tanton fair bak
capt1219 no lnx
judd 3 24
musk punked
...States." Federal courts have found that parole determinations are not subject to judicial review (https://substack.com/redirect/5e441b6a-11f1-41f3-85ca-b9fe7a4d7d45?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw). Every president has used parole authority since it was established in 1952 (https://substack.com/redirect/f2fd2355-1530-403b-867e-7f2e2a5f5dd0?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw), except Trump.
Musk says the immigrants admitted under the program are a national security threat — "\i]t is highly probable that the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11" — because they are "unvetted (https://substack.com/redirect/b8369775-2710-415c-a94d-b624af214571?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw)." This is also false. The program [requires (https://substack.com/redirect/24100a56-4d85-4d9d-97bb-57d617b33946?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw) all individuals to "[u]ndergo and pass required national security and public safety vetting."
Despite Musk's claims, individuals entering the United States under this program are doing so legally. And they are not eligible to vote. The notion that migrants are voting in meaningful numbers is not grounded in fact. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice evaluating 23.5 million votes across 12 states in 2016 found 30 incidents of suspected non-citizen voting, 0.0001% of the 2016 vote (https://substack.com/redirect/6cf1d347-08a0-4f1f-96cf-f83e199621cd?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw) in those jurisdictions. A 2022 audit (https://substack.com/redirect/d51be737-f0aa-461f-a57a-a46f0c2471a9?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw) of Georgia voting rolls found about 1600 noncitizens attempting to register to vote over a 25-year period, and no non-citizens were actually allowed to register or vote.
Playing the hits
“Secretive” migrant flights have been the focus of similar outcries in years past. Ahead of the 2022 midterms, multiple Republicans accused the Biden administration of organizing “ghost flights” of migrants. Republican Tyler Kistner, who ran for Congress in Minnesota, said (https://substack.com/redirect/274208d5-ac28-40be-a99b-6883010d5074?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw) that Biden “has been secretly flying illegal immigrants into communities across the country in the middle of the night.” Representative Ashley Hinson (R-IA) claimed (https://substack.com/redirect/0e58b671-96d7-437e-b726-69541ec35443?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw) the government was “flying illegal immigrants from the border into our country in the dead of night.” And former Congressman Lou Barletta (R-PA), in his bid for governor of Pennsylvania, blamed (https://substack.com/redirect/c30d4a07-29a3-4168-8324-c2cd9ad2f7fd?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw) Biden for “hid\ing] secret ghost flights of illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, politicians in Florida (https://substack.com/redirect/ccf5ae91-3617-4357-adae-78bbd6768f4c?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw), Texas (https://substack.com/redirect/1d6af346-bccd-4c60-bea1-6e48d177caa5?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw), New York (https://substack.com/redirect/27448e5a-ccd7-40d3-9ac5-9acec04dd9ff?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw), Alabama (https://substack.com/redirect/8a097e84-bafc-4ab9-87c4-eb5d3545c075?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw), and [North Dakota (https://substack.com/redirect/1d6af346-bccd-4c60-bea1-6e48d177caa5?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw) also fomented panic over migrant flights.
These claims, however, were highly misleading. Most of the flights targeted by the right carried unaccompanied minors who, under federal law, cannot be held by Border Patrol for more than 72 hours. The goal of these flights is to connect children with their parents, relatives or, in some cases, a licensed program. Experts say that it’s extremely unlikely (https://substack.com/redirect/ee038f46-2e06-442d-b811-777b8a715eba?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw) that adults with unauthorized immigration status were aboard these flights. The mix-up, a 2022 Washington Post fact-check explained (https://substack.com/redirect/ee038f46-2e06-442d-b811-777b8a715eba?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw), could have been due to the fact that there are separate flights that carry adults in ICE custody to “different detention facilities.”
Regardless, both types of transports are routine and were carried out under Trump (https://substack.com/redirect/115f6ed8-86c9-4fdd-a7c0-f42746f53cfa?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw). According to the Washington Post (https://substack.com/redirect/4118c25b-49e5-45f6-abdd-b77761a9d35d?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw), “in 2019, the Trump administration sought a private contractor whocould transport 225,000 migrants across the country (https://substack.com/redirect/ce9beec3-31c9-4d09-8fdc-e9dba8174d5d?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw) to temporary shelters, because of overcrowding at the border.”
The truth about the app
Musk’s posts also target the CBP One App and misrepresent its functions. To Musk, the app is evidence of an “open border.” The reality, however, is that the app limits the number of people who can immigrate.
Launched in 2020 by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the app has several purposes. At the southern border, asylum seekers must use the app to schedule appointments at a Port of Entry. Most migrants who don't use the app are turned away. Critics have highlighted many issues (https://substack.com/redirect/c1ebd281-be9e-40e3-a9a8-2f7aa01f709b?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw) with the app, including the fact that there are more individuals seeking asylum each day than there are available appointment slots. Some advocates have accused (https://substack.com/redirect/e247fec5-d698-4b7c-baaf-3cd144431cfb?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw) the app of being “unlawful because migrants are allowed to seek asylum anyway on U.S. soil.”
In addition, the app is also used for the parole process for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. (This is the well-publicized program Musk claimed was "secret.") These individuals can use the app to “request advance authorization to travel to an airport in the United States to seek a discretionary grant of parole,” CBP’s website states (https://substack.com/redirect/d0bffaa6-01ca-4d7d-bb15-3cd341a2250b?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw).
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a policy director at the American Immigration Council, explained that the app is just one component of the process. An individual using the app would still need to secure a sponsor who can “submit evidence that they are able to financially sponsor the person coming on parole,” Reichlin-Melnick said. A CBP agent will still inspect the individual upon arrival. The process is limited to 30,000 individuals per month, chosen at random. Everyone else is out of luck. Reichlin-Melnick says publicly available data shows the program has helped slow irregular entries by individuals from eligible countries.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/todaysclimate/how-mass-shootings-ecofascism-and-climate-change-got-tied-together/
kris t
two recent mass shootings in communities of color are renewing fears among environmental groups and climate activists that a growing number of young men are adopting racist right-wing ideologies to explain the worsening climate crisis and justify extreme violence.
On Tuesday, a gunman walked into an elementary school in the predominantly Latino city of Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 children and 2 adults in the worst school-related mass shooting since the one at Sandy Hook Elementary. Less than two weeks prior, a shooter targeted Black shoppers at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 and injuring three more.
While the motivations behind the Uvalde shooter, who was killed by police at the scene, remain unclear, the Buffalo shooter posted a manifesto online that was rife with racist underpinnings. That includes the mention of “ecofascism,” a theory that blames immigrants—particularly immigrants of color—for causing overpopulation and environmental degradation in Western nations.
“For too long we have allowed the left to co-opt the environmentalist movement to serve their own needs,” 18-year-old Payton Gendron, the alleged shooter in Buffalo, wrote in his 180-page document. “The left has controlled all discussion regarding environmental preservation whilst simultaneously presiding over the continued destruction of the natural environment itself through mass immigration and uncontrolled urbanization.”
Climate activists, many who have been tracking the proliferation of ecofascism among far-right groups, say the Buffalo shooting is just the latest in what appears to be a growing movement in the United States and Europe. In fact, Gendron pulled much of the language in his manifesto from the screeds of past shooters.
In 2019, a gunman walked into two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 Muslim worshippers. Later that year, another man entered a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and shot 46 people, killing 23—most of them Latino. Both shooters, who were also young white males like Gendron, cited ecofascism to justify their actions.
Once relegated to the fringes of society, ecofascism has found its way into mainstream discourse in recent years. Its origins, in many ways, trace back to theTanton network, a collection of more than a dozen anti-immigration groups founded or funded by John Tanton, a wealthy ophthalmologist from Michigan. Tanton, who was once a leader of the Sierra Club, believed that the root cause of environmental destruction is overpopulation by the “wrong” sorts of people.
Tanton died in 2019, but his legacy has lived on through others. In 2019, Tucker Carlson, the conservative pundit for Fox News, alluded to the concept of ecofascism on air with a member of the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank that has long perpetuated misinformation on climate change. “Isn’t crowding your country the fastest way to despoil it, to pollute it, to make it a place you wouldn’t want to live?” Carlson mused in the interview.
In 2021, Arizona’s Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovichfiled a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, alleging that the Biden administration’s immigration policies were harming his state’s environment by allowing immigrants to “drive cars, purchase goods, and use public parks and other facilities,” resulting in “the release of pollutants, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”
And a growing number of scholars say eco-fascist ideas are now swirling around right-wing circles as a way to address climate change while also advocating for anti-immigration policy. The groups are “always twisting” climate research “to support some rhetoric that we certainly were not aiming to support,” Jenny Rowland-Shea, deputy director for Public Lands at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, told the Christian Science Monitor. Her own research was used for “criticizing immigrants and people of color and saying they were responsible” for environmental damage, she said.
While right-wing groups blame immigrants for their environmental problems, research has long shown that it’s really the world’s affluent who are contributing most to the climate crisis.
A 2020 report by Oxfam found that from 1990 to 2015—a period when humans doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—the wealthiest 1 percent of the world’s population accounted for more than twice as much carbon emissions as the poorest half of the Earth’s population.
Still, the continued emergence of ecofascism is particularly worrisome given that worsening storms, droughts and other consequences of climate change are already displacing more people from their homes and sending refugees into neighboring countries. At the U.S.-Mexico border, climate change is contributing to a record-high backlog of immigration cases, ICN’s Aydali Campa reported last week.
“It is getting to the point where, around the world, we see the climate change impacts overriding a lot of people’s ability to adapt,” said Rebecca Carter, the acting director of climate resilience practice at the World Resources Institute, a global research non-profit based in Washington. “Whether it’s because they don’t have access to what they need, or because things are so severe that there really are not solutions to the challenges they’re facing.”
new
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/anti-immigration-cordelia-scaife-may.html
Dr. John Tanton, Quiet Catalyst in Anti-Immigration Drive, Dies at 85
[Dr. John Tanton in his ophthalmology office in Petoskey, Mich., in 1989. Opponents and supporters alike agreed that for an eye doctor living nearly 800 miles from Washington in a resort town on Lake Michigan, he had an outsize influence on national policy.
]
By Nicholas Kulish
July 18, 2019
Dr. John Tanton, a small-town ophthalmologist who founded or fostered the nation’s leading anti-immigration groups, which have helped shape President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, died on Tuesday in Petoskey, Mich. He was 85.
