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The Puppeteer
The organized anti-immigration 'movement,' increasingly in bed with
racist hate groups, is dominated by one man
Before he even said a word, U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) got a
standing ovation from the 27 anti-immigration activists who gathered at
the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C., on the morning of
Feb. 13 to kick off a two-day lobbying effort on Capitol Hill. Tancredo,
chairman of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, proceeded to
regale his audience with ominous warnings of a global plot to destroy
the United States. Many countries are pushing immigration in order to
erode American sovereignty, Tancredo warned. “China is trying to
export people. It's a policy for them, a way of extending their
hegemony. It's a government-sponsored thing.”
After Tancredo's 10-minute pep talk, Brian Bilbray, a former Republican
congressman from San Diego, Calif., weighed in with horror stories about
an impending social catastrophe due to immigration. “We are creating a
slave class that criminal elements breed in,” said Bilbray, who
complained bitterly and improbably - that he lost his 2000 re-election
bid because “illegal aliens” had voted againstt him. But all was not
doom and gloom, according to Bilbray. Praising the post-9/11 sweeps of
Arab communities by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)
that resulted in the indefinite detention of more than a thousand
people, Bilbray called for the INS to carry out an enlarged dragnet.
“We could have a terrorist coming in on a Latin name,” he said.
The meeting with Tancredo and Bilbray - and the entire lobbying
operation in mid-February - was masterminded by NumbersUSA, an
anti-immigration group that had recently opened a “government
relations office” in a three-story, red-brick Victorian near the
Capitol. NumbersUSA hosted an afternoon open house at its plush new
digs, where the lobbyists relaxed, nibbled on catered food, and
conversed with the leaders and other officials of key anti-immigration
organizations.
Patrick McHugh of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies,
which purports to be a squeaky clean think tank that rejects racism, was
there pressing the flesh along with Barbara Coe, head of the California
Coalition for Immigration Reform, who repeatedly referred to Mexicans -
as she has for years - as “savages.” The Citizens Informer, a
white supremacist tabloid put out by the Council of Conservative
Citizens hate group, was available. NumbersUSA executive director Roy
Beck, a long-time friend of Coe's, adopted a more moderate tone when he
addressed his guests and told them what they should be doing to end the
current immigration regime. It would be better, Beck counseled, if their
attempts to lobby legislators that week did not appear to be
orchestrated by NumbersUSA. For their campaign to be effective, he said,
it “needs to look like a grassroots effort.”
Grassroots or Astroturf?
To be sure, this was no grassroots effort. Nor is NumbersUSA, in any
sense of the word, a grassroots organization. Despite attempts to appear
otherwise, it is a wholly owned subsidiary of U.S. Inc., a sprawling,
nonprofit funding conduit that has spawned three anti-immigration groups
and underwrites several others, many of which were represented at the
NumbersUSA conclave. What's more, this interlocking network of
supposedly independent organizations is almost entirely the handiwork of
one man, a Michigan ophthalmologist named John H. Tanton.
A four-month investigation by the Intelligence Report, conducted
in the aftermath of the September terrorist attacks, found that the
appearance of an array of groups with large membership bases is nothing
more than a mirage. In fact, the vast majority of American
anti-immigration groups - more than a dozen in all - were either formed,
led, or in other ways made possible through Tanton's efforts. The
principal funding arm of the movement, U.S. Inc., is a Tanton creation,
and millions of dollars in financing comes from just a few of his
allies, far-right foundations like those controlled by the family of
Richard Mellon Scaife. Moreover, tax returns suggest that claims of huge
numbers of members in the case of one group, more than 250,000 are
geometric exaggerations put forward to create a false picture of a
“movement” that politicians should pay attention to.
Finally, even as activists court increasing numbers of national
politicians in the wake of Sept. 11, the Report's investigation
reveals that they are moving in large numbers into the arms of hate
groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens - a 15,000-member
organization whose Web site recently described blacks as “a retrograde
species of humanity.” In fact, many anti-immigration groups have been
growing harder- and harder-line since 1998, when they first began
working together with open white supremacists. Today, many of their
leading officials have joined racist organizations.
