The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is a non-profit tax exempt organization in the United States that seeks to reduce both legal and illegal immigration.
FAIR was founded in 1979 by the ophthalmologist John Tanton, former historian of labor movements and director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Otis L. Graham, Jr. and the late Sidney Swensrud, who was a former chairman of Gulf Oil and governing board member of Planned Parenthood. The founding chairman, John Tanton, became leader of several anti-immigration groups. John Tanton personally held white supremacist beliefs while he led the organization, leading the Southern Poverty Law Center to classify FAIR as a hate group.
Video Federation for American Immigration Reform
Mission
According to their website, FAIR seeks a moratorium on net immigration by anyone other than refugees and the spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens. FAIR also believes that the economic and social growth in the United States are no longer sustainable at the current rate of the influx of immigrants into the country. In an article entitled "Why America Needs an Immigration Time-Out", explains it "would ease the pressure on the environment and give us a chance to repair our institutions."
FAIR identifies itself as a "group whose membership runs the gamut from liberal to conservative, [whose] grassroots networks help concerned citizens use their voices to speak up for effective, sensible immigration policies that work for America's best interests". Its Board of Advisors has included individuals such as former Congressman Brian Bilbray (R-CA) and former Governor Richard Lamm (D-CO). The group promotes policies to improve border security and stop illegal immigration, and to reduce legal immigration into the United States to around 300,000 people a year. FAIR's policy studies emphasize the environmental, economic, and social effects of mass immigration. FAIR's President Dan Stein serves on the 61-member board of the Citizens' Debate Commission, a nonpartisan American organization formed in 2004, which was established to sponsor future general election presidential debates.
FAIR is a member of the Coalition for the Future American Worker, which describes itself as "an umbrella organization of professional trade groups, population/environment organizations, and immigration reform groups. CFAW was formed to represent the interests of American workers and students in the formulation of immigration policy."
Maps Federation for American Immigration Reform
Influence and work
Through organizing private events and lobbying, the Federation for American Immigrant Reform has impacted governmental policies in several areas related to immigration and civil rights.
- Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, Senate Bill 1070: This bill, primarily written with the help of Kris Kobach, who was a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School, and who became the Kansas Secretary of State in 2011, was a controversial immigration law in Arizona. Critics of the legislation said it would encourage racial profiling, while supporters argued that the law prohibits the use of race as the sole basis for investigating immigration status. The law was modified by Arizona House Bill 2162 within a week of its signing with the goal of addressing some of these concerns. There were protests in opposition to the law in over 70 U.S. cities, including boycotts and calls for boycotts of Arizona. Polling had found the law to have majority support in Arizona and nationwide. The passage of the measure has prompted other states to consider adopting similar legislation. The bill was signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer on April 23, 2010. It was scheduled to go into effect on July 29, 2010, ninety days after the end of the legislative session. Legal challenges over its constitutionality and compliance with civil rights law were filed, including one by the United States Department of Justice that also asked for an injunction against enforcement of the law. The day before the law was to take effect, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction that blocked the law's most controversial provisions.
- On December 12, 2011, the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari to hear the case. The court heard oral arguments for this case on April 25, 2012. Justice Elena Kagan recused herself from the case, presumably because while she was the United States Solicitor General, she defended the federal government's position in this case under the Obama administration.
- In June 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the case Arizona v. United States, upholding the provision requiring immigration status checks during law enforcement stops but striking down three other provisions as violations of the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution. The majority opinion was written by Justice Kennedy and was joined by Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Ginsburg, Justice Breyer, and Justice Sotomayor. Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito each concurred in part and dissented in part in separate opinions joined by no other justice. Justice Kennedy's majority opinion held that Sections 3, 5(C), and 6 were preempted by federal law. The three provisions struck down: required legal immigrants to carry registration documents at all times; allowed state police to arrest any individual for suspicion of being an illegal immigrant; and made it a crime for an illegal immigrant to search for a job (or to hold one) in the state.
- Protect Arizona Now, Proposition 200: In 2004, the Federation for American Immigration Reform cooperated with the group called Protect Arizona Now in order to support the passage of Proposition 200, which shares the similarities with California's Proposition 187 in which illegal aliens are restricted from public benefits and voting because they are most likely unable to provide the required proof of citizenship. It also made the crime of a public official not reporting illegal status a class 2 misdemeanor.
