fair fed am immig ref

oops see other node F A I R

wow no content 7/18

splc HATE GP

see John Tanton

see eco-fascism

===

mma 4 24

the hosts of Fox News’ popular midday news program Outnumbered trotted out misleading statistics from the right-wing Federation for American Immigration Reform — doused with Fox’s own patented brand of paranoid xenophobia — to fearmonger about the supposedly unsustainable financial burden immigrants place on American society. The report underpinning Fox’s segment is an apparent reproduction of a 2017 FAIR study that was roundly criticized for methodological omissions and exaggerations. At no point did anyone at Fox acknowledge how much immigrants contribute to American society or how much immigration contributes to economic growth and prosperity.

During the April 16 edition of Outnumbered, co-host Emily Campagno introduced a segment about the supposed financial burden imposed by illegal immigration.

“As the bloated government processes our taxes, we are learning just how much of your money is going toward the migrant crisis,” she began, before pivoting to data from FAIR; “The total net fiscal cost of illegal immigration is $150 billion.”

“So let’s run through some of those numbers, guys,” Campagno continued. “At the federal, state, and local levels, taxpayers are shelling out about $14 billion for welfare, $42 billion for medical care for the illegal immigrants, and that boils down to each individual taxpayer paying an estimated $1,100 a year, which Americans, I think we well know, don’t have.”

Seemingly riffing on the findings outlined in the FAIR report, right-wing radio host Ben Ferguson invoked the xenophobic “great replacement” conspiracy theory, arguing that the “Marxist, socialist, and communist” Democratic Party understands “that if you bankrupt a country, and you bring in new voters in the process, which we’re doing literally by the millions right now, then you can fundamentally change the United States of America in one generation.”

Dialing up the paranoia, Ferguson then suggested that supporting migrants was related to the Democratic Party’s supposed efforts to hook Americans on government benefits. “The government’s there to hand you your food and your housing and your medical,” he said. “They own you like a modern-day slave.”

Outnumbered co-host Harris Faulkner then narrated an on-screen scroll of government programs and agencies that cost less than the $150 billion allegedly spent on so-called “illegal immigration.”

Video

CitationFrom the April 16, 2024, edition of Fox News' Outnumbered

There’s just one problem. The entire set-up for this segment was based on false information. The study from FAIR — an anti-immigrant organization founded by a white nationalist and defined as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — is junk.

In fact, the 2023 study Fox cited in today’s broadcast — “The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers” — appears to follow the same methodology as a 2017 report that the libertarian Cato Institute comprehensively debunked the same year. From Cato (emphasis added):

FAIR’s report reaches that conclusion by vastly overstating the costs of illegal immigration, undercounting the tax revenue they generate, inflating the number of illegal immigrants, counting millions of U.S. citizens as illegal immigrants, and by concocting a method of estimating the fiscal costs that is rejected by all economists who work on this subject.

FAIR’s Errors

Merely using the correct numberswhen it comes to the actual size of the illegal immigrant population, the correct tax rates, and the effect of immigrants on property values lowers the net fiscal cost by 87 percent to 97 percent, down to $15.6 billion or $3.3 billion, respectively.

Fox News relied on a report that seemingly overstated the actual costs of illegal immigration by “87 to 97 percent.”

In line with Cato’s 2017 findings, FAIR admits in its 2023 methodology that its estimate of the undocumented population “is higher than those offered by most mainstream immigration research organizations” and that it intentionally “includes costs incurred by minor, U.S.-born children” in its calculation even though those children are Americans with the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship. (Anti-immigrant groups often use statistical gimmicks to exaggerate the supposed problems created by immigration, like lumping American citizens in with those in the country without permission or speculatively extrapolating the costs of government programs.)

Fox News depicting immigrants as an unsustainable fiscal burden imperiling American society falls in line with the network’s other routinely xenophobic portrayals of migrants.

Just this month, a Fox guest warned that immigrants were “poisoning the bloodline in this country,” while a long-time Fox Business host used the tragic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge to claim that migrant workers were “destroying the country.”

Earlier this month, a Fox prime-time host warned that immigration would turn America into a “third-world dumping ground.”

On another occasion, a Fox guest warned that “illegal immigrants” voting in elections was “part of a political endgame for the Democrats to hold power.”

Fox’s hard turn into anti-immigrant rhetoric, and its embrace of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, in particular, has only heightened as the 2024 election goes into full swing.

How the border-cop-to-pundit pipeline fuels anti-immigrant coverage | Media Matters for America

for Tom Homan, the answer is always simple, no matter the question: Harsh punishment and brutal tactics get the job done. As a lifelong cop and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement who has found a new career as a Fox News pundit, Homan deals in absolutes, regardless of his job title.

“Look, when it came to zero tolerance, it worked,” Homan said in a May 2020 interview, explaining and justifying the Trump administration’s family separation border policy, which he'd been advocating for since his time in the Obama administration. “Law enforcement uses zero tolerance across this country all the time, whether it’s drug enforcement or prostitution.”

:{Homan is one of three prominent border cops turned right-wing pundits who exert considerable influence in conservative media and policy circles. Along with Todd Bensman and Jaeson Jones, both former officers at the Texas Department of Public Safety, Homan pushes his hardline nativist messaging to any and all audiences that will have him. He and Bensman are both fellows at organizations founded by John Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.”

...?

As ex-cops, Homan, Bensman, and Jones speak with a practitioner's authority. Their claimed expertise, supposedly gleaned from firsthand experience, allows them to mask xenophobia as hard-won knowledge about public safety. They provide a faux-empirical justification for anti-migrant policies, giving viewers a sense that they’re getting the unvarnished truth from people who have lived it. (In reality, border officers are frequently ignorant about basic immigration facts.) But the role these three play isn’t to inform; it’s to reinforce existing anti-immigrant prejudices and provide scaffolding for new laws and policies restricting immigration.

Tom Homan: From family separation architect to Fox News stardom

Of this cop-turned-pundit trio, Homan is the most influential. He has made at least 357 appearances on weekday Fox News since becoming a contributor in August 2018, affording him a massive platform to influence conservative thinking about immigration. Homan’s history in border enforcement — which dates back to 1984, when he became a Border Patrol agent and later joined the Immigration and Naturalization Service — is integral to the authority he commands among conservative activists, politicians, and audiences.

One Fox appearance from 2019 shows how Homan uses his sway to legitimize outlandish proposals — in this case, sending the U.S. military to Mexico to target drug cartels. In late November of that year, then-President Donald Trump floated the idea of designating Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, which could potentially facilitate operations into the country. Days later, Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade interviewed Homan and asked about a recent mass shooting in Mexico that left 21 people dead.

“Tom, I know you say we should go help — but don’t we need to be asked?” Kilmeade said to begin the segment.

“Well, yeah. I think that would be great, and I think the Mexican president is going to ask,” Homan replied. “He has proven he can’t handle it. Mexico has failed at handling these cartels for the last three decades. They can’t succeed without us.”

Homan then approvingly referenced the U.S. invasion of Panama to oust its then-leader Manuel Noriega before arguing that Mexican drug cartels should be formally designated as terrorist organizations to empower federal law enforcement — and presumably the U.S. military — to wage war against Mexican drug cartels on their home soil.

“If we declare them [Mexican drug cartels] a terror group, what changes?” Kilmeade asked. “What does that legally let us do?”

“I think that helps the U.S. do some out-of-the-country operations to attack these organizations,” Homan responded.

If there was any confusion about where Homan stood, in its write-up of the interview, FoxNews.com characterized Homan’s remarks as “agreeing that the cartels should be designated as a terror organization by the U.S."

Homan wasn’t the only conservative pushing that idea, but he was an early adopter. Just as importantly, his years of appearances since then on Fox News have helped solidify the racist ideas used to justify the proposed terrorist group designation: that the United States is being invaded by migrants, and that those migrants are responsible for bringing a majority of the fentanyl that arrives in the country — which is factually incorrect.

Trump eventually backed off his threat to designate the cartels as terrorist organizations. But the idea of using such designations to confer authority on federal authorities to bomb or invade Mexico has essentially become a consensus position on the right. Nearly every candidate in the Republican presidential primary, for instance, sounds indistinguishable from Homan on immigration policy, with each of them pushing for hardline restrictionist policies that are justified by dehumanizing language about immigrants “invading” the southern border.

Nearly every candidate in the Republican presidential primary sounds indistinguishable from Homan on immigration policy.

Homan's hawkishness has been rewarded, as the conservative media and policy ecosystem has warmly embraced him since his departure from the Trump administration. In addition to his employment at Fox News, he was named a visiting fellow at the influential Heritage Foundation in 2022. He’s also a senior fellow at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the nonprofit legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a branch of the Tanton network that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a hate group.

Given Homan's association with that Tanton-founded organization, it’s not surprising that he has repeatedly pushed the great replacement theory, the racist idea that liberal elites are bringing people of color to the United States to replace white people. On October 11, Homan appeared on the show of a Hitler-praising antisemite where he claimed that the Biden administration is trying to purposely destroy the country by opening the borders to bring in “millions” of “future Democratic voters.”

Homan has pursued commercial endeavors as well. In 2020, Hachette Book Group published Homan’s Defend the Border & Save Lives, complete with a front-cover blurb from his Fox News colleague Mark Levin. He is a featured speaker at JL Wilkinson Consulting, a right-wing talent agency that also represents far-right cops Sheriff David Clarke and Sheriff Mark Lamb.

Homan also founded Homeland Strategic Consulting, which pulled in over $83,000 in consulting fees for services provided to Arizona businessman and failed Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Money began flowing Homan’s way just four months after he publicly endorsed Lamon’s candidacy. (Homan denied that the endorsement was related to the consulting contract.)

Homan has extensive links to extremist organizations and individuals, beyond his affiliation with the Tanton network. Earlier this year, Homan spoke virtually at an event honoring Mel K, a QAnon influencer and conspiracy theorist who has spread lies about the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich and denied the results of the 2020 election.

In March 2022, HuffPost reported that Homan had been scheduled to speak at an event organized by white nationalist Nick Fuentes. When confronted by HuffPost about his appearance at the racist conference, Homan blamed his assistant for arranging the appearance and the fact that “so many names of conservative groups sound the same."

Homan then claimed that he left the conference after reading that Fuentes was supportive of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but he stopped short of criticizing the openly bigoted group. “I’m not saying this is a bad group,” Homan said, referring to Fuentes and his racist supporters, known as groypers. “I’m saying I don’t know."

