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NumbersUSA

SEE CLETA GINNI GOTV

CLETA ONLY CITS 5 26

THIEL

HERITAGE // 2925?

RENAME?

recall he lost by 3 million votes, lied about inaug numbers for weeks/mo, basically his legitimacy at stake

see tanton

kobach

jeff sessions staffer trump transition

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CLETA ONLY CITS 5 26

[### Senate unveils funding package for immigration enforcement

Immigration Accountability Project

https://iaproject.org › commentary › weekly-update › se...](https://iaproject.org/commentary/weekly-update/senate-unveils-funding-package-for-immigration-enf/)

May 8, 2026 — The reconciliation package would provide: $38.2 billion for ICE;; $26 billion for CBP, including $3.5 billion for border security technology and ...Read more

AI Overview

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The Immigration Accountability Project (IAP) is a 501(c)(3) advocacy organization co-founded by former NumbersUSA staffers Chris Chmielenski and Rosemary Jenks.

SourceWatch

The organization receives its funding through various sources, including non-profit grants and public donations. Specific details on IAP's funding include:

SourceWatch +1

SourceWatch

SourceWatch

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/08/04/donald-trumps-widespread-voter-fraud-claim-untrue-election-official/905262002/

wASHINGTON – There's no proof to support President Donald Trump's repeated claims of widespread voter fraud during the 2016 election, according to a member of the disbanded commission set up to examine abuse at the ballot box.

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Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, who sat on the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, wrote Friday that a review of documents shows the panel's evidence of voter fraud is "glaringly empty."

Dunlap said the documents confirmed the commission's "troubling bias" that assumed widespread fraud going into the review before any data had been collected.

The letter was addressed to Vice President Mike Pence, who chaired the commission, and vice-chair Kris Kobach, secretary of state for Kansas. Kobach, who is running for governor, has often aired the president's unproved claims of massive voter fraud.

Since the disputed 2000 election, numerous government and private investigations and reports have found no substantial amount of voter fraud. Trump said 3 million to 5 million illegal votes took place.

More: Fact check: Trump claims massive voter fraud; here's the truth

More: Trump, after killing his 'voter fraud' commission, calls for new ID laws

"As Secretary of State, I am deeply involved in election integrity issues," Dunlap wrote. "Yet neither through my work, nor my time on the Commission, have I ever seen 'substantial evidence of widespread voter fraud.' Rather, these assertions appeared aimed at that pre-ordained objective: ratifying the President's statements that millions of illegal votes were cast during the 2016 elections."

Dunlap posted the documents on his office's website.He obtained them through a court order after he sued the commission for records and testimony it gathered during the six months it operated.

The panel, which Trump established by executive order last year, faced headwinds from the start.

Civil rights groups decried it as a sham designed to legitimize the president's narrative that he really won the popular vote and encourage states to make voting hard, especially for African-Americans, Hispanics and poor people.

Many state and local elections officials, including some Republicans, refused to hand over records, citing privacy concerns and a lack of voting abuses.

The commission suffered from infighting as some members, including Dunlap, said they were being shut out of certain deliberations because of their skepticism.

In January, Trump signed an executive order disbanding the election integrity commission, saying he didn't want to waste taxpayer money fighting with state governments over their voter data.

Trump said the commission's work will go to the Department of Homeland Security.

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https://www.propublica.org/article/election-commission-documents-cast-doubt-on-trumps-claims-of-voter-fraud

Election Commission Documents Cast Doubt on Trump’s Claims of Voter Fraud

Thousands of pages of internal records are likely to bolster critics of the short-lived Trump administration commission.

by Jessica Huseman

 Aug. 3, 2018, 6:23 p.m. EDT

In May of 2017, President Donald Trump established a presidential commission to explore the threat of voter fraud — staffing it with multiple Republicans who had theorized that fraud was a substantial problem in American democracy. The commission, widely called the voter fraud commission, was immediately criticized as a political creation aimed at a phony problem.