- End Sanctuary Cities Policy: After the shooting incidence in the summer of 2015 when Kathryn Steinle was killed by an undocumented immigrant, Francisco Sanchez, in San Francisco, the Federation for American Immigrant Reform organized the "End Sanctuary Cities" movement, arguing that the Federal government should end the sanctuary cities policy because the influx of illegal immigrants is the fundamental cause of criminal activities in the United States. Sanctuary cities including San Francisco are the jurisdictions where illegal immigrants are protected from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Through lobbying in Washington D.C, and actively promoting its ideas on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, FAIR is calling for the Federal government's denial of federal funds to sanctuary jurisdictions and amendment of IIRIRA Section 642 that hampers the collection of immigration information from immigrants in the United States.
- Suing the Obama Administration for crime rate records: In 2016, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), the affiliated group of FAIR, "filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking records from the Department of Justice (DOJ) concerning illegal alien crime rates."
History
The "founder of the modern immigration reform movement"--John Tanton--an ophthalmologist in Petoskey, Michigan--"saw a threat coming in the soaring rates of immigration" and that the "environment was threatened by overpopulation". Frustrated by the lack of interest of his "liberal colleagues in groups such as Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club where he was actively engaged, he helped establish "three major national groups"--FAIR, Numbers USA the Center for Immigration Studies--to fight to reduce [legal and illegal] immigration."
Tanton--along with University of North Carolina professor, Otis Graham and former Gulf Oil CEO, Sydney Swensrud--established FAIR in 1979. In 1982 Tanton also established U.S. Inc, a foundation chaired by Tanton with financial support from Cordelia Scaife May which would over the years, serve as a funding conduit for FAIR, Numbers USA, the Center for Immigration Studies, and many other groups.
FAIR's first executive director was environmental lawyer Roger Conner. Other co-founders included feminist Sharon Barnes, philanthropists Jay Harris and Stewart Mott (of the Stewart R. Mott Foundation) and William Paddock, dean of Zamorano the Pan American School of Agriculture Dan Stein has been president of FAIR since 1988.
In American Immigration: An Encyclopedia of Political, Social, and Cultural Change, Brian N. Fry described Tanton as the "leader of the drive to restrict immigration" starting in the mid-1970s. Fry described those who favored maintaining or increasing immigration numbers as "expansionists" and those who sought to reduce them as ""restrictionists." Fry traced "restrictions roots" to a surprising surge in illegal and legal immigration--the "new immigration"--following the 1964 termination of the Bracero Program and the enactment of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
Under Lyndon B. Johnson the Immigration Act "officially committed the United States, for the first time, to accepting immigrants of all nationalities on a roughly equal basis" by eliminating "national-origin quotas." According to The Atlantic, the effects of the Immigration Act were at odds with its "original intention" and it "inadvertently changed America". Whereas previously the vast majority of immigrants came to the United States from "northern and western Europe", under the Immigration Act--through the family unification process--non-European immigrants brought family members to the United States in numbers that were not expected. A nativist sentiment emerged at "the prospect of a nonwhite U.S. majority. It was in this context that Tanton as President of Zero Population Growth from 1975-77 attempted to get members to "support immigration restrictions." When they were unwilling, he launched FAIR with seed money in 1979.
In 1982, when Dan Stein was twenty-seven-years old, FAIR--with its small headquarters on P Street in Washington, D.C.--had only ten members. At the time it was not widely accepted by either the Republicans or Democrats. Throughout the 1980s FAIR's lobbying efforts on Capital Hill met with more success as did their direct mail campaigns. FAIR received funds from donors such as Cordelia Scaife May (1928-2005) through her Laurel Foundation(1928-2005) and the Pioneer Fund which contributed $1.2 million to FAIR in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Following negative publicity about FAIR receiving funds from Pioneer Fund when they were revealed in a Los Angeles Times article, FAIR stopped "receiving grants" from Pioneer that required "public disclosure." The SPLC claimed FAIR continued to "receive private financial support from Pioneer's leaders for several years."