Later that year, HTom Trentooman co-founded an anti-immigration organization that bears the same name as Homan’s book, Defend the Border & Save Lives, with fellow Islamophobe . In addition to helping Homan pilot the new group, Trento, who once told an audience at a 9/11 commemoration in 2013 that the goal of “all Islam” is to “get every single one of us to convert to Islam,” also runs an organization called The United West, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as an anti-Muslim group.

This March, Homan was named CEO of election denialist organization The America Project, founded by far-right multimillionaire Patrick Byrne. In addition to his duties as CEO, Homan also heads the group’s Border911 initiative, which has sponsored anti-migrant events throughout the country. The organization frequently posts videos of its rallies on Rumble, an extreme right-wing YouTube clone. Newsmax’s Jaeson Jones is also part of Border911, and he spoke alongside Homan at many of the group’s recent events.

Homan frequently denies that he has any political agenda, instead couching his preferences simply as apolitical enforcement of existing laws enacted by Congress. In 2018, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Homan if ICE’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy, a policy Homan was overseeing at the time, was “humane."

“I think it’s the law,” Homan replied.

“It may be the law, it may be the policy, but is it humane?” Blitzer asked again.

“I think it’s the law, and I’m a law enforcement [officer],” Homan reiterated. “I must follow the law.”

But for Homan, not all laws are meant to be followed. In April, he headlined a Border911 fundraiser with Donald Trump at the former president’s residence and club Mar-a-Lago to raise money for families of people who participated in the January 6 insurrection. Speaking to the crowd, Homan reminisced about an early conversation in which Trump told him to “enforce the laws, that's all I'm asking you to do.”

“We kicked ass,” Homan reflected. “We kicked ass.”

Todd Bensman: Not an expert on immigration, by his own admission

Like Homan, Bensman has leveraged his history in law enforcement into a new career as an immigration restrictionist pundit and writer. Most of his work appears on the website for the Center for Immigration Studies — another branch of the anti-immigrant Tanton network — but he’s also written two books, and has published pieces at The Daily Wire, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, and other prominent conservative news outlets. He’s been on Fox News and Fox Business combined at least 27 times since 2017, according to a search of an internal Media Matters database and Bensman’s official website.

As Media Matters previously reported, Bensman has also appeared on extremist streaming programs as well. In June, he appeared on The Stew Peters Show, whose eponymous host is a white nationalist. He’s also been on at least three programs or platforms with ties to the QAnon conspiracy theory, including: The Mel K Show, Making Sense of the Madness (hosted by QAnon supporter Sean Morgan), and The Debbie Aldrich Show, from Creative Destruction Media, an outfit that in addition to endorsing QAnon also posts racist and anti-LGBTQ content.

In 2018, the Center for Immigration Studies brought Bensman on as a senior national security fellow. From his first days at the organization, Bensman stoked fears about terrorist “infiltration” at the southern border, a framing he regularly returns to despite evidence that conservatives wildly overstate the perceived threat as a way to demonize migrants.

In mid-September, Bensman spoke at a conference that also hosted John Eidsmoe, a retired Air Force officer who once spoke at a conference organized by a white supremacist group and has praised Confederate leader Jefferson Davis and pro-slavery advocate John C. Calhoun. QAnon-promoter Alex Newman was also a featured speaker at the event.

A granular look at how Bensman’s misinformation traveled is instructive.

Bensman frequently adopts a flood-the-zone style of content production, using his Center for Immigration Studies-sponsored trips to the border to create images and videos that confirm the bigoted prior assumptions of his intended audience. One of his recent successful operations was seeding a myth that the Biden administration was providing all migrant families with $2,200 monthly cost-of-living checks. Experts fact-checked the claim as false in real time, and news organizations have long debunked earlier versions of the persistent rumor,but a granular look at how Bensman’s misinformation traveled is instructive.

On September 6, Bensman posted a video on X purportedly showing a Border Patrol agent saying migrant families “get a check every month” of “about $2,200.” Bensman characterized the imaginary program as a “scam,” but acknowledged that he would have “to independently confirm” its existence, which he did not do. Instead, Bensman repeated the false claim three days later, even while admitting the accusation was “short of details” and “unverified.”

In the meantime, the conspiracy theory-amplifying pipeline kicked into overdrive. The same day he first posted on X about the supposed checks, Bensman went on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and continued to spread the myth.

Video

CitationFrom the September 6, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

“The government gives them cost-of-living checks, for one family per month: $2,200. So if the father brings one of the kids and the mother brings another of the kids, and they just act like two families, they’re pulling in $4,400 a month, according to that Border Patrol agent,” Bensman told Bannon. Bensman again acknowledged he hadn’t confirmed whether it was true or not, but that didn’t stop him from spending more than two minutes spreading the misinformation.

On September 7, junk news site The Gateway Pundit picked up the story, citing Bensman as its primary source.

The same day, Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy parroted Bensman’s conspiracy theory, telling Fox’s audience that the Biden administration was “paying $2,200 per family."

Republican politicians spread the myth even further. “We are literally subsidizing our own invasion,” Rep. Matt Gaetz said on X, reposting The Gateway Pundit’s story. Former Trump official and Christian nationalist Russ Vought, a well-connected policy adviser on Capitol Hill, then reposted Gaetz.

Rep. Lauren Boebert repeated the $2,200-per-month claim on X/Twitter without any sourcing. When asked by local 9News Denver where she got her information, Boebert’s press office sent a link to the Gateway Pundit story. (9News’s ruling on Boebert’s statement? “Not true.”)

IFrame Content

On September 10, Bensman obliquely walked back his initial claim, without clearly admitting he was wrong. He later defended himself to The Washington Post, saying: “I was hoping to get to the bottom of it. Maybe an expert would send a link or explain it.”

At least one element of Bensman’s story is true. As he inadvertently acknowledged, he is not an expert. He is a propagandist, and his distortions are all the more potent in right-wing media because of his history as a cop.

Jaeson Jones: Bringing the war on terror to Mexico

On May 19, Newsmax border correspondent Jaeson Jones posted a promotional video for The America Project and Border911 to his Instagram account. In the video, Jones, sitting alongside Homan, directly addresses Border Patrol agents.

“I’m Jaeson Jones, retired captain from the Texas Department of Public Safety, and someone who’s out there on the border every day working with you guys to try to get out what you’re going through to the American people,” Jones said.

No viewer would expect Newsmax, which has sought to outflank Fox News from the right, to adhere to journalistic standards of neutrality and balance, but it’s still remarkable that Jones would openly admit that his goal as a correspondent is to show what his fellow border cops are “going through” rather than gather facts. By his own admission, he’s not covering a story — he’s “working with” the Texas Department of Public Safety and Border Patrol agents.

When Jones, Homan, and Bensman speak, they are speaking on behalf of border cops and law enforcement writ large, acting as representatives of what journalist Jessica Pishko describes as a “baronial class” of public employees who enjoy special rights and privileges. These ex-cops are pushing the ideological and material interests of that class, with the end result of expanding law enforcement budgets and political influence. The explosion of federal spending on immigration and border enforcement stretches back for decades, but the fearmongering that Homan, Bensman, and Jones push has the predictable effect of directing ever more public funds to this repressive apparatus.

That dynamic explains, in part, why — like Homan — Jones has repeatedly called for the U.S. government to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Such a move would almost certainly open up vast resources for state and federal border officers, in addition to conferring more political power and legal authority on those departments.

In fact, Jones advocated for designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations well before Trump ever publicly floated the idea.

Jones advocated for designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations well before Trump ever publicly floated the idea.

During a June 18, 2019, interview with Lou Dobbs on Fox Business, Jones described cartels as “global violent networks who are acting as terrorist organizations around the world.” He added that several cartels had “gone through a quantum leap in capabilities,” in part because of “what they’ve learned from the FARC, which is a designated terrorist organization."

Jones was referring to the Colombian guerilla group that the United States designated as a foreign terrorist organization from 1997 to 2021, and the reference wasn’t incidental. In the early days of the war on terror, the group served a crucial role for another federal organization, the Drug Enforcement Agency.

As journalist Trevor Aaronson has described, in the wake of 9/11, the U.S. government began funneling money into any project that could be described as counterterrorism. With Washington focused on global terrorism, the DEA, a key combatant in the previous generation’s war on drugs, found itself sidelined and relatively starved of federal funds. To bolster its raison d'être, the agency invented a new category of crime — narcoterrorism — and used the FARC, a designated terrorist organization funded in part by drug trafficking, as a pry-bar to access all the counterterrorism money sloshing around Washington at the time.

Under the DEA’s new mission, agents and their informants pretended to be members of the FARC and engaged in elaborate sting operations targeting purported terrorists. Given the FARC’s designation as a terror group, the DEA could claim that it stopped a would-be terrorist if its undercover agents convinced FARC rebels to act on their behalf. (Nevermind that they would have manufactured those would-be terrorists.) With federal resources on the line, fighting terrorism was as much a bureaucratic turf war as it was about waging any other kind of war.

As a former counterterrorism official at Texas Department of Public Safety, Jones likely would have known that specific history. More broadly, he surely understood how the federal funding game is played, and he kept pushing the new line. In a July 2019 interview, also on Lou Dobbs Tonight, Jones was even more explicit in calling for cartels to be labeled terror groups, and again referenced the FARC.

“These are terrorist organizations that are no longer just drug trafficking organizations,” Jones said. “They have evolved into something much larger."

“The U.S. government has not transitioned yet to look at them as terrorists and to designate them as terrorists but yet, they employ the FARC — that is a designated terrorist organization,” he added.

Jones repeated his calls that August, September, October, and November — when Trump publicly contemplated moving forward — and then again the following December, February, March, and June, all on Lou Dobbs Tonight. In the September segment, Jones told Dobbs he had lobbied four members of Congress, “trying to get this foreign terrorist designation.” In 2021, he appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to push for the change, and he continues to agitate for it from his new perch at Newsmax.

The once-fringe idea is now largely accepted as conventional wisdom on the right. Jones and Homan played a significant role in normalizing it, specifically by appealing to their identities as former cops. If their pitch is successful under the next Republican administration, their former agencies would almost certainly benefit handsomely from their advocacy.

The porous border between the hard-right and mainstream media

Homan, Bensman, and Jones are not the only former cops in the right-wing media and think tank ecosystem. One of Bensman’s colleagues at the Center for Immigration Studies, Jon Feere, is a former ICE and DHS official whom NPR quoted in June. Randy Clark, a writer at Breitbart, is retired from Border Patrol. Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protections, is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and is a member of Homan's Border911. The list goes on. These figures agitate for nativist immigration policies, channeling reactionary law enforcement attitudes into content served up in conservative media. The answer for them is always zero tolerance, harsher punishments, and more funding and discretion for cops.

