The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that claims to be an “independent, non-partisan, non-profit, research organization,” was started in 1985 and says that it has testified before Congress at least 130 times since then.[1] It enjoyed particular political success during the presidency of Donald Trump, who undertook to enact many of the 79 items CIS had published in a 2016 wish list[2], and whose administration frequently cited studies by CIS to support such policies as the highly controversial “Muslim ban.” Throughout, CIS has contrived to appear as a neutral scholar of immigration policy, even though virtually none of the hundreds of articles and studies it has published has found any positive aspect whatsoever to legal or illegal immigration.
As part of this professed neutrality, CIS has struggled to distance itself from John Tanton, the racist architect of the modern anti-immigration movement who long sought to maintain a “European-American majority” in the United States. Its leaders regularly claim that Tanton had no significant input to the center or its work. But in fact, CIS began life as a program of Tanton’s Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), to be separated later, as Tanton wrote his leading funder, “for credibility.” At around the same time, Tanton wrote that CIS’ purpose was to produce reports “for later passage to FAIR, the activist organization, to remedy.” It was also Tanton who convinced Otis Graham to leave his director’s position at FAIR in order to run CIS. (Mark Krikorian, CIS’ current executive director, had also worked at FAIR for about a year in 1988, writing and editing the organization’s newsletters, before being selected by the CIS board to take over from Graham in 1995.) Eight years after the founding of CIS, Tanton was still describing himself as setting “the proper roles for FAIR and CIS,” and the two groups have long had interlocking directorates. In 2009, for instance, four members of CIS’ board of directors also sat on FAIR’s advisory board, and as late as 2021, the chairman of the CIS board was still on FAIR’s advisory board. [3]
The center has developed a reputation for shoddy research and data manipulation.[4] It publishes studies with names like “Farfetched? Does Illegal Immigration Facilitate Teenage Obesity?”[5] and obsesses about purported problems such as the “Third World gold-diggers” who marry Americans to gain citizenship.[6] It blames immigrants for pollution, urban sprawl, depressing African-American wages, illegal voting, welfare fraud, and more.[7] Most remarkably, CIS has republished a slew of white supremacists and a key anti-Semitic writer who claims that Jews are genetically driven to undermine the Christian-majority societies in which most of them live. A 2017 study by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Center for New Community found that CIS had recirculated in its weekly newsletters more than 2,000 articles with white nationalist content over a 10-year period. They included some 1,700 articles from VDARE, a plainly racist website named after Virginia Dare, said to be the first English (white) person born in the New World. Among them were articles from a discredited race scientist and a Holocaust denier.[8]
Here are a few memorable comments from CIS officials:
Immigration threatens “the American people as a whole and the future of Western civilization.”
—CIS Fellow, later promoted to CIS Senior Policy Analyst, Stephen Steinlight, in a 2004 panel discussion[9]
“Maybe he was just ahead of his time!”
—Tanton letter to CIS leader Otis Graham lauding Madison Grant, author of the notoriously racist 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History. In it, Grant, whose eugenicist ideas were later endorsed by Adolf Hitler, posits the superiority of the “Nordic race”[10]
“Perhaps the simplest way to approach [skill-based immigration] would be to admit anyone who scores 140 on an IQ test.”
—CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian in his 2008 book The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal. An IQ of 140 is considered “genius,” and between 0.25% and 1.0% of the world population is estimated to have intelligence that high[11]
“I can promise you it will be a lot bloodier.”
—Steinlight in a 2013 speech to a Texas Tea Party group, claiming that Latino immigrants are not merely interested in jobs, but will soon create a civil rights movement far more violent than that of African Americans. Elsewhere that year, Steinlight told an interviewer that “Hispanics don’t exemplify ‘strong family values’”[12]
“[I]n America, you have Jews with the highest average IQ, usually followed by East Asians, and then you have non-Jewish whites, Hispanics and then blacks. These are real differences. They’re not going to go away tomorrow, and for that reason we have to address them in our immigration discussions.”
—Jason Richwine, on a 2008 panel with Krikorian on the release of Krikorian’s new book. In 2013, Richwine left his position at the Heritage Foundation after similar claims made in his 2009 dissertation were publicized.[13] Undeterred, CIS began using Richwine to write reports and blog items in 2016[14]
“Republicans who support amnesty are psychotic, so greedy as to be politically blind, or just stupid.”
—Steinlight in a 2014 speech to a Texas Tea Party group in which he referred to proposed bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform as a “plot against America”[15]
“In its long history of immigration, the United States has never encountered so violent-prone and radicalized a community as the Muslims who have arrived since 1965.”
—2002 CIS “Backgrounder” report, by Daniel Pipes and Khalid Duran[16]
“Islam is not so much a religion as a hideous totalitarian political creed looking for world supremacy.”
—Steinlight, in a 2014 speech to the Pearland, Texas, Tea Party[17]
“Launching a federal program that fundamentally alters the nation’s demographic course will take its place as the leading example in the second half of the 20th century of the elite arrogance and disconnect from either the sentiments or the interests of the broad public.”
—Graham in an essay attacking the 1965 immigration reform that ended a racist quota system imposed in 1924. The essay was published in 1995, the same year Graham was succeeded as CIS leader by Krikorian
“I would think being hung, drawn and quartered is probably too good for him.”
—Steinlight, in a 2014 speech to a Tea Party group in Sebring, Fla., attacking President Barack Obama for his pro-immigration stances[18]
“My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.”
—Krikorian in 2010 article following the devastating earthquake in Haiti that year[19]
CIS’ claim to be a neutral scholar of immigration is belied by the fact that its reports and other publications are notoriously false, misleading, or without supporting evidence —as the anti-racist Western States Center concludes, CIS “traffics in misinformation and blatant anti-immigrant bias.”[20] Its interactions with, and hiring of, individuals with racist and eugenicist views are far too numerous to have been mere mistakes or outlying incidents. It is closely linked to racist organizations in the network created by John Tanton and, indeed, is a key part of that network.
