Southern Poverty Law Center: Leading Anti-Immigration Lobbyist is Bigoted and Hateful

On Tuesday, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) said that the United States' leading anti-immigration organization, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the leaders of whom have testified again and again before Congress and are frequently quoted in the media, has connections to known racist groups and a long track record of bigotry against blacks, Latinos, and Catholics.

SPLC says that the founder of the group, John Tanton, operates a racist publishing company and compares immigrants to bacteria; employs members of white supremacist groups in key positions; adheres to racist conspiracy theories, including those that say Latinos' high birthrates will allow them to take over (and destroy) the United States; and takes money from the eugenics-supporting, race-to-IQ-correlation believing group the Pioneer Fund.

The SPLC asserts that it has found a 40 percent increase in the number of hate groups since 2000. The FBI has published statistics that allegedly reveal a 35 percent rise in hate crimes against Latinos since 2003. The SPLC says these statistics reflect a growing wave of anti-immigration fervor.

"The sad fact is that attempts to reform our immigration system are being sabotaged by organizations fueled by hate," said Henry Fernandez, a senior fellow and expert on immigration at the Center for American Progress.

Tanton began his activist career in the 1960s as an environmentalist and was a member of the Audobon Society as well as a small-town doctor. However, he apparently became obsessed with the idea that overpopulation by human beings leads to environmental degradation after reading Paul Ehrlich's now-discredited 1968 tome The Population Bomb, and from there is was not long before he was led to the conclusion that non-whites lack morals and as a result breed indiscriminately and often, leading to their crowding out of whites with their "savage" and "criminal" populations.

In 1975 Tanton wrote, "[H]uddled masses cast longing eyes on the apparent riches of the industrial West. The developed countries lie directly in the path of a great storm." He had been deeply inspired by a novel called The Camp of the Saints, written by French author Jean Raspail and roundly condemned as racist.

Critics of illegal immigration say that people like Tanton harm their just cause through their distortions of facts, leading people to take the opposite stance of not wanting to deal with the illegal immigrants in the United States in a strict way because their arguments have been tainted by hate speech that they don't believe in.

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