The cop-turned-pundit pipeline isn’t unique to conservative outlets, but these figures loom especially large in their reactionary ecosystem given the centrality of nativist politics in the age of Trump. The programs where they appear, especially on Fox News, often set the tone for how mainstream outlets frame immigration, as mainstream outlets frequently adopt language that there is a “crisis” at the border.

One recent example perfectly illustrates how the Tanton network’s reactionary messaging seeps into mainstream news coverage. In mid-September, Washington Post columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria called for the president to “use the power he has in existing law to suspend entirely the admission of asylum seekers while the system digests the millions of immigration cases already pending."

To support this extreme and seemingly illegal position, Zakaria cited Nolan Rappaport, a former Department of Homeland Security official who now writes xenophobic op-eds at The Hill. Zakaria identified Rappaport only as “a longtime congressional expert on the issue,” but there’s much more to the story.

One recent example perfectly illustrates how the Tanton network’s reactionary messaging seeps into mainstream news coverage.

Rappaport, as it turns out, appears to be profoundly influenced by the organizations that employ Homan and Bensman. Rappaport blurbed Bensman’s first book, has cited him in at least three recent op-eds, and cited the Center for Immigration Studies in another. Rappaport frequently directs his stories, which he posts on X, at the Center for Immigration Studies’ policy director by tagging her username and at the account for Immigration Reform Law Institute, where Homan is a legal fellow. The Immigration Reform Law Institute then regularly reposts Rappaport’s stories to its own feed.

The pipeline from the Center for Immigration Studies and Bensman, and the Immigration Reform Law Institute and Homan, to Rappaport to Zakaria is invisible to the average reader. But Homan, for his part, sees it clearly.

“Please support CIS,” Homan said at the end of the conversation where he defended zero tolerance punishment against sex workers, people who use drugs, and families who crossed the southern border. He was speaking with Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “When I was the director of ICE, even when I was running ERO — Enforcement and Removal Operations, number three in ICE — CIS was a great help to the rule of law and helping ICE do their job."

“And they’re on the right side of the argument, folks, and we’re in a fight for our — we’re in a fight for our lives right now,” he continued. “We’re in a fight for this country. CIS gets it. They’re on the right side of the issues and they’re helping shape immigration in the future. So please support them.”

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/bannons-war-room-celebrates-mainstreaming-extremist-immigration-group-fair-0

nice network viz widget

https://plotagainstimmigrants.com/network/

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/federation-american-immigration-reform

i assume this is 2x

fAIR leaders have ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists and have made many racist statements. Its advertisements have been rejected because of racist content. FAIR’s founder, the late John Tanton, has expressed his wish that America remain a majority-white population: a goal to be achieved, presumably, by limiting the number of nonwhites who enter the country. One of the group’s main goals is upending the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended a decades-long, racist quota system that limited immigration mostly to northern Europeans. FAIR President Dan Stein has called the Act a “mistake.”

In their own words

“Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing … Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans.” – FAIR President Dan Stein, interviewed by Tucker Carlson, Oct. 2, 1997

“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?” – John Tanton, letter to eugenicist Robert K. Graham (now deceased), Sept. 18, 1996

“I blame ninety-eight percent of responsibility for this country’s immigration crisis on Ted Kennedy and his political allies, who decided some time back in 1958, earlier perhaps, that immigration was a great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris, and the immigration laws from the 1920s were just this symbol of that, and it’s a form of revengism, or revenge, that these forces continue to push the immigration policy that they know full well are [sic] creating chaos and will continue to create chaos down the line.” – FAIR President Dan Stein, "Oral History of the Federation for American Immigration Reform," interview of Dan Stein by John Tanton, August 1994

“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.” – John Tanton, letter to eugenicist and ecology professor Garrett Hardin (now deceased), Dec. 10, 1993

“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?” – FAIR founder and board member John Tanton, Oct. 10, 1986

Background

Tanton founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform on Jan. 2, 1979, in Washington D.C. Roger Conner, an environmental lawyer, was appointed executive director, while Tanton served as the chairman of the board of directors. Before establishing FAIR, Tanton had experience working with groups concerned about how population growth affected the environment. Tanton served in several Sierra Club leadership posts, and he had been the president of Zero Population Growth, a group founded by biologist and longtime FAIR adviser Paul Ehrlich, from 1975 to 1977.

The founding of FAIR was a major change for Tanton. But he was driven to shift his efforts to the battle against immigration by his increasing concern that it was the primary cause of population growth. As a result, FAIR focuses exclusively on immigration issues. Its goal, according to its website, is to set immigration quotas “at the lowest feasible levels” and to prevent all illegal immigration. The group attempts to appear moderate, even though its record is extreme, particularly on racial issues. This strategy has paid off: In August 2009, FAIR President Dan Stein boasted that FAIR leaders had testified before Congress about 100 times.

In its early years, FAIR was known for frequent op-ed pieces and controversial advertisements. In December 1980, it ran an ad in the Rocky Mountain News with the headline: “Our Grandparents Came To America To Escape Poverty And Despair. Will Our Children Want To Leave For The Same Reasons?” The implication was that unless immigration policies were reformed, immigrants would swarm the United States, undermine job prospects for Americans and put an end to American prosperity.

In 1988, Dan Stein replaced Roger Conner as executive director. Stein had been an employee of FAIR since 1982; before that, he was the executive director of the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), which was incorporated under FAIR’s tax exemption and still serves as FAIR’s legal arm. Conner became FAIR’s president; this meant that Stein took over the responsibilities of running FAIR while Conner focused on fundraising.

On Oct. 9, 1988, the Arizona Republic published excerpts from embarrassing memos that had been sent by Tanton and Conner to members of FAIR’s leadership. The documents were known as the WITAN memos; they came from an October 1986 conference in which Tanton met with a number of anti-immigration activists for a strategy session. The memos revealed Tanton’s innermost, and controversial, thoughts. Tanton warned of a “Latin onslaught,” complained of Latinos’ allegedly low “educability.” He asked, “Will Latin American migrants bring with them the tradition of the mordida (bribe), the lack of involvement in public affairs, etc.?” He also wondered: “Can homo contraceptivus [meaning whites] compete with homo progenitiva [meaning Latinos] if borders aren’t controlled? Or is advice to limit ones [sic] family simply advice to move over and let someone else with greater reproductive powers occupy the space?”

In the memos, Tanton, sounding much like the Klan of the 1920s, expressed concerns over the role of the Catholic Church in the United States. He worried that the church would capitalize on the Catholic faith of Latino immigrants to exert more political influence in the U.S. Specifically, he thought the church would try to subvert the division between church and state and limit abortion and birth control.

Linda Chavez, then the executive director of another group founded by John Tanton and of which he was then president, U.S. English, resigned because of the memos, calling them “repugnant and not excusable” and “anti-Catholic and anti-Hispanic.” Several members of U.S. English’s board, including Walter Cronkite and Arnold Schwarzenegger, also quit the group, and Tanton resigned. But there was no fallout for Tanton with his colleagues at FAIR. There, Tanton was supported and a committee created to craft his defense for the incendiary comments in the WITAN memos.

The memos were far from the sum of Tanton’s extremism. As reports by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) would document, Tanton had a lengthy record of friendly correspondence with Holocaust deniers, a former Klan lawyer and leading white nationalist thinkers, including Jared Taylor (who wrote in 2005, “When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization – any kind of civilization – disappears”). On another occasion, Tanton wrote a major FAIR funder to suggest she read the work of radical antisemitic professor Kevin MacDonald – to “give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life” – and suggested that the entire FAIR board discuss the man’s theories about the Jews. In a letter to FAIR board member Donald Collins, Tanton enthused over the work of John Trevor Sr. – a key architect of the bluntly racist Immigration Act of 1924 and a man who distributed pro-Nazi propaganda and warned shrilly of “diabolical Jewish control” of America – and said it should serve FAIR as “a guidepost to what we must follow again this time.”

The WITAN memos revealed Tanton’s keen awareness of the importance of seeming respectable. In one memo, he wrote: “the issues we’re touching on here must be broached by liberals. The conservatives simply cannot do it without tainting the whole subject.” But the publication of the memos did not halt FAIR’s growth. In 1990, FAIR claimed 50,000 members.

Tanton’s preoccupation with immigration appeared to be based, at least in part, on race. In a March 3, 1993, memo to FAIR board member Otis Graham, he demonstrated his desire to limit the number of nonwhites living in the U.S. The memo concerned a new group Tanton wanted to start, which he would have named the League for European American Defense, Education, and Research, or LEADERs [sic]. According to another Tanton memo, he had hatched the idea with help from three prominent white nationalists: the Council of Conservative Citizens’ Sam Francis, *American Renaissance*’s Jared Taylor and Wayne Lutton, who edits Tanton’s hate journal *The Social Contract*. Tanton wrote in his LEADERs memo: “Projections by the U.S. Census Bureau show that midway into the next century, the current European-American majority will become a minority. … This is unacceptable; we decline to bequeath to our children minority status in their own land.” Here, Tanton made it quite clear that the skin color of immigrants factored into his desire to limit immigration.

Despite Tanton’s unsavory track record, longtime FAIR President Dan Stein has shrunk from any criticism of FAIR’s founder; on the contrary, in 2009 he toldThe Washington Post that Tanton was a “Renaissance man.”

Maybe Stein has vigorously defended Tanton because he has expressed similarly extreme positions. In 1991, Stein sent a report to FAIR’s board of directors under the subject line: “The Defenders of American culture Rise to the Call to Arms.” In the memo, which is archived at George Washington University’s Gelman Library, Stein celebrated a new “disdain” in the media and among intellectuals for “the political agenda of those who openly attack the contributions of Western Civilization.” He was particularly happy that “multicultural and Politically Correct” school curricula had come under criticism.

Stein’s report expressed the hope that mounting criticism of multiculturalism would eventually lead to attacks on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended years of racist immigration policy (under a national origins quota system heavily skewed against non-whites and even darker-skinned Europeans) and initiated a wave of non-white immigration to the U.S. For Stein, the 1965 Act was “a key mistake in national policy” and a “source of error.”

In 1994, Tanton interviewed Stein for FAIR’s oral history project, which is composed of transcribed audio interviews with about a dozen FAIR principals. In that interview, Stein again expressed his disgust for the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. He told Tanton that those who supported the 1965 reform wanted to “retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance” and that this “revengism” against whites had created a policy that is causing “chaos and will continue to create chaos.”