In January, Trump disbanded the commission, which by then had produced little if any evidence that voter fraud was a significant menace.

Today, thousands of commission documents were released that show aspects of the body’s inner workings. As critics have suggested, the records — a mix of memos, internal emails and reports — make clear the commission’s work was driven by a small number of members who were convinced voter fraud was widespread, and that other members were often excluded from critical decisions about the commission’s aims and tactics.

The documents were provided to ProPublica by American Oversight — a group that provided legal representation to Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap, who had been a Democratic member of the commission. Dunlap has contended that the commission’s leaders left him out of key deliberations, which he was entitled to participate in by law.

The judge ruled that the commission must disclose documentation related to internal deliberations, and the commission did so on July 18. Below is a sampling of some of the noteworthy material in them:

In January, when Trump abruptly dissolved the commission, he claimed that it had “substantial evidence of voter fraud” and that the commission’s “initial findings” would be turned over to the Department of Homeland Security. But the documents released today show there was nothing to support these claims.

On Nov. 18, 2017, Andrew Kossack — the executive director of the commission — circulated a draft “Staff Report” on the commission’s work. The report is a summary of the commission’s efforts, which Kossack appears to have been compiling beginning in August. The draft report included a prewritten section called “Evidence of Election Integrity and Voter Fraud Issues.” The section, with few exceptions, wound up almost entirely blank.

Austin Evers, the executive director of American Oversight, said the lack of material in the section set aside for evidence of fraud or other voting problems “shows that the White House knew, or at least should have known, that it was blatantly lying when they made those claims in January.”

Requests for comment sent to both the White House and Kris Kobach, the former vice-chair of the commission, have not yet been returned.

The only known action taken by the commission during its short life was a letter it sent to all 50 states in late June 2017 requesting copies of publicly available voter rolls, which list registered voters in each state. The letter did not include any details about how the records would be used, and many state officials denied the request.

Today’s documents show the commission worked behind the scenes with Republican Party officials in at least one state to circumvent the decisions of state officials.

John Merrill, the Republican secretary of state for Alabama, had denied the commission access to the state’s voter rolls, saying it violated Alabama law to distribute the data to such an entity.

However, in an email exchange with Kobach, Terry Lathan, the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, said, “The ALGOP will honor your request and have a full state voter pull for the commission you chair.” Lathan added that the party’s political director would “initiate this process immediately.”

Read More

How the Case for Voter Fraud Was Tested — and Utterly Failed

From a new Supreme Court ruling to a census question about citizenship, the campaign against illegal registration is thriving. But when the top proponent was challenged in a Kansas courtroom to prove that such fraud is rampant, the claims went up in smoke.

Merrill told ProPublica he was unaware that the state Republican Party had sent the list to the commission. Moreover, he said, the list would have been out of date — perhaps by several months.

After Colorado agreed to send information to the commission, voters there began canceling their voter registrations so that the Trump administration would not have access to their data. At the time, Colorado officials told ProPublica they were not worried — Colorado is a same-day-registration state, so voters could re-register even on the day of the next election in which they wanted to cast a ballot.

But Dick Lamm, a former governor of Colorado, and Roy Beck, the president of NumbersUSA, an organization that advocates for stricter limits on immigration, exchanged emails about the de-registration in the state.

In them, Lamm tells Beck he thinks those who deregistered should be investigated. “I suspect many/most of these were illegals now scared of Trump’s new policies,” he wrote.

Rosemary Jenks, the director of government relations for NumbersUSA, forwarded the exchange to Kobach saying, “Definitely interesting stuff for the Commission to check into, especially since Colorado is cooperating!” The documents do not make clear if such an inquiry was ever begun.

Several secretaries of state — including Merrill — expressed frustration with the commission after receiving the letters requesting voter rolls, responding to the commission with questions about how the data would be used.

The documents show that Kobach initially wanted to tell the states some of what the data might be used for. He wanted to “compare voter rolls to federal databases of known noncitizens residing in the United States to identify ineligible noncitizens who have become registered.”

