Anti-Immigration Groups

Behind the recent upswing in anti-immigration activism are an array of groups, including the 10 listed here. Most of these groups regularly work together, and their leaders frequently hold cross-memberships in several organizations at once. Some of the groups have clear ties to openly racist organizations, and even some of those that don't still espouse thinly disguised bigotry.

In the eyes of most of these groups, immigrants (typically, non-white immigrants) are responsible for nearly all the country's ills, from poverty and inner city decay to crime, urban sprawl and environmental degradation.

Many of them also believe there is a secret a plot by the Mexican government and American Hispanics to wrest the Southwest away from the United States in order to create "Aztlan," a Hispanic nation. Only four of the 10 groups described below are designated as "hate groups" by the Southern Poverty Law Center (see The Year in Hate).

American Immigration Control Foundation
Monterey, Va.
www.americanimmigrationcontrol.com

Founded in 1983, the American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF) is an anti-immigration group that has grown more shrill in recent years. AICF's web site suggests that immigrants have "sown the seeds of ethnic strife in America" and that large-scale immigration into America, especially Third World immigration, is "a policy rooted in humanistic pride and the worship of Mammon [a Biblical reference to anti-Christian materialism]."

AICF has been headed by John Vinson since 1990. In the mid-1990s, Sam Francis, who was fired from the conservative Washington Times after penning a racially inflammatory column, was AICF chairman.

Today, Francis is editor of the racist Council of Conservative Citizens' (CCC) monthly tabloid, Citizens Informer. Vinson, who is also editor of the anti-immigration publication Border Watch, often speaks at CCC meetings and is a founding member of the white supremacist League of the South.

The AICF was long funded by the Pioneer Foundation, the infamous institution that since its founding in 1937 has funded studies of eugenics and the alleged links between race and intelligence. It received more than $190,000 from Pioneer through 1998, according to the Michigan-based Institute for the Study of Academic Racism.

The AICF sells an array of anti-immigration videos and books, including works by Brent Nelson, author of America Balkanized and a frequent speaker at CCC events. In 1987, AICF published an edition of the racist anti-immigration novel, The Camp of the Saints.

The AICF worked with the Federation for American Immigration Reform and NumbersUSA in a recent million-dollar billboard campaign that blamed immigrants for many American social problems.

California Coalition for Immigration Reform
Huntington Beach, Calif.
www.ccir.net

Claiming an unlikely 26,000 members, the California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR) is headed by Barbara Coe, a woman who has referred repeatedly to Mexican immigrants as "savages." Coe founded CCIR in 1994 as a co-sponsor of California's Proposition 187, which would have denied social and medical benefits to illegal immigrants and their children.

Coe joined other co-sponsors in an attempt to recall California's governor, who she derides as a communist and refers to as "Gov. Gray 'Red' Davis."

Today, she claims to have exposed a secret Mexican plan to take over the American Southwest; favors using the military to seal the U.S.-Mexican border; and charges that a shadowy "New World Order" is being imposed on America by "globalists."

CCIR, which has an extensive web site linked to many other anti-immigrant groups, works closely with the Voices of Citizens Together (VCT), one of the hardest-line of the organizations.

Coe and VCT chief Glenn Spencer stage annual Fourth of July rallies that have drawn prominent neo-Nazis. Barbara Coe's political activities convinced the Orange County Weekly to name her in 1999 one of the "scariest" people in Orange County.

CCIR has sponsored billboards along the Arizona-California border that read, "Welcome to California, the Illegal Immigration State. Don't Let This Happen to Your State."

Federation for American Immigration Reform
Washington, D.C.
www.fairus.org

Founded in 1978 by John H. Tanton, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is one of the country's best-established anti-immigration groups — and the richest beneficiary among them of the largesse of the infamous Pioneer Fund.

The Fund, which has long subsidized dubious studies of the alleged links between race and intelligence, awarded FAIR $1.2 million between 1985 and 1994, according to the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism. FAIR now says that it has severed its links to the controversial Fund.

Today, FAIR claims a staggering 70,000 members, although that number is almost certainly inflated. Tanton remains on FAIR's board and also is the publisher of The Social Contract Press, which sells racist anti-immigrant tracts.

Dan Stein, the group's executive director, has warned that certain immigrant groups are engaged in "competitive breeding" aimed at diminishing white power. Rick Oltman, FAIR's western representative, has spoken before and worked with the racist Council of Conservative Citizens.

Garrett Hardin, a FAIR board member, has argued that aiding starving Africans is counterproductive and will only "encourage population growth." Overall, FAIR blames immigrants for crime, poverty, disease, urban sprawl and increasing racial tensions in America, and calls for a drastic cut in the numbers of those allowed in.