FAIR and the Pioneer Fund

Between 1985 and 1994, FAIR received around $1.2 million in grants from the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund is a eugenicist organization started in 1937 by men close to the Nazi regime who wanted to pursue “race betterment” by promoting the genetic lines of American whites. Once led by the late race scientist J. Philippe Rushton, the fund continues to back studies intended to reveal the inferiority of minorities to whites.

FAIR stopped receiving Pioneer Fund grants in 1994 due to bad publicity it received when the grants were made public. At the time, FAIR was backing California’s punishing anti-immigrant Proposition 187, which would have denied education and health care to the children of undocumented immigrants in that state if it had not died as the result of court challenges. Stein and Tanton had led FAIR’s efforts to win funding from Pioneer, and Stein said in 1993, before Pioneer’s extremism was made public, that his “job [was] to get every dime of Pioneer’s money.”

After the bad publicity, FAIR denied that the Pioneer Fund money had any influence on its work or in any way influenced its programs. To manage the fallout, on March 16, 1994, Stein wrote a letter to Harry Weyher, then the president of the Pioneer Fund. Stein attached a draft of a document that he wanted Weyher to endorse and send out, titled “Why the Pioneer Fund Supports the Immigration Reform Movement.” Stein wrote the piece as though Weyher had written it himself. One part read, “We are pleased and proud that through financial support, we’ve made FAIR’s important work possible.” Though FAIR stopped receiving grants from the fund, which require public disclosure, it continued to receive private financial support from Pioneer’s leaders for several years. In early 1997, Tanton organized a gathering at the New York Racquet and Tennis Club, where three members of FAIR’s board – Henry Buhl, Sharon Barnes and Alan Weeden – met with Harry Weyher. In the late 1990s, Tanton also vacationed with Pioneer Fund board member John Trevor Jr., who also provided private financial support to FAIR.

FAIR’s foray into TV

FAIR also has produced controversial media programming. In 1996, FAIR started a television program called “Borderline.” The show lasted for about a year and featured a number of prominent white nationalists, including Sam Francis and Jared Taylor. “Borderline” often advanced ideas popular in white nationalist circles; particularly popular was the idea that immigrants are destroying American culture or displacing Western civilization with degenerate, Third World ways.

Lawrence Auster, a white nationalist who spoke in 1996 to a conference put on by American Renaissance and whose website “A View from the Right” is listed as a hate site by the SPLC, appeared on the show on April 1, 1996, making the argument that if the U.S. loses its white majority, it will be destroyed. The topic that day, according to host Dan Stein, was to “take a politically incorrect look at American culture and Western Civilization.” Stein added, “America, love it or lose it.” Auster argued that because of an “invasion,” “America is in the process of dissolving as a nation.” Supposedly drawing on history, Auster warned that as demographic change occurs and “the majority is threatened in its position,” the result could be “civil war.” Auster’s particular concern that day was the loss of “the historic European Anglo American culture.” Stein certainly seemed to agree with his guest’s worries. “How can we preserve America if it becomes 50% Latin American?” he asked. Stein also said that Anglos were leaving Los Angeles because it had become “a foreign country to them.”

Another prominent white nationalist who appeared on “Borderline” was naturalized English immigrant Peter Brimelow, who in 1999 would go on to found the anti-immigrant hate site VDARE.com. Brimelow authored Alien Nation, a book that argues America should remain white-dominated. In a discussion about Alien Nation on Aug. 5, 1996, Stein asked Brimelow whether “America’s social and economic elites seem to be writing off the whole idea of the nation-state.” He added: “If they shift their loyalty from the nation-state, what are they loyal to?” Brimelow argued that these same elites are creating the “greatest transformation of any independent state in history” by bringing in “new minority groups that did not exist before.” Brimelow considered these elites to be “treasonous,” people who “hate our traditional culture and they see immigration as a weapon to help destroy it.” “Are they really patriots?” Brimelow asked.

Stein asked Brimelow to talk more about his statement “race is destiny in American politics.” Brimelow did, saying, “you really alter the texture of the country by bringing in different ethnic groups.” Endorsing the invasion theory, Brimelow told one caller, “you have areas of South Texas and so on that have essentially gone back to Mexico.” Stein later asked Brimelow whether this all meant “the end of the United States?” Brimelow’s answer: “Sure.”

In 1998, various nativists and nativist groups attempted to get the Sierra Club to take an anti-immigration stance. The effort culminated in a 1998 vote in which Sierra Club members determined whether the group would support immigration restrictions. FAIR was one of the groups that helped to put the measure on the Sierra Club ballot, and Dan Stein teamed up with then CNN Crossfire host Pat Buchanan to advocate for it. Members ultimately chose to retain the Sierra Club’s neutral stance on immigration policy in a 60-40% vote. The Sierra Club was an important target for FAIR because it was considered a liberal group, and Tanton, who held leadership positions there in the 1970s and still had many allies, expressed in his WITAN memos that he thought that the Sierra Club would be less vulnerable to charges of racism when advocating against immigration.

In April 1999, FAIR attacked then-U.S. Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., for supporting more visas for foreigners with technology skills. It ran a newspaper ad that placed a picture of Abraham, an Arab American, alongside a picture of Osama bin Laden. It asked, “Why Is a U.S. Senator Trying to Make It Easier for Osama bin Laden to Export Terrorism to the U.S.?” FAIR’s ads were widely condemned and caused former Senator Alan K. Simpson, R-Wyo., to resign from FAIR’s advisory board. FAIR has also run other extremely controversial political advertisements, including one in 2000 in Iowa that was rejected by a TV station as “borderline racist.”

FAIR officials and links to white supremacy

Several FAIR officials have links to white supremacist hate groups. Rick Oltman, who for much of the 1990s was FAIR’s western regional coordinator, spoke as part of a 1997 immigration panel sponsored by the Council of Conservative Citizens, a racist group that has described black people as a “retrograde species of humanity.” Council publications at the time listed Oltman as a member. Jim Staudenraus, FAIR’s eastern regional coordinator, participated in an anti-immigration conference in 2002 with white nationalist Jared Taylor. In 2007, a senior FAIR official met with leaders of Vlaams Belang, a Belgian political party that officials in that country outlawed in a previous incarnation (Vlaams Blok) as a “criminal organization” because of its racist, anti-immigrant views.

In late 2006, FAIR hired Joseph Turner as its western field representative after Oltman departed. Turner was the founder of the Southern California group Save Our State, a now-defunct anti-immigrant hate group that was known for attracting neo-Nazis to its rallies. Turner was on record before joining FAIR as saying that being a white separatist did not imply a person was racist. Turner once accused Mexican immigrants of turning California into a “third world cesspool.” He left FAIR in December 2007 shortly after the SPLC, in tandem with publishing an extensive report on the group’s racism that included Turner’s inflammatory comments, designated FAIR as a hate group. FAIR representatives did not comment as to the reason for Turner’s departure.

FAIR board members harbor extreme views and connections as well. Garrett Hardin, a now-deceased biologist, was a very close friend of Tanton’s and an active board member of FAIR from the mid-1980s until around 1996. Like Tanton, he often expressed eugenicist views. Hardin was a longtime supporter of population control: In 1968, he wrote “The Tragedy of the Commons,” in which he argued that “[the] freedom to breed is intolerable.” In a 1992 interview with Omni magazine, he argued against sending food to starving Ethiopians, noting that doing so would only “encourage population growth.” In that interview, he lauded China for its “one-child policy” but lamented that the policy was not thorough enough. Former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, a longtime member of FAIR’s board of advisors, once said that “new cultures” in America were “diluting what we are and who we are.”

Longtime FAIR board member Donald A. Collins has written frequently for VDARE.com, an anti-immigrant hate site named after Virginia Dare, said to have been the first English child born in the New World. (VDARE is dedicated to bashing immigrants and has published the work of many white nationalists and antisemites.) Collins has been published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, a journal run by eugenicist Roger Pearson. Collins’ articles have focused on attacking the Catholic Church for its liberal stance on immigration. One accused then Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony of selling out his country “in exchange for more temporal power and glory.” Another claimed bishops were “infiltrating and manipulating the American political process” to dismantle the separation of church and state – the classic calumny directed at American Catholics for decades by the Klan and others. Another person linked to VDARE is Joe Guzzardi, a member of FAIR’s board of advisors who worked as an editor of the site.

On Oct. 2, 2007, Julie Kirchner became FAIR’s third executive director. Dan Stein had taken the position of FAIR president by that time. Stein retained his status as leader and public face of FAIR, while Kirchner managed the day-to-day operations.

FAIR pushes anti-immigrant legislation at state and local level

In the late 2000s, FAIR became much more active in pushing anti-immigrant laws at the state and local level. Attorney Kris Kobach of FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, helped write Arizona Senate Bill 1070. The bill, signed by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on April 23, 2010, forces police officers to detain individuals they suspect to be illegal immigrants and makes it a misdemeanor under state law for non-citizen immigrants to fail to carry their immigration papers. The law is currently caught up in the federal courts. Kobach earlier helped to pass anti-immigrant ordinances in Farmers Branch, Texas, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and other cities. These laws seek to punish those who aid and abet “illegal aliens.” The laws have proven a massive financial burden to the towns that pass them and, in many cases, have sparked racial strife and economic disorder. The Hazleton ordinance, which was struck down by a federal appeals court in September, had left that community of about 20,000 on the hook for $1.4 million and forced it to file for a state bailout. Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State and lawyer for IRLI, is now running for governor as a Republican. On July 14, 2018, he spoke at a pro-ICE rally in Wichita where he promised to end in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants and said, “If you want to create a job for an American citizen tomorrow, deport an illegal alien today.”

Another FAIR initiative to end birthright citizenship provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment,a longtime goal of the group, was launched in January 2011. IRLI, FAIR’s legal arm, working in partnership with State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI), announced a plant to halt what they call “the misapplication of the 14th Amendment.” The Fourteenth Amendment ensures that children born in the U.S. are U.S. citizens. Birthright citizenship is how most Americans become citizens.

SLLI is a coalition of about 70 legislators in 38 states dedicated to eliminating “economic attractions” for immigrants and their “unlawful invasion” of the U.S. The group is often described as the legislative arm of FAIR, which is apt given the group says on its website that it has a “working partnership” with FAIR. SLLI’s legislators are the main instigators behind favored FAIR initiatives, including attempts at the state level to deny immigrants various rights through laws modeled on Arizona’s S.B. 1070.

