"The most influential anti-immigration network in America tries to convert liberals to its cause."

[pampango]

http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=guilt_by_association

A few years ago, anti-immigration ads began popping up in a number of progressive magazines, including this one. The ads displayed an environmental wasteland and suggested that immigrants were somehow the cause -- one showed an image of a congested highway with an adjoining paragraph about how immigration contributes to commuter traffic.

The ads were purchased by a network of anti-immigration organizations, all of them with ties to a man named John Tanton. According to the Center for New Community, which monitors the white nationalist movement, Tanton has fostered over a dozen groups that work to reduce immigration. Six of these organizations, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), have been cataloged as "hate groups" by the Southern Poverty Law Center, but Tanton doesn't seem bothered by his critics. He even framed a copy of the center's 2002 investigation of him (titled "The Puppeteer") and hung it in his office.

Tanton is not the financier of this network -- his pockets only go so deep -- but he could safely be called its architect. In 1985, for instance, he decided that the movement required an "independent" think tank, and shortly thereafter the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) was founded. Otis Graham, an old friend of Tanton's, was named chair of the board. ("I'm a great believer in cronyism," Tanton has said, only somewhat facetiously.) The center remained under FAIR's umbrella for only six months; it seceded quickly enough that barely a trace of their former connection remains. Devin Burghart, a civil-rights activist who writes frequently about the anti-immigration movement, has said that Tanton has done for immigration politics "what Pat Robertson did for the Christian right. As a tactician, he's done a brilliant job."

PFIR (Progressives for Immigration Reform), which launched in 2009, bills itself as an environmentalist group and argues that immigration "will only lead to more sprawl, more congestion, more pollution, and more degradation." ... Talking Points Memo has called PFIR "the latest front group of the anti-immigrant John Tanton Network." The organization has tried to downplay its connection to Tanton: The fact that Durant used to work as an attorney at FAIR -- before her tenure at the Justice Department in the George W. Bush administration -- is absent from her bio on PFIR's Web site. In fact, no ties to FAIR are disclosed on PFIR's site, despite a number of overlaps. Frank Morris, the vice president of the group, and Richard Lamm, a board member, have leadership roles at FAIR. Lamm, a Democrat and the former governor of Colorado, and Tanton are old friends. In 2004, Lamm made a widely circulated speech titled "I have a Plan to Destroy America," in which he warned that diversity only brings "turmoil, tension, and tragedy."