His death was announced by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, which he started four decades ago with the aim of reducing the number of immigrants to the United States. The cause was not given, but a funeral home obituary in Michigan said he had struggled with Parkinson’s disease for 16 years.
Other groups that Dr. Tanton either directly founded or provided with seed money and logistical support include the Center for Immigration Studies and the Immigration Reform Law Institute, both in Washington, and NumbersUSA, in Arlington, Va.
He also started groups dedicated to making English the official language of the United States and a publishing arm that put out the journal The Social Contract, as well as books by leading opponents of immigration.
Over the years the groups have chipped away at the nation’s pro-immigrant consensus, lobbying on Capitol Hill for greater enforcement at the southwestern border, a reduction in legal immigration and sanctions against employers who hire unauthorized immigrants. They have also nurtured tough state bills and local ordinances to check illegal immigration.
Many of Dr. Tanton’s ideas on immigration found a champion in President Trump, who has made securing the border with Mexico arguably the signature issue of his presidency.
Though Dr. Tanton had withdrawn from public view in recent years, his nonprofit U.S. Inc., based in Petoskey, on the North Shore of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, helped fund the Remembrance Project. The organization sought out grieving family members whose loved ones had been killed by unauthorized immigrants and repeatedly put them onstage with President Trump during his 2016 campaign for the White House.
Senior personnel from the Tanton-linked groups moved into key positions in the administration dealing with immigration after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
FAIR initially aimed at the political center, appealing to unions over wage competition from newly arrived immigrants, and at environmentalists over the added sprawl and pollution that came with a quicker-growing population. But the group’s proposals took hold largely in the Republican Party.
At the same time, Dr. Tanton’s legacy was tarnished by his connections to white nationalists and by a leaked memo he wrote warning of a “Latin onslaught.”
Opponents and supporters alike have long agreed that Dr. Tanton had an outsize influence on national policy for an eye doctor living nearly 800 miles from Washington in a resort town on Lake Michigan.
“He is the most influential unknown man in America,” Linda Chavez, a former aide to President Ronald Reagan who once led a Tanton group that promoted English-only laws, told The New York Times in 2011.
FAIR’s president, Dan Stein, said in a statement on the group’s website that Dr. Tanton was “a person with extraordinary persistence in promoting ideas based on a careful analysis of how today’s decisions affect the future.”
Though Dr. Tanton became best known for advocating reduced immigration, his father was himself an immigrant from Canada.
John Hamilton Tanton was born on Feb. 23, 1934, in Detroit to John Fitzgerald Tanton (who was known as Jack) and Hannah (Koch) Tanton. He spent his early childhood in Detroit before the family moved to his mother’s family farm in Eastern Michigan in 1945. There he learned farming from his father and grandfather.
After graduating from high school in Sebewaing, Mich., on Saginaw Bay, he attended Michigan State University in East Lansing, where he met Mary Lou Brown. They married in 1958.
He is survived by his wife, as well as the couple’s two daughters, Laura de Olazarra and Jane Thomson; two grandchildren; and a sister, Liz Faupel.
Dr. Tanton graduated from medical school at the University of Michigan and went into private practice as an eye doctor in Petoskey. After working at a birth-control clinic during his internship at Denver General Hospital, he and his wife became involved in Planned Parenthood, founding the group’s first clinic in Northern Michigan.
Friends and colleagues described Dr. Tanton as a Renaissance man and a voracious autodidact. He began a “great books” discussion group and taught himself German. He was also a beekeeper.
As an environmentalist, Dr. Tanton was active in local conservation issues as well as the national Sierra Club. He was also deeply concerned about the impact of the rapidly growing human population on the planet. He joined the group Zero Population Growth and became its national president.
As birthrates declined following the baby boom, he turned his focus to an ever larger source of population growth in the United States: immigrants.
He founded FAIR in Washington in 1979 and shortly thereafter took a sabbatical from his ophthalmology practice to work for the organization in the capital.
The Center for Immigration Studies was created in 1985 as a separate think tank to produce research on immigration. FAIR’s litigation group grew into the Immigration Reform Law Institute in 1986.
Early employees of FAIR said that over time it became clear that immigration restriction resonated more on the right than on the left.
Dr. Tanton pushed to make English the official language of the United States through his group U.S. English. During a battle over an official-English ballot initiative in Arizona in 1988, The Arizona Republic published racially provocative comments that Dr. Tanton had written in which he asked whether “Latin American migrants bring with them the tradition of the mordida (bribe).”
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He also asked: “As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?”
During his tenure, FAIR accepted money from the Pioneer Fund, a group that has funded research into eugenics, race and intelligence.
The Southern Poverty Law Center referred to Dr. Tanton as “the puppeteer” of the nativist movement and declared both FAIR and the Center for Immigration Studies, known as CIS, to be hate groups. (CIS filed a lawsuit over the designation.)
In his statement, Mr. Stein, of FAIR, described attacks against Dr. Tanton as “nasty sleight of hand” in instances “where he was floating an idea out as an intellectual exercise.”
Dr. Tanton’s ideas prefigured many of the debates about white identity politics that have taken hold on the right wing. “Demography is destiny,” he wrote. “We decline to bequeath to our children minority status in their own land.”
In a letter to The Times in response to a Page 1 article about him and his organizations in 2011, Dr. Tanton wrote, “Regarding my penchant for working with all sides of the political, ethnic, philosophic, economic, racial, religious and other spectra, that is how one forms a coalition that has political meaning and power.”
Interviewed as part of a FAIR oral history project in 1989, he looked into the future with concern.
“I am worried that we may be heading into a time when there is going to be heightened group conflict,” he said. “I think the next couple of decades will be very testy ones in mankind’s history.”
dead
see 2 other fair nodes
see kobach, sessions staff
see ctr immigr studies
==
intercept...
As life becomes increasingly untenable for people across the world, authoritarian, anti-migrant politics continue to demonstrate their potency as a track to American political power. Whether migrants are appearing at the border or not, these forces point to the threat of their arrival to impose lockdown conditions on border communities. The swirling mix of far-right politics and the actual threats posed by the climate crisis raise profound questions about what’s happening in the Arizona desert right now: Will the coming decades see a border more militarized than the last? What happens if people start showing up in truly unprecedented numbers with no livable homeland to return to? What moral obligations does that reality pose? What does the border become in that world?
For Jordahl, and for many others in the borderlands, these are the questions ringing out from the desert right now. In a sense, Jordahl explained, it’s as though the Trump administration is providing a dark model of what’s to come: using the impacts of the climate crisis that it is exacerbating as an asset to support its anti-migrant ends. “It’s a story that really hasn’t been told yet,” he said.
Draining Life From the Desert
Amy Juan grew up on the Tohono O’odham Nation. She graduated college there, and she’s 33 now, working as office manager of the International Indian Treaty Council in Tucson. Her dad’s side of the family comes from Newfield, a tiny O’odham community right on the border. She remembers days spent riding in the back of her grandpa’s pickup truck, rumbling over the steel cattle guard at the San Miguel gate. Sometimes they would be heading to a funeral, and sometimes they would be visiting family. Often, the trips were a treat: a chance to buy a soda or a quesadilla from the vendors on the other side of the crossing. For a kid growing up on the nation, “It was a cool place to go,” Juan told me. “I never knew it was a border.”
Juan was about 8 years old when she started noticing the changes. Though she didn’t know it at the time, the Clinton administration had passed a trade deal that would have devastating consequences for working Mexicans. Around the same time, in 1993, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended more than 1.2 million people attempting to enter the United States without papers. Democrats and Republicans agreed: This was a crisis.
The following summer, the Border Patrol and the Pentagon developed “Prevention Through Deterrence,” a strategy for stemming illegal immigration by locking down border cities, thus driving migration flows into the border’s deadliest places, such as the Sonoran Desert. Virtually overnight the number of dead bodies found along the border began to explode, eventually surpassing the death tolls of Hurricane Katrina and the September 11 attacks combined, as desperate people tried their luck in one of the planet’s most unforgiving ecosystems. In Pima County alone, the remains of roughly 3,000 people have been recovered in the desert since 2001. Border-wide, the government has tallied more than 7,500 migrant deaths over the last two decades, though experts agree the true toll is certainly higher. U.S. lawmakers have largely treated these deaths as the cost of doing business, agreeing year after year to pour an ever-increasing stream of money, manpower, and technology into the most elaborate border and immigration enforcement system the world has ever known.
CBP border patrol station where Dr. Warren was held in custody after his arrest.The Border Patrol’s Ajo station on July 10, 2018. Photo: Laura Saunders for The Intercept
At its core, Prevention Through Deterrence was a massive redirection of traffic. The Tohono O’odham went from seeing 200 or so migrants crossing the reservation every month to 1,500 people a day. There was litter and there was theft but that was just the beginning of it.
As Juan went from elementary to high school, the Border Patrol moved in. It began with the agency setting up a “forward operating base” near her grandparents’ house. At first, it was little more than a spare modular building in the desert. Today, Juan said, it’s a self-sufficient facility with a helicopter pad and detention pens indoors and out. As the years went by, the skies over the reservation became dotted with choppers, and later drones. The old adobe Border Patrol station outside Ajo was replaced with a state-of-the-art, multimillion-dollar facility. Its agent capacity went from 25 to 500. And then there were the checkpoints. “I think once the checkpoints were established that really, really was a big transition to understanding, like, yeah, we are militarized,” Juan said. “That’s what this means, having to check in and check out of our own lands, our own community.”
To get anywhere north of the reservation requires submitting to inspection by armed federal agents. This means a kid on the nation today might be less likely to grow up remembering happy trips over the border in the back of a relative’s truck, and more likely to grow up remembering agents flashing lights into their car and questioning their parents. “It has psychological effects,” Juan said. “Especially for a young kid.”
[Related
The U.S. Border Patrol and an Israeli Military Contractor Are Putting a Native American Reservation Under “Persistent Surveillance”]
Juan became politically conscious in her early 20s, as she began to realize that what her community was experiencing was both exceptional and unacceptable. “We started to see a lot of Border Patrol abuse and assault, especially on elders and children,” she explained. She’s spent the last decade speaking out, challenging the imposition of constant surveillance on the O’odham people, such as the recent fight to block the installation of a powerful Israeli spy company’s surveillance towers on the reservation. She recently traveled to the Arctic Circle and Palestine, and she sees clearly that militarized borders and the climate crisis are interwoven.