There's a word in Washington for outfits like these anti-immigration
organizations - “astroturf,” meaning that they lack any genuine
grassroots base. That such groups, with their increasingly direct links
to racist organizations, should have real power in the nation's capital
may seem hard to believe. But Americans have grown increasingly
xenophobic in the wake of the September terrorist attacks, and the rapid
growth of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus that Tancredo
heads reflects that - from just 10 legislators prior to the attacks to
59 by May.
What kind of influence do extremists have in this congressional caucus?
Although that is hard to measure, the caucus Web site now carries a
prominent link to an outfit called American Patrol - a racist hate group
run by Californian Glenn Spencer. With a tip of the hat to Tancredo and
the other legislators who have helped to provide him legitimacy, Spencer
recently deleted from his Web site the image of a cartoon figure
urinating on a Latino Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient.
From Environment to Race
It is not often that a single individual is largely responsible for
creating an entire political movement. But John Tanton can claim without
exaggeration that he is the founding father of America's modern
anti-immigration movement. In addition to directly controlling four
prominent immigration restriction groups, Tanton has been critical in
establishing or helping fund several other anti-immigration groups. He
serves on the board of the group with the largest membership, the
Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which he founded 23
years ago.
It was an odd turn of events for an erstwhile liberal activist who loved
beekeeping and the rural life. Raising a family and practicing medicine
in Petoskey, Mich., Tanton started out as a passionate environmentalist.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, he was a leader in the National Audubon
Society, the Sierra Club and other mainstream environmental groups. But
Tanton soon became fixated on population control, seeing environmental
degradation as the inevitable result of overpopulation. When the
indigenous birth rate fell below replacement level in the United States,
his preoccupation turned to immigration. And this soon led him to race.
Tanton had something akin to a conversion when he came across The
Camp of the Saints, a lurid, racist novel written by Frenchman Jean
Raspail that depicts an invasion of the white, Western world by a fleet
of starving, dark-skinned refugees. Tanton helped get the novel
published in English and soon was promoting what he considered the
book's prophetic argument. “Their [Third World] 'huddled masses' cast
longing eyes on the apparent riches of the industrial west,” Tanton
wrote in 1975. “The developed countries lie directly in the path of a
great storm.”
And so he began to develop a counter-force. After 1979, when he
co-founded FAIR, Tanton launched “a whole array of organizations that
serve the overall ideological and political battle plan to halt
immigration - even if those groups have somewhat differing politics,”
explained Rick Swartz, the pro-immigration activist who founded the
National Immigration Forum in 1982 (see interview, “Defending
Immigrants,” also in this issue).
“Tanton is the puppeteer behind this entire movement,” Swartz said.
“He is the organizer of a significant amount of its financing, and is
both the major recruiter of key personnel and the intellectual leader of
the whole network of groups.”
Tanton declined to be interviewed for this story.
The Strategy Emerges
Tanton's strategy was to fight his war on several fronts. FAIR relied
heavily on arguments about diminishing resources and jobs. In 1982,
Tanton created U.S. Inc. to raise and channel funds to his
anti-immigration network. The following year, he created his second
major vehicle, U.S. English, which made a cultural argument - that the
English language was in mortal danger of being made irrelevant. And
later, in 1985, FAIR would spin off yet another major Tanton
organization - the Center for Immigration Studies, which presented
itself as an impartial think tank and later even sought to distance
itself from the organization that had birthed it. Today, the Center
regularly dispatches experts to testify on Capitol Hill, and last year
it was awarded a six-figure research contract by the U.S. Census Bureau.
In the 1980s, U.S. Inc. provided millions of dollars to FAIR, U.S.
English, the Center for Immigration Studies and several similar groups -
the 21st Century Fund, Population-Environment Balance, and the
Immigration Reform Law Institute, which is now a litigation arm of FAIR.
