Arizona SB 1070 and the FAIR Connection

The Rachel Maddow Show recently did a great piece on FAIR, John Tanton, and how they all tie in with the Arizona anti-immigrant law. This the group Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-CA) really works for:

As previously noted (and pointed out in the Maddow piece), FAIR was founded by known racist John Tanton. FAIR is an anti-immigration lobbying organization with a far right-wing agenda. The group counts among its major benefactors the Pioneer Fund, which has contributed $1.2 million to fund FAIR’s efforts.

The Pioneer Fund is a group founded in 1937. Of its main purposes upon its founding was to continue the work of Nazi eugenicists and their ongoing efforts to prove the genetic superiority of white people. At the time, the Pioneer Fund was primarily concerned with proving white genetic superiority over blacks. The original incorporation documents of the Pioneer Fund lists as one of its two primary purposes as “encouraging the propagation of those “descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States and/or from related stocks, or to classes of children, the majority of whom are deemed to be so descended.

“Its second purpose was to support academic research and the “dissemination of information, into the ‘problem of heredity and eugenics’” and “the problems of race betterment.”

FAIR has its tentacles all over the anti-immigration bill signed into law last week by Arizona governor Jan Brewer. The bill’s main sponsor, State Senator Russell Pearce, enlisted the help of attorney Kris Kobach to write the specific language of the bill. Kobach is the legal counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of FAIR.

“Nativist Attorney” Kobach has also been retained since October 2009 by notorious Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to train the Maricopa County (AZ) Sheriff’s Office in immigration matters to the tune of $300 per hour, plus a $1500 monthly retainer, plus expenses. That is, of course, at taxpayers’ expense–Kobach’s contract, according to Stephen Lemons of the Phoenix New Times, is being paid out of Maricopa County’s RICO fund, the federal money allocated to the county to combat organized crime and racketeering activities.

Kobach is also a law professor at the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Law, and is a candidate for Secretary of State in Kansas. He failed at his previous attempt to win a public office as a candidate for Congress in Kansas’ 3rd District, a Republican stronghold, in 2004 because “in general, he was accused of taking money from a white supremacist organization, and the charge stuck.” (Kobach is, of course, a Republican.)

Russell Pearce–the man who enlisted Kobach’s help in writing the bill–himself has some dubious ties. In 2006 he sent an e-mail to supporters containing an article entitled “Who Rules America? The Alien Grip on our News and Entertainment Media Must Be Broken,” and a link to the article’s sponsor, the National Alliance, a white supremacist group. Pearce subsequently sent an apology e-mail, claiming that he had not read the article (which decried the “Jewish Holocaust tale” among other anti-Semitic and racist charges), and that he does not share the group’s neo-Nazi views.

More recently, however, Pearce has been photographed and attended rallies with neo-Nazi leader J.T. Ready:

That’s Ready on the left, Pearce on the right. That photo was taken at an anti-immigrant rally put on by the White Knights of America, a neo-Nazi, white supremacist hate group (and who presumably took their name from Mississippi’s White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan).

Pearce and Ready go back at least a few years. Pearce was an honored guest at a 2007 anti-immigration rally sponsored by Ready and his neo-Nazi pals at the Arizona State Capital (that’s Ready singing the praises of Pearce toward the beginning of the video.):

The forces behind the anti-immigrant bill signed into law last week can be traced directly back to FAIR.  In addition to the sanctioning of racial profiling, the law provides that state agencies can be sued by any citizen for not doing enough to enforce the state’s immigration laws (as well as being too overzealous, opening state agencies to a myriad of civil rights lawsuits). And according to the research of Rachel Maddow’s crack staff, there is a provision written into the law that states that any individual or organization who brings such a suit and wins (and FAIR makes much of its money by such lawsuits) is entitled by law to recover court costs and attorney’s fees from the state.

These are the driving influences behind the anti-immigration efforts in Arizona and across the United States. These are the causes championed by Rep. Brian Bilbray. These are the people he associates with (remember, Bilbray was a paid lobbyist for FAIR prior to being elected to represent the CA 50th, and currently serves on the group’s Board of Advisors).

It is frightening to think that the Nazi movement is alive and well and so deeply rooted here in the U.S. It’s even more frightening to find that our elected officials–the people who are charged with protecting the rights of all citizens, white and non-white alike–are so closely tied to such extremist organizations.

UPDATE: On a slightly related note:

Since the anti-immigrant movement can be tied to the Tea Party movement (albeit somewhat loosely), this Newsweek article deals with the question of the year to date: “Are the Tea Partiers racist?”

A study conducted by the University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Sexuality concluded that Tea Partiers tend to be more “racially resentful:” “The data suggests that people who are Tea Party supporters have a higher probability”—25 percent, to be exact—”of being racially resentful than those who are not Tea Party supporters,” says Christopher Parker, who directed the study. “The Tea Party is not just about politics and size of government. The data suggests it may also be about race.”

Seems to be a trend these days…….

Thanks to Jeremy Gilbert, who contributed a ton of research to this post.

Has Brian Bilbray Lost His Mind?