“Part of my work now is really having conversations within the community about how we’re going to survive,” she told me. “Talking about water.”
Draining groundwater at a place like Quitobaquito Springs might seem like a small thing, Juan explained, but it’s not. “It’s so representative of the danger that we’re in. This spring has been able to survive for thousands of years, and it’s still here,” she said. “It’s a watering hole for all life, anybody that’s out there in the desert.”
If the springs are sucked dry, the desert becomes even more deadly. It feels almost intentional, Juan said, like someone “thinking that this watering hole is important for migrants — and it is — and wanting to make sure that it’s not there.”
...
Until recently, most of Organ Pipe was closed to the public, a decision that was made after park ranger Kris Eggle was shot to death following a car chase with drug traffickers in August 2002. Following the killing, Organ Pipe became known as the country’s “most dangerous” national park. With nearly 70 percent of the monument off-limits to visitors until just five years ago, the wilderness was effectively transformed into a closed-off space where Border Patrol agents chased their targets with little notice from the world at large.
During his time at the Park Service, Jordahl became obsessed with figuring out exactly how many “renegade roads” Border Patrol agents were making on Organ Pipe. He eventually found the data he was looking for. “In one year, Border Patrol reported driving 17,000 miles, off road, in designated wilderness,” he told me. “And that’s just what they reported to NPS. Just in Organ Pipe, not even factoring in Cabeza Prieta.” Like the draining of water happening on the monument today, Jordahl said, the degradation only helped make Organ Pipe a more deadly place.
“When we’re talking about climate change, all of this off-road driving basically disturbs all of the biological soil crust there and that increases erosion, that decreases the soil’s ability to retain water,” he explained. “It dramatically increases the desertification of the region.”
Garfin, the climate scientist, said the same. Just above Organ Pipe is the Barry Goldwater bombing range, an active bombing range for the U.S. military. If you look at Barry Goldwater, Organ Pipe, and the other lands in the area, including the Tohono O’odham reservation, you see a region dramatically shaped by human activity over the last 30 years, Garfin explained. “Between the human migration and the Border Patrol efforts to police that area, there’s been a lot of environmental damage,” he said. “Going through this pristine desert in big vehicles increases the probability of erosion.” Add extreme storms to that picture and you begin to see “a real threat to infrastructure,” including roads and culverts. Not only does that pose a challenge to the military’s training mission, Garfin said, it also places migrants in increased danger. On top of all that, there are a number of threatened and endangered species in the area that require protecting. It is the climate crisis colliding with life in the borderlands and, in Garfin’s words, that “makes for a very, very challenging situation.”
State of Exception
The federal government’s tendency to treat the border as a place where the rules do not apply, where thousands of people can die without a major public outcry, and whole communities can be placed under constant surveillance, only increased after the September 11 attacks. This “state of exception,” as the anthropologist Jason De León has called it, helped pave the way for the anti-environmental efforts of the Trump administration.
Folded into the newly established Department of Homeland Security, the Border Patrol exploded in size after 9/11 and its agents were conditioned to see themselves as front-line soldiers in the global war on terrorism. Along with the new mission came new powers. In 2005, Congress passed the REAL ID Act, which gave DHS sweeping powers to waive local, state, and federal laws in order to construct barriers along the border. The act was emblematic of other war-on-terror legislation of the time; though it was passed under the Bush administration, it had bipartisan support — including the likes of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and current presidential front-runner Joe Biden — and its detrimental impacts continue to this day.
For years, REAL ID waivers were rarely used. Then came Trump and his plans for a wall. A sampling of the dozens of laws DHS has waived in service of realizing the president’s core campaign promise includes: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and the Farmland Protection Policy Act. The list goes on.
“Take the land,” the president has told advisers. “Get it done.”
In February, Trump declared a national emergency on the border, bringing an end to the longest government shutdown in American history, which he began after Democrats refused to provide full funding for the wall. Months later, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration could tap into $2.5 billion from the Pentagon for the project. That sum has since grown. Last month, the secretary of defense notified Congress that he would be moving an additional $3.6 billion in Pentagon funds to wall-building on the border, bringing the total amount the Defense Department has repurposed for Trump’s top reelection priority to $6.1 billion.
The administration has used the REAL ID waivers to push hundreds of miles of border wall construction, rumbling through whatever patch of sacred Native American sites, private property, or federally protected land gets in its way. With 66 miles completed thus far, the president is nowhere near the 500 miles of border wall he promised for his first term, and there are signs his already limited patience is growing thin. According to multiple accounts, Trump — who has expressed a desire for the border wall to be painted black, topped with spikes, and guarded by a moat filled with alligators or snakes — has gone so far as to offer pardons to officials who are charged with crimes while attempting to complete the construction.
In June, a team of Park Service archeologists visited Organ Pipe to assess potential threats to the monument’s many historical sites, which help to tell the story of the desert peoples who have inhabited the region for more than 10,000 years. In a 123-page report, first obtained by the Washington Post, the experts identified 22 sites that would be partially or wholly destroyed by border wall construction, which is slated for completion in January 2020.
“As soon as the Supreme Court green-lighted that military funding, I mean — it’s pretty much limitless,” Jordahl said. The Center for Biological Diversity was among the first organizations to sue over the border wall expansion, arguing that Congress never intended the waivers to exist in perpetuity; that they were designed for expeditious construction in 2005; and that construction projects beginning in 2019 no longer qualify as expeditious. Jordahl described the entire ordeal as a bizarro world version of the way the law is supposed to work in cases involving construction on protected lands.
“There’s no check on where they can build and how much money they can use,” he explained. “With the REAL ID Act waivers in place, the courts can’t step in. It’s like the definition of single branch government. Congress plays no role. The courts play no role. It’s an autocracy.”
Rising Fascism
In the last year, there have been at least three high-profile terror attacks involving white gunmen targeting immigrants or the people perceived to support them. Two were committed in the U.S., in El Paso, Texas, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The third, carried out by a self-described “eco-fascist,” targeted Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand. In each case, the killers had previously shared posts online that cribbed the “invasion” language so commonly heard from Trump and other far-right leaders. The El Paso and Christchurch shooters in particular put forth warped views of environmentalism that required them to kill competing races.
None of these ideas were particularly new. There is a long, dark history linking elements of the environmental movement, nativists, and white nationalists. John Tanton, a recently deceased Michigan ophthalmologist and godfather of the modern American nativist movement, once held a senior position in the Sierra Club. Bankrolled by an heiress obsessed with overpopulation and the environment, he went on to create the three most influential anti-immigrant groups in modern American history, while also running a publishing house popular with pseudo-intellectual white nationalists. Over the last decade, those groups cultivated a close-working relationship with former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions and his young, ultra-hard-line underling, Stephen Miller. With Trump in office, staffers from the Tanton organizations took up policymaking positions across the government. Sessions, meanwhile, became Trump’s first attorney general, and Miller became one of the president’s most trusted and powerful advisers.
The precise number of people who will emigrate to the U.S. as a result of the climate crisis is difficult to predict, but it’s also somewhat irrelevant to the question how future far-right governments, like the one in Washington, D.C., will respond to increased flows of people.
Authoritarian governments don’t need actual crises to initiate authoritarian policies. When the Trump administration came to power, Border Patrol apprehensions were at a historic low, and yet by the end of his first week in office, the president had signed executive orders banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries and laying the groundwork for an unprecedented attack on the legal systems designed to protect the world’s most vulnerable populations. Despite the fact that border apprehension levels still have not hit the highs of the early 2000s, the administration has nonetheless used current levels to justify declaration of a national emergency, the separation of thousands of children from their parents, and the dumping of tens of thousands of asylum-seekers in the border’s most dangerous cities.
While the president and his party may be unwilling to acknowledge the climate crisis, the institutions responsible for maintaining the border take a different view. “Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration,” read the Pentagon’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review Report. Reports published by DHS in 2012 and 2014 echoed that language, referring repeatedly to the possibility of “mass migration” events.
These are the kinds of signals that Todd Miller, a Tucson-based journalist and author of the new book,“Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World,” encourages people to pay attention to. In 1993, the year before Prevention Through Deterrence got started, the budget for the Immigration and Naturalization Service was $1.5 billion. Today, the amount of money spent on the nation’s border and immigration enforcement agencies exceeds all federal law enforcement agencies — including the FBI, the DEA, and the ATF — combined, with $324 billion doled out since 2003 and $24 billion appropriated in 2018 alone. According to Miller, there are now more than 70 border walls around the world, compared to just 15 when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Some market forecasts in the border security world describe the current moment as an “unprecedented boom period,” he said.
That boom translates to more surveillance equipment and more boots on the ground in border communities. “Analysts are thinking that there’s only going to be more and more buying of these technologies,” Miller explained. “So when you think about the future, well, then it’s a future of more of all this.”
There are no asylum protections for climate refugees, certainly not in the United States, where a cabal of anti-immigrant hard-liners are working day and night to dismantle, rather than expand, existing asylum protections. With research pointing to mass migration in the years to come, particularly poor people coming from countries that were not responsible for the climate crisis, Miller believes countries like the U.S. are presented with an enormously important moral decision. It’s a question of human mobility and freedom of movement, he said, and recognizing when the border has gone from an “obstacle or an impediment” to an actual “human rights violation for even being there in the first place.”
In the west desert of Arizona, where groups of asylum-seekers numbering in the hundreds turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents over the summer, the intersection of climate, migration, and border enforcement is already providing a glimpse at possible futures.
In addition to the border wall construction, the Trump government has charged nine people over the last two years with federal crimes for providing humanitarian aid to migrants crossing the desert in areas near the Tohono O’odham Nation and Organ Pipe. Working closely with the Border Patrol, senior U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials have built blacklists of aid volunteers, arguing that the provision of water in the desert degrades protected wilderness areas. In the most serious case to result from the crackdown, Scott Warren, a 36-year-old geographer from Ajo, was charged with two counts of harboring and one count of conspiracy for providing food, water, and shelter to two young undocumented men over the course of three days in 2018. Facing up to 20 years in prison, his trial ended in a hung jury over the summer. His retrial is scheduled for November.
The Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the borderlands in the president’s nationalist image is facing real resistance on the ground. Since filing their first suit challenging the president’s border wall expansion, Jordahl and his colleagues at the Center for Biological Diversity have brought more than a half-dozen other environmental lawsuits against the administration’s border construction efforts. They are not alone. The Sierra Club, having distanced itself from the Tanton stance of nativist environmentalism years ago, is also challenging the Trump’s border wall, as is the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Border Communities Coalition.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/anti-immigrant-group-white-nationalist-connections-says-it-has-met-white-house-aides
ProEnglish is an anti-immigrant group connected to the white nationalist movement that wants the United States “to adopt English as the official language at all levels of government.” The organization, which celebrated its 25th anniversary last month, recently said that it has met with White House aides six times to discuss policy issues and that it “spent the summer diligently visiting the offices of countless senators and representatives on Capitol Hill.”
President Donald Trump’s White House has frequently adopted white nationalist policies and rhetoric. That relationship was underscored this week when the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Michael Edison Hayden reported that in emails to Breitbart.com in 2015 and 2016, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller -- at the time an adviser to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) -- promoted white nationalist propaganda.
ProEnglish describes itself as the “nation’s leading advocate of official English. We work through the courts and in the court of public opinion to defend English’s historic role as America’s common, unifying language, and to persuade lawmakers to adopt English as the official language at all levels of government.” ProEnglish representatives also appear in right-wing media to push an English-only agenda. In 2013, the group ran ads featuring “a Spanish-speaking ‘illegal immigrant’ character ‘thanking’ [Sen. Lindsey] Graham for ‘for not requiring him to learn English in exchange for amnesty.’”
The group was founded in 1994 by the late white nationalist John Tanton and is a project of his nonprofit organization US Inc. As historian Carly Goodman wrote in The Washington Post, “Tanton helped Americans embrace nativist policies over the past 40 years by framing immigration as a threat to white America.” Tanton wrote that he was concerned about stopping the “reduction of the European-American demographic and cultural majority to minority status” and that “we decline to bequeath to our children minority status in their own land.”
Tanton also ran the racist publishing company The Social Contract Press and founded the anti-immigrant groups Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, and NumbersUSA. Alumni of his organizations have served in senior positions in the Trump administration.
In a July post on its website, ProEnglish’s Stephen Gushchov wrote that the organization has “met 6 times with different aides to President Trump and Vice President Pence at the White House.” Here’s a tally of the group’s reports about those meetings:
A September 25, 2017, release stated, “Executive Director Stephen Guschov recently had the privilege of briefly engaging Kellyanne Conway about the organization’s legislative work, projects, and mission.”
A September 26, 2017, release stated, “Guschov had the opportunity to meet with members of Vice President Pence’s domestic policy staff.”
A January 23, 2018, release stated that Guschov and ProEnglish Director of Government Relations Dan Carter met “with a senior legislative aide to President Donald Trump” in the East Wing of the White House.
A February 13, 2018, release stated that Guschov and Carter “recently visited the White House for the second time in three weeks to continue to discuss a variety of official English legislation issues with senior aides to President Donald Trump.”
A February 15, 2018, release stated that Guschov and Carter met with Pence aides.
A July 11, 2019, release stated that Guschov and Carter “returned to the White House” and “ProEnglish now has met 6 times with different aides to President Trump and Vice President Pence at the White House concerning official English legislation and new Executive Orders.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center reported on the group’s statement about the January 2018 meeting and also noted the July 2019 meeting in a piece about Tanton’s death.
On its 25th anniversary last month, the organization wrote that it “is very proud to have been able to have several meetings directly in the White House with a variety of aides to both President Trump and Vice President Pence.” Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) recorded a message of congratulations to the group for its work.
ProEnglish has also been involved with the white nationalist organization VDare over the years:
ProEnglish has frequently promoted VDare’s work on its Twitter account and website.
K.C. McAlpin, a member of ProEnglish’s board of directors, has written for VDare, most recently last month.
Robert Vandervoort, ProEnglish’s then-executive director, moderated a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) panel in 2012 that featured VDare head Peter Brimelow and white supremacist Rep. Steve King (R-IA).
Suzanne Bibby, then-director of Government Relations for ProEnglish, wrote for VDare in 2012.
US Inc. gave $10,000 in 2012 and $12,000 in 2013 to VDare, according to IRS records. Tanton and VDare head Peter Brimelow were also connected to each other over the years.
ctr immigr studies
https://theintercept.com/2019/09/12/anti-immigrant-groups-mainstream-media
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no graf
https://theintercept.com/2019/09/12/anti-immigrant-groups-mainstream-media
John Tanton, who died in July, spent the last four decades of his life building an anti-immigrant movement rooted in white nationalism. An ophthalmologist by training, his interest in immigration was spurred by his concern over population growth — there were too many people competing for too few resources. The solution, in Tanton’s mind, was to restrict immigration by overturning the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, a law that eliminated the racist quota system that had virtually excluded everyone who wasn’t a white European from immigrating to the U.S.
In 1979, Tanton launched the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR. He also founded the Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA. The “big three,” as the groups are collectively known, went on to become the intellectual backbone of the nativist movement in the United States.
Tanton’s groups argued that unchecked immigration brought with it unemployment, high crime rates, and other social ills. Their ideas were, for many years, infrequently cited in the mainstream media, where they were considered on the fringe of the immigration debate. Though they are still not widely cited, there has been a noticeable increase in references to these groups since Trump’s rise to political power.
[graf :Image: Courtesy of Define American] see ctr immigr studies
“John Tanton walked in, eyes wide open, and embraced white nationalism as a motivating factor, injecting it into our immigration policy,” said Ahmad. In a bid to make more information about this controversial figure available, Ahmad set out in 2016 to win the release of Tanton’s files, which were to be released by the University of Michigan in 2035. A Michigan appellate court ruling in Ahmad’s favor in June, but the university is in the process of appealing the decision.
Ahmad said Tanton’s long view and network of groups allowed his message to spread far and wide. “It might have ended with him, but he was so influential in creating this entire framework,” he said. “He wasn’t thinking about policies for the next five years or 10 years; he was thinking 100 years. Fear of an ‘invasion,’ ‘Latin onslaught,’ ‘America being less white,’ appealed to — and is in a sick, symbiotic relationship with — bona fide white nationalists.”
The Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda runs parallel to the agendas of the Tanton-linked groups. In 2016, Trump cited a study by the Center of Immigration Studies in a campaign ad that fearmongered about immigrants, accusing them of “collecting Social Security benefits, skipping the line.”
That influence has moved into the halls of power with Trump. A number of individuals formerly employed by groups in the Tanton network now work on immigration at Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. Julie Kirchner, who was the executive director of FAIR from 2007 to 2015, is the ombudsperson of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services at DHS. Robert Law, who was the government relations director at FAIR from 2013 to 2017, has been a senior policy adviser at USCIS since October 2017. Elizabeth Jacobs, another senior adviser at USCIS, was also a lobbyist for FAIR, where she advocated for ending Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans and reducing refugee admissions. Jon Feere, who was a legal policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, joined U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2017 as a policy adviser.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, has leveraged the revolving door between the Tanton organizations to try to get easy access to information. “Do you know if an actual person I can call at E-Verify for statistics (or maybe in your shop)?” Krikorian wrote to Law, the USCIS adviser, in December 2017, according to a record obtained by American Oversight through a public records request. “I’m trying to go through public affairs, but that may take a while and there’s some problems with the numbers at the E-Verify site, and a PR person isn’t going to know what I’m talking about.”
With the ascent of a fellow traveler into the White House and, with him, a gaggle of former employees from Tanton-linked groups into key policymaking positions, the groups have increasingly been cited as sources in mainstream immigration coverage. These citations are almost always in neutral terms that do not provide context about the groups’ agendas.
Once the researchers working on the Define American report identified instances in which the Center for Immigration Studies, FAIR, and NumbersUSA were cited, two coders manually studied the data to determine whether any context was provided, according to Ethan Zuckerman, a report author and the director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media.
“They looked at each of the mentions, and they looked to see if things were mentioned in any critical terms,” Zuckerman explained. “The theory behind that is that this group of think tanks is a pretty heavily agendaed group of organizations — groups that have been really sort of leading the anti-immigrant movement — and there’s a great deal of a relationship between them. And they’re far from a neutral provider of research and data. So, what we were looking for in that was, was there a caveat that says, you know, ‘This center, which has a track record of advocating against immigration’ or ‘This center, which takes a strong stand against immigration’?” Zuckerman added, “When we’re saying that we don’t find that, that means they’re simply just being cited as a source.”
Mainstreaming Hatemongers’ Words
The Washington Post consistently used what the Define American researchers considered denigrating language more frequently than the other outlets; along with the New York Times, it had a higher percentage of stories with degrading terms as compared to a sample collection of 227 national news sources, as well as collections of news sources that lean left or center-left. Right and center-right sources consistently used denigrating language more frequently than other news outlets.
Despite a 56 percent increase in the use of denigrating terms in the pages of the Los Angeles Times over the four-year period, it had the lowest overall percentage of stories that included such language — even though it had the highest overall increase in immigration coverage.
Zuckerman said the Los Angeles Times stands out as a newsroom that appears to have made a deliberate decision to avoid normalizing language that dehumanizes immigrants.
“We see evidence from our study of the LA Times that they handled it differently,” Zuckerman said. “They’ve been very reluctant to use that denigrating language, and in fact, even after it ticked up for a bit, they’ve brought it back. What that indicates to me is that they’ve made some very conscious newsroom choices that they don’t want to normalize this language, even by putting it in quotes.” He added, “We find that really interesting because that creates clearly an alternative way to handle this language.”
The Los Angeles Times’s style guide allows for the use of “illegal immigration” to describe entry or residence into a country in violation of the law, but it encourages writers to avoid “illegal immigrant” or “undocumented immigrant,” unless it appears in a direct quote. “We know that migration and immigrant communities are essential parts of day-to-day life in Los Angeles and across our region, and we have worked diligently to expand our coverage in recent years,” the paper’s managing editor, Scott Kraft, said in a statement to The Intercept. “Our language and style guidelines for immigration-related topics are fairly strict. They’re based on the expertise of our staff and are intended to help reflect our diverse city.”
In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for the New York Times shared the paper’s stylebook entry for “immigration status,” which notes that “the language of the immigration debate is often politically charged” and cautions reporters to “be as specific as possible in describing immigration situations.”