During the 1990s, Tanton's U.S. Inc. adopted a new tactic, creating
programs called NumbersUSA, The Social Contract Press (which publishes The
Camp of the Saints), and Pro English. Although these units would
often present themselves as independent, tax forms make it clear that
they are merely programs of U.S. Inc. Tanton's funding organization,
U.S. Inc., also has recently given money to Barbara Coe's California
Coalition for Immigration Reform and Glenn Spencer's American Patrol
(also known as Voice of Citizens Together), two of the most virulently
anti-Hispanic groups in Tanton's network.
In the Trenches
Tanton's “movement” achieved some notable successes. Almost 30
states and many more local communities passed “English Only”
statutes enshrining English as the language of official business. In
1994, after extensive campaigning by Tanton-supported groups, millions
of Californians joined in passing Proposition 187, which denied social
services to undocumented workers. Two years later, Tanton celebrated the
passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility
Act, a law meant to cut illegal immigration that was heavily backed by
anti-immigration groups. It required that asylum seekers be held in
detention until they established a credible fear of persecution at home,
a process that could take years.
There were failures, too. In 1996, Tanton spearheaded an effort to get
the Sierra Club, a mainstream environmentalist group whose Population
Committee he headed (earlier, he had been executive director), to pass
an anti-immigration plank. A major battle ensued, with many Sierra Club
members seeing the proposed plank as fundamentally racist and out of
line with the group's charter. The plank was finally rejected by 60
percent of those voting but that may not be the end of it. Another
Tanton-financed group, Californians for Population Stabilization, which
formed after the 1996 vote, is now gearing up to reintroduce the issue
to the Sierra Club.
Tanton was also careless in several ways.
Between 1985 and 1994, FAIR accepted $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund
- an outfit once described by eugenics expert Barry Mehler as a
“neo-Nazi organization, tied to the Nazi eugenics program in the
1930s, that has never wavered in its commitment to eugenics and ideas of
human and racial inferiority and superiority.” When the Pioneer link
was disclosed in 1988, Tanton, who was then president of FAIR's board,
said he knew nothing of Pioneer's unsavory history. Yet his group
continued to accept Pioneer grants for another six years, until 1994.
The Wise Men's Mistake
More damaging, however, was the leak, shortly before a 1988 English Only
referendum in Arizona, of the so-called WITAN
memos written by Tanton and the then-executive director of
FAIR, Roger Conner. (WITAN was short for the Old English term “witenangemot,”
meaning “council of wise men.” The memos were meant for Tanton
colleagues who met at retreats to discuss immigration.)
The memos
were replete with derogatory references to Latinos, reflecting a kind of
entrenched bigotry that had only been suspected before. They complained
mightily of the high Hispanic birth rate, suggested that Latin American
immigrants would bring political corruption to the United States, and
included a demographic punchline that depicted Hispanics as hyperactive
breeders and revolted many readers: “[P]erhaps this is the first
instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by
those with their pants down.”
Linda Chavez, executive director of Tanton creation U.S. English and
later a prominent Republican conservative columnist, quit over what she
saw as Tanton's bigoted, anti-Latino bias. So did several well-known
U.S. English board members, including Walter Cronkite, who called the
memos “embarrassing.” Eventually Tanton left, although he complained
he was being smeared as a racist, and went on to form a replacement
organization - English Language Advocates, later renamed Pro English.
More to the point, perhaps, the WITAN
memos spelled out the strategy that Tanton would continue to
follow for years. “We have spent some time, money and effort trying to
build a membership for purposes of political validity and power,” one
memo said, “but this has not been a major emphasis.” The memos
candidly added what anti-immigration groups would not admit publicly -
that the “movement” was “heavily based on a small number of
donors.”