Tanton had wanted FAIR to focus on issues related to Hispanics in the United States, such as "cultural division" and bilingualism. He was unable to convince FAIR's board of directors to shift their focus. However FAIR helped Tanton establish U.S. English as the umbrella organization for "projects pertaining to overpopulation, immigration, and the environment. Through the work of Senator Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa (R-CA) (1906-1992) and Tanton, U.S. English became a well-organized and well-funded official movement resulting in a twenty-two states enacting official language laws to protect English between 1981-97. From 2005-15, Julie Kirchner was FAIR's executive director.
In 1991 historian Eric Hobsbawm explained the rise of FAIR, US English and English first in the United States in the 1980s as part of a larger political phenomenon of xenophobia that "feeds on hostility towards the new mass migrations". He quoted a Czech historian, "Where old social relations become unstable, amid the rise of general insecurity, belonging to a common language and culture may become the only certainty in society, the only value beyond ambiguity and doubt."
FAIR became "the stuff of lore in 2007, with their successful campaign against Bush's proposed Immigration Reform which represented "a systemic overhaul including a path to citizenship for most illegal immigrants." "FAIR rallied talk show hosts...The Center for Immigration Studies published "studies of the bill's perceived flaws" and "Numbers USA jammed the Capitol's phones." FAIR had become the "most important organization [in the United States] fueling the backlash against immigration" and Tanton was perceived as the leader. As a result, liberal groups who opposed FAIR focused on Tanton who was at that time "in his 32nd year on the board." Tanton was concerned that US birthrates had dropped "below replacement level. In 1986 Tanton wrote memos to FAIR colleagues--which became known as the WITAN memos--predicting a "Latin onslaught" and worried that high Latino birth rates and low US birthrates would lead "the present majority to hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile". He was concerned Latinos would "bring with them the tradition of the mordida ['bribe'], the lack of involvement in public affairs." He asked, "What are the differences in educability between Hispanics (with their 50% dropout rate) and Asiatics (with their excellent school records and long tradition of scholarship)?" The memos--which became known as the WITAN memos--were leaked to the press in 1988.
He warned that unless Latino immigration was restricted it would ultimately "lead to linguistic, economic, racial and religious "apartheid" in the United States." He cautioned, "I've come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that." When the WITAN memos were leaked to the press in 1988, Tanton eventually had to resign from U.S. English. although he denied the accusations.
In 2007 FAIR began holding their signature event, an annual "lobbying and talk-radio extravaganza" of "like-minded talk radio hosts" held in Washington, D.C. Their tenth annual "Hold Their Feet to the Fire" (F2F) radio row broadcast was held in Washington in June, 2016 with "50 talk radio hosts from across the country [broadcasting] live both days, debating immigration policy and interviewing members of Congress, media figures, law enforcement officials, experts, activists, and those who live and work along the southern border."
In 2008, Lou Dobbs a regular F2F attendee broadcast on live television from the event's rally, commended FAIR. He was fired from CNN in 2009 and hired at Fox the next year, to run a similar show.
At the second annual "Hold Their Feet to the Fire" event in 2008 on the theme of immigration that was aired on C-SPAN, Joyce Kaufman responded to callers via the telephone and electronic mail. At the ninth annual "radio row" on June 22 and 23, 2016 fifty talk show hosts from all over the United States broadcast their shows and debated immigration policy." Participants included radio personalities Phil Valentine--who is on Talkers Magazine's Heavy Hundred list, Genesis Communications Network's Mike Siegel, WCRS's Anne Eller in Greenwood, KID's Neal Larson in Idaho Falls, KIDO's Kevin Miller in Boise, and KMED's Bill Meyer in Oregon.
In September 2009 two divisive issues--immigration and health care--became "politically linked" when partisan health reform opponents challenged what they perceived as subsidized health care for illegal immigrants. By early September the bipartisan Gang of Six negotiations on a compromise for the health care reform bill, had fallen apart. Senators who had previously "embraced the framework" were convinced by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell that they were being politically unwise. Their rhetoric turned "shrill" and "anti-reform" with one Senator talking about "death panels that would kill grandma." The furor on immigration "escalated" into what The Washington Post called a "proxy war." FAIR's annual "Hold their Feet to the Fire" event" in Washington on September 14 and 15, was described by The Post as a "Capitol Hill lobbying push..[with] 47 conservative radio hosts holding a 'town hall of the airwaves'... [highlighting] the costs of illegal immigration."