SLLI has grown dormant in recent years, and the Supreme Court in 2012 struck down most of SB 1070’s provisions as unconstitutional. FAIR’s push to end birthright citizenship, however, has not. Encouraged by then-candidate Donald Trump’s immigration plan, which proposed to “end birthright citizenship” because it is “the biggest magnet for illegal immigration,” FAIR published a report claiming the enforcement of birthright citizenship is based on a misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment. On June 29, 2018, IRLI filed an amicus brief in Fitisemanu v. United States. IRLI alleges the Fourteenth Amendment has been misinterpreted since 1898 and hopes the case will be taken to the Supreme Court.

The 2012 election saw a renewed push for immigration reform at the federal level, with a bipartisan bill passing the Senate before collapsing in the House. In an effort to stop reform legislation, anti-immigrant front groups first created with the help of FAIR in the mid-2000s were revived and rebranded. Groups like Choose Black America and You Don’t Speak for Me were replaced by the African American Leadership Council (AALC), a name replaced quickly by the Black American Leadership Alliance (BALA), and Alliance for Immigration Justice (AIJ). These groups, which ostensibly opposed reform because it would damage job prospects for minorities and hurt taxpayers, were made up of African Americans and Latinos. Many of them – such as Leah Durant, a former staffer at IRLI (FAIR’s legal arm), and Frank Morris, a longtime FAIR board member – had close ties to nativist organizations. BALA did manage to organize a rally in Washington – the “D.C. March for Jobs“ – that brought together a few thousand activists, including some nativist extremists like D.A. King of Georgia.

Following the failure of reform legislation, FAIR found a new focus. As the number of children fleeing violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua spiked in the summer of 2014, FAIR and its allies began to target organizations aiding these unaccompanied minors. FAIR published a map on its website with the title, “Is the Border Crisis Coming to a Town Near You?” It named locales where minors were being resettled and the organizations helping in that effort. Protests organized by anti-immigrant activists took place in a number of locations, most infamously in Murrieta, California, where activists blocked a bus full of women and children on their way to an immigration-processing center. In Michigan, anti-Muslim activist Tamyra Murray, a state adviser for FAIR, organized a protest against the relocation of minors in Vassar.

Even without a major immigration reform bill to challenge, FAIR’s public statements in recent years show that the organization remains true to the white nationalist principles on which it was founded. In late December 2015, Dan Stein told supporters in a video message that without a moratorium on immigration, “we’re going to lose everything about what it means to be an American.”

FAIR continues to be involved in pushing anti-immigrant laws at the state and local level. The organization has run campaigns in multiple states.

In March 2018, the organization emailed supporters to contact legislators in the campaign against Maryland becoming a sanctuary state. “House Bill (HB) 1461 makes it nearly impossible for state and local law enforcement to protect Marylanders against dangerous criminal aliens, even those convicted of the most serious crimes,” FAIR wrote.

In April 2018, FAIR praised the passage of anti-sanctuary bill HB 2315 in Tennessee, and promised to defend the legislation from any legal challenges. That same month, the organization lauded the passage of anti-sanctuary bill SF 481 in Iowa. FAIR’s State and Local Director Shari Rendall responded to criticism writing, “Most illegal aliens don’t cooperate with police – even in sanctuary cities – because the vast majority come from countries where law enforcement is either corrupt or serves as a tool of state oppression.” The Iowa Police Chiefs Association publicly came out against the bill. In December 2017, IRLI co-filed a lawsuit against Gary, Indiana, claiming ordinances preventing local law enforcement from detaining immigrants for ICE violate Indiana’s anti-sanctuary law. FAIR’s legal arm co-filed a second suit against the city of East Chicago in May 2018.

Oregonians for Immigration Reform (OFIR), an anti-immigrant hate group, is leading the campaign to overturn the state’s sanctuary policy through a referendum on the November 2018 ballot. FAIR has donated over $60,000 to this campaign while IRLI contributed $5,000.

FAIR and IRLI also led the campaign against California’s sanctuary city state law, which has resulted in over 25 cities voting to oppose SB 54. A group of anti-immigrant activists have testified throughout Southern California in opposition. These activists made antisemitic, anti-LGBT and nativist comments. IRLI also filed two amicus briefs opposing California’s sanctuary law. In one brief, IRLI claimed laws like the California Values Act, which ensures resources won’t be allocated for mass deportations, could lead to “armed confrontation between local and federal officers.”

FAIR, IRLI employees enter Trump administration

Former employees of FAIR and IRLI joined the ranks of the highest levels of government. Julie Kirchner, former FAIR director, left the organization in 2015 to act as an immigration adviser to the Trump campaign. She served as the Citizenship and Immigration Services ombudsman. John Zadrozny, also formerly of FAIR, moved to the State Department following his stint on the Domestic Policy Council. From 2017 to 2021, Robert _{La}_w worked at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), first as senior policy adviser and subsequently as chief of the Office of Policy and Strategy. Prior to joining the Trump administration, Law served as FAIR’s lobbying director and director of government relations from 2013 to 2017.

Ian Smith, who was previously employed by FAIR’s legal arm, IRLI, resigned his position as Homeland Security policy analyst on immigration issues on Aug. 28, 2018, after emails leaked to and shared by The Atlanticappeared to tie him to white nationalists Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor. That same day, former FAIR staffer and sole Latino employee Joe Gomez filed an official complaint with Washington, D.C.’s Office of Human Rights alleging discrimination and harassment during his tenure with the organization. Included in the litany of complaints was Communications Director Dave Ray inappropriately referencing Gomez’s ethnicity, often greeting him with “Hola hombre,” and “Que paso?” while other employees used a mocking Hispanic accent. Gomez also alleges FAIR employee Jennifer Hickey used the word “s---” twice, once referencing him.

The Trump administration to the present

During the Trump administration, FAIR and other anti-immigrant hate groups witnessed the implementation of draconian and nativist policies they spent decades advocating for. President Trump’s defeat meant that the nativist movement no longer had an ally in the White House.

The implications for groups like FAIR were twofold. First, FAIR, and the nativist movement at large, would need to shift their strategy from policy implementation to policy preservation; secondly, with their influence over the executive branch extinguished, FAIR and other anti-immigrant hate groups would need to refocus their attention on a familiar set of actors: state and local public officials.

The end of the Trump administration also resulted in former senior administration officials joining FAIRs and other anti-immigrant group’s staff. Mark Morgan, the former acting director of ICE and acting commissioner of CBP, joined FAIR as a senior fellow and spokesperson. Morgan also serves as a visiting fellow in the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

Additionally, IRLI, FAIR’s legal arm, hired Tom Homan as a senior fellow. During the Trump administration, Homan served as the acting director of ICE from January 2017 to June 2018. Through their new roles, both Morgan and Homan have used media appearances to excoriate the Biden administration’s immigration policies, while lauding and promoting the preservation of Trump administration policies.

Across 2021, FAIR has focused its attention on increasing its influence on state and local public officials, particularly sheriffs. On June 25, 2021, FAIR organized a “Rally to End Biden’s Border Crisis,” at a segment of the U.S. border in Hereford, Arizona. The speakers at the event included Mark Morgan, Tom Homan, local sheriffs and Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council. On April 8, 2021, FAIR promoted a letter signed by 275 sheriffs from across 39 states attacking the Biden Administration’s immigration strategy. The letter is filled with talking points routinely espoused by groups like FAIR.

https://insideclimatenews.org/todaysclimate/how-mass-shootings-ecofascism-and-climate-change-got-tied-together/

kris t

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/eco-fascism-rise-and-its-anti-immigrant-beliefs-have-bullhorn-fox-news

the far right is increasingly embracing an extremist ideology known as “eco-fascism,” which seeks to co-opt legitimate environmental concerns and repurpose them to support white nationalism. The alleged shooters who carried out racist, xenophobic attacks in Buffalo, New York; El Paso, Texas; and Christchurch, New Zealand, all either identified as eco-fascists or espoused eco-fascist views, but these beliefs are also being spread by mainstream conservative media figures. Fox News and other right-wing outlets regularly put forward eco-fascistic arguments that either implicitly or explicitly adopt the racist “great replacement” theory, which holds that a cabal of elites is seeking to displace white people through increased immigration.

Eco-fascism holds that immigrants are to blame for a scarcity of resources and, therefore, must be prevented from entering the United States, Europe, or other countries coded as “the West.” “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable,” the El Paso shooter allegedly wrote. That statement echoed the nativist and proto-eco-fascist Garrett Hardin’s argument that rich countries are like a “lifeboat” with limited social, economic, and natural resources – including food and housing stock – that needed to turn away immigrants, or else the “boat swamps, everyone drowns.”

In addition to this supposed competition for resources, eco-fascists hold racist beliefs about immigrants’ hygiene, respect for nature, and perceived higher birthrates. Historically, eco-fascism has held that the “purity” of a land’s natural resources should be reflected in racist ideas of a nation’s racial “purity,” most explicitly in the Nazi “emphasis on ‘blood and soil’” and “the need for a living space purified of alien and undesirable elements.” Just as the great replacement theory says that white people are being politically marginalized and subjugated, eco-fascists say they are being denied their rightful resources.[vid

November 11, 2019, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight]

The ideas that immigrants are a “drain” on resources or present an environmental risk to the United States are not limited to explicit eco-fascists though. Both of those narratives are common on Fox News, including from the network’s top star Tucker Carlson. On April 25, after Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) blamed migrants for causing “environmental degradation” at the southern border, Carlson thanked him for mentioning the “effect on the physical landscape, on the land.” The host added, “Where is the Sierra Club, you know, as our country is being trampled?”

Carlson has discussed this theme repeatedly over the years. The Potomac River “has gotten dirtier and dirtier and dirtier and dirtier,” he said in a 2019 interview in The Atlantic. “I go down there and that litter is left almost exclusively by immigrants.” (The Potomac Conservancy condemned Carlson’s remarks, calling them “racist plain and simple.”)

“I actually hate litter which is one of the reasons I'm so against illegal immigration. It produces a huge amount of litter,” he said in August 2018.

That December, Carlson said that immigrants make “our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.” He faced a significant backlash following those remarks, including from 26 companies which pulled advertisements from his show. But he doubled down on the comments just days later in a monologue that explicitly called increased immigration levels – not just the act of migrating – a threat to U.S. natural resources.

“Thanks to illegal immigration, huge swaths of the region are covered with garbage and waste that degrade the soil and kill wildlife,” he said. “Illegal immigration comes at a huge cost to our environment.”

“The left used to care about the environment – the land, the water, the animals,” he continued. “They understood that America is beautiful because it is open and uncrowded. Not so long ago, environmentalists opposed mass immigration. They knew what the costs were.”