Illegal immigrant remains accurate and acceptable, but be aware that some people view it as loaded or offensive. (Illegal immigration, because it describes the issue rather than an individual, is less likely to be seen as troubling.) Undocumented, the term preferred by many immigrants and their advocates, is also acceptable, though using that term exclusively may be seen as one-sided. Unauthorized is also accurate and may be perceived as more neutral than other descriptions.
Consider other alternatives whenever possible to explain the specific circumstances of the person in question, or to focus on actions: who crossed the border illegally; who overstayed a visa; who is not authorized to work in the United States.
Take particular care in describing people whose immigration status is complex or subject to change — for example, young people brought to this country as children, many of whom received temporary reprieves from deportation under federal policies adopted in 2012. The common colloquial term Dreamers may be used sparingly for this group, but avoid making it the routine description, which may seem tendentious.
Do not use illegal as a noun, and avoid the sinister-sounding alien.
USA Today did not respond to a request for comment. The Washington Post did not provide a comment in time for publication.
The Define American report authors posit that U.S. newsrooms face a distinct challenge when reporting on immigration in the age of Trump. “Do they adopt terms used by public figures and use them throughout their coverage?” the report asks. “Do they acknowledge denigrating terminology but parrot the language, separating themselves by using quotation marks to make clear they do not endorse the framing? Or do they resist denigrating language by simply avoiding it, choosing instead to omit or rephrase?”
At present, news outlets are often choosing the middle path. The Define American researchers suggest that journalists think more deliberately about the language of immigration reporting. They offer five basic ethical standards of reporting, including focusing on the people most impacted by policy prescriptions, setting high standards for when it’s necessary to quote newsmakers using denigrating terms, not quoting nativist groups without context about their history and ties to the government, continuing to work toward diversifying newsrooms, and establishing these standards in public style guides.
“This study creates an important opportunity for self-reflection by major news organizations in deciding whether to purge denigrating phraseology in their style guidelines,” Peter Perl, the former assistant managing editor of the Washington Post who oversaw the newspaper’s guidelines, said in a written statement. The use of big data gives journalists “an unprecedented insight into the impact of their language choices and their selection of information sources,” added Perl, who sits on the board of Define American. “We hope they will use this chance to provide a fairer, more balanced presentation of the U.S. immigration debate to better serve their millions of readers worldwide.”
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mma 2 24
The right-wing, anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies, which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has designated a hate group, released a report claiming to show that all of the overall employment growth during the Biden recovery went to immigrants, and right-wing media amplified the report as evidence that Americans are losing jobs to immigrants.
But the CIS report misleadingly conflates naturalized citizens as “foreign-born” workers and overlooks data showing that U.S.-born workers have had more total job growth than immigrant workers.
Additionally, multiple studies and immigration and economic experts have explained that immigration is a net positive to the U.S. economy, that immigrants create jobs, and that immigrant workers complement American workers rather than replacing them....
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FAIR looks like CTT, reports --> law, congress testimony
history pete w behind 20 pts kathleen brown, prop 187 boosted polls
https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-june-25-2019/
john carlos frey sp bk sand and blood
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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/hate-had-a-meeting-in-the-white-house/
President Donald Trump met with two representatives of groups that lobby for bigoted anti-immigrant policies at the White House this month, The New York Times reports.
Frank Gaffney of the anti-Muslim hate group Center for Security Policy and Rosemary Jenks of the anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA joined Rep. Louie Gohmert’s chief of staff Connie Hair in a meeting with Trump and a handful of White House aides. During the meeting, multiple comments were put forward to the president that many Americans would find offensive, including claims that gay marriage was destroying America.
In addition, some members of the group complained to the president that their suggested candidates for administration positions had been ignored. Some reportedly “also accused White House aides of blocking Trump supporters from getting jobs in the administration”—a claim popularized in pro-Trump social media circles.
The meeting was organized by Ginni Thomas, a right-wing activist who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas’ political activity has raised concerns about conflicts of interest for her husband, the Times reported, and she once hired a young activist who was ousted from the organization Turning Point USA after writing in a text message: “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.”
Thomas founded a conservative advocacy group that would later merge with the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty. She used to write columns for The Daily Caller and was once employed at the Heritage Foundation.
In 2017, Thomas gave awards to right-wing activists including James O’Keefe, Gaffney, and Fox News host Sean Hannity. She has appeared as a speaker alongside her husband at an Eagle Forum conference in Washington, where anti-LGBTQ rhetoric was a staple in multiple presentations. In 2013, Thomas discussed “cultural Marxism” with the late anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly—a conspiracy theory that was originally coined by an anti-Semites and white nationalists in the 1990s that alleged Jews were trying to degrade Western societies for their own benefits.
The White House meeting was scheduled for this month after “months of delay.” From The Times:
For 60 minutes Mr. Trump sat, saying little but appearing taken aback, the three people said, as the group also accused White House aides of blocking Trump supporters from getting jobs in the administration.
It is unusual for the spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice to have such a meeting with a president, and some close to Mr. Trump said it was inappropriate for Ms. Thomas to have asked to meet with the head of a different branch of government.
A vocal conservative, Ms. Thomas has long been close to what had been the Republican Party’s fringes, and extremely outspoken against Democrats. Her activism has raised concerns of conflicts of interest for her husband, who is perhaps the most conservative member of the Supreme Court.
Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy have enjoyed increased access to government officials in the Trump era and cheered on the Trump administration’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and initiatives, such as the travel ban. NumbersUSA began as a program of a foundation run by John Tanton, who advocated for immigration policies that would maintain United States’ majority-white status. (Tanton has also published, through his The Social Contract Press, white nationalists and anti-Semites.) In 2015, NumbersUSA chided Trump for not being anti-immigrant enough.
jared holt, corrected
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wow see huge splc on greenwash sierra club takeover:
https://www.splcenter.org/20100630/greenwash-nativists-environmentalism-and-hypocrisy-hate
In this article
Executive Summary
The Hypocrisy of Hate: Nativists and Environmentalism
An Early Battle: Defending the Sierra Club
The Foundations: Funding the Greenwashers
The Greening of Hate: An Environmentalist's Essay
Nativists and Environmentalists: A Timeline
Key Groups and Individuals
This report describes how right-wing nativists are targeting the mainstream environmental movement with advertisements, websites and even a newly formed "progressive" organization that purports to represent liberals who believe immigration must be radically curtailed to preserve the environment.
Want to read this in PDF form? Click here.
Executive Summary
A quarter of a century ago, John Tanton, a white nationalist who would go on to almost single-handedly construct the contemporary, hard-line anti-immigration movement, wrote about his secret desire to bring the Sierra Club, the nation's largest environmental organization, into the nativist fold. He spelled out his motive clearly: Using an organization perceived by the public as part of the liberal left would insulate nativists from charges of racism — charges that, given the explicitly pro-"European-American" advocacy of Tanton and many of his allies over the years, would likely otherwise stick.
In the ensuing decades, nativist forces followed Tanton's script, making several attempts to win over the Sierra Club and its hundreds of thousands of members. That effort culminated in 2004, when nativists mounted a serious effort to take over the Sierra Club's board of directors, an attempt that was beaten back only after a strenuous campaign by Sierra Club members and groups including the Southern Poverty Law Center. The attempt was a classic case of "greenwashing" — a cynical effort by nativist activists to seduce environmentalists to join their cause for purely strategic reasons.
Now, the greenwashers are back. In the last few years, right-wing groups have paid to run expensive advertisements in liberal publications that explicitly call on environmentalists and other "progressives" to join their anti-immigration cause. They've created an organization called Progressives for Immigration Reform that purports to represent liberals who believe immigration must be radically curtailed in order to preserve the American environment. They've constructed websites accusing immigrants of being responsible for urban sprawl, traffic congestion, overconsumption and a host of other environmental evils. Time and again, they have suggested that immigration is the most important issue for conservationists.
The hypocrisy of these come-ons can be astounding. The group headed by Roy Beck, one of the key activists leading the efforts, has given close to half a million dollars to a far-right news service that has described global warming as a hoax. Tanton's wife, who works hand in glove with her husband, runs an anti-immigration political action committee (PAC) that funds candidates with abysmal environmental voting records. The congressional allies of John Tanton, Beck and the other greenwashers are organized into an anti-immigration caucus whose members have even worse environmental voting records than the beneficiaries of Mary Lou Tanton's PAC. John Tanton's U.S. Inc., a foundation set up to fund nativist groups, spent about $150,000 on a highly conservative fundraising agency whose client list includes several major anti-environmental organizations.
This new wave of greenwashing attempts, in particular the formation of Progressives for Immigration Reform as a purported group of “liberals,” is only the latest attempt by nativist forces to appear as something they are not. The white-dominated Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the most important of the groups founded by Tanton, has been behind the creation of three other front groups that supposedly represented African Americans (Choose Black America), Latino Americans (You Don’t Speak for Me!) and labor (Coalition for the Future American Worker). In fact, FAIR had its own white spokesman double as a press representative for the first two organizations. Another group unrelated to FAIR, Vietnamese for Fair Immigration, turned out to be led by a white man who used a fake Vietnamese surname and whose only connection to that country was that he liked the food.
The arguments being made by the nativists today — in a nutshell, that immigration drives population increase and that a growing population is the main driver of environmental degradation — have in the last 15 years been rejected by the mainstream of the environmental movement as far too simplistic. The allegation that immigrants are responsible for urban sprawl, for example, ignores the fact that most immigrants live in dense, urban neighborhoods and do not contribute significantly to suburban or exurban sprawl. In a similar way, most conservationists have come to believe that many of the world's most intractable environmental problems, including global warming, can only be solved by dealing with them on a worldwide, not a nation-by-nation, basis.
The greenwashers are wolves in sheep's clothing, right-wing nativists who are doing their best to seduce the mainstream environmental movement in a bid for legitimacy and more followers. John Tanton, the man who originally devised the strategy, is in fact far more concerned with the impact of Latino and other non-white immigration on a "European-American" culture than on conservation. Most of the greenwashers are men and women of the far right, hardly "progressives."
Environmentalists need to be aware of so-called "progressives for immigration reform" and their true motives. These individuals and organizations do not see protecting the environment as their primary goal — on the contrary, the nativists are first and foremost about radically restricting immigration. Environmentalists should not fall for their rhetoric.
The Hypocrisy of Hate: Nativists and Environmentalism
By Heidi Beirich
In January 2010, national leaders in ecology, sustainable business, and the larger environmental movement gathered in Washington to grapple with the problem of building "The New Green Economy." Hosted by the government-funded National Council for Science and the Environment, the event was a prestigious one.
