FAIR Leaders Have 20-Year Track Record of Denigrating Immigrants

Principals of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), including FAIR founder John Tanton and FAIR President Dan Stein, have been attacking immigrants for 20 years. The quotations below of statements made by FAIR officials reveal their anti-immigrant views.

"We're building in a deadly disunity. All great empires disintegrate, we want stability." — John Tanton, 1986, FAIR founder and now board of directors member

"Gobernar es poblar translates 'to govern is to populate'... In this society where the majority rules, does this hold? Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile?" — John Tanton, 1986

"Is apartheid in Southern California's future? The demographic picture in South Africa now is startlingly similar to what we'll see in California in 2030. In Southern Africa, a White minority owns the property, has the best jobs and education, has the political power, and speaks one language. A non-White majority has poor education, jobs and income, owns little property, is on its way to political power and speaks a different language." — John Tanton, 1986

"The new immigration will not work the same as the old. For some reason, Mexican immigrants are not succeeding as well as other groups." — Roger Conner, 1986, then FAIR executive director

"Will Latin American migrants bring with them the tradition of the mordida [bribe], the lack of involvement in public affairs, etc.? What in fact are the characteristics of Latin American culture, versus that of the United States?" — John Tanton, 1986

"Can homo contraceptivus compete with homo progenitiva if borders aren't controlled? Or is advice to limit one's family simply advice to move over and let someone else with greater reproductive powers occupy the space?" — John Tanton, 1986

"Not everyone thinks that replacing strawberry fields with dim-sum restaurants and noodle houses is necessarily an enhancement in their quality of life." — Dan Stein, 1989, then FAIR spokesman, now FAIR president

"I've come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires an European-American majority, and a clear one at that." — John Tanton, 1993 letter to Garrett Hardin, a controversial ecologist

"I think [Pioneer Fund officials] support our work because the[ir] trustees agree with what we're doing. But we pitched the funding proposal to them. They give us money because we asked for it." — Dan Stein, 1994, on donations to FAIR from the racist Pioneer Fund

"I have no doubt that individual minority persons can assimilate to the culture necessary to run an advanced society, but if through mass migration, the culture of the homeland is transplanted from Latin American to California, then my guess is we will see the same degree of success with governmental and social institutions that we have seen in Latin America." — John Tanton, 1996 letter to NumbersUSA head, Roy Beck

"Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less? Who is going to break the bad news [to less intelligent individuals], and how will it be implemented?" — John Tanton, 1996 letter to California multimillionaire Robert K. Graham, a eugenicist who started a sperm bank to collect the semen of Nobel Prize-winning scientists

"The situation then is that the people who have been the carriers of Western Civilization are well on the way toward resigning their commission to carry the culture into the future. When this decline in numbers is coupled with an aging of the core population...it begins to look as if the chances of Western Civilization passing into the history books are very good indeed." — John Tanton, 1997 letter to Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, a fellow immigration critic.

"[Millions of immigrants coming to America will be] defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs." — John Tanton, 1997

"In the bacteriology lab, we have culture plates. You put a bug in there and it starts growing and gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it grows until it finally fills the whole plate. And it crashes and dies." — John Tanton, 1997, comparing immigrants to bacteria

"How many computer whiz kids cancel out one Sirhan Sirhan, a Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman or ... a Charles Ponzi?" — John Tanton, 1997, criticizing visas for immigrants with high-tech skills

"Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not subsidizing those with high ones?" — Dan Stein, 1997

"Immigrants don't come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing. Some of them firmly believe in socialist or redistributist [sic] ideas. Many of them hate America, hate everything the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans." — Dan Stein, 1997

"I'm sure [anti-Semitic Professor Kevin MacDonald's article] will give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life, which explains a large part of the Jewish opposition to immigration reform."— John Tanton, 1998 letter to Cordelia May Scaife, an heiress who financially backed Tanton's work

"I have a secret plan to destroy America. ... We must first make America a bilingual-bicultural country. ... I would then invent 'multiculturalism' and encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture. ... Having made America a bilingual-bicultural country, having established multiculturalism, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of 'victimology,' I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws." — Richard Lamm, 2000, speech at FAIR conference, now FAIR board of advisers co-chair

"American secessions have rarely been viewed with alarm [but] in the 1990s ... we are more inclined to consider them a serious threat to national unity, especially since that unity is being stretched to the breaking point by ethnic revanchiste movements fueled by Third World immigration. ... In any major city, the peace is disturbed by Latino, black, and Asian nationalist gangs, which in some cases are only the shock troops of ethnic movements seeking the racial dismemberment of the United States. In refusing to control immigration, the Federal Government is writing a script for ethnic civil war. Why?" — FAIR website, 2002, quoting paleoconservative author Thomas Fleming, a member of the neo-Confederate hate group, League of the South

"[Muslims] are not coming here to become Americans. ... [They are] promoting colonization of their own religion, of their own culture in towns and taking them over." — Susan Tully, 2004, FAIR national field director

"New cultures ... [in the U.S. are] diluting what we are and who we are." — Richard Lamm, 2004

"I am sick and tired of all the white bashing that goes on through the use of political correctness as an indoctrinating tool." — Joe Turner, 2005, then FAIR western field representative

"I am sick and tired of multiculturalism, meaning, let's celebrate every culture as long as it isn't a European/white culture. ... [J]ust because one believes in white separatism that does not make them a racist." — Joe Turner, 2005

"It is clear that there is a 'fifth column' movement in the United States that professes greater allegiance to a greater Mexico or a breakaway, separatist movement based on a Latino homeland, despite the efforts of Latino politicians to dismiss it as a quixotic idea of rambunctious Latino youth, largely on university campuses." — FAIR website, 2005

"The large influx of immigrants from Mexico ... differs in important ways from the traditional immigration model... . [T]he United States has no historic precedent of large numbers of people coming to this country who could argue that they were returning to a country that was once theirs. ... Further complicating the picture is the fact that due to many social factors — particularly low educational achievement — this unprecedented group of immigrants is entering American society at the very bottom of the socio-economic ladder... . This reality breeds the kind of resentment and alienation that makes them susceptible to the siren songs of radical activists." — FAIR website, 2005

"The hierarchy from the Pope down has from time to time acknowledged the right of sovereign states to control their borders. But the numerous conditions the churchmen have invoked would seriously vitiate this right. ... [Catholic bishops apparently] would like to condition this sovereign prerogative of states right out of existence." — FAIR website, 2006

"Far from being the agenda of a kooky fringe element, the idea of reconquest of the American Southwest and the creation of an Aztlan nation, was prominently displayed by millions of illegal aliens all across the United States as they marched earlier this year to demand amnesty." — FAIR's website, 2006

"Last week, President Bush met with Mexican President Calderón and Canadian Prime Minister Harper ... to hone their plan for a North American Union that would merge the U.S. with Canada and Mexico. ... FAIR has been exposing the short-sighted Bush plan to eventually erase the border between the U.S. and Mexico ... and American sovereignty since 2000." — FAIR E-mail to supporters, 2007

"The SPLC's characterization of the Pioneer Fund is fraudulent. The Fund's mission statement clearly states that it supports equal opportunity for all Americans, regardless of race, religion, national origin or ethnicity." — Dan Stein, 2007 press release