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FAIR leaders have ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists and have made many racist statements. Its advertisements have been rejected because of racist content. FAIRs founder, John Tanton, has expressed his wish that America remain a majority-white population: a goal to be achieved, presumably, by limiting the number of nonwhites who enter the country. One of the groups main goals is upending the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended a decades-long, racist quota system that limited immigration mostly to northern Europeans. FAIR President Dan Stein has called the Act a "mistake."

In Its Own Words "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?" FAIR founder and board member John Tanton, Oct. 10, 1986

"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." John Tanton, letter to eugenicist and ecology professor Garrett Hardin (now deceased), Dec. 10, 1993

"I blame ninety-eight percent of responsibility for this country's immigration crisis on Ted Kennedy and his political 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 continue to push the immigration policy that they know full well are [sic] creating chaos and will continue to create chaos down the line." FAIR President Dan Stein, "Oral History of the Federation for American Immigration Reform," interview of Dan Stein by John Tanton, August 1994.

"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?" John Tanton, letter to eugenicist Robert K. Graham (now deceased), Sept. 18, 1996

"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." FAIR President Dan Stein, interviewed by Tucker Carlson, Oct. 2, 1997

Background John Tanton founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform on Jan. 2, 1979, in Washington D.C. Roger Conner, an environmental lawyer, was appointed executive director, while Tanton served as the chairman of the board of directors. Before establishing FAIR, Tanton had experience working with groups concerned about how population growth affected the environment. Tanton served in several Sierra Club leadership posts, and he had been the president of Zero Population Growth, a group founded by biologist and longtime FAIR adviser Paul Ehrlich, from 1975 to 1977.

The founding of FAIR was a major change for Tanton. But he was driven to shift his efforts to the battle against immigration by his increasing concern that it was the primary cause of population growth. As a result, FAIR focuses exclusively on immigration issues. Its goal, according to its website, is to set immigration quotas "at the lowest feasible levels" and to prevent all illegal immigration. The group attempts to appear moderate, even though its record is extreme, particularly on racial issues. This strategy has paid off: In August 2009, FAIR President Dan Stein boasted that FAIR leaders had testified before Congress about 100 times.

In its early years, FAIR was known for frequent op-ed pieces and controversial advertisements. In December 1980, it ran an ad in the Rocky Mountain News with the headline: "Our Grandparents Came To America To Escape Poverty And Despair. Will Our Children Want To Leave For The Same Reasons?" The implication was that unless immigration policies were reformed, immigrants would swarm the United States, undermine job prospects for Americans and put an end to American prosperity.

In 1988, Dan Stein replaced Roger Conner as executive director. Stein had been an employee of FAIR since 1982; before that, he was the executive director of the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), which was incorporated under FAIR's tax exemption and still serves as FAIR's legal arm. Conner became FAIR's president; this meant that Stein took over the responsibilities of running FAIR while Conner focused on fundraising.

On Oct. 9, 1988, the Arizona Republic published excerpts from embarrassing memos that had been sent by Tanton and Conner to members of FAIR's leadership. The documents were known as the WITAN memos; they came from an October 1986 conference in which Tanton met with a number of anti-immigration activists for a strategy session. The memos revealed Tanton's innermost, and controversial, thoughts. Tanton warned of a "Latin onslaught," complained of Latinos' allegedly low "educability." He asked, "Will Latin American migrants bring with them the tradition of the mordida (bribe), the lack of involvement in public affairs, etc.?" He also wondered: "Can homo contraceptivus [meaning whites] compete with homo progenitiva [meaning Latinos] if borders aren't controlled? Or is advice to limit ones [sic] family simply advice to move over and let someone else with greater reproductive powers occupy the space?"

In the memos, Tanton, sounding much like the Klan of the 1920s, expressed concerns over the role of the Catholic Church in the United States, a favorite topic of his. He worried that the Church would capitalize on the Catholic faith of Latino immigrants to exert more political influence in the U.S. Specifically, he thought the church would try to subvert the division between church and state and limit abortion and birth control.

Linda Chavez, then the executive director of another group founded by John Tanton and of which he was then president, U.S. English, resigned because of the memos, calling them "repugnant and not excusable" and "anti-Catholic and anti-Hispanic." Several members of U.S. English's board, including Walter Cronkite and Arnold Schwarzenegger, also quit the group, and Tanton resigned. But there was no fallout for Tanton with his colleagues at FAIR; there, Tanton was supported and a committee created to craft his defense for the incendiary comments in the WITAN memos.