It was an odd aim, for Kobach, the secretary of state in Kansas, had admitted during litigation in Kansas that such comparisons were not productive or reliable.

The commission ultimately never told the secretaries of state that the data might be used in this way, and took this out of communications to the states at the behest of Vice President Mike Pence’s office.

The vice president’s office did not respond to a request for comment on this matter.

The documents released today also suggest that the commission had intended to ask states for far more information than has been publicly reported.

ProPublica first reported last October that Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams— two individuals who are closely associated with advocacy for strict laws to prevent voter fraud — provided feedback on the request for state voter rolls behind the scenes before their formal appointment to the commission. The documents now show their specific suggestions.

In addition to the voter roll data, von Spakovsky and Adams jointly recommended the commission ask for a long list of other data from states. Those on the email chain jointly agreed that the first request should be simple, and that additional data could be requested later.

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/hate-had-a-meeting-in-the-white-house/

President Donald Trump met with two representatives of groups that lobby for bigoted anti-immigrant policies at the White House this month, The New York Times reports.

Frank Gaffney of the anti-Muslim hate group Center for Security Policy and Rosemary Jenks of the anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA joined Rep. Louie Gohmert’s chief of staff Connie Hair in a meeting with Trump and a handful of White House aides. During the meeting, multiple comments were put forward to the president that many Americans would find offensive, including claims that gay marriage was destroying America.

In addition, some members of the group complained to the president that their suggested candidates for administration positions had been ignored. Some reportedly “also accused White House aides of blocking Trump supporters from getting jobs in the administration”—a claim popularized in pro-Trump social media circles.

The meeting was organized by Ginni Thomas, a right-wing activist who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas’ political activity has raised concerns about conflicts of interest for her husband, the Times reported, and she once hired a young activist who was ousted from the organization Turning Point USA after writing in a text message: “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.”

Thomas founded a conservative advocacy group that would later merge with the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty. She used to write columns for The Daily Caller and was once employed at the Heritage Foundation.

In 2017, Thomas gave awards to right-wing activists including James O’Keefe, Gaffney, and Fox News host Sean Hannity. She has appeared as a speaker alongside her husband at an Eagle Forum conference in Washington, where anti-LGBTQ rhetoric was a staple in multiple presentations. In 2013, Thomas discussed “cultural Marxism” with the late anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly—a conspiracy theory that was originally coined by an anti-Semites and white nationalists in the 1990s that alleged Jews were trying to degrade Western societies for their own benefits.

The White House meeting was scheduled for this month after “months of delay.” From The Times:

For 60 minutes Mr. Trump sat, saying little but appearing taken aback, the three people said, as the group also accused White House aides of blocking Trump supporters from getting jobs in the administration.

It is unusual for the spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice to have such a meeting with a president, and some close to Mr. Trump said it was inappropriate for Ms. Thomas to have asked to meet with the head of a different branch of government.

A vocal conservative, Ms. Thomas has long been close to what had been the Republican Party’s fringes, and extremely outspoken against Democrats. Her activism has raised concerns of conflicts of interest for her husband, who is perhaps the most conservative member of the Supreme Court.

Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy have enjoyed increased access to government officials in the Trump era and cheered on the Trump administration’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and initiatives, such as the travel ban. NumbersUSA began as a program of a foundation run by John Tanton, who advocated for immigration policies that would maintain United States’ majority-white status. (Tanton has also published, through his The Social Contract Press, white nationalists and anti-Semites.) In 2015, NumbersUSA chided Trump for not being anti-immigrant enough.

jared holt, corrected

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http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/36760-focus-greg-palast-with-dennis-bernstein-trumps-gop-hitman-whos-stealing-your-vote

Dennis Bernstein:Welcome back to our weekly Election Protection Bulletin with best-selling author Greg Palast. Let's start in Topeka, Kansas with its Secretary of State Kris Kobach. He's definitely going head to head with the ACLU there.