America's Voice's Director Frank Sharry said, "conservative activists" had attempted to "intimidate" Congress by "tapping into a thin but vocal vein of populist anger... We didn't call them out last time, we thought we were in a political debate. Now we realize it's part political debate and... part culture war. These talk-show guys and FAIR, this isn't about immigration policy, as much as they think there are way too many Latinos in this country and they want to get rid of a couple of million of them." The SPLC strongly denounced FAIR and its founder. FAIR president Dan Stein stated in The Post article that the SPLC had "decided to engage in unsubstantiated, invidious name-calling, smearing millions of people in this movement who simply want to see the law enforced and, frankly, lower levels of immigration" and that "America's Voice and allied groups were 'juvenile mud throwers who seem unprepared to engage in serious public debate'. The Center for Immigration Studies's Mark Krikorian, said, "Right now there are a lot of members of Congress [congressional Democrats] who might have thought the immigration issue wasn't as hot for opponents as it was a couple of years ago. They were disabused of that notion."
In a 2011 New York Times article a former aide to President Ronald Reagan, Linda Chavez, was cited as saying that 77-year-old Tanton was "the most influential unknown man in America." In a 2011 interview published in the New York Times and The Houston Chronicle, FAIR's President Dan Stein said, "Is FAIR responsible for everything [John Tanton] said in his private correspondence? No, I love John, but he's had no significant control over FAIR for years."
During President Obama's tenure, FAIR's President Dan Stein was particularly critical of Eric Holder as Attorney General (2009-2015), calling Holder "the chief dismantler of laws this administration found to be politically inconvenient, notably all those related to immigration enforcement and the law's administration." In 2014 in a FAIR press release, they strongly challenged Holder's lawsuits against Arizona, South Carolina and Alabama, states that opposed sanctuary cities' protecting illegal immigrants.
In an interview with Florida radio host Joyce Kaufman, Stein warned that the United States was at "the verge of 'civil violence' thanks to "Holder and immigration reform advocates". Kaufman shared Stein's concerns that President Obama had "done nothing but destroy everything my country represented."
With the election of President Trump, some of the United States' "most ardent" advocates for reducing immigration levels--such as FAIR, the Center for Immigration Studies, and NumbersUSA--have an opportunity "to dramatically reduce legal immigration". These three groups enjoy "formidable grassroots support" across the United States. By 2017, FAIR claimed a support network of over 1.3 million people and a $5.5 million annual budget.
Affiliations
FAIR has created several affiliated groups in order to maximize its effectiveness. In 1987, FAIR founded the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) which claims that the rights, privileges, and property of U.S. citizens are threatened by immigration. In 2004, FAIR also established the FAIR Congressional Task Force (FCTF) as a 501(c)(4) organization who believe that promoting public welfare requires drastic restrictions on legal immigration. The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) was spun off from FAIR in 1985.
Classification as a Hate Group
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) currently classifies FAIR as a hate group, citing the white supremacist beliefs of its founder. In 1982, John Tanton wrote "As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion." Later, in a 1993 memo to another board member, Tanton said that "Projections by the U.S. Census Bureau show that midway into the next century, the current European-American majority will become a minority ... This is unacceptable; we decline to bequeath to our children minority status in their own land." These statements among other documents led the SPLC to believe that the true intent of Tanton's anti-immigration advocacy was to "to limit the number of nonwhites living in the U.S.", hence the classification as a hate group.
FAIR responded to this charge by stating that there is no factual basis for the accusation; that FAIR has compiled a long record of mainstream credibility and respect on immigration issues and has always opposed discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, or religion; and that the accusation is an "act of desperation, resulting from the SPLC's failure to convince the American people of their viewpoint."
See also
- You Don't Speak for Me
- NumbersUSA
References
External links
- Federation for American Immigration Reform. Official website
- Federation for American Immigration Reform Facebook
- Federation for American Immigration Reform Twitter
- Federation for American Immigration Reform YouTube channel
- FAIR's Immigration blog site
- Preliminary Guide to the Otis Graham Jr. Papers, 1978-2008, Special Collections Research Center, Estelle and Melvin Gelman Library, The George Washington University
- An Inquiry into the Methods and Tactics Employed by the Southern Poverty Law Center: Parallels and Dangers
- Preliminary Guide to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) Records, 1867-2006, Special Collections Research Center, Estelle and Melvin Gelman Library, The George Washington University
Source of article : Wikipedia
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