Far-right website The Federalist wrote up that segment under the headline: “Tucker Carlson Is Absolutely Right: Illegal Immigration Is Destroying The Environment.”

One year earlier, far-right pundit Ann Coulter wrote an opinion piece for the Daily Caller titled “Choose Between A Green America And A Brown America,” criticizing the Sierra Club for adopting progressive immigration policies. In the piece, she made a racist reference to a “Mexican cultural trait of littering” and promoted “taking white Western European immigrants” over “Mass Third World immigration.”

The eco-fascistic right often couches its anti-immigrant conservationism in Malthusian anxieties about overpopulation. “A sensible environmentalism” would have to ask “is it good for us or the environment that the population grows artificially through the mass introduction of foreigners?” Christopher Roach wrote in a piece for American Greatness, a hotbed of far-right Trumpist nationalism. Roach also referenced “an immigration regime that transports billions from the fertile—though impoverished—Third World,” highlighting again the overlap between great replacement panic and eco-fascist narratives.

The far right’s demonization of immigrants as “dirty” or bad stewards of the environment goes hand-in-hand with the lie that they steal wealth from the United States, or otherwise don’t contribute their fair share.

“Our national wealth is up for grabs by whomever gets here first, and they are coming,” Carlson on May 21, 2019. “The United States is being plundered.”

That segment was based on a report from an immigration restrictionist group that has deep ties to the far-right ecology movement, called the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The group seeks to drastically reduce the level of authorized immigration and stop all unauthorized border crossing, according to theSouthern Poverty Law Center, which has designated FAIR as an extremist group.

In a recent blog post, FAIR government relations manager Preston Huennekens argued that “any increase in our population is going to our tax natural resources” and that migration had negative environmental impacts “through the physical act of migrating itself,” including “border trash, smuggling trails destroying fauna, etc.”

The idea of scarcity is crucial to the racist appeal of eco-fascism, and Fox News regularly suggests that municipal and federal resources can’t accommodate increased migration.

“At a time when there were more than half a million Americans homeless living on the streets – a crushing number that our leaders ignore but that rises every single year – at that moment, Joe Biden is giving hotel rooms to illegal aliens,” Carlson declared. “It's hard to believe that's real. Oh, but it is real.”

Anchor Harris Faulkner played that clip on her March 23, 2021, show, to which Fox News’ Will Cain responded: “Welcoming in migrants from Central America, that's all fine and good but not if it’s coming at the expense of a limited amount of resources that we're depriving of Americans.” As Media Matters noted at the time, immigrants contribute more to governmental resources than they use[vid]

March 23, 2021, edition of Fox News' The Faulkner Focus ]

In fact, Cain’s entire premise is wrong. The world has enough wealth and productive capacity to feed every human being. The United States could house every person living here, and the choice not to is due to a lack of political will, not limited environmental resources.

Nevertheless, over a 12-week period in 2021, Fox News repeated some version of Cain’s lie, fearmongering about immigrants taking resources from American citizens in at least 46 segments, according to a Media Matters study. The same research found that Fox News hosts demonized migrant children in 32 segments, accusing them of being a burden on the educational system, such as when Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade said on March 1, 2021, that migrant children who “don't speak English” were “taking time and energy away from your kids.”

Environmentalists have worked for decades to successfully expel any strains of eco-fascism from their movement. Now, right-wing media have openly adopted eco-fascistic rhetoric to conflate an ideology grounded in white supremacy with genuine environmental concerns, all in their crusade against immigration.

To paraphrase the Potomac Conservancy: These attacks are racist, plain and simple.

mma 121

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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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https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/federation-american-immigration-reform

FAIR leaders have ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists and have made many racist statements. Its advertisements have been rejected because of racist content. FAIR’s founder, John Tanton, has expressed his wish that America remain a majority-white population: a goal to be achieved, presumably, by limiting the number of nonwhites who enter the country. One of the group’s main goals is upending the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended a decades-long, racist quota system that limited immigration mostly to northern Europeans.FAIR President Dan Stein has called the Act a "mistake."

In Its Own Words

"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?"

— FAIR founder and board member John Tanton, Oct. 10, 1986

"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."

— John Tanton, letter to eugenicist and ecology professor Garrett Hardin (now deceased), Dec. 10, 1993

"I blame ninety-eight percent of responsibility for this country's immigration crisis on Ted Kennedy and his political allies, who decided some time back in 1958, earlier perhaps, that immigration was a great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris, and the immigration laws from the 1920s were just this symbol of that, and it's a form of revengism, or revenge, that these forces continue to push the immigration policy that they know full well are [sic] creating chaos and will continue to create chaos down the line."

— FAIR President Dan Stein, "Oral History of the Federation for American Immigration Reform," interview of Dan Stein by John Tanton, August 1994.

"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?"

— John Tanton, letter to eugenicist Robert K. Graham (now deceased), Sept. 18, 1996

"Immigrants don't come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing … Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans."

— FAIR President Dan Stein, interviewed by Tucker Carlson, Oct. 2, 1997

Background

John Tanton founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform on Jan. 2, 1979, in Washington D.C. Roger Conner, an environmental lawyer, was appointed executive director, while Tanton served as the chairman of the board of directors. Before establishing FAIR, Tanton had experience working with groups concerned about how population growth affected the environment. Tanton served in several Sierra Club leadership posts, and he had been the president of Zero Population Growth, a group founded by biologist and longtime FAIR adviser Paul Ehrlich, from 1975 to 1977.

The founding of FAIR was a major change for Tanton. But he was driven to shift his efforts to the battle against immigration by his increasing concern that it was the primary cause of population growth. As a result, FAIR focuses exclusively on immigration issues. Its goal, according to its website, is to set immigration quotas "at the lowest feasible levels" and to prevent all illegal immigration. The group attempts to appear moderate, even though its record is extreme, particularly on racial issues. This strategy has paid off: In August 2009, FAIR President Dan Stein boasted that FAIR leaders had testified before Congress about 100 times.

In its early years, FAIR was known for frequent op-ed pieces and controversial advertisements. In December 1980, it ran an ad in the Rocky Mountain News with the headline: "Our Grandparents Came To America To Escape Poverty And Despair. Will Our Children Want To Leave For The Same Reasons?" The implication was that unless immigration policies were reformed, immigrants would swarm the United States, undermine job prospects for Americans and put an end to American prosperity.

In 1988, Dan Stein replaced Roger Conner as executive director. Stein had been an employee of FAIR since 1982; before that, he was the executive director of the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), which was incorporated under FAIR's tax exemption and still serves as FAIR's legal arm. Conner became FAIR's president; this meant that Stein took over the responsibilities of running FAIR while Conner focused on fundraising.

On Oct. 9, 1988, the Arizona Republic published excerpts from embarrassing memos that had been sent by Tanton and Conner to members of FAIR's leadership. The documents were known as the WITAN memos; they came from an October 1986 conference in which Tanton met with a number of anti-immigration activists for a strategy session. The memos revealed Tanton's innermost, and controversial, thoughts. Tanton warned of a "Latin onslaught," complained of Latinos' allegedly low "educability." He asked, "Will Latin American migrants bring with them the tradition of the mordida (bribe), the lack of involvement in public affairs, etc.?" He also wondered: "Can homo contraceptivus [meaning whites] compete with homo progenitiva [meaning Latinos] if borders aren't controlled? Or is advice to limit ones [sic] family simply advice to move over and let someone else with greater reproductive powers occupy the space?"

In the memos, Tanton, sounding much like the Klan of the 1920s, expressed concerns over the role of the Catholic Church in the United States, a favorite topic of his. He worried that the Church would capitalize on the Catholic faith of Latino immigrants to exert more political influence in the U.S. Specifically, he thought the church would try to subvert the division between church and state and limit abortion and birth control.

Linda Chavez, then the executive director of another group founded by John Tanton and of which he was then president, U.S. English, resigned because of the memos, calling them "repugnant and not excusable" and "anti-Catholic and anti-Hispanic." Several members of U.S. English's board, including Walter Cronkite and Arnold Schwarzenegger, also quit the group, and Tanton resigned. But there was no fallout for Tanton with his colleagues at FAIR; there, Tanton was supported and a committee created to craft his defense for the incendiary comments in the WITAN memos.

The memos were far from the sum of Tanton's extremism. As reports by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) would document, Tanton has a lengthy record of friendly correspondence with Holocaust deniers, a former Klan lawyer and leading white nationalist thinkers, including Jared Taylor (who wrote in 2005, "When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears"). On another occasion, Tanton wrote a major FAIR funder to suggest she read the work of radical anti-Semitic professor Kevin MacDonald— to "give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life" — and suggested that the entire FAIR board discuss the man's theories about the Jews. In a letter to FAIR board member Donald Collins, Tanton enthused over the work of John Trevor Sr. — a key architect of the bluntly racist Immigration Act of 1924 and a man who distributed pro-Nazi propaganda and warned shrilly of "diabolical Jewish control" of America — and said it should serve FAIR as "a guidepost to what we must follow again this time." Tanton has also made several racist comments, telling a reporter in 1997 that unless U.S. borders are sealed, America will be overrun by people "defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs."

The WITAN memos reveal Tanton's keen awareness of the importance of seeming respectable. In one memo, he wrote: "the issues we're touching on here must be broached by liberals. The conservatives simply cannot do it without tainting the whole subject." But the publication of the memos did not halt FAIR's growth. In 1990, FAIR claimed 50,000 members.

Tanton's preoccupation with immigration appears to be based, at least in part, on race. In a March 3, 1993 memo to FAIR board member Otis Graham, he demonstrated his desire to limit the number of nonwhites living in the U.S. The memo concerned a new group Tanton wanted to start, which he would have named the League for European American Defense, Education, and Research, or LEADERs [sic]. According to another Tanton memo, he had hatched the idea with help from three prominent white nationalists: the Council of Conservative Citizens' Sam Francis, *American Renaissance*'s Jared Taylor and Wayne Lutton, who edits Tanton's hate journal *The Social Contract*. Tanton wrote in his LEADERs memo: "Projections by the U.S. Census Bureau show that midway into the next century, the current European-American majority will become a minority … This is unacceptable; we decline to bequeath to our children minority status in their own land." Here, Tanton made it quite clear that the skin color of immigrants factored into his desire to limit immigration.

Despite Tanton's unsavory track record, longtime FAIR President Dan Stein has shrunk from any criticism of FAIR's founder; on the contrary, in 2009 he told the Washington Post that Tanton was a "Renaissance man."