Crossing the Rubicon
In many ways, 1998 became a kind of political Rubicon for Tanton and his
colleagues. That year, a federal judge found much of Proposition 187
unconstitutional, dealing the anti-immigration movement one of its
harshest setbacks ever and igniting a kind of desperation that drove
many activists into increasingly extremist politics. At the same time,
Congress was whittling away at the 1996 immigration law, and U.S.
political and economic elites generally were supporting immigration. At
least partly as a result of these developments, anti-immigration
activists increasingly came to embrace conspiracist ideas like the
notion pushed by Spencer and Coe of a Mexican plot to reconquer the
American Southwest. More and more key leaders in the Tanton network
seemed to abandon all caution when it came to joining forces with
like-minded white supremacist activists.
That summer, The Social Contract Press released a special issue of its
journal, The Social Contract (published by Tanton), that was
entitled “Europhobia: The Hostility Toward European-Descended
Americans.” The lead article was written by John Vinson, head of the
Tanton-supported American Immigration Control Foundation, and argued
that “multiculturalism” was replacing “successful Euro-American
culture” with “dysfunctional Third World cultures.” Tanton himself
elaborated on Vinson's remarks, saying an “unwarranted hatred and
fear” of white Americans was developing. The main culprits, in
Tanton's view, were immigrants and their ideological allies, the “multiculturalists.”
The issue was one of the first public manifestations of a collaboration
between Tanton's network and open racists. In addition to Tanton and
Vinson, the line-up of authors included Sam Francis, who would later
become editor of the Citizens Informer, the racist publication of
the Council of Conservative Citizens; Lawrence Auster, who also spoke at
conferences of American Renaissance, a pseudo-scientific magazine
devoted to racial breeding and the idea that blacks are less
intelligent; and Joseph Fallon, who writes for American Renaissance.
(Later issues of The Social Contract would carry articles by
James Lubinskas, an editor of American Renaissance; Derek Turner
of Right Now!, a similar British publication; and Michael
Masters, the Virginia leader of the Council of Conservative Citizens.)
An unholy alliance had begun to take shape.
Number Inflation
Tanton also wrote an editorial in 1998 that spoke of “trying to touch
off the political phase of the immigration reform movement.” While
Tanton didn't spell out exactly what he meant, it seems clear that he
sought to develop a real base of popular support - and to regain the
trust of lawmakers, particularly the many Republicans who were scared
off in the wake of the Proposition 187 fiasco. Many already had been
punished at the polls for their support for the California proposition.
Typically, American politicians respond most to those groups that seem
to represent a real constituency - groups whose leaders are presumed to
be able to command votes and money. Obviously, it was in the interest of
the now struggling anti-immigration groups to appear to have large
numbers of paid-up members.
The problem was, most of them did not.
First of all, the vast majority of funding for most of these groups
comes from just a handful of donors, many of them large, right-wing
foundations. In 2000, the latest year for which tax returns are
available, Vinson's American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF)
received 90 percent of its funding from just three contributors. Five
contributions accounted for 82 percent of U.S. Inc.'s income in the same
year. Fifty-eight percent of FAIR's 2000 donations were provided by six
donors. Fourteen donors account for 94 percent of the Center for
Immigration Studies income for that year.
The narrow funding base of such groups becomes even more apparent in
cases like that of FAIR (with a budget of $4.2 million in 2000), which
received more than $6 million from a single donor between 1996 and 1999.
U.S. Inc. (whose 2000 budget was $2.3 million) likewise got nearly $5
million in that period from one donor, while three other Tanton-linked
organizations were given $1 million to $2 million donations by single
donors.
If these kinds of major grants are subtracted from the groups' annual
donation totals - and if the membership fees posted on group Web sites
are taken seriously - then the membership claims made by many groups are
clearly exaggerated. For example, after subtracting the three major
donations reported on AICF's 2000 tax forms, only $39,386 in income is
left. If members pay $15 a year, as the AICF Web site says, then the
group has at most 2,625 members - hardly the 250,000-plus that it
claims. Similarly, ProjectUSA has said it has 3,000 members; but if a
donation of $20 - a figure recently suggested on its Web site - was paid
by each donor, then it would have had 841 members. In the case of FAIR,
which claims 75,000 members, the 2000 tax forms suggests a real
membership base of about half that.
