CNN failed to ask even one immigration question during Tuesday night’s 2020 Democratic presidential debate, something that wasn’t lost on the candidates themselves. “Three hours and no questions tonight about climate, housing, or immigration,” tweeted former HUD Secretary Julián Castro. “Three hours. Not one question about immigration,” tweeted Sen. Kamala Harris.
What CNN didn’t forget to do was air an ad from NumbersUSA, an anti-immigrant group cofounded by John Tanton, a white nationalist described as the "puppeteer" of the nativist movement. The ad, which aired during a commercial break in the debate, decried “illegal workers” and ended with “paid for by NumbersUSA. Because numbers count.”
What Tanton’s groups really mean to say is that they believe there’s just too many nonwhite immigrants. Tanton, who regularly corresponded with Holocaust deniers and other deplorables over the years, said it himself, writing a book titled The Immigration Invasion that was apparently so disgusting, “Canadian border authorities banned it as hate literature.” That piece of work was edited by Roy Beck, NumbersUSA’s executive director. Unfortunately, these pieces of shit getting treated as legitimate organizations by mainstream media is not unusual.
A report last month from Define American and the MIT Center for Civic Media found that major newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, regularly legitimized one such Tanton group: “Over 90% of the time, the Center for Immigration Studies was referenced as a neutral information source for expert opinion or data without contextualizing the group’s extremist ties or its relationship with the Trump administration.”
Mark Krikorian, executive director of CIS, had a meltdown and even sued (unsuccessfully) the Southern Poverty Law Center over being labeled a hate group, Krikorian seemingly forgetting his organization’s years of distributing propaganda by “prominent and outspoken racists” such as Jared Taylor, who once wrote, "Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization—any kind of civilization—disappears."
So, way to go, CNN. Because it’s constantly under attack by the president, it can feel gross to join in on criticism, but this is deserved. Donald Trump and his racist allies continuously attack immigrant families as invaders, but it’s these immigrant families that are under siege. There’s thousands of asylum-seekers stranded at the border, ICE is separating families in our communities, children—children—have died in federal immigration custody, and millions remain without a chance to legalize their status. All ignored last night, but NumbersUSA got its ad up.