But one of the invited speakers was hardly an environmentalist.
Roy Beck, who participated in a panel entitled "Perverse Incentives, Subsidies, and Tax Code Impediments to a Sustainable Economy," is the head of NumbersUSA, an anti-immigration group that was largely responsible for sinking a comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2007. Beck has spent nearly 20 years relentlessly attacking American immigration policies, even editing tracts like The Immigration Invasion, a book so raw in its nativism that Canadian authorities banned it as hate literature. More to the point, perhaps, purported environmentalist Beck's group not long ago paid nearly half a million dollars to a far-right news service— an outfit that has described global warming as a "religion" that is "impervious to evidence" and has pilloried conservationists as "anti-mankind."
So what was Beck doing talking about "greening the tax code"?
Roy Beck is part of a sweeping, renewed attempt by immigration restrictionists in America to convince environmentalists that they, too, must oppose immigration if they are to save the environment from the ravages of a growing population. Because such efforts typically have been organized by anti-immigration activists whose leading concern is not the environment — men and women who attempt to recruit conservationists and other "progressives" to their cause, sometimes even while simultaneously working with nakedly anti-environmental forces — this strategy has come to be known as "greenwashing."
In the last few years, key nativist groups have increasingly been taking up this strategy. They have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to run full-page advertisements appealing to liberals in an array of publications and have started a new group, Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR). They've built a series of websites aimed at "progressive" environmentalists — and many of those sites are run by people who are also principals of right-wing nativist groups.
Time and again, the hypocrisy of their claims comes to the surface. PFIR was originally registered by a Republican activist who was also involved in efforts to denounce overly liberal professors — hardly a "progressive" position. Its leader is a former attorney for one of the country's leading nativist organizations and agreed to be interviewed for a cover story in a far-right nativist journal. A nativist political action committee controlled by Mary Lou Tanton, who is married to the primary architect of the strategy of appealing to environmentalists, has given money to an array of politicians whose environmental voting records are miserable.
"The nativist movement is clearly attempting to split the environmental movement in order to advance its own white nationalist agenda," said the Rev. David Ostendorf, who heads the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based interfaith group dedicated to "building community, justice and equality." "The greening of hate is not about the environment, conservation or population. It is about preserving the dominance of European Americans."
Early Efforts
Nativists have been working since the late 1960s to enlist environmentalists as allies in their struggle to drastically limit or end immigration. And, in fact, a great many early environmental leaders, including the powerhouse Sierra Club, did endorse the argument that population had to be stabilized and that immigration had to be reduced. Following that logic, some who started on the environmental left went even further, becoming critical not only of the numbers of immigrants but also of their impact on a "European" culture. A handful, including former Democratic Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm, ended up attacking multiculturalism.
That began to change in the 1990s, largely because new evidence was making clear that the population explosion of prior decades was ending — that fertility declines dramatically as societies develop, meaning that the fear of an endlessly expanding population "bomb" was not a realistic one. At the same time, more and more environmentalists concluded that immigrants did not contribute in significant ways to such problems as urban sprawl, overconsumption of resources and traffic congestion. Many also worried about the white nationalism that seemed to be at the core of many restrictionist groups. The Sierra Club, in particular, abandoned its anti-immigration stance in 1996. Similarly, Paul Ehrlich, the author whose influential 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted a "race to oblivion" if population wasn't brought under control, eventually renounced the immigration-restrictionist position he had explicitly endorsed, instead describing fighting global poverty as the key to slowing population growth.
But John Tanton, Mary Lou Tanton's spouse and the main builder of today's nativist movement, did not move with the environmental mainstream. Instead, he continued to see immigration as a root cause of environmental degradation.
A Michigan ophthalmologist who headed the Sierra Club's Population Committee in the early 1970s, Tanton kept moving to the right, eventually coming to embrace an array of eugenicists, white nationalists and race scientists as he increasingly viewed "European-American" society as under threat. More and more, he worried about a "Latin onslaught," writing to colleagues about the necessity of maintaining "a European-American majority" in America and complaining that Latinos were less "educable" than other races. But through it all, Tanton never lost interest in wrestling the Sierra Club around to his point of view.
In 1986, Tanton wrote a private memo to staff members at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which he had founded in 1979 (and where he remains a board member today) and U.S. English, an English-only group he then headed. In addition to denigrating Latinos, the memo explicitly laid out the idea that, in order to avoid the appearance of racism, nativists needed to win over "liberal" groups like the Sierra Club. "[T]he issues we're touching on here must be broached by liberals," Tanton wrote. "The conservatives simply cannot do it without tainting the whole subject" by attracting charges of racism.
And then he got to the punch line: "The Sierra Club may not want to touch the immigration issue, but the immigration issue is going to touch the Sierra Club!"
But even then, a decade before their 1996 decision to move to a neutral stance on immigration, the views of the club's leadership were changing. By 1998, when nativists made their first concerted attempt to reverse the club's position, there were enough members opposed to reject their anti-immigration ballot proposal by a 3-to-2 margin. That was not the end of it, however. The extensive and hard-fought battle for control of the Sierra Club would continue right through 2005, when the last nativist attempt was beaten back decisively.
Now, with immigration reform back as a major national issue, a whole series of new nativist efforts to appeal to environmentalists has been launched by many of the same people who were behind the attempted "hostile takeover" of the Sierra Club. But the mainstream of the environmental movement, meanwhile, has gone in the other direction. Today, most environmentalists see blaming immigrants for environmental degradation as too simplistic.
"The ‘keep them at home' refrain of the U.S. anti-immigration movement assumes an automatic connection between immigrant-related population growth and environmental degradation," said Betsy Hartmann, director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College and the author of a book on the politics of population control. "But no such automatic connection exists. Take the issue of urban sprawl. … ‘Smart growth' advocates identify the main causes of sprawl as poor land-use planning, zoning regulations and tax laws — not population growth and immigration. In other words, it's not so much the number of people that matters, but how they live."
Back at You
The Sierra Club defeats were painful ones for the nativist movement and, for a time, restrictionists essentially licked their wounds. But it wasn't long before the immigration opponents launched new efforts to seduce environmentalists.
In 2007, Beck's group started a website called Sprawl City. Focusing on how "uncontrolled immigration" threatens "America's environmental stability," the site blames immigrants for creating sprawl. It is registered to Beck's NumbersUSA and relies, it says, on research by Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz, a man who had written for key nativist groups for years and would later advise PFIR. In 2008, a very similar site, Apply the Brakes, was mounted by a group that included one of the principals in the nativist attempt to take over the Sierra Club.
But the nativists' real attention-getting move of 2008 came with their attempt to directly target environmentalists rather than their organizations. A series of expensive, full-page ads — signed by a previously unheard-of organization with the unwieldy name of America's Leadership Team for Long Range Population-Immigration-Resource Planning (ALT) — appeared that year in relatively liberal publications, including The Nation, Harper's Magazine and The New York Times. "We're the nation's leading experts on population and immigration trends and growth," boasted the ads, which depicted highway gridlock and argued that using alternative energy resources and simultaneously reducing immigration would "reduce the threat" of rising prices of fuel and other resources. Another version of the ad warned "progressive thinkers" that the natural resources and future of the United States were in jeopardy if the country allowed continued immigration.
ALT is actually a coalition of five leading nativist organizations: FAIR, the American Immigration Control Foundation, The Social Contract Press, Californians for Population Stabilization and NumbersUSA. All five have received funding from Tanton's U.S. Inc. foundation, and the first three are listed as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) because of the virulent nature of their advocacy and, in FAIR's case, its ties to white supremacy.
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https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/john-tanton
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In October 2015, Kobach was a featured speaker at a “writers’ workshop” put on by The Social Contract Press, a racist publishing house that regularly publishes the writings of white nationalists. TSCP is a project of another foundation, U.S. Inc., created by FAIR’s Tanton.
In 2012, Kobach claimed he had not done any legal work for any organization that “expresses or supports racial discrimination.” However, FAIR has received $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund, an organization founded in 1937 by Nazi sympathizers. FAIR’s current president, Dan Stein, said in 1994 that immigration reform in the 1960s was “revengism” against whites and that its supporters wanted to “retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance.” He has claimed immigrants are “getting into competitive breeding.”
[1] The SPLC has listed FAIR as a hate group since 2007. It was founded by Michigan ophthalmologist John Tanton, the founder and principal ideologue of the modern anti-immigrant movement in the United States. Tanton spent decades at the heart of the white nationalist movement and corresponded with former Klan lawyers, Holocaust deniers and leading white nationalist intellectuals. He also founded and operated The Social Contract Press, a racist publishing company. FAIR has accepted more than $1 million from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation devoted to proving a connection between race and intelligence. FAIR also has hired as key officials men who were active in white supremacist groups
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https://www.splcenter.org/20090201/nativist-lobby-three-faces-intolerance
Editor's Note
The Puppeteer: John Tanton and the Nativist Movement
FAIR: The Action Arm
CIS: The "Independent" Think Tank
NumbersUSA: The Lobby’s Grassroots Organizer
This report describes how the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and NumbersUSA were founded and funded by John Tanton, a retired Michigan ophthalmologist who operates a racist publishing company and has written that to maintain American culture, "a European-American majority" is required.
Want to read this in PDF form? Click here.
Editor's note
Three Washington, D.C.-based immigration-restriction organizations stand at the nexus of the American nativist movement: the Federation for American Immigration Reform(FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and NumbersUSA. Although on the surface they appear quite different — the first, the country's best-known anti-immigrant lobbying group; the second, an "independent" think tank; and the third, a powerful grassroots organizer — they are fruits of the same poisonous tree.
FAIR, CIS and NumbersUSA are all part of a network of restrictionist organizations conceived and created by John Tanton, the "puppeteer" of the nativist movement and a man with deep racist roots. As the first article in this report shows, Tanton has for decades been at the heart of the white nationalist scene. He has met with leading white supremacists, promoted anti-Semitic ideas, and associated closely with the leaders of a eugenicist foundation once described by a leading newspaper as a "neo-Nazi organization." He has made a series of racist statements about Latinos and worried that they were outbreeding whites. At one point, he wrote candidly that to maintain American culture, "a European-American majority" is required.