FAIR's executive director, Dan Stein, defends his numbers, telling the Intelligence
Report members pay “a certain amount over a period of 24 months
… like $20” - in other words, $10 a year. FAIR's Web site says that
membership costs $25 a year.
The Foundations
The tax returns reveal another hidden aspect of many anti-immigration
groups - their heavy reliance on funding by right-wing foundations.
Tanton's most important funding source for the last two decades may well
have been the Scaife family, heirs to the Mellon Bank fortune. Richard
Mellon Scaife, a reclusive figure, has been instrumental in establishing
right-wing organizations like the Heritage Foundation and supporting
causes like the “Arkansas Project,” an effort to dig up dirt on
President Clinton. Scaife family foundations, including those controlled
by Scaife's sister, Cordelia May Scaife, provided some $1.4 million to
FAIR from 1986-2000. These foundations, along with private trusts
controlled by Scaife family members, have also provided millions of
dollars to other anti-immigration groups.
Other foundations that have supported the Tanton network include the
McConnell Foundation, whose president, Scott McConnell, is on both FAIR
and the Center for Immigration Studies' boards; the Shea Foundation,
which also funds the Council of Conservative Citizens; and the Weeden,
Salisbury, Smith Richardson, Blair and Sikes foundations.
Joining the Extremists
Since 1998, the links have been strengthened between key
anti-immigration activists and groups and white supremacist
organizations in particular, the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC)
and American Renaissance (also known by the name of its parent,
the New Century Foundation). That year, Coe, Spencer and Rick Oltman,
FAIR's western regional representative, all came to Cullman, Ala., for a
CCC-organized protest against a swelling local population of Mexican
workers.
After the protest, Vinson, the leader of the American Immigration
Control Foundation, began writing of the perils of immigration for the
CCC's paper, the Citizens Informer. Spencer started selling his
anti-immigrant videotape in the same tabloid. In 1999, the CCC hosted a
panel on immigration that featured four key anti-immigrant activists -
Vinson, Spencer, Population-Environment Balance's Virginia Abernethy and
Wayne Lutton, who had begun to edit The Social Contract, a Tanton
publication, just a year earlier.
More recently, Lutton joined the editorial board of the Citizens
Informer - and also became a trustee of the racist New Century
Foundation, parent of American Renaissance magazine. Barbara Coe
of California Coalition for Immigration Reform has spoken at three
recent CCC conferences and writes regularly for the Informer.
Brent Nelson, who is on the board of Vinson's AICF, began serving as
president of the CCC's Conservative Citizens Foundation and as an
adviser to the Informer.
Asked by the Intelligence Report about Lutton - who works out of
Tanton's Petoskey, Mich., offices - and other anti-immigration activists
who have climbed on board with hate groups, Tanton declined to answer
that or a series of other questions faxed to him by the Report at
his request. The questions showed “little evidence of tolerance for
differences of opinion,” he wrote.
Last year, Virginia Abernethy, a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt's
medical school and leader of the Tanton-influenced
Population-Environment Balance, became the latest in the Tanton network
to join the Citizens Informer editorial board. “My view of the
Council of Conservative Citizens,” she told the Intelligence
Report, “is that they support traditional values and the freedom
of people to associate with people that they want to associate with.”
She spoke on the same day that the CCC's Web site carried a comparison
of black pop singer Michael Jackson and an ape - a comparison that
Abernethy suggested may have reflected “bad taste,” but not racism.
“What is the point of a society that pushes [racial] mixing?” she
asked when told of another CCC Web item that derided the wife of
murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl as a “mixed
race” woman who is “committed to racial and ethnic amalgamation.”
“Our society pushes mixing,” the retired Vanderbilt professor added.
“I think this is probably not a good thing for the society.”
