American nativists tend to be part of the hard political right. Many of them are open about their antipathy toward people of color, frequently attacking foreigners’ personal traits and cultures. They are often jingoistic boosters of what the Klan called “100 percent Americanism.” Similarly, large numbers of them are declared opponents of multiculturalism. Many have been ardent eugenicists, or proponents of breeding a better human race by allowing only some people to reproduce. Through much of American history, hardline nativists have been connected to proto-fascist groups, later neo-Nazi formations, and other hate groups. In 1924, history’s largest Klan, along with a pro-Nazi group called the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, helped pass an Immigration Act that was explicitly racist, drastically reducing Catholic, Jewish and dark-skinned immigration in favor of northern Europeans.[1]
But it’s not true that all the political drivers of nativism emanate from the far right. The contemporary American anti-immigration movement is largely composed of a network of organizations founded or otherwise nurtured by John Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist who died in 2019. And Tanton certainly did have an array of far-right beliefs, including a contemptuous attitude toward Latinos, Muslims, “low-IQ” individuals, and other minorities, and a lasting fondness for eugenics. But Tanton, fundamentally, began his ideological journey as an environmentalist and, later, a person who worried that overpopulation was the world’s greatest problem. He was a vigorous supporter of birth control and abortion rights — he was a local official with Planned Parenthood for years — and a committed environmentalist who saw immigrants as the environment’s worst enemy.[2] Ultimately, because of those views, he came to see an array of churches and religious traditions that welcome immigrants as antagonists. He claimed that certain religions were breaching the separation of church and state through their activism. He was suspicious of Jews because of Jewish traditions of welcoming the stranger. Tanton and others in his orbit also harshly criticized big business and other major American institutions. Tanton’s most important organization, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), even worked hard to stop the so-called Mariel boatlift of Cuban refugees, who those on the political right almost universally welcomed as a result of their hatred of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.[3]
A remarkable amount of nativist vitriol is directed at churches. Long-time FAIR board member Donald Collins, in one article for the VDARE hate site, accused Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony of selling out the United States “in exchange for more temporal power and glory.” In another, he said Catholic bishops were “infiltrating and manipulating the American political process” to breach the separation of church and state.[4] Tanton was intensely focused on the problem of religious opposition to his views. In letters to Roy Beck, head of NumbersUSA (which started as a program of Tanton’s US Incorporated), Tanton said that the Catholic Church’s ability to bring in priests from abroad was “a clear breach of the wall of separation of church and state,” asked Beck to write a “Challenge to Religious Leaders” essay, and also wondered if the pro-immigration U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants was composed of “Marxists.”[5] Meanwhile, the wealthy heiress Cordelia May Scaife, the leading funder of Tanton’s network of nativist groups, worried that contraceptives were not enough — she wanted, as her office wrote in a 1973 letter, “to greatly accelerate the availability of abortion services worldwide on an ‘abortion on request’ basis.”[6]
Here are some comments from people tied to the Tanton network reflecting animosity toward individuals and institutions typically considered to be on the political right or center-right. A few comments come from enthusiasts of various eugenicist measures, which are opposed today by virtually all mainstream churches:
“[O]ur opponents: the Roman Catholic Church, several of the Protestant denominations, the Lutheran Church in particular.”
—1998 Tanton letter, listing what are seen as pro-immigration groups[7]
“The hierarchy from the Pope down has from time to time acknowledged the right of sovereign states to control their borders. But the numerous conditions the churchmen have invoked would seriously vitiate this right. … [Catholic bishops apparently] would like to condition this sovereign prerogative of states right out of existence.”
—FAIR website, 2006[8]
“One of the problems with churches is that they see themselves as universal, and as transcending national boundaries.”
—1994 Tanton letter to Roy Beck, then a Tanton employee and head of NumbersUSA[9]
“These have generally been pushed by Jewish interests who are offended but those who have challenged the received version of the Holocaust.”
—1998 Tanton letter suggesting that recent European anti-racism laws are the product of Jews wanting society only to learn of “received wisdom,” rather than truth, about Nazi extermination of Jews[10]
“Republicans who support amnesty are psychotic, so greedy as to be politically blind, or just stupid.”
—Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) Senior Policy Analyst Stephen Steinlight in a 2014 speech to a Texas Tea Party group calling proposed bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform a “plot against America”[11]
“[R]eligious leaders — God help me, find a baseball bat, there would be a whole lot fewer of them around — but they are all of them, right across the spectrum, are the leaders of the amnesty. From the Conference of Catholic Bishops to every Jewish organization to the National Conference of Churches, all of them are in the same league.”
—2014 Steinlight speech, suggesting that taking a “baseball bat” to some religious leaders might reduce the number who support immigration reform[12]
“I try to avoid cynicism and the idea that the church is trying to lobby for more warm bodies in the pews, but it’s hard not to. I’m not saying there’s no moral component to immigration, but the way the church is weighing into this is trying to make it a black-and-white issue.”
—2013 interview with CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian[13]
“All the big institutions in the country are behind this. Big Business is for this, Big Labor, all the big donors, Big Government, Big Education, Big Media, Big Philanthropy, Big Religion — the Southern Baptist Convention has been roped into this as well.”
—Krikorian in 2013 on Tea Party Unity conference call, urging the defeat of comprehensive immigration reform[14]
“The unwanted child is not the problem, but, rather, the wanted one that society, for diverse cultural reasons, demands.”
—Cordelia May Scaife, the single largest funder of Tanton’s organizatons, in a letter to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, who May said she “always admired,” suggesting that some form of involuntary sterilization might be needed[15]
“It would be better to encourage the breeding of more intelligent people rather than the less intelligent.”
—Longtime FAIR board member Garrett Hardin in 1993[16]
[1] See, for example, Bennett, David H., The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988), and Okrent, Daniel, The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America (New York: Scribner, 2019).
