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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhy a Banking Heiress Spent Her Fortune on Keeping Immigrants Out (NYT)
Last edited Wed Aug 14, 2019, 09:13 PM - Edit history (2)
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/anti-immigration-cordelia-scaife-may.htmlWhy a Banking Heiress Spent Her Fortune on Keeping Immigrants Out
Newly unearthed documents reveal how an environmental-minded socialite became an ardent nativist whose money helped sow the seeds of the Trump anti-immigration agenda.
By Nicholas Kulish and Mike McIntire
Aug. 14, 2019
She was an heiress without a cause an indifferent student, an unhappy young bride, a miscast socialite. Her most enduring passion was for birds.
But Cordelia Scaife May eventually found her lifes purpose: curbing what she perceived as the lethal threat of overpopulation by trying to shut Americas doors to immigrants.
She believed that the United States was being invaded on all fronts by foreigners, who breed like hamsters and exhaust natural resources. She thought that the border with Mexico should be sealed and that abortions on demand would contain the swelling masses in developing countries.
An heiress to the Mellon banking and industrial fortune with a half-billion dollars at her disposal, Mrs. May helped create what would become the modern anti-immigration movement. She bankrolled the founding and operation of the nations three largest restrictionist groups the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies as well as dozens of smaller ones, including some that have promulgated white nationalist views.
Today, 14 years after Mrs. Mays death, her money remains the lifeblood of the movement, through her Colcom Foundation. It has poured $180 million into a network of groups that spent decades agitating for policies now pursued by President Trump: militarizing the border, capping legal immigration, prioritizing skills over family ties for entry and reducing access to public benefits for migrants, as in the new rule issued just this week by the administration.
A letter to a young cousin in the 1980s.
Stephen Miller, the architect of President Trumps anti-immigration agenda, is a longtime ally of FAIR. Doug Mills/The New York Times
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Why a Banking Heiress Spent Her Fortune on Keeping Immigrants Out (NYT) (Original Post)
dalton99a
Aug 2019
OP
superpatriotman
(6,252 posts)1. Mellon-Scaife money runs deep and dark on the right
Real scumbag fascists.
struggle4progress
(118,330 posts)2. And her brother Richard Mellon Scaife was another prize
CatMor
(6,212 posts)3. The wealthy pretty much think ...
the world is meant exclusively for them and not us unwashed masses.
brush
(53,837 posts)4. I guess she and her ancestors were all born here on this continent.
None of them came over on some boat. What is it with people like this? And sorry to say, they are always white.
UTUSN
(70,725 posts)5. K&R for, the sicko SCAIFEs, wish we could *pin* this!1
SaintLouisBlues
(1,244 posts)6. Like the Sierra Club with their bullshit anti-immigration stance.
They have walked it back recently, but I will not join that organization ever again.
rockfordfile
(8,704 posts)7. Those people are un-American