'Vietnamese' Anti-Immigration Group Really Isn't

First, he denied it. Then he said it was his wife's idea. Finally, white anti-immigration activist Tim Brummer admitted to using the false Vietnamese surname "Binh" in his capacity as spokesman for Vietnamese for Fair Immigration. In his defense, Brummer claimed that because he eats Vietnamese food and is half-Vietnamese "in my own mind," he wasn't really fibbing. In fact, he told The Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, he may even legally change his name to Binh.

Welcome to the world of "diverse" immigration-reform groups. Brummer had taken to speaking and writing under the name of "Binh" to darken the skin hue of the California-based Vietnamese for Fair Immigration.

Tim Brummer has long been railing against immigrants, often on radical anti-immigrant sites like Save Our State and Vdare.com, a racist forum named after Virginia Dare, supposedly the first white child born in America. In one such post, he wrote: "The children of occupying aliens should not be U.S. citizens. I would have to say 10 million illegal aliens that cost Americans $300 billion a year, that kill thousands of Americans, that sicken millions of Americans, and that trash our environment, are a hostile alien occupation."

In the last two years, Brummer, a member of the relatively moderate Californians for Population Stabilization, has posted more than 2,000 comments on the Internet forum of the California-based hate group Save Our State, which has tolerated neo-Nazis and other white supremacists at its rallies.

Brummer's "Vietnamese" group is not the first to try to put an ethnic face on a predominantly white anti-immigration movement trailed by whiffs of racism and tarred by accusations of extremist connections. Jim Gilchrist's Minuteman group is one of many that routinely highlight their few minority members to camouflage their overwhelmingly white membership.

Other groups claiming to represent specific ethnic blocs have also turned out to have connections to predominantly white parent organizations. In the case of You Don't Speak for Me! (YDSFM), a Washington, D.C.-based immigration restriction organization that describes itself as "a group of concerned Americans of Hispanic/Latino heritage," the group is so intertwined with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) that the two share the same press officers. (There are also connections between the group and the Minuteman Project: Rosanna Pulido, 50, founded the Illinois chapter of the Minuteman Project and is also Illinois chapter leader of YDSFM.)

One of these mutual YDSFM/FAIR press contacts is Ira Mehlman, a white man who is also active in the FAIR-sponsored anti-immigration outfit, Choose Black America (CBA). Supposedly a coalition of black leaders opposed to illegal immigration, CBA, whose only press conference was orchestrated and funded by FAIR, is in fact just another FAIR product attempting to improve public perceptions of the overwhelmingly white anti-immigration movement.