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immigrants
I have a cover story in the most recent issue of In These Times that goes up on the web today, "Keeping America Empty" How one small-town conservationist launched today’s anti-immigration movement --- by Christopher Hayes The article is a profile of John Tanton, a soft-spoken retired opthamologist from Petoskey, Michigan who almost single-handedly built from scratch the anti-immigration movement that today commands such political capital. In 1978 when he founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) there wasn't a single organization in the US advocating reduced immigration. Given the reactionary bent of the movement he founded, you might expect Tanton to be a hard-core, Limbaughesque conservative. But he's a committed environmentalist, Planned Parenthood supporter and self-described progressive. I went up to Petoskey to spend a few days with Tanton and figure out how it was that a whip-smart, mild-mannered farm boy committed to conserving the natural world ended up seeding and nurturing a movement that now dispatches gun-toting vigilantes to patrol the border: "Crisscrossing the country, Tanton found little interest in his conservation-based arguments for reduced immigration, but kept hearing the same complaint. “‘I tell you what pisses me off,’” Tanton recalls people saying. “‘It’s going into a ballot box and finding a ballot in a language I can’t read.’ So it became clear that the language question had a lot more emotional power than the immigration question.”
Tanton tried to persuade FAIR to harness this “emotional power,” but the board declined. So in 1983, Tanton sent out a fundraising letter on behalf of a new group he created called U.S. English. Typically, Tanton says, direct mail garners a contribution from around 1 percent of recipients. “The very first mailing we ever did for U.S. English got almost a 10 percent return,” he says. “That’s unheard of.” John Tanton had discovered the power of the culture war. The success of U.S. English taught Tanton a crucial lesson. If the immigration restriction movement was to succeed, it would have to be rooted in an emotional appeal to those who felt that their country, their language, their very identity was under assault. “Feelings,” Tanton says in a tone reminiscent of Spock sharing some hard-won insight on human behavior, “trump facts.” " » in related news, human chains (as part of an 'economic boycott') will be formed next monday, may 1st at 12:16pm at locations throughout the city to protest legislation that would crack down on immigrant workers and their employers. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||