Dan Stein, the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), has worked for America’s premier nativist organization for close to four decades. A lawyer who was a Capitol Hill staffer in the late 1970s, Stein joined FAIR in 1982 as press secretary; became executive director of FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, in 1986; was promoted to FAIR executive director in 1988; and finally, in 2003, became the organization’s president and public face.[1] Throughout, Stein remained a faithful acolyte of John Tanton, the racist architect of the contemporary anti-immigration movement and the founder, in 1979, of FAIR.
Even as evidence accumulated of Tanton’s racist and eugenicist views, Stein relentlessly defended his mentor, insisting that Tanton was no racist, had no interest in eugenics, and opposed all forms of discrimination.[2] But at the same time, Stein repeatedly made comments that sounded remarkably like Tanton’s uglier views.[3] He is frequently disingenuous in this regard. For instance, his official FAIR biography claims that Stein sees the 1965 Immigration Act, which ended a racist national origins quota system in place since 1924, as “well intended” and “fundamentally the right thing” but one that “contained unworkable extended family preferences” that required a fix.[4] But that’s not at all what Stein has said elsewhere. In 1991, for instance, Stein wrote in a report to the FAIR board of directors that increasing resistance to “political correctness” gave him hope that the 1965 act would come under attack,[5] and he called that act “a key mistake in national policy.”[6] Three years later, in an interview for an oral history, he said that the 1965 act was “a form of revengism, or revenge” undertaken by liberals who supposedly saw it as “a great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris.”[7] Tanton made comparable remarks over the years.[8]
Similarly, Stein’s official biography says that he and FAIR have “steadfastly opposed” any consideration of race, religion or ethnicity, or the use of “smears and name-calling,” in the immigration debate.[9] But Stein, like Tanton, fretted frequently about Latino, Muslim and low-IQ immigrants. Both embraced baseless claims about immigrants that effectively demonized them. And Stein, through the decades he has led FAIR, has stood by while other FAIR officials, including Tanton, made remarks that undeniably amounted to “smears and name-calling.”[10]
That’s not all. Until 2003, Stein was an editorial adviser to The Social Contract, a racist journal started by Tanton that published dozens of articles from prominent white supremacists. During that time, one special issue was entitled “Europhobia: The Hostility Toward European-Descended Americans,” and carried a lead article that lamented how multiculturalism was replacing “successful Euro-American culture” with “dysfunctional Third World cultures.”[11] Even more remarkably, Stein was in 1996 the host of a 51-episode TV series produced by FAIR in which he sympathetically interviewed white supremacists and other bigots.[12] To one who was warning of a potential civil war, for instance, Stein asked: “How can we preserve America if it becomes 50 percent Latin American?” Stein went on to theorize that white people were leaving Los Angeles because it had become “a foreign country to them.”[13]
Here are a few other memorable comments from Stein over the years:
“We’re going to lose everything about what it means to be an American.”
—2015 video message to supporters, suggesting a bleak future if immigration is not halted[14]
“Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing. … Many of them hate America; hate everything that the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans.”
—1997 interview[15]
“Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not subsidizing those with high ones?”
—1997 interview with Tucker Carlson for an editorial in the Wall Street Journal[16] [17]
“Yeah, so what? … What is your problem with that?”
—1997 Wall Street Journal interview, when asked about FAIR board member emeritus Garrett Hardin’s assertion that only “intelligent” people should breed[18]
“Any effort to try to limit or reduce immigration is always met with the same argument, that you’re splitting families. I mean, the bottom line is everybody’s related to everybody else at some point.”
—2017 interview with KNX-AM, making light of immigrant family separations[19]
“I blame ninety eight percent of the responsibility for this country’s immigration crisis on Ted Kennedy and his allies, who decided some time back in 1958, earlier perhaps, that immigration was a great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris, and the immigration laws from the 1920s were just this symbol of that, and it’s a form of revengism, or revenge, that these forces will continue to push the immigration policy that they know full well are [sic] creating chaos and will continue to create chaos down the line.”
—1994 interview for an oral history of FAIR, referencing Sen. Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act, which replaced a racist national origins quota system in place since 1924[20]
“Not everyone thinks that replacing strawberry fields with dim sum restaurants and noodle houses is necessarily the best enhancement in their quality of life.”
—1989 interview[21]
“People here illegally, in order to compete … have to crowd into overcrowded housing conditions so they can work really cheap. That, in turn, affects your schools, the schools in turn affect, you know, the quality of the tax base, people who want to stay in that school system, that ripples throughout and pretty soon, what was a nice, safe neighborhood is no longer a safe neighborhood.”
—2016 radio interview, explaining how undocumented immigrants “destroy” good neighborhoods[22]
“The average American basically likes the idea of immigration, maybe he loves the concept — it’s played an important historic role in our history — but would be perfectly fine if we didn’t have another immigrant for 50 years.”
—2017 interview with The New York Times[23]
“Take a look at what happened to the Native Americans when they didn’t properly screen for contagious diseases back in 1620.”
—2016 interview, saying that immigrants bring deadly diseases like smallpox[24]
“After we saw Iraq fall apart, a lot of us are wondering, are we going to see the same post-Obama disaster from, what, eight years of his decimating our immigration control apparatus.”
—2014 radio interview, suggesting President Barack Obama’s moderate approach to immigration could reduce the country to something like Iraq after the American invasion[25]
“It’s almost like they’re getting into competitive breeding. You have to take into account the various fertility rates in designing limits on immigration.”
—1991 interview with the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union about high birth rates among Latinos and Asians.[26] In 2018, Stein “unequivocably” — and falsely — claimed that “I have never, ever made any such statement”[27]
“The question of course is why is it we haven’t had more terror attacks in this country. The only answer must be that they don’t want to embarrass Obama, who seems to be such an ally.”
—2015 radio interview, suggesting the president was helping terrorists[28]
“Certainly, we would encourage people in other countries to have small families. Otherwise they’ll all be coming here, because there’s no room at the Vatican.”
—1997 Wall Street Journal interview, making one of the rhetorical attacks on the immigrant-friendly Catholic Church for which FAIR and some of its officials have become known[29]
“ISIS has made it perfectly clear that it intends to use the refugee flow to infiltrate the West, including the U.S., and these actions will hopefully stymie those plans and protect Americans from future attacks.”
—2017 press release, praising President Donald Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban”[30]
“[T]here are a lot of organizations and politicians who simply want to use immigration to reengineer the demographics of the electorate. They don’t like the old America, they want to make it something new. … Immigration shouldn’t be stopped just to preserve the ethnic base, but you shouldn’t use it to radically alter it either.”
—2016 panel discussion on “Islam in America”[31]