The memos were far from the sum of Tanton's extremism. As reports by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) would document, Tanton has a lengthy record of friendly correspondence with Holocaust deniers, a former Klan lawyer and leading white nationalist thinkers, including Jared Taylor (who wrote in 2005, "When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization any kind of civilization disappears"). On another occasion, Tanton wrote a major FAIR funder to suggest she read the work of radical anti-Semitic professor Kevin MacDonald to "give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life" and suggested that the entire FAIR board discuss the man's theories about the Jews. In a letter to FAIR board member Donald Collins, Tanton enthused over the work of John Trevor Sr. a key architect of the bluntly racist Immigration Act of 1924 and a man who distributed pro-Nazi propaganda and warned shrilly of "diabolical Jewish control" of America and said it should serve FAIR as "a guidepost to what we must follow again this time." Tanton has also made several racist comments, telling a reporter in 1997 that unless U.S. borders are sealed, America will be overrun by people "defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs."

The WITAN memos reveal Tanton's keen awareness of the importance of seeming respectable. In one memo, he wrote: "the issues we're touching on here must be broached by liberals. The conservatives simply cannot do it without tainting the whole subject." But the publication of the memos did not halt FAIR's growth. In 1990, FAIR claimed 50,000 members.

Tanton's preoccupation with immigration appears to be based, at least in part, on race. In a March 3, 1993 memo to FAIR board member Otis Graham, he demonstrated his desire to limit the number of nonwhites living in the U.S. The memo concerned a new group Tanton wanted to start, which he would have named the League for European American Defense, Education, and Research, or LEADERs [sic]. According to another Tanton memo, he had hatched the idea with help from three prominent white nationalists: the Council of Conservative Citizens' Sam Francis, American Renaissance's Jared Taylor and Wayne Lutton, who edits Tanton's hate journal The Social Contract. Tanton wrote in his LEADERs memo: "Projections by the U.S. Census Bureau show that midway into the next century, the current European-American majority will become a minority This is unacceptable; we decline to bequeath to our children minority status in their own land." Here, Tanton made it quite clear that the skin color of immigrants factored into his desire to limit immigration.

Despite Tanton's unsavory track record, longtime FAIR President Dan Stein has shrunk from any criticism of FAIR's founder; on the contrary, in 2009 he told the Washington Post that Tanton was a "Renaissance man."

Maybe Stein has vigorously defended Tanton because he has expressed similarly extreme positions. In 1991, Stein sent a report to FAIR's board of directors under the subject line: "The Defenders of American culture Rise to the Call to Arms." In the memo, which is archived at George Washington University's Gelman Library, Stein celebrated a new "disdain" in the media and among intellectuals for "the political agenda of those who openly attack the contributions of Western Civilization." He was particularly happy that "multicultural and Politically Correct" school curricula had come under criticism.

Stein's report expressed the hope that mounting criticism of multiculturalism would eventually lead to attacks on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended years of racist immigration policy (under a national origins quota system heavily skewed against non-whites and even darker-skinned Europeans) and initiated a wave of non-white immigration to the U.S. For Stein, the 1965 Act was "a key mistake in national policy" and a "source of error."

In 1994, Tanton interviewed Stein for FAIR's oral history project, which is composed of transcribed audio interviews with about a dozen FAIR principals. In that interview, Stein again expressed his disgust for the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. He told Tanton that those who supported the 1965 reform wanted to "retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance" and that this "revengism" against whites had created a policy that is causing "chaos and will continue to create chaos."

Between 1985 and 1994, FAIR received around $1.2 million in grants from the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund is a eugenicist organization that was started in 1937 by men close to the Nazi regime who wanted to pursue "race betterment" by promoting the genetic lines of American whites. Now led by race scientist J. Philippe Rushton, the fund continues to back studies intended to reveal the inferiority of minorities to whites.

FAIR stopped receiving Pioneer Fund grants in 1994 due to bad publicity it received when the grants were made public. At the time, FAIR was backing California's punishing anti-immigrant Proposition 187, which would have denied education and health care to the children of undocumented immigrants in that state if it had not died as the result of court challenges. Stein and Tanton had led FAIR's efforts to win funding from Pioneer, and Stein said in 1993, before Pioneer's extremism was made public, that his "job [was] to get every dime of Pioneer's money."

After the bad publicity, FAIR denied that the Pioneer Fund money had any influence on its work or in any way influenced its programs. To manage the fallout, on March 16, 1994, Stein wrote a letter to Harry Weyher, then the president of the Pioneer Fund. Stein attached a draft of a document that he wanted Weyher to endorse and send out, titled "Why the Pioneer Fund Supports the Immigration Reform Movement." Stein wrote the piece as though Weyher had written it himself. One part read, "We are pleased and proud that through financial support, we've made FAIR's important work possible." Though FAIR stopped receiving grants from the fund, which require public disclosure, it continued to receive private financial support from Pioneer's leaders for several years. In early 1997, Tanton organized a gathering at the New York Racquet and Tennis Club, where three members of FAIR's board Henry Buhl, Sharon Barnes and Alan Weeden met with Harry Weyher. In the late 1990s, Tanton also vacationed with Pioneer Fund board member John Trevor Jr., who also provided private financial support to FAIR.