FAIR recently helped run a billboard campaign in Virginia blaming immigrants for traffic and sprawl. Last summer, FAIR attacked Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.), an Arab-American, for supporting more visas for foreigners with high-technology skills.

In radio and TV ads, it said Abraham's proposal could "make it easier for [Arab] terrorists like Osama bin Laden to export their way of terror to any street in America." FAIR's ads were condemned across the country and caused former Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) to resign from FAIR's advisory board.

In a 1997 interview, Tanton said that unless U.S. borders are sealed, America will be overrun by people "defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs."

National Organization for European American Rights
Mandeville, La.
www.duke.org/nf/index.html

Declaring that "European-Americans must band together as a group the same way African-Americans do," notorious former Klansman David Duke organized the National Organization for European American Rights (NOFEAR) in January 2000. Otherwise, Duke warned, "The European-American people will basically be lost as an entity."

Today, NOFEAR claims to have members in every state and chapters in 16 of them, although it is unclear how active these chapters are.

While NOFEAR has a number of interests, its key issue is immigration. "Government immigration policies," NOFEAR says on its site, "discriminate against Europeans in favor of the Third Worlders who will eventually transform our society into a version of Mexico City, Rio, and Kampala. Unless we act ... we will be helpless to halt the accelerating dispossession of our folk."

A month after forming, NOFEAR took that message to the streets, co-sponsoring an anti-immigration rally with the neo-Nazi National Alliance in Siler City, N.C. Afterward, Duke wrote immigration officials with an offer of volunteers to round up illegal aliens.

Apart from Duke, who is an unrepentant racist and anti-Semite, NOFEAR has a number of extremist leaders. Media director Bruce Allan "Vince" Breeding (alias Vincent Edwards) is a long-time member of the National Alliance who also runs the hard-line Nationalist News Agency.

California NOFEAR president Stan Hess, who was arrested for violating an open-burning ordinance in 1998 by burning a Mexican flag at a rally in Alabama, has been a member of the racist Council of Conservative Citizens and was a key player in forming the neofascist American Friends of the British National Party.

Jeff Wilkerson, listed as NOFEAR's South Florida contact, has been a member of several extremist groups, including a stint as America First Party boss, and has associated with an array of white supremacists.

NumbersUSA
Arlington, Va.
www.numbersusa.com/home.html

Directed by Roy Beck, who has written extensively on environmental and financial issues, NumbersUSA is the most reasoned of the anti-immigration groups, offering information on the relationship between immigration and the environment.

In fact, Beck makes a statement on his web site that NumbersUSA is not intended to bash immigrants or have racial overtones. Still, his group supports the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the American Immigration Control Foundation in their immigrant-bashing billboard campaign.

Beck also is the Washington editor of The Social Contract, a quarterly journal that has published articles by "white nationalists" like Samuel Francis, who was fired from the conservative Washington Times after writing a racially inflammatory column, and James Lubinskas, a contributing editor for the racist American Renaissance magazine.

Beck's web site includes an extensive listing of other anti-immigration groups.

ProjectUSA
Long Island City, N.Y.
www.ProjectUSA.org

Started in 1997 by Craig Nelsen, ProjectUSA runs a web site, publishes an E-zine and a regular magazine, and claims more than 3,000 members.

The group says it is concerned only with immigration numbers, not race or ethnicity. But several of its arguments seem to belie that.

"In addition to the environmental degradation with which current immigration policy is saddling our children," ProjectUSA warns on its web site, "we believe there is a very strong possibility that present policy will lead to a balkanized America of hostile and competing ethnic groups."

Nelsen's group also has put up billboards that have drawn harsh criticism, including one in New York City showing a white boy and the words, "Immigration is doubling U.S. population in my lifetime. (Please don't do this to us Congress)."

In comments adjoining a photo of the billboard, ProjectUSA's web site offers up the following comments: "Stop immigration! Why anti-racism is turning us into cockroaches." Then it adds: "The 'white kid' billboard was the one that really roasted their ass."

Amid cries of racism, the billboard was ordered down within days for lack of a proper permit — a move that brought a suit from Nelsen against the city.

The Social Contract Press
Petoskey, Mich.
www.tscpress.com

With a strong focus on immigration, The Social Contract Press (TSCP) sells books from its on-line bookstore and publishes a quarterly journal, The Social Contract. TCSP says it favors lowering immigration levels merely "to reduce the rate of American's population growth, protect jobs, preserve the environment, and foster assimilation."

But it publishes a number of racist works, including a reprint of the "gripping" 1973 book, The Camp of the Saints (see Fear and Fantasy), a French racist fantasy novel about the obliteration of Western civilization by dark-skinned hordes from India. The novel, like the race war fantasy The Turner Diaries, has become a key screed for American white supremacists.

