John Tanton and the anti-immigration movement

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Interesting find...I just stumbled onto this, but one of groups connected to Tanton is NumbersUSA.com ...the one that our very own, JohnK was trying to get people here to visit. I'm looking more into it, but Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo is closely tied to Tanton. Hmmm...very interesting.

INTELLIGENCE Report: In looking at the contemporary anti-immigrant movement, we’ve found that even though there are a large number of organizations involved, they almost always seem to go back to one man -- John Tanton, the Michigan ophthalmologist who founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform [FAIR] in 1979. Has that always been the case?

SWARTZ: Tanton is the puppeteer behind this entire movement. 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. I don’t know if he’s personally wealthy -- it could well be that people give him big donations just because he is so mesmerizing. He does have a charismatic feel about him.

It’s been clear since 1988, when a series of embarrassing internal memos by Tanton (to FAIR and to attendees of WITAN IV) and Roger Conner [who was then executive director of FAIR] were leaked to the press, what the overall strategy is. Those memos are a blueprint for what Tanton and his friends have been doing ever since.

IR: Can you describe that blueprint?

SWARTZ: The blueprint envisaged creating a whole array of organizations that serve the overall ideological and political battle plan to halt immigration -- even if some of these groups have somewhat differing politics. They camouflage the links between these organizations, their true origins, so that they appear to have arisen spontaneously. But in fact they have the same creator, Tanton.

IR: So the idea was to create the illusion of a grassroots movement that was supported by a significant number of Americans?

SWARTZ: Yes indeed, to confuse the press. The leaked memos did bring some public attention to the Tanton network, and some of these linkages were further exposed in the early 1990s. More recently, fair’s tax records established that the Center for Immigration Studies, which has become an influential Washington institution, was spun off from fair as a separate organization. But these facts aren’t widely known by the public today.

For years and years, fair and these other spinoffs have been part of a strategy of, "Well, it can’t just be fair and other major Tanton creations like U.S. English and the Center for Immigration Studies, because then it’s too easy to pin us down. So therefore how about creating NumbersUSA, English First, the American Immigration Control Foundation and all these smaller local groups?" All of this was anticipated by the memos, which were written in 1986, two years before the leak.

IR: Has even the limited exposure of these kinds of linkages damaged the ability of Tanton’s anti-immigrant groups to affect public policy in Congress?

SWARTZ: They are well known to everybody deeply involved in the immigration debate. But when it comes to Congress, very few members -- maybe two -- can come close to understanding the situation or the history of the immigration reform efforts of the last 25 years. They may have voted on immigration-related items, but immigration is not a way of life for them.

IR: Let’s go back a little. How did Tanton get started?

SWARTZ: When Tanton started fair in 1979, he was already president of a liberal organization, Zero Population Growth [ZPG]. He wanted ZPG to be the vehicle for a significant advocacy effort to reduce immigration, but the senior staff and at least some members of the ZPG board resisted.

As a result, FAIR was created. Conner ran FAIR as executive director through most of the ’80s before leaving to become executive director of yet another Tanton creation, the American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities, which was intended to be an antidote to the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union]. At the time, FAIR was promoting employer sanctions [laws to punish those who hire illegal aliens] and dramatic increases in border enforcement, sweeps, arrests and deportations. It was opposing guest worker programs and asylum for refugees from Haiti or the Central American wars.

It was also FAIR that first had the idea of barring social services and other public benefits for immigrants [an enterprise that came to fruition with California’s Proposition 187, which was passed in 1994 with the support of FAIR and other Tanton creations, but ultimately found to be unconstitutional]. FAIR also tried to build linkages to mainstream environmental groups, but without much success.

IR: When did Tanton get into the English Only movement?

SWARTZ: Tanton established an organization called U.S. English in the early 1980s, and this became his second major national organization after FAIR. The organization was dedicated to "English Only" [the idea that all official government business should be conducted in English alone], and it attracted into its ranks a number of well-known celebrities -- Walter Cronkite and Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example.

U.S. English funded a range of "official English" state and local referenda [through early 2002, 27 states had passed English-only legislation]. The most recent example of this kind of activity is in Iowa, where the governor earlier this year declared English the state’s official language.

By the way, there is a lot happening in Iowa right now. Why Iowa? Well, you’ve got meatpacking plants and the immigrants employed in them, leading to demographic change. And you have Iowa’s governor making pro-immigration statements over the last couple of years, saying we’re losing people and we need new people, therefore we should be trying to attract immigrants.

And, of course, Iowa is the first presidential primary. So add it all up, and you can see why they’re spending a ton of advertising money in Iowa. It’s perfect for Tanton’s message.

IR: Although he has always denied it, Tanton and his progeny have frequently been accused of being racist, not to mention anti-Catholic and, in particular, anti-Hispanic.

In fact, Tanton helped to arrange for the English-language publication of "The Camp of the Saints," a grotesquely racist French novel that tells of European civilization being overrun by bestial Third World immigrants. And he continues to promulgate that book in his role as publisher of The Social Contract Press, a hate group.

What do you make of the role of this remarkable book?

SWARTZ: A movement of the kind that Tanton envisions needs a bible. It needs a bible for conversion. It needs a bible as an ideological road map. It needs a bible to stimulate zeal and a sense of belief among its followers.

"The Camp of the Saints" is that book for Tanton. It puts out a vision of immigrants rampaging and destroying the West, and that is the vision that Tanton believes in and wants his followers to believe in. James Crawford, who wrote a book on the English Only movement, calls "The Camp of the Saints" "a cult book" -- and that is what I think it is.

IR: A similar vision of white people being overwhelmed by dusky, Third World hordes is suggested in the Tanton-Conner memos. Did the leak of those memos to The Arizona Republic hurt Tanton and FAIR significantly?

SWARTZ: It hurt him a lot at the time. The revelations led to the resignation of Linda Chavez, who had become executive director of U.S. English in the mid-1980s [and is a conservative Republican columnist today]. A whole group of celebrities resigned from the board or advisory board of U.S. English because of the memos, which were complicated by "The Camp of the Saints" being sort of a Holy Bible for the movement. All this revealed the underlying ideology of Tanton.

It also made it that much more difficult for people like [former Sen.] Alan Simpson [R-Wyo.] and others who shared FAIR's point of view from holding FAIR up as this great organization that other members worked with all the time. And the political character of the Tanton-Conner memos -- the strategies of infiltration and so on that they discussed -- also contributed to the rash of resignations.

Rick Swartz may have done more than any other activist to encourage a healthy level of immigration to America and to protect the rights of immigrants once they are here.

After graduating from the University of Chicago Law School, Swartz directed an immigrant rights project at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights before going on to found, in 1982, what has become the nation’s leading immigration rights advocacy group, the National Immigration Forum. Swartz was president of the Forum, a coalition of more than 250 national organizations and several thousand local groups, until 1990.

In that post, he worked to secure a safe haven for Haitian and Central American war refugees, to legalize the status of millions of other immigrants and to battle the anti-immigrant and English Only movements. Since leaving the Forum, Swartz, now 52, has run a small public policy firm representing a range of corporate and nonprofit clients, at the same time continuing his immigration advocacy work.

http://www.tolerance.org/news/article_hate.jsp?id=555

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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 (*).

In this list, "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.

*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 (founded separately in 1986)

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

Intelligence Report

Summer 2002