FAIR also has produced controversial media programming. In 1996, FAIR started a television program called "Borderline." The show lasted for about a year and featured a number of prominent white nationalists, including Sam Francis and Jared Taylor. "Borderline" often advanced ideas popular in white nationalist circles; particularly popular was the idea that immigrants are destroying American culture or displacing Western civilization with degenerate, Third World ways.

Lawrence Auster, a white nationalist who spoke in 1996 to a conference put on by American Renaissance and whose website "A View from the Right" is listed as a hate site by the SPLC, appeared on the show on April 1, 1996, making the argument that if the U.S. loses its white majority, it will be destroyed. The topic that day, according to host Dan Stein, was to "take a politically incorrect look at American culture and Western Civilization." Stein added, "America, love it or lose it." Auster argued that because of an "invasion," "America is in the process of dissolving as a nation." Supposedly drawing on history, Auster warned that as demographic change occurs and "the majority is threatened in its position," the result could be "civil war." Auster's particular concern that day was the loss of "the historic European Anglo American culture." Stein certainly seemed to agree with his guest's worries. "How can we preserve America if it becomes 50% Latin American?" he asked. Stein also said that Anglos were leaving Los Angeles because it had become "a foreign country to them."

Another prominent white nationalist who appeared on "Borderline" was naturalized English immigrant Peter Brimelow, who in 1999 would go on to found the anti-immigrant hate site VDARE.com. Brimelow authored Alien Nation, a book that argues America should remain white-dominated. In a discussion about Alien Nation on Aug. 5, 1996, Stein asked Brimelow whether "America's social and economic elites seem to be writing off the whole idea of the nation-state." He added: "If they shift their loyalty from the nation-state, what are they loyal to?" Brimelow argued that these same elites are creating the "greatest transformation of any independent state in history" by bringing in "new minority groups that did not exist before." Brimelow considered these elites to be "treasonous," people who "hate our traditional culture and they see immigration as a weapon to help destroy it." "Are they really patriots?" Brimelow asked.

Stein asked Brimelow to talk more about his statement "race is destiny in American politics." Brimelow did, saying, "you really alter the texture of the country by bringing in different ethnic groups." Endorsing the invasion theory, Brimelow told one caller, "you have areas of South Texas and so on that have essentially gone back to Mexico." Stein later asked Brimelow whether this all meant "the end of the United States?" Brimelow's answer: "Sure."

In 1998, various nativists and nativist groups attempted to get the Sierra Club to take an anti-immigration stance. The effort culminated in a 1998 vote in which Sierra Club members determined whether the group would support immigration restrictions. FAIR was one of the groups that helped to put the measure on the Sierra Club ballot, and Dan Stein teamed up with then-CNN Crossfire host Pat Buchanan to advocate for it. Members ultimately chose to retain the Sierra Club's neutral stance on immigration policy in a 60%-40% vote. The Sierra Club was an important target for FAIR because it was considered a liberal group, and Tanton, who held leadership positions there in the 1970s and still had many allies, expressed in his WITAN memos that he thought that the Sierra Club would be less vulnerable to charges of racism when advocating against immigration.

In April 1999, FAIR attacked U.S. Senator Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.) for supporting more visas for foreigners with technology skills. It ran a newspaper ad that placed a picture of Abraham, an Arab-American, alongside a picture of Osama bin Laden. It asked, "Why Is a U.S. Senator Trying to Make It Easier for Osama bin Laden to Export Terrorism to the U.S.?" FAIR's ads were widely condemned and caused former Senator Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) to resign from FAIR's advisory board. FAIR has also run other extremely controversial political advertisements, including one in 2000 in Iowa that was rejected by a TV station as "borderline racist."

Several FAIR officials have links to white supremacist hate groups. Rick Oltman, who for much of the 1990s was FAIR's western regional coordinator, spoke as part of a 1997 immigration panel sponsored by the Council of Conservative Citizens, a racist group that has described black people as a "retrograde species of humanity." Council publications at the time listed Oltman as a member. Jim Staudenraus, FAIR's eastern regional coordinator, participated in an anti-immigration conference in 2002 with white nationalist Jared Taylor. In 2007, a senior FAIR official met with leaders of Vlaams Belang, a Belgian political party that officials in that country outlawed in a previous incarnation (Vlaams Blok) as a "criminal organization" because of its racist, anti-immigrant views.

