John Tanton, who died in 2019, was the racist architect of the contemporary American anti-immigration movement. Based in Petoskey, Mich., Tanton was an ophthalmologist who was an early advocate of birth control and abortion rights (serving for a time in local leadership positions with Planned Parenthood) and an environmentalist (he was affiliated for many years with the Sierra Club). Increasingly, however, Tanton came to see overpopulation as the main danger facing the environment, and immigration as the main driver of that overpopulation. Over the decades, he founded, funded or otherwise nurtured more than a dozen nativist groups, including three that still dominate the scene today: the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR, founded by Tanton in 1979), the Center for Immigration Studies (1985), and NumbersUSA (1996). As Tanton laid out in letters and memos in the 1980s, the three were envisioned as complementary parts of a single machine — FAIR as its “activist” group, CIS as a think tank producing “nonpartisan” studies, and NumbersUSA to lobby and influence legislation.[1] Tanton also created an umbrella organization called US Incorporated, which has served as a parent group and funding conduit for Tanton projects including NumbersUSA, ProEnglish, and The Social Contract Press, a publishing house.[2]
Although Tanton began his political journey in groups perceived as liberal, like Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club, he came to believe, as he wrote in a 1993 letter, “that for a European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”[3] That same year, Tanton wrote a lengthy memo proposing the creation of a group he called the League for European-American Defense, Education, and Research — LEADERs — and specifically described as working to protect the interests of white people,[4] although it never came to fruition. In 1996, he proposed another — the Society for Genetic Education, or SAGE, to promote eugenics,[5] the “science” of creating better humans through selective breeding that was embraced by Adolf Hitler. As early as 1969, Tanton wrote Michigan officials asking whether state laws allowed involuntary sterilization, a concern he said grew from “a local pair of sisters who have nine illegitimate children between them.” And through the decades, he was increasingly at the heart of the white nationalist scene. He corresponded with Holocaust deniers, leading racist and eugenicist thinkers, and a one-time Klan lawyer. He introduced key FAIR leaders to the president of the Pioneer Fund, a racist, eugenicist group set up to encourage “race betterment” of white people. He wrote a major funder to urge her to read the work of a radical anti-Semitic professor — to “give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life” — and urged the entire FAIR board to discuss the professor’s theories. He hired racist writers, published the work of other racists including the infamous French nativist Jean Raspail, and practically worshipped a key promoter of the Immigration Act of 1924 (a racist national origins quota system), a rabid anti-Semite whose pro-Nazi American Coalition of Patriotic Societies was indicted for sedition in 1942.[6] Indeed, in a 2001 letter to a FAIR board member, Tanton wrote that the work of John B. Trevor Sr. — a committed nativist who warned shrilly of “diabolical Jewish control” of America — should serve FAIR as “a guidepost to what we must follow.”[7]
Tanton, who warned in 1986 of a “Latin onslaught” and often attacked churches and big business for their stances on immigration, came to be an embarrassment to nativist organizations that were frequently accused of racism. But hardly any repudiated him, despite overwhelming evidence of his bigotry.[8] Dan Stein, FAIR’s leader since 1988, even claimed in 2004 that Tanton “never asserted the inferiority or superiority of any racial, ethnic, or religious group.”[9] Five years later, he called him a “Renaissance man.”[10] After Tanton’s 2019 death, Stein issued a statement calling the FAIR founder “a selfless giver of his time and talents in the interests of a better tomorrow.”[11] But not everyone had such sunny views. “It’s sad,” Patrick Burns, FAIR’s former deputy director, told the Detroit News in 2017. “It’s like a dead cat in a well. It poisons a lot of good water. Tanton has been that cat for 30 years.”[12]
Here are a few of Tanton’s more remarkable comments over the years:
“Demography is destiny. … In many areas of the country, this change will come sooner, or is already upon us. This is unacceptable; we decline to bequeath to our children minority status in their own land.”
—1993 memo proposing the creation of a group to “defend” white people[13]
If its borders are not secured, America will be overrun by people “defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs.”
—1997 interview with the Detroit Free Press [14]
“Does the addition of Santeria and voodoo help things out? How about a larger Muslim population, with all the conflict that applies [sic] for some of our values, and with our Jewish population?”
—1995 letter taking to task a writer who suggested that the U.S. would “be enriched by immigrants of all ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds”[15]
Undocumented immigrants are “not here to mow your lawn — they’re here to blow up your buildings and kill your children, and you, and me.”
—D.A. King, anti-immigrant activist partly funded through Tanton’s US Inc.[16]
“Their ‘huddled masses’ cast longing eyes on the apparent riches of the industrial west. The developed countries lie directly in the path of a great storm.”
—1975 essay[17]
“I have no doubt that individual minority persons can assimilate to the culture necessary to run an advanced society, but if through mass migration, the culture of the homeland is transplanted from Latin America to California, then my guess is we will see the same degree of success with governmental and social institutions that we have seen in Latin America.”
—1996 letter to Roy Beck, the same year Beck, a Tanton employee, became leader of NumbersUSA[18]
“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[19]
“These have generally been pushed by Jewish interests who are offended by those who have challenged the received version of the Holocaust.”
—1995 letter, referencing anti-racist legislation in France and Switzerland[20]
“One morning [Tanton] told me of his experience with black women in Denver, when he was delivering babies there [as a medical intern]. There’s nothing quite like a black woman in labor. They roll their eyes and call out to Jesus. Imitating their accent, he mimicked them: ‘Lawdy Jesus, save me!”; “Oooh me, Jesus come down and get me!”; etc. … He also does great imitations of fat people who come in for eye exams and have trouble squeezing into the chair behind the optical equipment.”
—Tanton aide Kathy Bricker in a 1983 file memo for a planned Tanton biography[21]
“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 to eugenicist Robert K. Graham[22]
“Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile? … As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?”
—1986 internal memo from Tanton to staffers[23]
“[P]erhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down!”
—1986 memo, alluding to greater fertility among Latinos than whites[24]
