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around the time of the Hostettler hearing, a large bloc of anti-immigrant Sierrans were attempting a coup. It had been the second such attempt in recent years. For decades the club, which was cofounded in 1892 by a Scottish immigrant named John Muir, had agitated for less immigration to the United States as a way of limiting population growth. Back in 1968, it had even copublished Paul Ehrlich’s antinatal bestseller, The Population Bomb. By the mid-1990s, however, it had piped down the restrictionist rhetoric. Immigration had become an especially contentious issue due to Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative in California that denied public education and health care to illegal aliens. And in 1996, the San Francisco-based Sierra Club announced it would no longer take a position on immigration levels.

Partly, this had to do with a mostly white and entirely elitist organization fearing charges of racism. And then there was the more practical matter of fund-raising. A Los Angeles Times article later revealed that the Sierra Club’s largest individual donor was a retired hedge fund manager named David Gelbaum who’d quietly given more that $100 million to the organization. A descendent of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who was married to a Mexican American, Gelbaum told the paper, “I cannot support an organization that is anti-immigration. It would dishonor the memory of my grandparents.” He added that in the mid-nineties he had informed Carl Pope, who would later become the club’s executive director, that “if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”

In any case, the club’s new, pseudo-agnostic stand on immigration angered so many members that a referendum was held two years later on whether or not to call for a “reduction in net immigration.” The proposal was defeated, 60-40, but proponents, who maintained that population growth was “the most fundamental issue” for the green movement, were undeterred. They began in earnest to recruit anti-immigrant figures to sit on the Sierra Club’s fifteen-member board of directors. And by 2004 that rebel faction of the club was poised to take the reins and yank them in a decidedly restrictionist direction. It had already elected five sympathetic board members in the past two elections. Sierrans would vote to fill five more seats on the panel in April of that year, and the activists were pushing three of their hand-picked candidates—former Colorado governor Richard Lamm, Cornell professor David Pimentel, and Frank Morris.

The club’s leadership was so worried about these dissident challengers that in the run-up to the election it sent out ballot notices to members, warning them about outsiders trying to “take over” the organization. Past leaders of the group also phoned and e-mailed members and asked them to vote for candidates selected by the club’s nominating committee, all of whom advocated a neutral stand on immigration.

It worked.

The anti-immigrant slate was defeated, and the leadership’s candidates won all five seats in the largest turnout ever for a club election.

THE PUPPETEER

For immigrant restrictionists, the battle may have been lost but the war continues. And that’s thanks in no small part to the efforts of one man, John Tanton. Tanton and his organizations were working in the shadows for years to foment the Sierra Club upheaval. (“The Sierra Club may not want to touch the immigration issue, but the immigration issue is going to touch the Sierra Club,” he once vowed.) And Tanton-linked groups and individuals have played major roles in drumming up faux grassroots anti-immigration sentiment nationwide. The head of one of Tanton’s major organs, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), claims to have testified before Congress more than fifty times. Tanton’s extensive network shows how activists from across the political spectrum and with different agendas—population control, abortion rights, economic protectionism, racial purity— have coalesced around the issue of restricting immigration.

The three Republican witnesses who