In late 2006, FAIR hired Joseph Turner as its western field representative after Oltman departed. Turner was the founder of the Southern California group Save Our State, a now-defunct anti-immigrant hate group that was known for attracting neo-Nazis to its rallies. Turner was on record before joining FAIR as saying that being a white separatist did not imply a person was racist. Turner once accused Mexican immigrants of turning California into a "third world cesspool." He left FAIR in December 2007 shortly after the SPLC, in tandem with publishing an extensive report on the group's racism that included Turner's inflammatory comments, designated FAIR as a hate group. FAIR representatives did not comment as to the reason for Turner's departure. FAIR board members harbor extreme views and connections as well. Garrett Hardin, a now-deceased biologist, was a very close friend of Tanton's and an active board member of FAIR from the mid-1980s until around 1996. Like Tanton, he often expressed eugenicist views. Hardin was a longtime supporter of population control: In 1968, he wrote "The Tragedy of the Commons," in which he argued that "[the] freedom to breed is intolerable." In a 1992 interview with Omni magazine, he argued against sending food to starving Ethiopians, noting that doing so would only "encourage population growth." In that interview, he lauded China for its "one-child policy" but lamented that the policy was not thorough enough. Former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, a longtime member of FAIR's board of advisors, once said that "new cultures" in America were "diluting what we are and who we are."

Longtime FAIR board member Donald A. Collins writes frequently for the VDARE.com, an anti-immigrant hate site named after Virginia Dare, said to have been the first English child born in the New World. (VDARE is dedicated to bashing immigrants and has published the work of many white nationalists and anti-Semites.) Collins has been published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, a journal run by eugenicist Roger Pearson. Collins' articles have focused on attacking the Catholic Church for its liberal stance on immigration. One accused Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony of selling out his country "in exchange for more temporal power and glory." Another claimed bishops were "infiltrating and manipulating the American political process" to dismantle the separation of church and state the classic calumny directed at American Catholics for decades by the Klan and others. Another person linked to VDARE is Joe Guzzardi, a member of FAIR's board of advisors who worked as an editor of the site.

On Oct. 2, 2007, Julie Kirchner became FAIR's third executive director. Dan Stein had taken the position of FAIR president by that time. Stein retained his status as leader and public face of FAIR, while Kirchner managed the day-to-day operations.

In the late 2000s, FAIR become much more active in pushing anti-immigrant laws at the state and local level. Attorney Kris Kobach, who works for FAIR's legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, helped to write Arizona Senate Bill 1070. The bill, signed by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer on April 23, 2010, forces police officers to detain individuals who they suspect to be illegal immigrants and makes it a misdemeanor under state law for non-citizen immigrants to fail to carry their immigration papers. The law is currently caught up in the federal courts. Kobach earlier helped to pass anti-immigrant ordinances in Farmers Branch, Texas; Hazleton, Pa.; and other cities. These laws seek to punish those who aid and abet "illegal aliens." The laws have proven a massive financial burden to the towns that pass them and, in many cases, have sparked racial strife and economic disorder. The Hazleton ordinance, which was struck down by a federal appeals court in September, had left that community of about 20,000 on the hook for nearly $3 million in legal fees as of January 2011. The city is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Another FAIR initiative to end birthright citizenship provisions of the 14th Amendment, a longtime goal of the group, was launched in January 2011. IRLI, FAIR's legal arm, working in partnership with State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI), announced a plan to halt what they call "the misapplication of the 14th Amendment." At the time of its adoption in 1868, the 14th Amendment ensured that the children of slaves could not be denied citizenship; it now ensures that almost all children born on U.S. soil are automatically granted U.S. citizenship.

SLLI is a coalition of about 70 legislators in 38 states dedicated to eliminating "economic attractions" for immigrants and their "unlawful invasion" of the U.S. The group is often described as the legislative arm of FAIR, which is apt given the group says on its website that it has a "working partnership" with FAIR. SLLI's legislators are the main instigators behind favored FAIR initiatives, including attempts at the state level to deny immigrants various rights through laws modeled on Arizona's S.B. 1070.

SLLI has grown dormant in recent years, and the Supreme Court in 2012 struck down most of SB 1070s provisions as unconstitutional.

The 2012 election saw a renewed push for immigration reform at the federal level, with a bipartisan bill passing the Senate before collapsing in the House. In an effort to stop reform legislation, anti-immigrant front groups first created with the help of FAIR in the mid-2000s were revived and rebranded. Groups like Choose Black America and You Dont Think for Me were replaced by the African American Leadership Council (AALC), a name replaced quickly by the Black American Leadership Alliance (BALA), and Alliance for Immigration Justice (AIJ). These groups, which ostensibly opposed reform because it would damage job prospects for minorities and hurt taxpayers, were made up of African Americans and Latinos. Many of them such as Leah Durant, a former staffer at IRLI (FAIRs legal arm), and Frank Morris, a longtime FAIR board member had close ties to nativist organizations. BALA did manage to organize a rally in Washington the DC March for Jobs that brought together a few thousand activists, including some nativist extremists like D.A. King of Georgia.