Greg Palast: Kris Kobach is spelled like Koch with a BA in the middle. He's the most influential Republican secretary of state in America - the Katherine Harris of 2016.

He's one of the very first governmental Republican supporters of Donald Trump. Anne Coulter has

said Trump should pick him as his running mate. This guy is an important cat.

What's he up to? He's “saving” America from an invasion of aliens - not from outer space, but from other nations, wading the Rio Grande to vote in American elections. He claims there is a mass incursion of illegal aliens coming to the US to vote for Hillary.

The federal government, despite a massive and costly hunt, has found almost no non-citizen has voted. (Florida’s campaign to stop alien voters netted a single conviction—an Austrian who registered Republican, while threatening the votes of 181,000.) Yet, Kobach’s envisioning the alien ships are there. To prevent this crime that doesn't happen, he's required anyone registering to vote in Kansas to prove their citizenship.

This is not as easy as it sounds. A driver’s license doesn't count. A social security card doesn't count. Only naturalization papers, a passport, or an original birth certificate count. As a result, the state of Kansas has suspended the registration of 36,000 young people. [This doesn’t affect Kobach’s voters who have an average age of 115.]

This is very effective at keeping out voters of color and young people. Not many poor Americans or people of color have passports. They have not just returned from their vacation in the Alps with their

passport in hand. Many people, including those who were born at home, cannot find their original birth certificate. This is crushing the voter rolls of the state of Kansas. Now it’s in Georgia as well.

DB: This has become a model for many states.

GP: Kris Koback wrote SB 1070 for the state of Arizona, which was mostly thrown out by the courts as racist and unconstitutional. This guy is no foolish redneck bigot. He's a graduate of Harvard, Yale and Oxford.

A few years ago, Indiana was the first state to require a photo voter ID to vote. There was only that one state in 2006, and now 23 states require it. If Kobach gets away with requiring citizenship proof in Alabama, Kansas and Georgia, you can bet that coming soon will be North Carolina, Arizona, Florida and many others. They know what they are doing.

And dig this: It’s quite unusual that Kobach, as Secretary of State of Kansas, is still counsel, a lawyer, for a group IRLI, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which is the legal arm of two allied groups called Numbers USA and FAIR. FAIR is the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a hate group. It was founded by John Tanton, who says

the purpose of the group is to maintain a "European American majority."

Kobach - while a lawyer for the hate group and Secretary of State of Kansas at the same time - has also been the lawyer for Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. (Arpaio was officially charged with racism by the US Justice Department.)

As Secretary of State of Kansas, Kobach is in charge of voting in Kansas— and the most influential Republican voting official in the US.

Kobach has mounted a frontal assault on the federal voter protection, starting with the Motor Voter law.

Under Bill Clinton, the US made a huge leap in the voter franchise - the biggest since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - by enacting the Motor Voter Law. Now, when you get a driver's license, you fill out the attached form and you become a voter. Adding voter registration forms to the driver’s license

application has massively increased the reach of voter registration in America.

The Republicans, especially Kobach, really hate it. They say the federal motor voter form does not require that you prove your citizenship. You need to be a citizen, sign a box saying you are a citizen and sign it.

So Kobach said that if you register on the federal form, YOU CAN’T VOTE IN STATE ELECTIONS unless you register separately with your proof of citizenship.

The result: There are 36,000 young people in Kansas , especially young voters of color, whose state voting rights have been suspended. So Kansas literally has an official apartheid voting system.

DB: The ACLU filed a motion for summary judgment seeking to declare this as an illegal system based on dual registration. Where is this case going?

GP: There’s a terrible new twist.

Kobach asked the federal government to make a special voter form for his state, and other white Republican-controlled states of Alabama and Georgia. The federal government and courts turned him down.

But then, one of his acolytes became the chief of the federal Elections Assistance Commission. Kobach’s man Brian Newby is now the Executive Director of the agency that’s supposed to protect our vote!