I’m embarrassed to be a San Diegan today.  It’s pretty well known that San Diego Congressman Brian Bilbray is infamously anti-immigration, flaunting his ties to FAIR (more on that later) as a former lobbyist for that organization and a current board member.   But yesterday, in an appearance on “Hardball” with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Bilbray showed his true colors.

In a discussion with Matthews and California Democratic Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez about the Arizona anti-immigration law just passed in the legislature, the trio tackled the issue of how exactly Arizona law enforcement officials are to identify whether someone appears to be in the country illegally or not.  The pertinent question is “How do you know if someone is illegal or not just by their appearance?”

It’s pretty easy, according to Bilbray.  Basically, anybody who looks Mexican is subject to questioning:  “They will look at the kind of dress you wear.  There’s different types of attire, there’s different types of—right down to the shoes, right down to the clothes, but mostly by behavior.”

Here’s the segment:

Got it.  So if you look or dress in a manner other than “American” then you should be detained.  What Bilbray is saying is perfectly acceptable, and what the Arizona law is promoting, is that racial profiling is now the preferred method to enforcing immigration laws.  It’s now OK to choose a person off the street who looks like a foreigner and ask him or her for their papers.  This means, of course, as Congresswoman Sanchez points out in the segment, that since she herself is Hispanic, then she will be required to carry around with her at all times her birth certificate and affidavits along with her driver’s license and other ID as proof that she is a U.S. citizen.

And how about this man?:

He sure looks like an illegal immigrant, no?  Doesn’t he look Mexican to you?  Just look at the way he’s dressed!  Look at that tie!  Would anybody from the U.S. wear that kind of tie?

That man, of course, is Congressman Raul Grijalva, the Democratic Representative from the Arizona 7th district.  According to Bilbray, since this man looks like an immigrant, he should be pulled aside and questioned.  Mind you, this is a colleague of Bilbray’s in the U.S. House of Representatives!

Here’s Congressman Grijalva earlier this week with Keith Olbermann:

As Mr. Grijalva says so succinctly, what the Arizona law does and what Mr. Bilbray advocates is to “codify into law racial profiling.”  In a bold stance, the Congressman is advocating a boycott against his home state until this law is vetoed by the Republican governor of Arizona.

But Bilbray’s stance on immigration, and his essentially racist attitude towards immigrants in general and Mexian/Latino immigrants in particular (by the way, his mother is an Australian immigrant), should really come as no surprise.  His positions can be traced directly to his affiliation with FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform), an organization that has been labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-immigration hate group.

Prior to his current stint in Congress, Bilbray was a lobbyist for FAIR.  He also currently sits on the group’s Board of Advisors.

FAIR is the brainchild of known racist John Tanton, the founder of eight other such anti-immigration groups.  Tanton and FAIR have received a great deal of  funding from the Pioneer Fund, described by the New York Times‘ Bob Herbert as “an organization that spent decades pushing the notion that whites are genetically superior to blacks.” FAIR is also an organization that has expressed it’s approval for China’s forced abortion policy as a means to control its population (I’m sure that’ll go over well with the Pro Life Republican base).

Among the main goals of FAIR is to shut down the borders, limiting all immigration, not just illegal immigration, to a mere trickle.  Which may sound fair and reasonable, but when you consider some of the statements made by the group’s leaders, a different picture emerges.

For example, John Tanton declared that unless America’s borders are sealed, the country will be overrun by people “defecating and creating garbage looking for jobs.” Or Tanton hero Garrett Hardin, a “committed eugenicist and for years a professor of human ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara” who wrote in his essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” that “Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.”  Or former Colorado Governor and FAIR Advisory Board member Richard Lamm, who said that “new cultures” in the U.S. “are diluting what we are and who we are.”

Add Bilbray’s assertion that you can tell an illegal immigrant from the kind of clothes and shoes they wear and we get a better idea of what kind of organization this is, and what Bilbray’s values really are.

What they are really saying is that racial profiling is a legitimate tool to root out the “undesirables” from our society.  That anybody that looks “different” will now be a target for legalized harassment.  That bigotry and racism are alive and well.  Put these notions in the wrong heads and the results will be catastrophic.

We can all acknowledge that our immigration system is broken and is in desperate need of reform.  But what we don’t need is to unleash a bunch of zealots onto the streets looking for an excuse to club someone over the head because they might be an illegal immigrant.  We’re all aware of the problems that illegal immigration presents to our communities, but there’s a right way to deal with it and a wrong way.  Mr. Bilbray’s way is the wrong way.

In a region that sits on the border, what we need is for cooler heads to prevail.  Instead of encouraging racist stereotypes and the raising of tensions in an already volatile environment to a boiling point, we need a representative in Congress who will work to find real, reasonable, and EFFECTIVE long term solutions to America’s immigration problems.  Rounding people up at random and demanding to see their papers, corralling them under threat of deportation and possible bodily harm if they don’t carry their life’s history with them at all times doesn’t sound like the American way to me.  It sounds like a much more shameful time in human history not all that long ago halfway around the world.