Maybe Stein has vigorously defended Tanton because he has expressed similarly extreme positions. In 1991, Stein sent a report to FAIR's board of directors under the subject line: "The Defenders of American culture Rise to the Call to Arms." In the memo, which is archived at George Washington University's Gelman Library, Stein celebrated a new "disdain" in the media and among intellectuals for "the political agenda of those who openly attack the contributions of Western Civilization." He was particularly happy that "multicultural and Politically Correct" school curricula had come under criticism.

Stein's report expressed the hope that mounting criticism of multiculturalism would eventually lead to attacks on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended years of racist immigration policy (under a national origins quota system heavily skewed against non-whites and even darker-skinned Europeans) and initiated a wave of non-white immigration to the U.S. For Stein, the 1965 Act was "a key mistake in national policy" and a "source of error."

In 1994, Tanton interviewed Stein for FAIR's oral history project, which is composed of transcribed audio interviews with about a dozen FAIR principals. In that interview, Stein again expressed his disgust for the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. He told Tanton that those who supported the 1965 reform wanted to "retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance" and that this "revengism" against whites had created a policy that is causing "chaos and will continue to create chaos."

Between 1985 and 1994, FAIR received around $1.2 million in grants from the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund is a eugenicist organization that was started in 1937 by men close to the Nazi regime who wanted to pursue "race betterment" by promoting the genetic lines of American whites. Now led by race scientist J. Philippe Rushton, the fund continues to back studies intended to reveal the inferiority of minorities to whites.

FAIR stopped receiving Pioneer Fund grants in 1994 due to bad publicity it received when the grants were made public.At the time, FAIR was backing California's punishing anti-immigrant Proposition 187, which would have denied education and health care to the children of undocumented immigrants in that state if it had not died as the result of court challenges. Stein and Tanton had led FAIR's efforts to win funding from Pioneer, and Stein said in 1993, before Pioneer's extremism was made public, that his "job [was] to get every dime of Pioneer's money."

After the bad publicity, FAIR denied that the Pioneer Fund money had any influence on its work or in any way influenced its programs. To manage the fallout, on March 16, 1994, Stein wrote a letter to Harry Weyher, then the president of the Pioneer Fund. Stein attached a draft of a document that he wanted Weyher to endorse and send out, titled "Why the Pioneer Fund Supports the Immigration Reform Movement." Stein wrote the piece as though Weyher had written it himself. One part read, "We are pleased and proud that through financial support, we've made FAIR's important work possible." Though FAIR stopped receiving grants from the fund, which require public disclosure, it continued to receive private financial support from Pioneer's leaders for several years. In early 1997, Tanton organized a gathering at the New York Racquet and Tennis Club, where three members of FAIR's board — Henry Buhl, Sharon Barnes and Alan Weeden — met with Harry Weyher. In the late 1990s, Tanton also vacationed with Pioneer Fund board member John Trevor Jr., who also provided private financial support to FAIR.

FAIR also has produced controversial media programming. In 1996, FAIR started a television program called "Borderline." The show lasted for about a year and featured a number of prominent white nationalists, including Sam Francis and Jared Taylor. "Borderline" often advanced ideas popular in white nationalist circles; particularly popular was the idea that immigrants are destroying American culture or displacing Western civilization with degenerate, Third World ways.

Lawrence Auster, a white nationalist who spoke in 1996 to a conference put on by American Renaissance and whose website "A View from the Right" is listed as a hate site by the SPLC, appeared on the show on April 1, 1996, making the argument that if the U.S. loses its white majority, it will be destroyed. The topic that day, according to host Dan Stein, was to "take a politically incorrect look at American culture and Western Civilization." Stein added, "America, love it or lose it." Auster argued that because of an "invasion," "America is in the process of dissolving as a nation." Supposedly drawing on history, Auster warned that as demographic change occurs and "the majority is threatened in its position," the result could be "civil war." Auster's particular concern that day was the loss of "the historic European Anglo American culture." Stein certainly seemed to agree with his guest's worries. "How can we preserve America if it becomes 50% Latin American?" he asked. Stein also said that Anglos were leaving Los Angeles because it had become "a foreign country to them."

Another prominent white nationalist who appeared on "Borderline" was naturalized English immigrant Peter Brimelow, who in 1999 would go on to found the anti-immigrant hate site VDARE.com. Brimelow authored Alien Nation, a book that argues America should remain white-dominated. In a discussion about Alien Nation on Aug. 5, 1996, Stein asked Brimelow whether "America's social and economic elites seem to be writing off the whole idea of the nation-state." He added: "If they shift their loyalty from the nation-state, what are they loyal to?" Brimelow argued that these same elites are creating the "greatest transformation of any independent state in history" by bringing in "new minority groups that did not exist before." Brimelow considered these elites to be "treasonous," people who "hate our traditional culture and they see immigration as a weapon to help destroy it." "Are they really patriots?" Brimelow asked.

Stein asked Brimelow to talk more about his statement "race is destiny in American politics." Brimelow did, saying, "you really alter the texture of the country by bringing in different ethnic groups." Endorsing the invasion theory, Brimelow told one caller, "you have areas of South Texas and so on that have essentially gone back to Mexico." Stein later asked Brimelow whether this all meant "the end of the United States?" Brimelow's answer: "Sure."

In 1998, various nativists and nativist groups attempted to get the Sierra Club to take an anti-immigration stance. The effort culminated in a 1998 vote in which Sierra Club members determined whether the group would support immigration restrictions. FAIR was one of the groups that helped to put the measure on the Sierra Club ballot, and Dan Stein teamed up with then-CNN Crossfire host Pat Buchanan to advocate for it. Members ultimately chose to retain the Sierra Club's neutral stance on immigration policy in a 60%-40% vote. The Sierra Club was an important target for FAIR because it was considered a liberal group, and Tanton, who held leadership positions there in the 1970s and still had many allies, expressed in his WITAN memos that he thought that the Sierra Club would be less vulnerable to charges of racism when advocating against immigration.

In April 1999, FAIR attacked U.S. Senator Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.) for supporting more visas for foreigners with technology skills. It ran a newspaper ad that placed a picture of Abraham, an Arab-American, alongside a picture of Osama bin Laden. It asked, "Why Is a U.S. Senator Trying to Make It Easier for Osama bin Laden to Export Terrorism to the U.S.?" FAIR's ads were widely condemned and caused former Senator Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) to resign from FAIR's advisory board. FAIR has also run other extremely controversial political advertisements, including one in 2000 in Iowa that was rejected by a TV station as "borderline racist."

Several FAIR officials have links to white supremacist hate groups. Rick Oltman, who for much of the 1990s was FAIR's western regional coordinator, spoke as part of a 1997 immigration panel sponsored by the Council of Conservative Citizens, a racist group that has described black people as a "retrograde species of humanity." Council publications at the time listed Oltman as a member. Jim Staudenraus, FAIR's eastern regional coordinator, participated in an anti-immigration conference in 2002 with white nationalist Jared Taylor. In 2007, a senior FAIR official met with leaders of Vlaams Belang, a Belgian political party that officials in that country outlawed in a previous incarnation (Vlaams Blok) as a "criminal organization" because of its racist, anti-immigrant views.

In late 2006, FAIR hired Joseph Turner as its western field representative after Oltman departed. Turner was the founder of the Southern California group Save Our State, a now-defunct anti-immigrant hate group that was known for attracting neo-Nazis to its rallies. Turner was on record before joining FAIR as saying that being a white separatist did not imply a person was racist. Turner once accused Mexican immigrants of turning California into a "third world cesspool." He left FAIR in December 2007 shortly after the SPLC, in tandem with publishing an extensive report on the group's racism that included Turner's inflammatory comments, designated FAIR as a hate group. FAIR representatives did not comment as to the reason for Turner's departure.

FAIR board members harbor extreme views and connections as well. Garrett Hardin, a now-deceased biologist, was a very close friend of Tanton's and an active board member of FAIR from the mid-1980s until around 1996. Like Tanton, he often expressed eugenicist views. Hardin was a longtime supporter of population control: In 1968, he wrote "The Tragedy of the Commons," in which he argued that "[the] freedom to breed is intolerable." In a 1992 interview with Omni magazine, he argued against sending food to starving Ethiopians, noting that doing so would only "encourage population growth." In that interview, he lauded China for its "one-child policy" but lamented that the policy was not thorough enough. Former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, a longtime member of FAIR's board of advisors, once said that "new cultures" in America were "diluting what we are and who we are."

Longtime FAIR board member Donald A. Collins writes frequently for the VDARE.com, an anti-immigrant hate site named after Virginia Dare, said to have been the first English child born in the New World. (VDARE is dedicated to bashing immigrants and has published the work of many white nationalists and anti-Semites.) Collins has been published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, a journal run by eugenicist Roger Pearson. Collins' articles have focused on attacking the Catholic Church for its liberal stance on immigration. One accused Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony of selling out his country "in exchange for more temporal power and glory." Another claimed bishops were "infiltrating and manipulating the American political process" to dismantle the separation of church and state — the classic calumny directed at American Catholics for decades by the Klan and others. Another person linked to VDARE is Joe Guzzardi, a member of FAIR's board of advisors who worked as an editor of the site.

On Oct. 2, 2007, Julie Kirchner became FAIR's third executive director. Dan Stein had taken the position of FAIR president by that time. Stein retained his status as leader and public face of FAIR, while Kirchner managed the day-to-day operations.

In the late 2000s, FAIR become much more active in pushing anti-immigrant laws at the state and local level. Attorney Kris Kobach,who works for FAIR's legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, helped to write Arizona Senate Bill 1070. The bill, signed by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer on April 23, 2010, forces police officers to detain individuals who they suspect to be illegal immigrants and makes it a misdemeanor under state law for non-citizen immigrants to fail to carry their immigration papers. The law is currently caught up in the federal courts. Kobach earlier helped to pass anti-immigrant ordinances in Farmers Branch, Texas; Hazleton, Pa.; and other cities. These laws seek to punish those who aid and abet "illegal aliens." The laws have proven a massive financial burden to the towns that pass them and, in many cases, have sparked racial strife and economic disorder. The Hazleton ordinance, which was struck down by a federal appeals court in September, had left that community of about 20,000 on the hook for nearly $3 million in legal fees as of January 2011. The city is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Another FAIR initiative to end birthright citizenship provisions of the 14th Amendment, a longtime goal of the group, was launched in January 2011. IRLI, FAIR's legal arm, working in partnership with State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI), announced a plant to halt what they call "the misapplication of the 14th Amendment." The 14th Amendment ensures that children born in the U.S. are U.S. citizens. Birthright citizenship is how most Americans become citizens.

