Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [7]
Tanton’s voice isn’t as readily identifiable as some others’ singing from the anti-immigrant hymnal. Commentators like Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs, academics like Sam Huntington and Victor Davis Hanson, and politicians like Tom Tancredo and Lamar Smith are all better-known figures. Yet a 2006 profile of Tanton in The Washington Post referred to him as the “mastermind of the modern-day movement to curb immigration.” That’s not an overstatement. And research conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group, shows why.
Tanton is a retired ophthalmologist who lives in the tiny northern Michigan town of Petoskey (population 6,000), which is about as far from the front lines of the immigration brouhaha as you can get. A longtime environmentalist and member of the Sierra Club and Audubon Society, he turned his attention to population control in the 1960s after becoming familiar with the works of antinatal zealots like Paul Ehrlich and the late ecologist Garrett Hardin. If you think zealot is too strong a word, know that Ehrlich has said all U.S. aid to developing nations should be conditioned on the sterilization of Third World fathers with more than two children. And Hardin once asserted that “the freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.” Hardin also believed that “either there must be a relatively painless weeding out before birth or a more painful and wasteful elimination of individuals after birth.”
Tanton and his wife organized one of Michigan’s first Planned Parenthood associations in 1965. By the midseventies he was the national president of Zero Population Growth. And in 1979, convinced that immigrants were to blame for overpopulation, which in turn would result in nature’s doom, he founded FAIR.
Over the past four decades, Tanton has birthed or bank-rolled a loose-knit network of anti-immigrant and antinatal groups that continue to impact the national debate. In addition to FAIR, the Center for Immigration Studies, and NumbersUSA, it includes the American Immigration Control Foundation, Californians for Population Stabilization, and ProjectUSA. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which labeled him “the Puppeteer” of the restrictionist movement, the “vast majority of American anti-immigration groups—more than a dozen in all—were either formed, led, or in other ways made possible through Tanton’s efforts.”
And if you’re wondering why SPLC, a civil rights organization that specializes in tracking “hate groups,” has Tanton on its radar screen, it’s because the good doctor is also in cahoots with individuals and organizations that preach white supremacy. FAIR, by Tanton’s own reckoning, has received some $1.5 million from the Pioneer Fund, a group dedicated to racial purity through eugenics. In the 1980s Tanton hosted retreats to discuss U.S. immigration policy, and attendees included open racists like Jared Taylor of the New Century Foundation. Taylor holds conferences attended by the likes of Klansman David Duke and edits a newsletter, American Renaissance, that’s very popular with the white nationalist set. Tanton also wrote memos to attendees that betrayed a racialist agenda. In one that was later leaked to the press, Tanton said, “As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night?” And complaining about high Latino birth rates, he wrote, “Perhaps, this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught