Immigration Report Being Released Today Linked to White Supremacists
Last Friday, a highly conservative publication called Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) published an editorial on its website called “The Real Cost of Immigration” that previewed a report to be released today at the National Press Club — an analysis, as IBD noted, by one Edwin S. Rubenstein that is being published by The Social Contract journal. What IBD didn’t bother to tell its readers was the troubling truth about Rubenstein’s politics and those of his Michigan publisher.
According to IBD, Rubenstein’s report, “The Fiscal Impact of Immigration: An Analysis of the Costs to 15 Federal Departments and Agencies,” concludes that every immigrant to the United States costs taxpayers more than $9,000. That’s vastly more than other analyses have concluded, and no mention whatsoever is made of what most economists agree on —that immigrants, legal and otherwise, help grow the economy in ways that actually increase jobs for native Americans. But that’s no surprise, given where Rubenstein and his publisher are coming from.
The truth is that Rubenstein is a man who has written for years for a racist anti-immigration website called VDARE — short for Virginia Dare, said to be the first white child born in the New World. He also writes for the white supremacist National Policy Institute. Last spring, the institute released a report, prepared with Rubenstein’s help, that paints “a statistical and narrative portrait of the war on white America,” in the website’s words. Nicholas Stix’s introduction to the article describes the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling outlawing school segregation as “arguably the worse decision in the Court’s 216 year history.” He claims later civil rights legislation was unconstitutional. “[I]ntegration and the civil rights movement led directly to the destruction of great cities,” he concludes.
Rubenstein’s publisher has its own sordid story. Although you’d never know it from the IBD editorial, The Social Contract Press (which publishes The Social Contract, the journal where the new report appears) is well known for its racist publications. The press was started by nativist ideologue John Tanton and is run by his editor, Wayne Lutton, who has been on the board of advisors of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a hate group that describes blacks as “a retrograde species of humanity.” In 1994, Tanton republished an infamous racist novel, The Camp of the Saints, along with his wholehearted endorsement and a special afterword from its author saying “the proliferation of other races dooms our race, my race, to extinction.” The novel describes the “swarthy hordes” of Indian immigrants who take over France, send white women to “a w----house for Hindus,” and engage in a grotesque orgy of men, women and children. The immigrants are described as “monsters,” “grotesque little beggars from the streets of Calcutta,” and worse. Unconcerned, Tanton said he was “honored” to republish what he described as an important and “prescient” text.
None of this has stopped other websites from picking up on the IBD editorial. On Monday, it went up on the Money page of CNN’s website. It has been republished by the far-right Eagle Forum, on several nativist blogs, and the GOPUSA website. GOPUSA is a right-wing website that reportedly owns Talon News, the shady organization that credentialed Jeff Gannon (real name: Jeff Guckert) as a reporter who regularly attended White House news conferences. That ended in 2005, after Gannon's links to gay escort service websites (where he was known as "Bulldog") were exposed by liberal bloggers. Gannon had no real journalism background and, according to many reporters who attended White House briefings, seemed to be there simply to boost the Bush Administration and bash Democrats.
The editor of this blog contacted IBD Monday with some of these facts but no reply had been received as of today. Perhaps that should come as no surprise. After all, IBD since 2005 has been home to cartoonist Michael Ramirez, whose far-right views ended in his resignation from the L.A. Times despite his winning of the Pulitzer Prize. Among other things, Ramirez was known for a 1993 speech to the Council of Conservative Citizens, America’s largest hate group.
