Burnt Orange Report

SCLM Coddles Racist

By Andrew Dobbs

Tired of hearing wingers tell you that Fox News has to be conservative to balance out that awful liberal CNN? Well bust this out on them. On Lou Dobbs (no relation, thank God) this evening they had a whole segment about our "broken borders"- the crisis of immigration. Now, talking about immigration isn't a bad thing, its an important issue that gets little talk time because it is so rife with controversy. But the foundation of the segment was an interview with an immigration expert named Otis Graham, author of the book "Unguarded Gates." Here's an excerpt from the piece:

In your book, which is very interesting, you point to a second wave of immigration. The first wave, we're all familiar with from our grade school class, history class, of the great immigration wave. Now we're in a second one. Why is this any different than the first? The first went fairly well.

OTIS GRAHAM, AUTHOR, "UNGUARDED GATES": The first was restricted after 40 years of argument and it did go rather well, partially because it was restricted and we had time to assimilate those 30 million people who came in those years. The situation is very different for the second wave that began arriving in the 1960s.

First of all, the source countries are profoundly different. The first wave came from Europe. They were western people however different we thought that they were and they seemed to be. The source countries are now very different.

The largest single source country -- there was no one single source country in the first wave. In the second wave, Mexico and Latin America generally, but Mexico is a very large component, sustained component coming from a country with a poor economy, a troubled economy, and a fast-growing population. 2,000-mile border between the two so that coming and going back and forth, the cultural reinforcement, the language reinforcement, these circumstances didn't apply 100 years ago.

A third thing I would mention as a difference, 100 years ago, when immigrants came into the U.S., we were a culture and a society that insisted on Americanization. English, learn our ways, learn our history. Now we've changed for reasons which we don't need to go into now given our time. But we're a society which is much less emphasis on a common language. There's multi-culturalism as an intellectual current which welcomes all cultures and doesn't insist on Americanization.

So whether the assimilation process is working well is not a question that applies in the same way as the first wave. So the second wave and the first wave are about the same in size, and they've both been running about four decades. Whether we can curb and control the second wave, as we did the first wave, is a very open question, I think.

Okay, so doesn't sound overtly ignorant but the dichotomy drawn between the "successful" or good immigration of "Westerners" versus the "very different" second wave of mostly Latino people that needs to be "curbed or controlled" is pretty disturbing. I heard this piece, which went unchallenged either from an opposing theorist or from the guest host, Kitty Pilgrim. So I decided to do a little detective work.

First stop, the Anti-Defamation League, one of the top watchdogs for hate groups in the country. I ran a search on Graham's name and found a report on the group he founded, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Here's what they say:

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR),* headquartered in Washington, D.C., describes itself as “a national, non-profit, public interest organization of concerned citizens who share a common belief that the unforeseen mass immigration that has occurred over the last 30 years should not continue.” Its stated goal is “to end illegal immigration” and “to set legal immigration at the lowest feasible levels consistent with the demographic, economic, social, and environmental realities….”

However, in recent years, FAIR has:
• acknowledged and defended having received grants reportedly totaling around
$600,000 from the Pioneer Fund, which has been described by The New York Times as having been established for the express purpose of promoting research into eugenics, and which has sponsored projects based on the notion that Blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites.

• expressed support for an anti-immigration op-ed article by John Tanton, a FAIR founder and board member, in which immigrants were compared to bacteria. (Linda Chavez, a former official of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, has called Tanton’s views “anti-Hispanic, anti-Catholic, and not excusable.”)

• reflected hostility toward Hispanics and the Catholic Church when FAIR’s executive director, Dan Stein, told an interviewer, “Certainly we would encourage people in other countries to have small families. Otherwise they’ll all be coming here, because there’s no room at the Vatican… Many [immigrants] hate America, hate everything the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans.”

• Sponsored a newspaper ad critical of a U. S. Senator’s position on immigration legislation, in which a photo of the Senator, who is of Lebanese ancestry, was juxtaposed with one of a notorious Middle East terrorist; the ad suggested that the senator’s position would cause Americans to be “needlessly exposed to the threat of terrorism from criminals like Osama bin Laden.” The Detroit Free Press recently described FAIR’s ad campaign regarding the senator (Spencer Abraham, R-MI) as “hysterical rhetoric … disingenuous and nativistic. It comes perilously close to a smear.”

• expressed approval of China’s forced abortion policy (in a column by Ben
Wattenberg quoting Dan Stein) as an “international family planning program.”

• Provided a link on its Internet web site to that of the California-based Voice of
Citizens Together (VCT), a strident anti-immigration group whose web site has
referred to “Mexico’s invasion of the United States,” and predicted that “California will be taken over by Third World forces, led by Mexico, who have an axe to grind against European Americans.” (...)

Critics of FAIR have accused the group of engaging in old-fashioned nativism and xenophobia in its single-minded pursuit of immigration control, and of using racism to promote its message. In addition, the group has been accused of anti-Hispanic and anti-Catholic bias, based on comments made by some of its leaders. The group has rejected such allegations. Moreover, FAIR has been criticized for accepting financial support of approximately $600,000 from the Pioneer Fund, a controversial New York-based taxexempt foundation that has promoted eugenics.** In 1994 Daniel Stein told The New York Times that such contributions to FAIR came without any strings attached. More recently Stein said his job was “to get every dime of Pioneer’s money.”

Okay, so pretty scary stuff. Futhermore, the other big hate group watchdog, the Southern Poverty Law Center has grouped them together with David Duke's group and other hate groups. Here's what they had to say:

Today, FAIR claims a staggering 70,000 members, although that number is almost certainly inflated. Tanton remains on FAIR's board and also is the publisher of The Social Contract Press, which sells racist anti-immigrant tracts.

Dan Stein, the group's executive director, has warned that certain immigrant groups are engaged in "competitive breeding" aimed at diminishing white power. Rick Oltman, FAIR's western representative, has spoken before and worked with the racist Council of Conservative Citizens.

Garrett Hardin, a FAIR board member, has argued that aiding starving Africans is counterproductive and will only "encourage population growth." Overall, FAIR blames immigrants for crime, poverty, disease, urban sprawl and increasing racial tensions in America, and calls for a drastic cut in the numbers of those allowed in.

The ADL article cites Otis Graham, the man who was on Lou Dobbs, as the cofounder of FAIR. So, let's connect the dots here. Otis Graham is the cofounder and spokesperson for a group that is identified by both the ADL and the SPLC as a white supremacist group and he goes on CNN and is treated like a normal scholar and his claims go unchallenged.

Some liberal media, huh?