate with known White Supremacists, hatemongers, Neo-Nazis, and Tom Tancredo. They are part of a systematic plan by John Tanton to make hatred of immigrants respectable by disguising that hatred in mainstream language.
There is plenty of room for reasonable debate on how much or how few immigrants to let in. But people who use the CIS to make their arguments do not understand the biased and xenophobic assumptions that are behind their thought. And in any event, CIS has totally failed to disguise their right-wing ties – their inflammatory rhetoric slips out on a regular basis.
As Democrats, we need to create values and policies which benefit all people. We cannot submit to the politics of playing off one group of people against another. Crafting sensible immigration laws must go hand in hand with continuing the process of fighting racism, homophobia, sexism, wage depression, and the exporting of jobs to third-world countries. The Declaration of Independence reminds us that all people are created equal. Not just all Americans, but all people. Right-wing organizations who teach otherwise do not share the values of this country, this party, or this community.
The kind of hatred that Tanton promotes has resulted in the tragic suicide of a 14 year old boy whose Vice Principal screamed at him and threatened him with jail time for organizing a protest against HR 4437. It is a direct result of the kind of hatemongering that Tanton engages in. We need to debate immigration policy without resorting to the kind of hatred that the CIS and their allies resort to.
Update: Hate is not something that just happens in the South or just something you watch on TV news or read about here. There is probably a hate group in your area. Here is a database from the SPLC to see if there are hate groups operating in your area.