Following the failure of reform legislation, FAIR found a new focus. As the number of children fleeing violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua spiked in the summer of 2014, FAIR and its allies began to target organizations aiding these unaccompanied minors. FAIR published a map on its website with the title, Is the Border Crisis Coming to a Town Near You? It named locales where minors were being resettled and the organizations helping in that effort. Protests organized by anti-immigrant activists took place in a number of locations, most infamously in Murrieta, California, where activists blocked a bus full of women and children on their way to an immigration-processing center. In Michigan, anti-Muslim activist Tamyra Murray, a state adviser for FAIR, organized a protest against the relocation of minors in Vassar.

Even without a major immigration reform bill to challenge, FAIRs public statements in recent years show that the organization remains true to the white nationalist principles on which it was founded. In late December 2015, Dan Stein told supporters in a video message that without a moratorium on immigration, were going to lose everything about what it means to be an American.

Link:
Federation for American Immigration Reform | Southern ...

In his first week in office, President Donald Trump acted on his core campaign issue: immigration. In a short span of time, the president signed executive orders calling for the construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and a crackdown on so-called sanctuary cities, which limit collaboration between local authorities and federal immigration agents.

The orders fell in line with Trumps repeated pledge to control illegal immigration in the United States and suggested that Trump will likely pursue an immigration agenda that resembles the aggressive deportations of former President Obamas first term. The Obama administration deported record numbers of undocumented immigrants, much to the frustration of immigrant advocates. In his first term alone, he deported 1.5 million undocumented immigrants. By the end of his tenure, Obama had deported more people than his most recent predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, though the number of deportations dipped after his second term. There was also a corresponding push for legalization under the Obama administrationand that push is absent from Trumps order.

The Donald Trump Cabinet Tracker

Obamas successor has already put forth new, more stringent criteria for deportation. With the establishment of a new deportation program in 2014, the Obama administration sought to prioritize deporting undocumented immigrants who broke the law over those who did not. That year, the Department of Homeland Security created the Priority Enforcement Program, which focused on undocumented immigrants who posed a threat to national security, border security, and public safety.

The intent of this new policy is to provide clearer and more effective guidance in the pursuit of those priorities, wrote then-Department of Homeland Secretary Jeh Johnson in a 2014 memo.

The Obama administrations new approach meant scrapping the Secure Communities Program, in which local law enforcement shared digital fingerprints of people booked into jail with federal authorities, who would then determine whether an individual was in the country illegally and whether to pursue deportation. The program originated in the George W. Bush administration and had received backlash from city officials, who said it was driving a wedge between law enforcement and the communities they police. Its very name has become a symbol for general hostility toward the enforcement of our immigration laws, Johnson wrote in a 2014 memo.

The executive order signed by Trump last week, dubbed Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, adopted a priority system that is far broader than the previous administrations after 2014. Trumps order specifically names aliens who have been convicted of any criminal offense; have been charged with any criminal offense, where such charge has not been resolved; have committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense; have engaged in fraud or willful misrepresentation in connection with any official matter or application before a governmental agency; have abused any program related to receipt of public benefits; are subject to a final order of removal, but who have not complied with their legal obligation to depart the United States; or in the judgment of an immigration officer, otherwise pose a risk to public safety or national security.

The language used in the order suggests that an individual does not need to be convicted of a crime to be considered for removal. That goes further than the Obama administrations 2014 directive, which explicitly noted that to be considered a priority for deportation, an undocumented immigrant must be convicted of an offense. The enforcement priorities are much more loose, said Kevin Appleby, the senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies, a think tank focused on immigration. [Trump] is casting a wider net.

The Trump administration also intends to reinstate the Secure Communities Program, despite the friction it caused between local authorities and the communities they protect.

Clarissa Martnez De Castro, the deputy vice president of the Office of Research, Advocacy, and Legislation at National Council of La Raza, said Trumps revival of the programand the broad language used in listing prioritiesindicates that he has a different perspective from that of his predecessor. When the executive orders that you are putting on the table are predicated aggressively on misinformation or outright lies about the immigrant community, I think theres a huge gap, she said.

Obamas stated goal was to reform the system, bring people out of the shadows, put them on a path to citizenship, so it didnt make sense to advocates that he was pursuing Secure Communities, as well as another federal program that involved local authorities, Appleby said.

Also included in the executive order are measures to penalize sanctuary cities, or jurisdictions that adopt policies to shield undocumented immigrants from deportation. During his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to block federal funds to such jurisdictions, a measure he included in the order. Sanctuary cities, the text reads, are not eligible to receive Federal grants, except as deemed necessary for law enforcement purposes by the Attorney General or the Secretary.

Its not clear what federal grants that includes, but withholding them may take the administration into precarious legal territory. As Lena Graber, a special projects attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, told me earlier this month, Supreme Court precedent, like the 2012 ruling that upheld Obamacare, might present an obstacle. That ruling found that the Affordable Care Acts withdrawal of Medicaid funds for states that did not agree to expand Medicaid was unconstitutionally coercive.

