One of the major anti-immigration organizations is the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). It's been around a long time; I've seen their ads in a lot of places and heard their spokespeople often. So who started the outfit? A Paul Ehrlich acolyte. If you were a teenager in the 1970s you might remember Ehrlich. He wrote The Population Bomb, an apocalyptic and highly popular book which postulated that the world was going to run out of food to feed its citizens by end of that decade. Obviously that didn't happen, but its premise infected a Michigan environmentalist named John Tanton.
"FAIR is a big problem," says Peter Brimelow, an anti-immigration activist who runs the Web site VDARE.com, "because its natural constituency is conservative nationalists, but its operatives are basically liberal and centrist and terrified by Pat Buchanan." In fact, in the early days of the organization, the leadership was scared of its own members. The board resisted setting up local chapters for fear of who might show up and kept a tight lid on FAIR’s stationery, afraid some member would get their hands on it and write something "demagogic" that would discredit the group.Tanton recognized this situation was untenable. Notes from a 1982 FAIR board meeting report that Tanton was "very concerned that FAIR has acquired only 4,000 real members in three years, and believes it is time to change our methods." 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."
They're not as obviously rabid as the Minutemen or some of the other groups (or even some of the House Republicans), but they're a vocal bunch.
Thanks to Digby for the heads-up to the article.
Posted by Linkmeister at May 22, 2006 02:37 PM | TrackBack