The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), formed in 1979, is the single most important anti-immigration organization created by the late John Tanton, the racist architect of the contemporary American nativist movement. It describes itself as “a non-partisan, public interest organization with a support base comprising nearly 50 private foundations and over 1.9 million members and supporters,”[1] and it boasts that it has testified to Congress more than 90 times.[2] With a budget of nearly $14 million in 2019,[3] it forms, along with two other Tanton-nurtured groups — the Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA — the heart of the anti-immigration movement.[4] Although FAIR concedes that immigration, “within proper limits, can be positive,”[5] it regularly takes hardline positions on virtually all immigration issues. It not only wants to abolish illegal immigration, but also seeks to cut legal immigration by more than two thirds. It wants to end birthright citizenship, the guarantee afforded to almost everyone born on U.S. soil by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution; end refugee programs; and revoke special protections against deportation for “Dreamers” brought to this country as children and others.[6] It has blamed immigrants for environmental degradation, low working-class wages, violent crime (despite the fact that academic studies have repeatedly shown immigrants are less criminal than U.S. natives), welfare fraud, and more.[7]
FAIR’s website claims that it opposes discrimination of all types,[8] and for a time many observers took the group at its word. But in 1988, internal memos written by Tanton two years earlier came to light, with Tanton worrying about a “Latin onslaught,” questioning the “educability” of Hispanic immigrants, and warning that Latino fertility was far outdistancing that of white people.[9] Also in 1988, it was revealed that FAIR had solicited grants (eventually totaling some $1.3 million) from the Pioneer Fund, a Nazi-friendly organization formed in 1937 to pursue “race betterment” and promote the genetic stock of whites from the original colonies.[10] After that, evidence of the racist and eugenicist ideas of Tanton and FAIR leaders continued to accumulate. In 2008, the Southern Poverty Law Center unearthed a trove of letters and other documents that Tanton had donated to a university library in Michigan — and the papers proved a veritable dynamite keg. FAIR’s founder, it turned out, had carried on friendly correspondences with white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, enthusiasts of eugenics like the Pioneer Fund’s principals, and others. Tanton, it became clear, was no multiculturalist — he worried that Latinos, Muslims, Africans, and any number of others were weakening American culture and fomenting the danger of inter-ethnic warfare.[11] One sentence in a 1994 Tanton letter seemed to sum up the core of Tanton’s hardening ideology: “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”[12]
There was more. In 1996, FAIR produced 51 episodes over the course of the year of a television talk show, “Borderline,” hosted by its longtime leader Dan Stein, who was then FAIR’s executive director and was promoted to president in 2003. The show featured a laundry list of extremist interview subjects, including Sam Francis, who later became the top editor of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens; Jared Taylor, who edits American Renaissance, a white supremacist journal; Lawrence Auster, who argued that America will be destroyed if it loses its white majority; Peter Brimelow, the proprietor of the racist VDARE website; William Lind, who railed against “cultural Marxism” and multiculturalism; and others. FAIR also trafficked in racist political propaganda.[13] In 2000, it ran a TV advertisement opposing the reelection of Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.), an Arab American whose picture was featured next to a photo of Osama bin Laden along with the question, “Why is Senator Abraham trying to make it easier for terrorists like Osama bin Laden to export their wave of terror to any city street in America?” One staunch conservative, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), quit FAIR’s advisory board in disgust. “The trash that this crowd puts out is just beyond terrible,” he fumed. Four years later, another FAIR TV ad, in Texas, showing dark-skinned men running from police, was denounced as racist by both its target and that man’s GOP opponent.[14]
FAIR regularly promotes radical propaganda. One remarkable example of this is its embrace of utterly baseless conspiracy theories about immigration — the “Aztlan” theory that claims that Mexico is secretly planning to “reconquer” the American Southwest, and the “North American Union” theory that asserts that elites in Mexico, the United States and Canada are secretly scheming to merge their countries.[15] FAIR has also created fake front groups claiming to represent Blacks,[16] Latinos, workers and “progressives”[17] in a weak bid to enlist further support for its positions.[18] And its fondness for eugenics has surfaced repeatedly over the years. According to a 2013 study by the anti-racist Center for New Community, Tanton and FAIR advisory board members Sarah Epstein and Donald Collins Sr. (who are married and both former members of FAIR’s board of directors, and whose son in 2021 was chairman of the FAIR board) were all advocates of involuntary sterilization, with FAIR helping to fund promotion of the Quinacrine sterilization method, a dangerous procedure not approved by any country.[19] The late Garrett Hardin, a close Tanton friend and a longtime member of FAIR’s board of directors, was a controversial eugenicist who wrote in a 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” that “[f]reedom to breed will bring ruin to all.”[20] Tanton himself wrote a paper in 1975 entitled “The Case for Passive Eugenics” that promoted supposedly less noxious eugenicist policies like restricting childbearing to women between the ages of 20 and 35.[21]
Here are a few noteworthy comments from FAIR and its officials:
“In any major city, the peace is disturbed by Latino, black, and Asian nationalist gangs, which in some cases are only the shock troops of ethnic movements seeking the racial dismemberment of the United States. In refusing to control immigration, the Federal Government is writing a script for ethnic civil war. Why?”
