Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [8]
Tanton doesn’t merely hobnob with racists. He employs them and actively promotes their views. The Tanton network’s publishing arm is The Social Contract Press, which publishes and distributes the works of all manner of unsavory characters. Among the more notable contributors is Peter Brimelow, a politically conservative anti-immigration immigrant from Britain who runs the white nationalist Web site, VDARE. Another favorite was the late Sam Francis, a VDARE writer and conservative columnist who was sacked by the Washington Times after giving a speech (at an American Renaissance conference) describing how the white race is bestowed with superior genes.
The editor of Social Contract Press, founded by Tanton in 1990, is Wayne Lutton, another ardent white nationalist. Lutton is a trustee at Jared Taylor’s New Century Foundation and speaks at American Renaissance events. He sits on the advisory board of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor group to the White Citizens’ Council that fought desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. Pseudonymously, Lutton writes articles for The Journal of Historical Review, the in-house publication of the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review. In 1994, he and Tanton coauthored a book titled The Immigration Invasion.
When I travel the country to report on immigration, or speak to groups in the know about Tanton and his network, I’m often asked why the mainstream media continue to cite groups like FAIR and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) without mentioning their origins or ulterior motives. CIS “reports” are given the gravitas of the Brookings Institution’s, and FAIR is described as an organization that merely favors less immigration, when in fact its stated goal is to cut the U.S. population in half.
My reply is that in most cases it should be chalked up to ignorance (or laziness) rather than malice. The space constraints and daily deadlines of newspaper journalism often lend themselves to only so much exposition. But it’s a credit to Tanton’s tenaciousness that his “puppets”—folks like Dan Stein, Roy Beck, and Mark Krikorian—are considered by the press (and lawmakers) to be legitimate policy analysts making good-faith restrictionist arguments. Krikorian has written for the highly regarded Jewish neoconservative magazine Commentary and even managed to ingratiate himself with select movement conservatives. He writes regularly for National Review, which happens to count a fair number of devout Catholics among its editors. If there’s one thing that bugs Tanton more than all those dusky people crossing the Rio Grande and overpopulating his country, it’s that too many of them are Catholic, or so he once told the Associated Press.
RISE OF THE SOCIAL DARWINISTS
At first blush it might seem odd that one of the country’s leading anti-immigration figures isn’t a fire-breathing right-wing conservative but a tree hugger obsessed with population control. That someone like Tanton would also dabble in eugenics might seem stranger still. Historically speaking, however, those dots aren’t difficult to connect. And in order to understand the contemporary immigration debate, it’s important that these connections be drawn.
The origins of today’s population control movement date to the nineteenth century and the Social Darwinist thinking that grew to florescence under the banner of eugenics, or improving the human race through controlled selective breeding. Under this theory of racial hygiene, some—not only some people but some peoples—are more “fit” than others. And the way to improve the lot of humanity was to encourage the propagation of the fit while mitigating or suppressing the propagation of the unfit.
This thinking later reached its apogee in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, but it’s popularity in America pre-dated the Nazis and in some ways even inspired them. In 1907, Indiana became the first state to enact a sterilization law. California, Connecticut, Washington, and others soon followed. The Supreme Court blessed the medical procedure