Newby’s first act in office was to allow Kansas, Georgia and Alabama to have their own special voter

registration form—allowing those states to require proof of citizenship to vote. This may moot the ACLU's complaint because the federal form now includes this special extra hurdle for voters in those state to prove citizenship.

This is a devastatingly effective means to suppress the registration of new, young, minorities and low-income voters. So, the ACLU has sued the US agency as well. Weirdly (and thankfully), the US Justice Dept. is backing the ACLU against the federal government.

Then the League of Women Voters joined the ACLU to sue the federal agency. Kobach's response was to call the League of Women Voters the "Communist League of Women Voters." Reporters couldn't believe their ears, so he repeated, "The Communist League of Women Voters."

Is there really a danger non-citizens will flood the polling stations? The reason folks who are not citizens never vote is that the Motor Voter Form asks you to state if you’re a citizen — and makes it

perfectly clear that if you lie, you can go to prison for five years. People aren't going to risk going to prison for five years just to vote for school board, or even for president. There’s been no problem with this. Why would an alien without documents sign a form with their address? To make it easier for ICE to snap them up? It’s nuts. But Kobach won’t accept this. He demands a passport or original birth certificate or you don't get to register.

Consider the implications of this new voter form for November.

Georgia will be a swing state in 2016 and Alabama has a crucial Senate race this year. Blocking voters who can't easily prove they are citizens has killed registrations among young voters in these states.

Guess which way young people vote?

As an investigative reporter I follow the money. Who is behind this latest suppression tactic, the attack on voters as potential aliens?. Who is paying for Kobach?

A group called Numbers USA gave $100,000 to a little town called Farmers Branch, Texas. The town gave that $100,000 to Kobach to defend a racist law that was immediately thrown out by the courts. Numbers USA is funded by something called Donors’ Trust—which, in turn, is the funnel for the funds from the Charles and David Koch. So, where does Kris Kobach get his pin money? He gets it from the brothers Koch, through a chain of front organizations.

DB: The Koch brothers say publicly they are stepping out of this election because they don't support Trump, so don't want any part of this. We assume they are not controlling the structure of the

election. But they are only talking about one candidate. Their hands are all over everything - who has the control, the power, and who has the right to vote in the future of this country, which is now a whiteminority.

GP:Let's not fall for the jive. It's not whether they support Trump or not. The Koch brothers are putting $900 million - just short of a billion dollars - into this election. If it's not for the presidency, what is it for? It's very clear: If the Republicans lose just four senate seats - and they've got 24 seats up for grabs - the control of the Senate flips to the Democrats.

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The Weeden Foundation

The Weeden Foundation (WF) is run by President Alan Weeden, who is on the board of FAIR.139 WF’s mission is to “save biodiversity on the planet”140 through funding environmental, population-control, abortion, and anti-immigration advocacy.141 Weeden sees “continued high levels of immigration . . . carrying a very high environmental cost that cannot be sustained.”142 WF’s website says that people are the problem and population control is the solution:

Population growth, particularly in the United States, and over-consumption have also evolved into major program interests in order to more fully address the factors driving biological impoverishment. Organizations supported to date range from those that protect ecosystems and wildlife to those that work towards population stabilization and sustainable consumption.143

And,

[P]opulation growth is equally problematic within the U.S. which is growing faster than any other industrialized nation and which could reach 500 million people (if current trends continue) by the year 2050. The Foundation’s primary domestic population objective is for the U.S. to respond directly to the directives of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development by adopting a national policy dealing effectively and equitably with all sources of U.S. population growth, including immigration, and leading towards population stabilization in the near future. Cultivating support among environmental and population organizations for such a policy is among our top grant-making priorities. The Foundation has funded projects to: advocate for increased federal funding of family planning clinics (Title X); conduct sprawl studies that break out population growth as an important driver of sprawl; and, promote immigration reduction on the basis of environmental concerns.144

To further advance that goal, in 2009 WF gave $20,000 each to ISAF, Ipas, and the Population Media Center (PMC).145 The last was to insert reproductive and environmental propaganda into popular Brazilian soap operas.146 WF also funded the Alliance for a Sustainable USA, Catholics for Free Choice, National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, PMC, Ipas, and CAPS.147 Some other environmental groups funded by WF are the World Wildlife Fund, National Wildlife Federation, Rainforest Alliance, and Conservatree.148 WF and Alan Weeden have also given significantly to FAIR: a total of $49,000 from 2002-2008, as well as $40,000 to the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of FAIR.