The Threat from the Right
Two weeks after the NumbersUSA lobbying trip to the offices of Tom
Tancredo and a series of other congressmen, Glenn Spencer, head of the
Tanton-funded anti-immigrant American Patrol, was one of the main
speakers at a conference hosted by Jared Taylor of American
Renaissance magazine. Joining Spencer, who warned his audience that
a second Mexican-American war would erupt in 2003, was an array of key
extremists: Mark Weber, a principal of the Holocaust-denying Institute
for Historical Review; white power Web maven, former Klansman and ex-con
Don Black; and Gordon Lee Baum, “chief executive officer” of the CCC.
In addition, several members of the neo-Nazi National Alliance were
present.
Neo-Nazis like those of the National Alliance were not among those who
lobbied Tancredo and the other politicians during the NumbersUSA event
two weeks earlier. But there were strong indications that the Tanton
network and some of its new friends did make a number of key inroads in
the halls of Congress.
The white supremacist CCC, for instance, later boasted in print about
how its “members were welcomed … and made a number of stops”
during the lobbying trip. Both congressmen and senators were offered
copies of its Citizens Informer, the group's newspaper reported.
Several of the anti-immigration activists who attended later claimed
that the Tancredo caucus had grown in size specifically because of their
lobbying efforts. At the end of the day, the CCC told its members that
the Senate was now expected to pass a restrictive visa-tracking bill,
which it said President Bush would likely sign.
There were other indications, too, of the strength of the Tanton network
inside Tancredo's congressional immigration caucus. Rosemary Jenks, who
used to be a researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies, and Linda
Purdue, who has worked with Tanton for years, are now both lobbyists
with NumbersUSA. Addressing her fellow lobbyists with Tancredo still in
the room, Jenks said that she and Purdue could be reached any time in
Tancredo's offices - where, she said, they were “virtual staffers.”
This kind of strategy was explicitly foreseen in the WITAN memos,
described under subtitles like “Infiltrate the Judiciary Committee”
and “Secure appointments of our friends” to key governmental
positions. Indeed, Cordia Strom, who was once FAIR's legal director,
became a staffer for the House Immigration Subcommittee in 1996. Today,
Strom is counsel to the director and coordinator of congressional
affairs for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
There is a real threat that members of Congress - many of whom are
rushing to become involved in immigration issues in the wake of the
Sept. 11 attacks - may be taken in by the propagandists of the racist
right. Opinion polls consistently show that a majority of Americans
believe that immigration needs to be cut below current levels, although
that does not imply that they support the ideas of white supremacists or
other bigots. Certainly, the lobbyists who visited in February were
taken seriously by many of those they visited - today, the Web page of
Tancredo's Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus carries links to the
pages of a whole array of Tanton-associated groups. The danger is not
that immigration levels are debated by Americans, but that the debate is
controlled by bigots and extremists whose views are anathema to the
ideals on which this country was founded.
Intelligence Report
Summer 2002
Issue 106
THE NETWORK
The organized anti-immigration “movement” is almost entirely the
handiwork of one man, Michigan activist John H. Tanton. Here is a list
of 13 groups in the loose-knit Tanton network, followed by acronyms if
the groups use them, founding dates, and Tanton's role in the groups.
Those organizations designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty
Law Center are marked with an asterisk (*).
*American Immigration Control Foundation
AICF, 1983, funded
*American Patrol/Voice of Citizens Together
1992, funded
California Coalition for Immigration Reform
CCIR, 1994, funded
Californians for Population Stabilization
1996, funded
Center for Immigration Studies
CIS, 1985, founded and funded
Federation for American Immigration Reform
FAIR, 1979, founded and funded
NumbersUSA
1996, founded and funded
Population-Environment Balance
1973, joined board in 1980
Pro English
1994, founded and funded
ProjectUSA
1999, funded
*The Social Contract Press
1990, founded and funded
U.S. English
1983, founded and funded
U.S. Inc.
1982, founded and funded
In this chart, “founded” means a group was founded or co-founded by
John Tanton. “Funded” means that U.S. Inc., the funding conduit
created and still headed by Tanton, has made grants to the group.
Intelligence Report
Summer 2002
Issue 106
Immigration Packet |