The Social Contract is edited by Wayne Lutton, who recently the joined the editorial advisory board of the newspaper of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC).

At a 1997 CCC conference, Lutton said Third Worlders "have declared racial demographic war against us. ... Why are their populations exploding? Because ... our people have exported medical technology and we feed them.

"Had we left them alone, many of them would be going extinct today."

The Social Contract has published articles by James Lubinskas of the racist American Renaissance magazine; Brent Nelson, who like Lutton is on the advisory board for the CCC's periodical, and Sam Francis, current editor of the CCC tabloid.

John H. Tanton, publisher of The Social Contract Press and founder of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, was instrumental in a 1996 effort to add an anti-immigration plank to the Sierra Club platform, a move that nearly split the environmental group permanently.

To editor Lutton, America essentially is a white man's country. "We are the real Americans," he declared in 1997, "not the Hmong, not Latinos, not the Siberian-Americans. ... As far as the future, the handwriting is on the screen. The Camp of the Saints is coming our way."

The Stein Report
www.steinreport.com

The Stein Report is a web-based daily E-zine that posts press articles dealing with immigration. Edited by Dan Stein — a founder and currently executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) — the Report offers a search engine tailored to locating anti-immigration articles.

The site also includes links to other anti-immigration publications and to FAIR. Stein has attacked the Catholic church for supporting U.S. immigration.

He told news commentator Tucker Carlson that certain immigrant groups were engaged in "competitive breeding" in order to boost their political power. Stein also asserts that the U.S. population should be cut to 150 million people.

V-DARE
www.vdare.com

V-DARE — shorthand for Virginia Dare, the first English child to be born in what is now the United States — is a web site run by a "coalition" whose most prominent member is Peter Brimelow.

Brimelow, a leading anti-immigration activist and author of Alien Nation, argues that America is historically a predominantly white nation, and that Americans have a right to demand that it remain that way.

A past columnist for the conservative National Review, Brimelow says he once considered adding a fictional end to his Alien Nation, a nonfiction critique of immigration, about the last white family to leave Los Angeles.

V-DARE posts anti-immigration articles by Brimelow's twin brother John; right-wing columnists like Paul Craig Roberts and Joseph Fallon (Brimelow's main researcher on Alien Nation); and defenders of The Bell Curve — a controversial book arguing that whites are more intelligent than blacks — like Steve Sailer.

Both Brimelow and Fallon have defended Jared Taylor, who edits the racist American Renaissance magazine. Taylor's deputy, James Lubinskas, has returned the favor by writing for V-DARE.

Brimelow has close ties to several other leaders on the anti-immigration scene, among them John Vinson of the American Immigration Control Foundation, Llewellyn Rockwell and Jeffrey Tucker of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and John H. Tanton of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Voices of Citizens Together/American Patrol
Sherman Oaks, Calif.
www.americanpatrol.com

Glenn Spencer, one of the hardest line anti-immigrant ideologues now operating, founded the Voices of Citizens Together (VCT, which is also known, like his web site and radio show, as American Patrol) in 1992.

In 1994, VCT lobbied hard for passage of California's controversial Proposition 187, which would have denied educational and other benefits to illegal immigrants and their children. (Although it passed, 187 was later thrown out by the courts.)

Four years later, Spencer claimed 3,500 subscribers to the VCT newsletter. Spencer takes a hard line on immigration, demanding that the armed forces seal America's southern border. He also displays a bigoted and vulgar side quite openly.

On his web site, he attacks Mario Obledo, a leading Latino activist and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, as "Pinche [literally, f------] Cockroach and 1998 A------ of the Year." A cartoon character is depicted urinating on Obledo's picture.

Spencer posts dozens of immigration-related articles but replaces the words "illegal immigrant" with "illegal alien," among other editing touches. In a 1996 letter to The Los Angeles Times, Spencer wrote: "The Mexican culture is based on deceit. Chicanos and Mexicanos lie as a means of survival."

He posts material on his site from such men as H. Millard, an infamous columnist for the racist Council of Conservative Citizens who once bemoaned the "slimy brown mass of glop" that immigration and interracial relationships were making of the U.S. population.

Spencer sent every member of Congress a copy of his videotape — "Bonds of Our Nation" — that purports to prove the Mexican government and Mexican-Americans are plotting to take over the American Southwest and create the nation of Aztlán. Hand-delivering the videos was Betina McCann, the fiancé of neo-Nazi Steven Barry.

On a weekly radio show that airs in several cities, Spencer has hosted a series of guests like Kevin McDonald, a professor who accuses Jews of devising an immigration policy specifically intended to dilute and weaken the white population of America.