The Alliance for a Sustainable USA

The Alliance for a Sustainable USA, formerly Diversity Alliance for a Sustainable America (AS-USA), “works to preserve a socially, environmentally, economically and politically sustainable America by addressing this nation’s population growth for all U.S.-born citizens and legal immigrants.”149 It seeks to achieve those goals through promoting replacement-level fertility and a moratorium on all immigration.150 AS-USA received $45,000 from WF between 2005 and 2007.151

FAIR advisory board member Yeh Ling-Ling is the Executive Director of AS-USA.152 Ling focuses the group’s attention on the environmental impact of immigration while avoiding nativist critiques. Other FAIR advisory-board members involved with AS-USA are Frank Morris and Peter Nunez. They are, respectively, Chairman and Vice-Chair of AS-USA. Morris was the Executive Director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.153 He and Nunez are also on the board of CIS.154

Pro-Abortion Groups and Political Action Committees

Many FAIR board and advisory-board members either serve on or contribute to abortion-supporting political action committees (PACs). The majority of political donations made by the vice president of FAIR’s board, Henry M. Buhl, are to Republican PACs and politicians, but he also gave $2000 to the Women’s Campaign Fund (WCF) in 2000.155 WCF seeks to protect and expand abortion access in the United States.

Former FAIR advisory-board member Janet Harte, founder of Planned Parenthood of South Texas,156 was the chairwoman of the Texas Pro-Choice PAC.157 Robert Zaitlin of FAIR’s advisory board contributed to NARAL and Pro-Choice America PAC.158 Recently deceased FAIR advisory-board member Dorothy R. Blair was a contributor to Republicans for Choice PAC and Voters for Choice/Friends of Family Planning.159 She was also an avid environmentalist and early board member of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida.160 In 1999 she donated $1 million to build the Blair Audubon Center, a two-story environmental-education center at Corkscrew.161

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)

Since 1985, when Tanton, using his position at FAIR and U.S. Inc., created CIS, it has attempted to become the scholarly face of the immigration restrictionist establishment.162 CIS is supposed to “[b]uild the intellectual basis for immigration law reform”163 by supplying information to FAIR and other anti-immigration activists. The same environmentalist, abortion, and population-control ideology permeates CIS, its funders, and founders.

Mark Krikorian, the current executive director of CIS, used to work for FAIR. When asked about the ties among CIS, population-control groups, and John Tanton, he stated:

The center [CIS] has no views on population control, no views on China’s one child policy, or anything else. The guy you mentioned, John Tanton, he’s an eye doctor or retired doctor, he helped arrange our first grant, he’s a population guy, Malthusian in a lot of ways, has never been on our board, doesn’t know where our offices are, never told or had any hand in the opinions, development, or views of the research of the center in any way. I met him a couple times and he seems like an affable enough guy, but what do I know, and what do I care.164

Tanton’s own writings to donors and others contradict Krikorian’s statement. As noted earlier, Tanton told Cordelia Scaife in a letter that “For credibility this will need to be independent of FAIR, though the Center for Immigration Studies, as we’re calling it, is starting off as a project of FAIR.”165 CIS’s supposed independence from FAIR was a façade. Tanton was intimately involved with its founding and guided its positions from the start. As late as 1994, Tanton’s front group U.S. Inc continued to funnel money to CIS.166 Tanton arranged a lot more than a first grant for CIS—he created it, funded it, and provided its ideology.