But the text of the order itself also presents its own limitations. Rick Su, a law professor at the University at Buffalo who studies immigration and local government, noted that the Trump administration used Section 1373 to define what constitutes a sanctuary city. That section says that any government entity or official who decides to voluntarily collaborate with federal immigration agents cannot be prohibited from doing so. It does not, however, require communication between local and state governments and federal immigration agents.

The Obama administration also put pressurethough arguably at a lesser degreeon sanctuary cities to cooperate with deportation requests, a move that garnered support from conservatives. Last year, the administration announced a policy that would require authorities to turn over undocumented immigrants who have finished their sentences in federal prison and are eligible for deportation.

Still, the federal government is largely dependent on local authorities to identify individuals who may be in the country illegally and turn them over to federal immigration agents.

Trump appears to have noted that limitation in his executive order. [There was] a lot of bluster and talk about penalizing sanctuary cities, but for all the extreme positions, the order recognized that the presidents power is arguably quite limited, Su said. This might also be true for the creation of the Office for Victims of Crimes Committed by Removable Aliens, which would issue reports studying the effects of the victimization by criminal aliens in the country. Presumably, that office would also rely on data from local authorities. Congress might, too, present a hurdle, as they would need to approve funding to implement these proposals.

Still, anti-immigrant groups appear to be pleased with the administrations orders. The presidents decision to strip federal funds from dangerous sanctuary cities is also a welcomed move, Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said in a statement released in response to the executive orders. While this action will not bring back the thousands of innocent lives lost or destroyed by reckless sanctuary policies, it will go a long way to making sure this senseless and preventable carnage doesnt continue.

While Obamas and Trumps immigration-enforcement policies are not identical, neither one is free from challenges, whether that be funding issues or pushback from communities and advocacy groups. In the end, Appleby said. Well have to look at the numbers and see where both presidents were after their first term.

Read the original:
How Trump Is Changing Immigration Enforcement - The Atlantic

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Sending out a statement of opposition isnt enough when the President is attempting to criminalize and demonize an entire religion, said the statement from an Islamic group called Muslim Advocates. Immigrants and refugees are suffering If [other] companies want to be on the right side of history and the right side of their customers, theyll join Uber in stepping down from this council immediately.

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In January, Trump issued apopular policyorder curbing the inflow of refugees from seven of 57 Islamic countries, and also announcing that officials will exclude would-be immigrants if they carry hostile attitudes. The excluded will be migrants who:

do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including honor killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Establishment media outlets, as well as Democrats, describe the popular reform as a Muslim ban.

The Muslim activists who are leading the backlash against Trumps reform complain that the hostile attitudes in the reform are code words for Islamic beliefs and are intended to block Islamic immigration. However, the Islamic activists decline to debate the written Islamic doctrines that endorse and encourage such hostile and anti-women attitudes.

Ubers exit was also praised by Islamic radical Linda Sarsour.

Trumps supporters say the focus on excluding hostile attitudes meets his campaign promise to Americans that the nation will exclude Islamic jihadis, and also Buy American and Hire American.

On Thursday,Ubers chief,CEO Travis Kalanick announced his decision to quit Trumps advisory council.Earlier today I spoke briefly with the President about the immigration executive order and its issues for our community. I also let him know that I would not be able to participate on his economic council, said a statement from Kalanick.

Joining the group was not meant to be an endorsement of the President or his agenda but unfortunately it has been misinterpreted to be exactly that. The implicit assumption that Uber (or I) was somehow endorsing the Administrations agenda has created a perception-reality gap between who people think we are, and who we actually are. The executive order is hurting many people in communities all across America. Families are being separated, people are stranded overseas and theres a growing fear the U.S. is no longer a place that welcomes immigrants.

On Jan. 29, Kalanick sent a messageopposing what he called Trumps wrong and unjust immigration ban, which he addressed to foreign-born Uber drivers.

The Muslim Advocates group hit the news in December 2015, when then Attorney General Loretta Lynch spoke at its annual fund-raising dinner, and threatened prosecution of Americans who criticize Islams violent and anti-democratic doctrines. Lynch said:

Now obviously this is a country that is based on free speech, but when it edges towards violence, when we see the potential for someone lifting that mantle of anti-Muslim rhetoric When we see that, we will take action

The Muslim Advocates group also played a leading role in prodding President Barack Obamas deputies to issue a directive ordering all FBI counter-terrorism training to pretend there is no link between Islamic jihad terror and Islamic jihad teaching in the Koran and Muslim scriptures. The gag order was imposed in 2011 after the group requested the FBI stop learning about Islamic motivations.

Since Trump announced his popular immigration reform, Islamic and progressive groups aided by the media and many Democratic Party leaders have pressured companies to announce their opposition.

Many companies have joined the backlash, partly because the nations very high levels of annual immigration have provided them with many cheap employers and welfare-aided customs.

Each year, the nation imports 1 million new immigrants, who compete for jobs against the 4 million young Americans who turn 18 each year. All told, immigrants now provide one in seven customers around the nation.

Uber also imports hundreds foreign white-collar contract workers for jobs sought by young American graduates. Nationwide, many companies and universities employ roughly 1 million foreign contract-workers each year. In 2013, Uber asked for visas to import eight of the foreign contract-workers. In 2016, the company asked to import 505 contract workers for a variety of jobs that could go to Americans, according to the MyVisaJobs.com website.

The company also sought Green Cards for up to 87 white-collar employees in 2016. If they get the Green Cards, they wont have to go home when their visa expires, but will remain in the United States. Each year, the federal government gives out up to 150,000 Green Cards to the foreign hires at U.S. companies.

Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com

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Islamic Advocates Celebrate Uber Quitting White House Panel Over Immigration Reform - Breitbart News

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The company provided employers at its Philadelphia headquarters time off on Thursday to protest Trumps popular policy, which is designed to reduce the inflow of costly refugees and to exclude migrants carrying hostile attitudes. Company protestswere also expected in Washington D.C., New York and California.

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Trumps new policy seeks to exclude people who:

do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including honor killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Trump underlined the pro-American nature of his reform today, saying at the National Prayer Breakfast that;

Our nation has the most generous immigration system in the world. But there are those who would exploit that generosity and undermine the values that we hold so dear. We need security. There are those who would seek to enter our country to spread violence or oppressing other people based upon their faith.

We will not allow intolerance to spread in our nation So in the coming days we will develop a system to make sure those admitted into our country fully embrace our values of religious and personal liberty and that they reject any form of oppression and discrimination. We want people to come into our nation but we want people to love us and love our values. Not hate us and hate our values.

In Philadelphia, the 45-minute protest against the hostile attitudes policy was held just after lunch.

The growing campaign by corporations including Google, Starbucks, Amazon, Lyft and Netflix against the newly elected president and his immigration reform is shaped by their bottom-line desire to raise the inflow of immigrant consumers and cheap workers.

But the corporate backlash is also boosted by sympathy from many top-level managers both native-born and immigrant towards striving migrants, regardless of the migrants political or ideological views.

Comcasts Kotay, for example, arrived in the United States as a child and worked his way to the top of the nations high-tech sector, alongside other Indian immigrants who now running Google and Microsoft. In his Twitter account, he describes himself as comcast. chief technology officer. immigrant.

Kotay made his political sympathies clear in a message to his employees, in which he appears to described the elected President as the enemy, and also suggests that Trump is similar to now-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

The screenshot was leaked to a radio station,New Jersey 101.5.

Kotays Twitter feed also shows his personal dislike of Trumps policies, which may end up reducing the inflow of Indian-born migrants and contract-workers into the United States.

Trumps policy is designed to exclude hostile immigrants, including those who reject the U.S. constitution or who support violence via Islamic holy war or jihad.The new policy would also exclude people who endorse honor killings of women and girls, which is a widespread problem in Indiaand a growing problem in the United States.

Like many other progressive advocates, Kotay praises immigrants while downplaying the accomplishment of ordinary Americans, who either birthed most of Comcasts workforce and customers, and or remain the vast majority of Comcasts employees and customers.

At a Jan. 26 speech to at an awards event, Kotay declared, according to his notes, that

It is hard, of course, to be up here and not be mindful of the current environment around us the rise of Nationalism, and what that says about patriotism. discussions abound on race and gender, orientation and religion and of course, on that illusive notion of Privilege and how that shapes us (or doesnt)

People are often surprised when I tell them about where I grew upin the middle of nowhere Virginia And yes, as an Indian immigrant, I encountered my share of racismmostly the casual racism of ignorance and exclusion, less so the angry racism of hate and fear and that was its own privilege. Adversity builds characterand, you know, I pushed back too my own brand of casual reactionary-ism. But all things said, it was a wonderfully surprisingly supportive place to grow up

[a] hero of mine, Neil Degrasse Tyson (who I think of as my personal chocolate Jesus:P), recently tweeted: I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes peoples politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true.

I am also certainly privileged to be an Indian man in the technology industry in the good ol US of A.

During the Philadelphia protest, pictured above, Kotay stood at the front of the crowd of native-born and immigrant workers, wearing glasses pushed back to the top of his head. He also wore a coat with a yellow armband.

Comcast officials downplayed the companys role in the backlash against Trumps popular immigration policies, which complement his Buy American, Hire American campaign promises.

We understand that some of our employees are concerned and we respect theirdesire to express their opinions, Comcast flack John Demming said in a statement to the radio station.

