A retired Michigan ophthalmologist, John Tanton spent decades at the heart the white nationalist movement. His racist views were first exposed in 1988 when a series of private memos he wrote for principals at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) were leaked to the press. The memos were filled with racist statements and warned about a coming "Latin onslaught."
At the time, Tanton’s group U.S. English, which opposed bilingualism in public schools and government agencies, disavowed any racial motivation. “Hispanics who learn English will be able to avail themselves of opportunities,” explained its president, former Reagan administration official Linda Chavez. She resigned when Tanton’s memos were leaked. The news that U.S. English had received funds from the distributor of The Camp of the Saints, a racist French novel in which starving Third World refugees overrun Europe, added to Chavez’s sense of betrayal.
The novel has recently re-emerged, with HuffPo noting that white nationalist and senior counselor to Trump, Steve Bannon, has used “this stunningly racist novel” to demonize Muslims. Other papers from Tanton’s library show he “has for decades been at the heart of the white nationalist scene. He has corresponded with Holocaust deniers, former Klan lawyers and the leading white nationalist thinkers of the era.” And according to Think Progress, “Tanton is a strict nativist who once wrote a paper titled ‘The Case for Passive Eugenics.’” Charming.
Still, SPLC doesn’t have to rely on Tanton’s moldy papers in order to make the case that CIS belongs on the baddies list. Krikorian does a mighty fine job himself, once referring to respected journalist and Univision anchor Jorge Ramos as a “white-Hispanic ethnic hustler.” In 2009, Kirkorian had a fit over Sonia Sotomayor’s name. Really. A year later, Krikorian argued, following the devastating earthquake there, that Haiti is “so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough” by white people.
Then there’s CIS “weekly email roundup.” Lord. According to Krikorian’s own words, the roundup of “immigration commentary has occasionally included pieces”— translation: this has happened a couple times—“by writers who turned out to be cranks.” The “cranks,” according to SPLC, have actually been anti-Semites and Holocaust-deniers, one of whom called Jewish people “truly subversive,” “manipulative,” and “evil.” Or maybe have some “vices,” Kirkorian might argue.
Krikorian also tries to slither out of the infamous Jason Richwine scandal, saying that “CIS has published work by independent researcher Jason Richwine, who wrote a contentious Harvard University dissertation on IQ a decade ago.” What Kirkorian doesn’t mention is that Richwine was forced to resign from his job because that “contentious” dissertation, which basically argued that the children and grandchildren of immigrants will always be dumber than white people. From Imagine 2050:
In May 2013, Richwine co-authored a deeply flawed Heritage Foundation study on the fiscal impact of immigration. He resigned in disgrace later that week following revelations first published by The Washington Post that Richwine wrote a racist doctoral dissertation, titled “IQ and Immigration Policy,” asserting there are persistent racial differences in IQ.
“No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites,” Richwine writes at one point in his dissertation, “but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.” As Imagine 2050 noted around the time of the Heritage report’s release, Richwine’s work is easily fit within the tradition of the Pioneer Fund’s bigoted legacy of so-called “race realism.”
CIS was aware of Richwine’s bigoted argument well before the release of the Heritage report and details of Richwine’s “IQ and Immigration Policy” surfaced.
FYI, Mark: The son of immigrants authored this post.
Finally, not even the magic of Christmas Day is sacred, with SPLC noting that CIS staffer John Miano attended VDARE’s holiday party last December. VDARE—named after Virginia Dare, the first white child born in the Americas—“focuses on opposing non-white immigration into the United States, but has also published the writings of anti-Semites.” And according to SPLC, Ann Coulter may have also been at that holiday party too. Talk about a “white Christmas.”
When it comes to immigration, CIS is in the minority here. Nearly two-thirds of Americans prefer a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants rather than deportation, according to recent polling. And no one’s trying to silence CIS—by Kirkorian’s own account, the group has testified in front of Congress some 200 times. With Trump in power, there will probably be even more.
CIS may not like the designation from SPLC, but after all the racist mud they’ve flung out, it’s deserved.
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