CIS produces many research papers and other writings about population control. Much of their material focuses on how population growth is contributing to environmental decay; they go so far as criticizing mainstream environmental organizations for not doing enough about population growth.167 CIS calls population “stabilization” (a code word for population control) a fundamental aspect of the 1970s American environmentalist movement and laments its relative decline in importance.168 Following its founding mandate, CIS is openly terrified of increases in national population and supportive of trends that show a potential decline in population.169

CIS claims that, as immigrants move to wealthier nations like the United States, they become a significant source of increased carbon-dioxide emissions that (CIS asserts) will lead to widespread man-made global warming.170 When the Kyoto Treaty was first being negotiated in the 1990s, CIS drew a direct link between population growth through immigration and greenhouse-gas emissions, blaming the former for the latter.171 As CIS admits:

Other factors beside population size determine total U.S. output of greenhouse gases. New technologies and conservation efforts, for example, can reduce per-person emissions. . . . The simple fact is high immigration will make any effort to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases more costly for the average American.172

CIS consistently condemns urban sprawl as a consequence of unchecked population growth through immigration and reproduction.173 To CIS, seemingly every supposed problem in the world can be solved by decreasing the size of the human population.

NumbersUSA

“Immigration and the fertility of immigrants is the only long-term cause of the population growth in this country. . . . Most people could understand that if you add three million people a year to your country, that’s going to have a lot of inter-environmental impact. And of that three million, about two and a half million of that three million can be accounted for from new immigrants, legal and illegal, and from the births of immigrants. That’s two and a half million a year.”—Roy Beck, President of NumbersUSA174

NumbersUSA was founded in 1997 with the generous financial backing of U.S. Inc. and has been run by executive director Roy Beck ever since.175 Between 1994 and 2001, U.S. Inc. paid Roy Beck a total of $751,546 to get NumbersUSA off the ground and produce “independent” anti-immigrant research.176 In 1996 and 1998, U.S. Inc. also paid NumberUSA’s Vice President of Operations Jim Robb a total of $147,041.177

NumbersUSA is open about its mission to reverse American population growth. Its name is meant to conjure fears of too great a number of people in the United States. Its emblem is a ghostly image of blue silhouettes multiplying into the distance.178 Its website includes a population counter, and Beck incessantly warns about the dangers of population growth.

In 2010, on the anniversary of the 40th Earth Day,179 Beck said that, “Congress [does] not understand that U.S. environmental sustainability is not possible unless we greatly reduce immigration numbers.”180 He then referred to rapid population growth in the United States and blamed immigration for most of the increase.181 In the same piece, he favorably quoted President Clinton’s Population and Consumption Task Force, which reported: “We believe that reducing current immigration levels is a necessary part of working toward sustainability in the United States.”182 Beck further stated:

The 1990s saw the biggest population boom in U.S. history. This is truly astounding news coming three decades after widespread agreement among Americans that the country was mature and probably already overpopulated. No wonder Americans became increasingly alarmed at their deteriorating quality of life due to sprawl, congestion, overcrowded schools, lost open spaces and increasing restrictions on their individual liberty caused by the new population explosion!183

As Beck clearly states, the issue is not so much immigration in itself but population control:

To talk about changing immigration numbers is to say nothing against the individual immigrants in this country. Rather, it is about deciding how many foreign citizens living in their own countries right now should be allowed to immigrate in the future.184

Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz wrote a report in 2001 titled, “Forsaking Fundamentals: The Environmental Establishment Abandons U.S. Population Stabilization.” They portrayed a Catholic conspiracy led from the Vatican to halt population-control policies, and cited National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), a long document about the dangers to American national security of population growth in third-world nations.185 The report was endorsed by President Ford,186 but Beck believes that its population-control recommendations were never implemented “because of intense pressure applied by the Vatican and the U.S. Conference of Bishops.”187 Beck’s notion that NSSM 200 was never implemented is fiction and Catholics are his scapegoat.