FAIR, which Tanton founded and where he remains on the board, has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Among the reasons are its acceptance of $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund, a group founded to promote the genes of white colonials that funds studies of race, intelligence and genetics. FAIR has also hired as key officials men who also joined white supremacist groups. It has board members who regularly write for hate publications. It promotes racist conspiracy theories about Latinos. And it has produced television programming featuring white nationalists.
CIS was conceived by Tanton and began life as a program of FAIR. CIS presents itself as a scholarly think tank that produces serious immigration studies meant to serve "the broad national interest." But the reality is that CIS has never found any aspect of immigration that it liked, and it has frequently manipulated data to achieve the results it seeks. Its executive director last fall posted an item on the conservative National Review Online website about Washington Mutual, a bank that had earlier issued a press release about its inclusion on a list of "Business Diversity Elites" compiled by Hispanic Business magazine. Over a copy of the bank's press release, the CIS leader posted a headline — "Cause and Effect?" — that suggested a link between the bank's opening its ranks to Latinos and its subsequent collapse.
Like CIS, NumbersUSA bills itself as an organization that operates on its own and rejects racism completely. In fact, NumbersUSA was for the first five years of its existence a program of U.S. Inc., a foundation run by Tanton to fund numerous nativist groups, and its leader was an employee of that foundation for a decade. He helped edit Tanton's racist journal, The Social Contract, and was personally introduced by Tanton to a leader of the Pioneer Fund. He also edited a book by Tanton and another Tanton employee that was banned by the Canadian border officials as hate literature, and on one occasion spoke to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a hate group which has called blacks "a retrograde species of humanity."
Together, FAIR, CIS and NumbersUSA form the core of the nativist lobby in America. In 2007, they were key players in derailing bipartisan, comprehensive immigration reform that had been expected by many observers to pass. Today, these organizations are frequently treated as if they were legitimate, mainstream commentators on immigration. But the truth is that they were all conceived and birthed by a man who sees America under threat by non-white immigrants. And they have never strayed far from their roots. - Mark Potok
The Puppeteer: John Tanton and the Nativist Movement
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan is an unassuming place, more like a small-town library than a research institute. But hidden away in 17 cardboard boxes deep inside the simple facility are the papers of John Tanton, the retired Michigan ophthalmologist who has been the most important figure in the modern American anti-immigration movement for three decades. The papers, which include more than 20 years of letters from the founder of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and a batch of other nativist groups, contain explosive material about Tanton's beliefs. They also show that FAIR, on whose board of directors Tanton still sits, has been well aware of Tanton's views and activities for years.
Tanton has long claimed that he is no racist — that, in fact, he came to his immigration restrictionism through progressive concerns for population control and the environment, not disdain for the foreign born. He characterizes himself as a "fair person," and on his website he condemns the "unsavory characters whose views can easily be characterized as anti-American, anti-Semitic and outright racist."
Fair enough. But what do Tanton's letters have to say?
As it turns out, quite a lot. Although Tanton has been linked to racist ideas in the past — fretting about the "educability" of Latinos, warning of whites being out-bred by others, and publishing a number of white nationalist authors — the papers in the Bentley Library show that Tanton has for decades been at the heart of the white nationalist scene. He has corresponded with Holocaust deniers, former Klan lawyers and the leading white nationalist thinkers of the era. He introduced key FAIR leaders to the president of the Pioneer Fund, a white supremacist group set up to encourage "race betterment" at a 1997 meeting at a private club. He wrote a major funder to encourage her to read the work of a radical anti-Semitic professor — to "give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life" — and suggested that the entire FAIR board discuss the professor's theories on the Jews. He practically worshipped a principal architect of the Immigration Act of 1924 (instituting a national origin quota system and barring Asian immigration), a rabid anti-Semite whose pro-Nazi American Coalition of Patriotic Societies was indicted for sedition in 1942.
As early as 1969, Tanton showed a sharp interest in eugenics, the "science" of breeding a better human race that was utterly discredited by the Nazis, trying to find out if Michigan had laws allowing forced sterilization. His interest stemmed, he wrote in a letter of inquiry that year, from "a local pair of sisters who have nine illegitimate children between them." Some 30 years later, he was still worrying about "less intelligent" people being allowed children, saying that "modern medicine and social programs are eroding the human gene pool."
Throughout, FAIR — which, along with Tanton, refused repeated requests for comment for this story — has stood by its man. Its 2004 annual report praised him for "visionary qualities that have not waned one bit." Around the same time, Dan Stein, who has led FAIR since 1988 as executive director or president and who was copied on scores of Tanton's letters, insisted FAIR's founder had "never asserted the inferiority or superiority of any racial, ethnic, or religious group. Never."
Blood and Soil
In the world view of John Tanton, successful societies are not based on a mere sharing of territory, values and political systems. Nations and their cultures, he has suggested on numerous occasions, are largely determined by biology — race.
In a Nov. 13, 1994, letter to white nationalist columnist Lawrence Auster, a regular correspondent, Tanton suggested that the Declaration of Independence was actually a document based on the "bond of blood and ethnicity — nationhood." Almost a year earlier, in a Dec. 10, 1993, letter to Garrett Hardin, a controversial ecology professor, he said: "I've come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that." On Jan. 26, 1996, he wrote Roy Beck, head of the immigration restrictionist group NumbersUSA (and then an employee of Tanton's foundation U.S. Inc.), questioning whether Latinos were capable of governing California.
"I have no doubt that individual minority persons can assimilate to the culture necessary to run an advanced society," Tanton said in his letter to Beck, "but if through mass migration, the culture of the homeland is transplanted from Latin America to California, then my guess is we will see the same degree of success with governmental and social institutions that we have seen in Latin America." Referring to the changing California public schools, Tanton wondered "whether the minorities who are going to inherit California (85% of the lower-grade school children are now 'minorities' — demography is destiny) can run an advanced society?"
For Tanton, the question was entirely rhetorical.
"The situation then is that the people who have been the carriers of Western Civilization are well on the way toward resigning their commission to carry the culture into the future," he wrote in an Aug. 8, 1997, letter to Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, a fellow immigration critic. "When this decline in numbers is coupled with an aging of the core population ... it begins to look as if the chances of Western Civilization passing into the history books are very good indeed."
John Tanton
This kind of thinking led Tanton to defend racial quotas imposed on immigrants. In a Nov. 3, 1995, memo to FAIR boss Dan Stein and the entire FAIR board of advisers, Tanton defended the infamous "White Australia" policy that restricted non-white immigration into that country from 1901 to 1973, saying it was not racist, but intended to protect native-born labor (the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act outlawed racial quotas in Australia). Tanton also mocked the idea that the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, banning Chinese immigration to the U.S., was racist.
Similarly, Tanton has defended America's Immigration Act of 1924, which formalized a racial quota system that was only dismantled in 1965. In fact, as shown in his correspondence, Tanton has long lionized a principal architect of the act, John B. Trevor Sr. (In addition to founding the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, Trevor was an adviser to the extreme-right, anti-Catholic Christian Crusade of Billy James Hargis, who regularly referred to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as Communist documents.) Tanton arranged for the Bentley Library to house the papers of both Trevor and his son, long a Pioneer Fund board member and a close friend of Tanton's until his 2006 death.
Despite the elder Trevor's extremely unsavory past, Tanton has sent his unpublished autobiography to numerous friends, including, on Nov. 21, 2001, FAIR board member Donald Collins. In a cover letter, Tanton told Collins that the work of Trevor — who distributed pro-Nazi propaganda, drew up plans to crush uprisings of "Jewish subversives," and warned shrilly of "diabolical Jewish control" of America — should serve FAIR as "a guidepost to what we must follow again this time."
Communing with the Movement
John Tanton has not merely flirted with and adopted many of the core ideas of white nationalism over the past three decades. He has carried on correspondences with some of the key leaders of the white nationalist movement, meeting and even vacationing with some of them, and pushing many of their central ideas.
Over the years, his closest friend on the white nationalist scene seems to have been Jared Taylor, the man who began publishing American Renaissance, a racist, pseudo-scientific magazine focusing on race, intelligence and eugenics, in 1990. ("When blacks are left entirely to their own devices," Taylor wrote in its pages a few years ago, "Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.")
Tanton, who met Taylor shortly after American Renaissance began publication, seems to have been particularly taken with Taylor's angry opposition to affirmative action, spelled out in Taylor's 1992 book, Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. On Nov. 12, 1993, Tanton wrote Taylor and three of his American Renaissance colleagues — Wayne Lutton, who would later work for Tanton; Sam Francis, a white nationalist ideologue then working as aWashington Timescolumnist; and Jerry Woodruff, who wrote for the nativist publication Middle American News — suggesting that their new journal take on literary critic Stanley Fish, who had defended affirmative action in an article for The Atlantic. Tanton enclosed "a little something" for Taylor's "start-up costs."
Tanton promoted Taylor's efforts repeatedly. On Dec. 15, 1994, he wrote a friend to suggest that he read Taylor's 1992 book. More remarkably, on Jan. 24, 1991, he wrote to the then-president of the Pioneer Fund, Harry Weyher, about Taylor's American Renaissance effort. And as recently as April 20, 1998, Tanton wrote to several FAIR employees, including Dan Stein, to ensure that they were receiving American Renaissance mailings: "I write to encourage keeping track of those on our same side of the issue, but who are nonetheless our competitors for dollars and members." (The underlining was in Tanton's original letter.)
Tanton also corresponded for years with the late Sam Francis, a one-time Washington Timescolumnist who was fired after details of a racist speech he gave at an American Renaissanceconference became public. From 1999 until his death in 2005, Francis edited the crudely racist and nativist Citizens Informer, the tabloid published by the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), an organization that says it "oppose[s] all efforts to mix the races of mankind."
What may have been most remarkable of all was Tanton's endorsement of a proposal from another friend — Peter Brimelow, who would later start the racist anti-immigration website vdare.com— that FAIR hire Sam Francis to edit its newsletter. That proposal, which Tanton sent to FAIR's Dan Stein on Nov. 3, 1995, was made two months after The Washingon Times fired Francis for racism.
Tanton's contacts with other white nationalists also are instructive. Beginning in the late 1980s, Tanton corresponded regularly with Virginia Abernethy, now a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University. Abernethy is a member of the CCC and recently described herself as a "white separatist."
