Anti-Immigrant Center for Immigration Studies Continues to Promote White Nationalists

Each week, the anti-immigrant movement’s premier think tank, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) circulates a lengthy list of immigration articles to its supporters. As the Southern Poverty Law Center and other civil rights groups (and Rachel Maddow) have reported, CIS routinely circulates pieces penned by white nationalists, Holocaust deniers, and material from explicitly racist websites.

The past month has been no different, with CIS circulating two pieces from the white nationalist website American Renaissance (AmRen). AmRen is run by Jared Taylor, one of America’s most prominent and outspoken racists. Taylor in no way shies away from his beliefs, writing in 2005, "Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears."  Taylor, a well educated pseudo-academic formerly edited a journal also called American Renaissance and now, along with his website and speaking engagements at racist events worldwide, organizes an annual conference in Tennessee that is among the most highly attending racist gatherings on American soil each year.

The first AmRen article CIS circulated recently was in early October. It was a review of a recent CIS event that featured white nationalist Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, a book that uses racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of black and Latino communities. Another speaker at the CIS event was Jason Richwine, a man who has published numerous reports and blog pieces for CIS in 2016. Richwine is a former Heritage Foundation analyst who left Heritage after details about his Harvard dissertation came to light. Richwine argued that Hispanics had lower IQs than whites. He also wrote pieces for white nationalist Richard Spencer’s Alternative Right website.

On November 6, CIS circulated another piece from AmRen, this time one that AmRen cross-posted from the far-right website American Thinker. Rather than taking the piece from the original source, CIS chose to circulate the link from AmRen, an explicitly white nationalist website.

CIS has also circulated links to the anti-immigrant and white nationalist hate site VDARE, named after Virginia Dare, who is said to be the first English child born in the New World. VDARE is run by English white nationalist Peter Brimelow, whose white nationalist views first came to public light in 1995 when he published the book Alien Nation, which argued that America is historically white-dominated and should remain that way. Brimelow’s VDARE site is a hub for white nationalist and anti-Semitic authors and CIS has actually published pieces by Brimelow twice, in 1998 and 2001.

One of the white nationalist VDARE contributors CIS circulated on November 6 was John Derbyshire, who was fired from the National Review in 2013 after he wrote an essay encouraging white and Asian parents to warn their children that blacks are dangerous. Like Peter Brimelow, Derbyshire has spoken at Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance conference in the past.

In Taki’s Magazine, a paleoconservative outlet that includes white nationalist authors, Derbyshire wrote: 

"A small cohort of blacks –– in my experience, around five percent –– is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us. They will do this out of racial solidarity, the natural willingness of most human beings to be led, and a vague feeling that whites have it coming."

Though CIS uses the tagline “low immigration, pro-immigrant,” some of the individuals and websites it circulates to supporters on a weekly basis clearly oppose immigration on racial grounds. It was for this very reason that John Tanton, the white nationalist founder of the anti-immigrant movement in America as we see it today, created a number of anti-immigrant groups designed to stop immigration to America at all costs. One of those was CIS, which he founded back in 1985.