—FAIR website, 2002, quoting neo-Confederate ideologue Thomas Fleming[22]
Muslims “are not coming here to become Americans. … [They are] promoting colonization of their own religion, of their own culture in towns and taking them over.”
—2004 essay by Susan Tully, FAIR’s national field director[23]
“My position is that this idea of a multiethnic society is a disaster. That’s what we’ve got in Central Europe, and in Central Africa. A multiethnic society is insanity. I think we should restrict immigration for that reason.”
—Garrett Hardin, close Tanton friend, controversial eugenicist professor, and longtime FAIR board member, in a 1997 essay published in Tanton’s Social Contract journal[24]
“Can our country tolerate beheadings, be-handings, female genital mutilation, arranged marriages for 12 year old girls and murders of gays?”
—2013 essay in News With Views by Frosty Wooldridge, a member of FAIR’s advisory board since 2011, attacking Muslim immigration[25]
“It is clear that there is a ‘fifth column’ movement in the United States that professes greater allegiance to a greater Mexico or a breakaway, separatist movement based on a Latino homeland.”
—FAIR website, 2005[26]
“[T]he African worldview is totally different than that of Europeans. Their culture is diametrically opposed to ours. That’s why so many blacks are in prison.”
—Wooldridge, in a 2014 interview with the anti-Semitic American Free Press newspaper in which he also attacked Muslims and said immigration numbers mean “[w]hites in this country are doomed”[27]
“What diseases are being imported into the US that have already been eradicated here? Many of these ‘children’ belong to dangerous gangs and drug cartels.”
—Tamyra Murray, in a 2014 Facebook announcement of a protest against undocumented children and mothers being relocated to a holding facility in Vassar, Mich. Murray was then the Michigan state advisor to FAIR and was also a liaison and speaker for Tanton’s US Incorporated[28]
“I can make the argument that just because one believes in white separatism that that does not make them a racist. … I don’t think standing up for your ‘kind’ or ‘your race’ makes you a bad person.”
—Joseph Turner essay written in 2005, the year before FAIR hired him as its western field representative[29]
“I have a secret plan to destroy America. … We must first make American a bilingual-bicultural country. … Having made America a bilingual-bicultural country, having established multiculturalism, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of ‘victimology,’ I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws.”
—2000 speech to a FAIR conference by Richard Lamm, a former governor of Colorado who would later join FAIR’s board of advisers as co-chairman[30]
“When illegals are caught (before they’re deported), they should spend several years turning big rocks into little rocks, in prisons that make Edmond Dantes’ Chateau D’If look like the Ritz Carlton. Troops should be stationed on our southern border with shoot-to-kill orders for anyone trying to enter the United States without a visa or proof of citizenship in hand.”
—2005 essay by Don Feder, a member of FAIR’s advisory board by 2007 at the latest[31]
“Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less? Who is going to break the bad news [to less intelligent individuals] and how will it be implemented?”
—1996 letter from Tanton, who founded FAIR and was still on its board[32]