On June 26, 1996, Tanton wrote to Sam Dickson — a Georgia lawyer who has represented the Ku Klux Klan, written for and been on the editorial advisory board of Holocaust denial publications, and spoken at several of the biannual conferences put on by American Renaissance — to thank him for a good time during a visit by Tanton and his wife. "The next time I'm in Atlanta," Tanton wrote Dickson, "I hope to take one of your 'politically incorrect' tours."
In a Dec. 23, 1996, letter, Tanton complained that it was hard to write checks for Theodore O'Keefe, who was involved for years in the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review, because O'Keefe would only use a pen name. It was not clear from the letter what O'Keefe had written for Tanton.
On June 17, 1998, Tanton wrote to Stan Hess, who was then a member of the CCC, about Hess' proposal to open a FAIR office in California (the letter was copied to Stein). The letter recounted how Tanton had "presented" Hess' idea to the FAIR board. Hess was arrested later that year for burning a Mexican flag at an Alabama CCC rally that was attended by an unrobed Klansman. Hess would go on in 1999 to help form the neofascist American Friends of the British National Party and, later, to become California state leader of a group headed by neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke.
Tanton on 'the Jews'
In some ways, given his ideas, it's not surprising that John Tanton would cozy up to white nationalists and their fellow travelers. What is unexpected, even among long-time observers of the FAIR founder, is his attitude toward "the Jews."
In the late 1990s, Kevin MacDonald, a California State University, Long Beach, professor, was finishing up a trilogy of books that purported to show that Jews collectively work to undermine the dominant majorities in the host countries in which they live, including the United States. MacDonald said that Jews pursue these tactics — including promoting non-white immigration into white-dominated nations — in order to weaken the majority culture in a bid to enhance their own standing. He would later go on to speak and write for white nationalist groups across America.
Tanton liked what he read. On Dec. 28, 1998 — the same year that the last two books of MacDonald's trilogy were published — he wrote MacDonald, saying, "I hope we can meet some day." On that same date, Tanton sent a memo to Dan Stein and the FAIR board of directors about a MacDonald paper "on the segment of the Jewish community that has an open borders mentality." The paper, Tanton said, "would be fertile for group discussion at the forthcoming board meeting."
Earlier that month, on Dec. 10, 1998, Tanton also sent MacDonald's work to Cordelia Scaife May, a now-deceased millionaire philanthropist who gave regularly to far-right causes and was a close Tanton friend. "I'm sure [MacDonald's article] will give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life, which explains a large part of the Jewish opposition to immigration reform," he wrote.
Tanton's criticism of religious groups wasn't limited to Jews, however. Over the years, he — like some principals of FAIR — lashed out at a variety of religious denominations, especially Catholics, for their welcoming attitude toward immigrants coming to America from the Third World. In his letter to the FAIR board suggesting a discussion of Kevin MacDonald's theories, for instance, he described "the Roman Catholic Church [and] several of the Protestant denominations, the Lutheran Church in particular," as being among "our opponents." In an earlier, May 24, 1994, letter to Roy Beck of NumbersUSA, he said that "one of the problems with churches is that they see themselves as universal, and as transcending national boundaries."
Endorsing Eugenics
For years, FAIR President Dan Stein has hotly denied that his organization had anything to do with eugenics. "Eugenics," he wrote in a 2004 op-ed in the Kansas City Star, "is pure junk science, and it is utterly unrelated to FAIR's efforts to bring order to immigration in America." Two months later, in a press release attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for suggesting otherwise, the group called SPLC's reporting "utterly specious" and "McCarthyist."
The press release went on to accuse the SPLC of unfairly linking FAIR to "a long discredited pseudo-science of eugenics" by noting the group had accepted $1.2 million from the eugenicist Pioneer Fund, ending in 1994. The release also claimed that the idea that FAIR had an interest in eugenics had been disproven.
Apparently, John Tanton failed to get that message.
On Dec. 30, 1994 — at the end of the year that FAIR finally stopped soliciting Pioneer donations (after negative publicity) and issued its denunciation of eugenics — Tanton wrote to German academic Wolfgang Bosswick to defend the Pioneer Fund, saying its critics were the "hard (Marxist) left in the United States."
On Sept. 18, 1996, he wrote to now-deceased California multimillionaire Robert K. Graham, a eugenicist who started a sperm bank to collect the semen of Nobel Prize-winning scientists: "Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less? Who is going to break the bad news [to less intelligent individuals], and how will it be implemented?"
On May 21, 1997, Tanton wrote to Richard Lynn — a race "scientist" who claims that black people "are more psychopathic than whites" and suffer from a "personality disorder" characterized by a poverty of feeling and lack of shame — to congratulate Lynn on his book, Dysgenics, on how less intelligent individuals are outbreeding the intelligent. The next year, on Feb. 9, 1998, he wrote to Pioneer Fund President Harry Weyher to propose that Weyher hire Lynn to write "a study of Barry Mehler." Mehler, the Ferris State University professor who founded the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism, is a harsh critic of race science and eugenics.
FAIR officials may not have known of these contacts, but they certainly knew of others. On Oct. 29, 1998, for instance, Tanton wrote a memo for his file on Harry Weyher discussing the Pioneer Fund's new website and a paper on "sub-replacement fertility" by Roger Pearson, a notorious race scientist who heads the Institute for the Study of Man. The memo was copied to FAIR's Dan Stein and K.C. McAlpin, the executive director of ProEnglish, a group on whose board Tanton now sits.
Most remarkable of all, however, was the Feb. 13, 1997, gathering organized by Tanton at the New York Racquet and Tennis Club. Three years after FAIR had stopped taking Pioneer Fund money, Tanton brought FAIR board members Henry Buhl, Sharon Barnes and Alan Weeden — along with Peter Brimelow, future founder of the VDARE.com hate site — to a meeting with Pioneer Fund President Harry Weyher. The meeting, held expressly to discuss fundraising efforts to benefit FAIR, was memorialized in a Feb. 17, 1997, memo that Tanton wrote for his "FAIR Fund-Raising File." A year later, on Jan. 5, 1998, Tanton wrote to John Trevor, a Pioneer Fund board member and the son of the notorious pro-Nazi eugenicist John Trevor Sr., to thank him for his personal "handsome contribution" to FAIR.
It's not that Tanton didn't understand, just as well as Stein and the other leaders of FAIR, exactly how controversial eugenics was. After starting his own eugenicist group, the Society for Genetic Education in 1996, he wrote to Graham, the California eugenicist, to discuss public relations strategies. In a Sept. 18, 1996, letter, Tanton explained how his new group's website "emphasized 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." Elaborating, he added: "We report ways [eugenics] is currently being done, but under the term genetics rather than eugenics."
Immigration and Race
Throughout its history, the United States has been subjected to periodic outbreaks of xenophobic nativism, angry reactions to waves of immigrants who are seen as somehow different than "real" Americans. These movements, directed at different times at Germans, Catholics, Jews, Asians, southern Europeans, blacks and others, have typically been undergirded by racist stereotyping. Again and again, the new immigrants are described as stupid, ugly, disloyal, diseased and more.
Today, no one disputes the vulgar racism of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, which grew to nearly 4 million members on the strength of hating Catholics and Jews. And much the same can be said of nativist movements from the Know-Nothings of the 1840s, who saw German Catholics as dangerous subverters of American democracy, to the racist demonization of Mexican "wetbacks" during the 20th century.
But John Tanton and his Federation for American Immigration Reform have repeatedly claimed that they are different, that FAIR and its founder are not linked to the irrational fears and hatreds of the past. Their critics, they say angrily, are simply tarring them with the brush of racism to unfairly denigrate their arguments.
As the Bentley Library files show, that is far from true. - Heidi Beirich
FAIR: The Action Arm
The forces seeking to sharply reduce the number of immigrants coming to America won a stunning victory in June 2007, when nativist anger at an "amnesty" for the undocumented scuttled a major bipartisan immigration reform package backed by President Bush. Many members of Congress were completely unprepared for the flood of angry E-mails, phone calls and faxes they received — an inundation so massive that the phone system collapsed under the weight of more than 400,000 faxes.
They should not have been surprised. The furious nativist tide was largely driven by an array of immigration restriction organizations that has been built up over the course of more than 20 years into fixtures in the nation's capital.
The vast majority of these groups were founded or funded by John Tanton, a major architect of the contemporary nativist movement who, 20 years ago, was already warning of a destructive "Latin onslaught" heading to the United States. Most of these organizations used their vast resources in the days leading up to a vote on the bill to stir up a nativist backlash that ultimately resulted in its death.
FAIR official Dan Stein testified before a House Judiciary subcommittee in 2003, one of dozens of FAIR appearances before Congress since 2000. FAIR's opinion is sought despite its well-documented links to extremism.
At the center of the Tanton web is the nonprofit Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the most important organization fueling the backlash against immigration. Founded by Tanton in 1979, FAIR has long been marked by anti-Latino and anti-Catholic attitudes. It has mixed this bigotry with a fondness for eugenics, the idea of breeding better humans discredited by its Nazi associations. It has accepted $1.2 million from an infamous, racist eugenics foundation. It has employed officials in key positions who are also members of white supremacist groups. Recently, it has promoted racist conspiracy theories about Mexico's secret designs on the American Southwest and an alternative theory alleging secret plans to merge the United States, Mexico and Canada. In 2006, a senior FAIR official sought "advice" from the leaders of a racist Belgian political party.
FAIR officials declined repeated requests for comment.
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Jan 31, 2009 - Three Washington, D.C.-based immigration-restriction organizations stand at the nexus of the American nativist movement: the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and NumbersUSA. ... FAIR, CIS and NumbersUSA are all part of a ...
John Tanton | Southern Poverty Law Center
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/john-tanton
John Tanton is the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement. He created a network of organizations – the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and NumbersUSA – that have profoundly shaped the immigration ...
John Tanton - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tanton
John H. Tanton (born 1934) is a retired ophthalmologist from Petoskey, Michigan, and an ... He was the co-founder of the Center for Immigration Studies, a non-profit research group; and NumbersUSA, a grassroots lobbying group. He was ...
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Early life · ?Career · ?Political advocacy · ?Personal life
Center for Immigration Studies - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Immigration_Studies
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) is a conservative non-profit research organization that .... a network of restrictionist organizations conceived and created by John Tanton, the "puppeteer" of the nativist movement and a man with deep racist roots ... CIS was conceived by Tanton and began life as a program of FAIR.
The Anti-Immigration Crusader - NYTimes.com
www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/us/17immig.html?pagewanted=all