Our primary focus is to make sure that all of our employees feel safe in their jobs, including while traveling. We have assured our employees that no one willbe asked to travel to a place that would result in them feeling vulnerable in any way.

Although progressives argue that Trumps policies promote violence, the actual violence is being directed against Trumps supporters.

Many companies reduce their labor costs and boost their profits by relying on immigrant and foreign contract-worker labor. Since 2013, Comcast has tried to hire hundreds of cheaper foreign white-collar professionals workers to take the jobs sought by young, debt-burdened American graduates. Many of those foreign workers come from India, according to the MyVisaJobs.com website, which displays government provided data. Without the extra inflow, companies would be forced to raise salaries to attract Americans into those professions, so nudging up salaries for all white-collar workers.

The MyVisaJobs.com site also shows that Comcast is seeking Green Cards for foreign white-collar workers.

Each year, the federal government provides up to 150,000 Green Cards to foreign workers sponsored by U.S. companies, such as Comcast. Of course, each new Green Card worker nudges down the average salary that Americans companies have to pay their domestic employees.

Legal immigration also delivers roughly 1 million new prospective customers each year to companies. Legal and illegal immigrants now comprise one out of seven people living in the United States. But many of the migrants are unskilled, and sorely on taxpayer-provided welfare paymentsto fund their living expenses, including Comcast services.

In 2015, Googles chairman Eric Schmidt bemoaned the slow population growth in the United States, Japan and other countries, asking how are you over a couple of decades to deal with the fact that one third of your customers are going to go away?

Well, one [way] is produce more customers through immigration, he said at theMarch 18 event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute.

However, Comcast, like many other companies, has to deal with government on many critical issues. One huge issue for Comcast is the planned merger of AT&T with Time-Warner, which would give AT&T a huge store of media products to help it compete against other companies, such as Comcast. Trump has voiced opposition to the merger, but his deputies have yet to announce a decision.

From 2009 to 2015, Comcast gradually bought the NBC media company.

Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com

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Corporate Backlash: Comcast Executives Push Employees To Protest Trump's Popular Immigration Reform - Breitbart News

BTW

Last week's restriction on Muslims and refugees was apparently just the beginning of President Donald Trump's immigration reform. Leaked draft executive orders obtained by Vox and the Washington Postshow the White House is considering denying and deporting immigrants on the basis of welfare, with families of those immigrants footing the bill.

The draft order, titled "Executive Order on Protecting Taxpayer Resources by Ensuring Our Immigration Laws Promote Accountability and Responsibility," calls for the Department of Homeland Security to deny immigrants from entering the U.S. if it's determined they will receive any kind of money from the government, be it in cash or in-kind benefits.

"Our countrys immigration laws are designed to protect American taxpayers and promote immigrant self-sufficiency. Yet households headed by aliens are much more likely than those headed by citizens to use Federal means-tested public benefits," the draft order reads.

However, the order fails to provide evidence to support the claim regarding immigrant-headed households, nor have experts reached such consensus, according to the Post.

The federal government can stop someone from entering the U.S. or from becoming a legal permanent resident if it's determined they'll become a "public charge," and depend on federal cash benefits. However, the order would open this determination to include in-kind benefits like Medicaid and food stamps, too.

The order calls for immigrants with U.S. visas who receive such welfare within their first five years in the country to be deported. And the friend or family member who sponsored the immigrant would have to reimburse the federal government for the benefits the immigrant received.

The order also wants to make these numbers publicit would make the government publish biannual reports on benefits used by immigrants, and reports on how much money could be saved, as well as how that money could be redirected to U.S. programs to go to "inner-city communities, and to disadvantaged youth."

Under the order, unauthorized immigrants would be ineligible for the child tax credit, even if the children are citizens, and would be ineligible for Social Security during the time they're unauthorized, even if they paid the tax.

Ultimately the order seeks to crack down on resources used by immigrants, regardless of visa and green card status, as a means to indicate that immigrants are wrongly taking tax money.

A second order, "Executive Order on Protecting American Jobs and Workers by Strengthening the Integrity of Foreign Worker Visa Programs," wants to stop the "jobs magnet" from driving immigration by unauthorized workers, and would rescind work visa provisions for immigrants found not to be in "the national interest" or in violation of immigration laws.

It also wants to make U.S. immigration "more merit based" by having site visits at companies that employ foreign workers, having Homeland Security report the total number of foreign-born people authorized to work in the U.S. biannually, and combating "birth tourism," the concept that non-citizens have children in the U.S. as an effort to gain citizenship.

According to the Post, the draft orders have circulated the desks of administration officials. It's unclear if Trump will move forward with them. The White House did not confirm the authenticity of the draft orders with the publication, and did not return requests for comment.

Read the full reports on the two orders by Vox and theWashington Post.

See more here:
Trump's draft executive order could deport immigrants for being poor - The Daily Dot