SLLI is a coalition of about 70 legislators in 38 states dedicated to eliminating "economic attractions" for immigrants and their "unlawful invasion" of the U.S. The group is often described as the legislative arm of FAIR, which is apt given the group says on its website that it has a "working partnership" with FAIR. SLLI's legislators are the main instigators behind favored FAIR initiatives, including attempts at the state level to deny immigrants various rights through laws modeled on Arizona's S.B. 1070.

SLLI has grown dormant in recent years, and the Supreme Court in 2012 struck downmost of SB 1070’s provisions as unconstitutional.

The 2012 election saw a renewed push for immigration reform at the federal level, with a bipartisan bill passing the Senate before collapsing in the House. In an effort to stop reform legislation, anti-immigrant front groups first created with the help of FAIR in the mid-2000s were revived and rebranded. Groups like Choose Black America and You Don’t Think for Me were replaced by the African American Leadership Council (AALC), a name replaced quickly by the Black American Leadership Alliance (BALA), and Alliance for Immigration Justice (AIJ). These groups, which ostensibly opposed reform because it would damage job prospects for minorities and hurt taxpayers, were made up of African Americans and Latinos. Many of them – such as Leah Durant, a former staffer at IRLI (FAIR’s legal arm), and Frank Morris, a longtime FAIR board member – had close ties to nativist organizations. BALA did manage to organize a rally in Washington – the “DC March for Jobs” – that brought together a few thousand activists, including some nativist extremists like D.A. King of Georgia.

Following the failure of reform legislation, FAIR found a new focus. As the number of children fleeing violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua spiked in the summer of 2014, FAIR and its allies began to target organizations aiding these unaccompanied minors. FAIR published a map on its website with the title, “Is the Border Crisis Coming to a Town Near You?” It named locales where minors were being resettled and the organizations helping in that effort. Protests organized by anti-immigrant activists took place in a number of locations, most infamously in Murrieta, California, where activists blocked a bus full of women and children on their way to an immigration-processing center. In Michigan, anti-Muslim activist Tamyra Murray, a state adviser for FAIR, organized a protest against the relocation of minors in Vassar.

Even without a major immigration reform bill to challenge, FAIR’s public statements in recent years show that the organization remains true to the white nationalist principles on which it was founded. In late December 2015, Dan Stein told supporters in a video message that without a moratorium on immigration, “we’re going to lose everything about what it means to be an American.”

Recent News

Anti-immigrant roundup: 7/6/18

Anti-immigrant roundup: 6/13/18

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting director to speak at hate group event tomorrow

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rem pjt

reporter Kenneth Vogel interviewed a number of victims' families who had left the organization, claiming Espinoza was only using them to boost her public profile.

The Politico piece also reported that at TRP’s inaugural conference last year, where then-candidate Trump spoke, tables cost upwards of $10,000.

But according to the article, none of the money raised that day made its way into the hands of the victims’ families.

Former TRP member Maureen Maloney spoke to Politico for the piece. Her son was killed by an undocumented Ecuadorean man, who had been driving while intoxicated and later was convicted of manslaughter.

“The more involved I got, once I got past my son’s trial and could focus more on the organization, it just seemed like my values and my goals were different than what Maria’s were," she explained. "It started to feel like this might be a steppingstone for her.”

A  TRP press release from March 7 announcing the group's relocation of its headquarters from Houston to the nation's capital is instructive. TRP was mentioned once, in the first sentence, while Espinoza’s name appeared six times in five paragraphs.

In an apparent attempt to save face following the Politico article and a large exodus from the organization, TRP announced June 22 what Espinoza called a “groundbreaking victims’ support initiative,” in which the group will partner with CAREforce.us and The Counseling Team International -- described in the press release as “two prominent nationwide professional intervention response groups” -- to provide support services to the families of victims killed by undocumented immigrants.

The next day, however, Iowa Rep. Steve King, a staunch ally of the anti-immigrant movement and heretofore of The Remembrance Project, was at the launch of what appears to be a splinter group from TRP, named Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime (AVIAC).

The group shares similar goals to that of Espinoza’s project. For example, TRP’s tagline reads, “Educating and raising awareness of the epidemic of killings of Americans by individuals who should not have been in the country in the first place. Americans must come first in order to stop the permanent separation of families.”

Meanwhile, AVIAC’s states, “AVIAC seeks to educate the public on the statistics and impact that illegal immigration has on American lives, our country's safety and the financial burden it is costing each and every American.”

Though there was no mention of TRP at the AVIAC event, a least one woman who was perturbed by Espinoza’s antics has joined the splinter group: Maureen Maloney, who spoke at the AVIAC launch.

A little awkwardly, both AVIAC members and Espinoza were in Washington, D.C., for the annual Hold Their Feet to the Fire event put on by the anti-immigrant group, Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). In one radio interview, Espinoza was mum on the AVIAC creation, choosing instead to announce that TRP would be hosting another conference, this time to take place in D.C. in November.

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ref jul 17

For Sandy Rios, a radio host with the anti-LGBT hate group American Family Association (AFA), the immigration issue boils down to proper bathroom etiquette.

“Listen, I am being very impolitic here,“ Rios explained in a recent episode of “Sandy Rios in the Morning” for AFA’s American Family Radio, “but, as a female I find that bathrooms have just become unbearable because I think the people coming in don’t know basic hygiene, don’t know how to handle modern amenities.”

Rios’ bigoted comment, first reported by Right-Wing Watch, came during day one of the annual Hold Their Feet to the Fire radio event, organized by the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and held June 28-29 at Washington, D.C.’s Phoenix Park Hotel.

FAIR president Dan Stein with right-wing firebrand Michelle Malkinat FAIR's recent HTFTTF event. (via Twitter)

The event brought together nativist politicians, activists and law enforcement officials with around 60 like-minded radio hosts for a de rigueur demonization of immigrants, combined with a celebration of president Donald Trump’s election and a call for ever more draconian immigration reform measures.

AFA’s Rios was expounding on her bizarre fears regarding immigrants and bathrooms as she interviewed Dan Stein, FAIR’s longtime president, who seemed to believe that the nation’s impasse over immigration may require something far more vigorous than impassioned debate.

“The immigration issue is going to be dealt with one way or the other,” Stein told Rios. “Now, it’s either going to be dealt with responsibly and reasonably, or it will be decided in the streets, because the public is going to get so frustrated with total inaction.”

Stein’s dark turn aside, FAIR had a lot to celebrate last week: Anti-sanctuary bills passed in the House; FAIR staffers invited to the White House to meet the president and discuss immigration issues; and, of course, the 2017 HTFTTF, billed as FAIR's biggest to date.

After talking about their frustration with President Trump for not yet fulfilling some of his campaign promises on immigration, Rios reminded Stein that life was good for immigrant-bashers these days.

“Still, there’s a lot to be grateful for!” Rios enthused, accentuating the positive.

“Oh, yes indeedy, ha ha ha!” Stein snickered.

When he wasn’t celebrating an ally in the White House, Stein was warning about demographic changes and taking stabs at familiar bête noires of the right.

During an interview with Boston Herald radio, Stein accused Democrats of advocating for unfettered immigration in order to expand their constituency.

“SEIU, George Soros and others have kind of taken over the party," he claimed. "And they see immigration, by any means necessary, legal, illegal, as helping the party long term by re-engineering the demographics.”

As Stein inveighed against his foils on the left, outside the hotel on the street, a half dozen protesters carried signs, reading “Racists Enter Here” and “End White Supremacy, Sanctuary for All!”

The demonstrators caused some irritation for attendees and radio hosts, and their signs certainly alluded to FAIR’s decades-long history of racism, starting with its founder, white nationalist John Tanton. Despite this distasteful history, the group is still able to attract elected officials.

Over two-dozen U.S. House Representatives attended HTFTTF, along with at least four U.S. Senators and a number of state politicians. Iowa Congressman Steve King, one of the most outspoken anti-immigrant members of the House, used one of his speaking engagements with conservative West Virginia-based radio host Tom Roten to question the legitimacy of some Supreme Court justices.

When talking about the SCOTUS decision on the Muslim ban, King took a jab at the more liberal justices, stating that, according to “the dissents on the part of the real justices,” the president “has the authority, congress gave it to him.”

FAIR’s deep ties to law enforcement and U.S. Border Patrol were also on display. Brandon Judd and Hector Garza, president and vice president, respectively, of the National Border Patrol Council, were in attendance, along with Art Del Cueto head of the Tucson Border Patrol Union.

A number of Sheriffs FAIR works with also attended, including Tom Hodgson of Bristol County, MA, Chuck Jenkins of Frederick County, MD, and Sam Page of Wentworth, NC.

Hodgson, a longtime FAIR ally told Tom Roten that if elected officials offer sanctuary to undocumented immigrants, like the Mayor of Boston pledged recently, the response should be to “issue arrest warrants” on every one of those elected officials.

Among the extremists present at HTFTTF was Robert Spencer, one of the most outspoken anti-Muslim activists in America today, a man who in a 2007 interview, stated that Islam is “not a religion of peace” and has “an inherently political character that is being brought to the West by immigrants, and will cause more trouble in the future.”

In an interview with Rios, Spencer described Islam as “an ideology [that's] been a raid against the West for 1400 years.”

Spencer and Rios also talked about a leftist/Islamic plot to bring down the West, a conspiracy theory anti-Muslim groups have been peddling for a number of years.

Yet another extremist attending HTFTTF offered a disturbing example of the alliance between the Trump administration and the established nativist movement.

Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka, a man it was recently revealed was fired from the FBIfor his anti-Muslim beliefs, attended the event on day one. In an interview with Portland radio host Lars Larson, Gorka railed on sanctuary cities in the United States, saying that these need to be done away with. Gorka also threatened to pull federal grants from sanctuary cities, a common threat from the Trump administration.

During the Trump campaign, numerous anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim figures advised the President, and now a number of them have left anti-immigrant groups to join the Department of Homeland Security and other posts.

These disturbing moves have been documented by the civil rights organization Center for New Community in its living-report “Nativists at the White House.”

Michelle Malkin, a much sought after attendee, summed up the theme of the event in her interview with Rios, first echoing Dan Stein’s concerns about Trump's not following through with some campaign pledges, then praising U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, another key nativist ally.

“I like the fact that we have him in the White House," she said, adding, "and with brilliant policy advisers and analysts and strategists like [senior policy adviser] Stephen Miller, we know we’ve got a voice in the White House like we’ve never had before.”