Beck seemed to suggest that American Catholics are more loyal to the Vatican than they are to the American government, claiming that “U.S. government officials of Roman Catholic background were particularly susceptible to such pressure”188 from the Vatican and U.S. bishops. Beck also complained that into the 1990s it was difficult for “a pro-stabilization person or group to get a hearing among many Catholic and pro-life groups without being automatically considered an abortion apologist.”189

NumbersUSA’s website features a litany of outlandish environmental claims and pleas for population control. Environmental sustainability is the stated objective of NumbersUSA’s population-control and anti-immigration advocacy.190 The organization also appears concerned that increased immigration will cause population growth and damage the environment.191 In fact, its concern for the environment is so great that it wants immigration bills to be reviewed by the environmental committees in Congress.192

On virtually every page of NumbersUSA’s website, there are warnings about overpopulation. It begs its followers to:

Contact your senators and representatives and urge them to vote for bills which would help stabilize the United States’s population numbers, and to vote against bills that would worsen the problem. Use NumbersUSA.com to send e-faxes to your congressmen for free, to stay informed on all the latest immigration bills in congress, and to find the latest news on the effort to reduce immigration numbers.

Similarly, it argues that cutting immigration would reduce the population and therefore CO2 emissions.193Notably, NumbersUSA’s reasons for decreasing immigration are the same used by other population-control advocates.194

The radical Weeden Foundation (WF) played no less a prominent role in funding NumbersUSA than it did with FAIR and CIS. NumbersUSA board member Don Weeden, son of Alan Weeden, is also the executive director of WF and had a long career working at Planned Parenthood.195 Between 2001 and 2008 WF granted $180,000 to NumbersUSA196 in addition to the hundreds of thousands of dollars it also donated to other population-control, pro-abortion, environmental, and anti-immigration groups.

Working with Pro-Life Leaders?

FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA were created and now are largely supported and staffed by radical environmentalist population-control and abortion advocates. Many of those same people and organizations fund and ideologically support abortion, sterilization, and population-control policies. FAIR serves as the activist wing of the movement, while CIS produces studies and research reports that support their position. NumbersUSA makes little effort to hide its advocacy for population control.

Beyond the legacies and goals of FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA, in recent years they have attempted—in many ways successfully—to broaden their advocacy efforts by establishing ties to leaders, organizations, and elected officials who are otherwise staunch defenders of life. The legislative battles and highly intense public debates over immigration in the mid-2000s served as an opportunity for the population-control movement to whitewash its true agenda. FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA have managed to conceal their true intentions enough to be invited to speak at conferences, briefings, and media events alongside pro-life individuals and leaders.

For example, former U.S. Representative from Colorado Tom Tancredo and current Representative Steve King (R-IA) are both on record as not just citing, but praising, the work of FAIR, NumbersUSA, and CIS. Another former U.S. Representative, Todd Tiahrt of Kansas, was one of numerous “pro-life” members of Congress who worked with FAIR and/or NumbersUSA to craft immigration-related legislation. Likewise, think tanks and advocacy organizations that describe themselves as pro-family and pro-life have allied with Roy Beck of NumbersUSA, Dan Stein of FAIR, and Mark Krikorian of CIS. This represents such a stark dichotomy that one must, at a minimum, question whether any due diligence was done at all.

Conclusion

No civilization has ever sustained a shrinking population and a growing economy for long. Without people there is no economy, and nobody left to value the environment.197 Organizations that would limit population growth through abortion, drugs, sterilization, and other methods are pursuing a radical anti-life agenda that undermines our country, freedom, prosperity, and morality.

Those who seek to advance the pro-life cause should not allow themselves to be fooled by those whose work is ultimately diametrically opposed to the right to life—the most fundamental of all rights. Regardless of one’s particular views on immigration, pro-life leaders in particular should denounce CIS, FAIR, NumbersUSA, and any other entities that advance the dark cause of population control.

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