John Tanton, the man who astroturfed several different anti-immigrant groups, has ties with Willis Carto, a known holocaust denier. This is documented in this new piece by Imagine 2050. Tanton is a white nationalist who seeks to make his ideology look more respectable by dressing it up as concern about immigration. Specifically:
ProEnglish, FAIR, and U.S. Inc. are all members of the Tanton Network - a group of organizations founded by or connected to white nationalist John Tanton. These groups make up the modern day anti-immigrant movement. KC McAlpin maintains close ties to Tanton. He left his role as Executive Director of ProEnglish to become President of U.S. Inc. McAlpin, however, still remains on ProEnglish’s Board of Advisors. McAlpin representing these groups in a publication such like AFP is another instance of the organized anti-immigrant movement actively associating itself with white nationalists.
McAlpin is a regular contributor to American Free Press, the website of Carto:
McAlpin disturbingly appears to share Carto’s bigoted views. In the AFP piece, he equates immigration and nuclear holocaust; describing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people already in the country as a “demographic mushroom cloud.” Later on, McAlpin amplifies on long-refuted fears of supposed negative impact immigration has on the economy saying, “How will it spur growth to bring in millions of uneducated and illiterate illegals? The only thing it will spur is the welfare state and those dependent on government. Their children will go to government schools and be a burden on local taxpayers. The only taxes these people will pay are sales taxes. It’s absolutely a disaster…”
Carto, as noted in the article, has an extensive history of forming Neo-Nazi and holocaust denial groups such as the National Alliance, the Institute for Historical Review, and the Barnes Review. This is a pattern common to both the nativist groups like Tanton and holocaust denial groups like Carto's -- they create respectable-sounding names for their groups to disguise the fact that their purpose is to promote white nationalism and holocaust denial.
Not all people opposed to comprehensive immigration reform are racist. But it's important to be aware of the kind of racist ties of some of the largest anti-immigrant groups in the country. And the racist roots of certain anti-immigrant ideologies goes back further than Tanton -- the same people who made segregation the law of the land and who created the myth of corporate personhood also passed the first laws against immigration in the period following the civil war. Before that, the US had been an open borders country.