The Washington Times Again Cites Dubious Anti-Immigrant Sources

The Washington Times is at it again, pushing anti-immigrant views while citing questionable sources. On today’s front page, Stephan Dinan reports about a new ad campaign by the Coalition for the Future American Worker (CFAW) that calls for fewer immigrant workers. Dinan’s article — which cites no union sources — implies that immigration is bad for the American worker.

CFAW’s campaign includes an inflammatory TV ad featuring a white couple sitting at a kitchen table with a baby crying in the background. The husband tells his wife he failed to get a job, because “they hired all foreign workers.” CFAW was harshly criticized in 2004 for running racially inflammatory ads in an attempt to influence a Texas congressional campaign.

Though CFAW portrays itself as a group that represents “the interests of American workers,” not one union participates in its “coalition.” Dinan did not report that, nor did he report that CFAW is, in fact, a front group for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the largest anti-immigration organization and the recipient of more than $1 million in grants from the racist Pioneer Foundation. One of the members of CFAW’s coalition is the American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF), which is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. AICF believes that immigrants have “sown the seeds of ethnic strife in America.”

CFAW’s coalition is incestuous, with several organizations that are founded, financed or led by a tiny handful of anti-immigrant activists. For example, John Tanton founded both FAIR and NumbersUSA. Roy Beck, who runs NumbersUSA and worked for many years for Tanton, heads several of CFAW’s other constituent groups. Dinan also cites Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, which was established under FAIR's nonprofit tax umbrella and whose creation Tanton endorsed in 1986. Krikorian claims in Dinan’s article that immigrants and their children will potentially add 105 million new residents to the U.S. by 2060 — an outlandish number that would require nearly the entire population of Mexico to move to the US.

The connection to Tanton, who is the founder of America’s modern anti-immigration movement, is particularly problematic given his history of anti-Latino bigotry. Tanton has questioned whether Latinos can be educated to the level of other races and he endorses and publishes the racist novel Camp of the Saints. (For a description of the book’s racism, see here.)

FAIR has been creating false front groups for years, usually in an attempt to hide the predominantly white face of American’s anti-immigration movement. FAIR bankrolls Choose Black America, which supposedly represents African Americans who want to restrict immigration. In fact, the group is basically one man, Ted Hayes. FAIR also bankrolls You Don’t Speak for Me!, a supposedly Latino group that favors immigration restrictions. As in the case of Choose Black America, the group has only a handful of participants and its media contact, Ira Mehlman, works for FAIR.

If Dinan really wanted to report on the labor movement’s view of American immigration policies, he could have talked with the AFL-CIO. The group, along with other unions and the American Civil Liberties Union, last week sued the Department of Homeland Security over its plans to force businesses to check Social Security numbers against the department’s records in an attempt to root out undocumented workers. They contend that the policy would lead to harassment against anyone who looks or sounds foreign.