center for european studies
He said Tanton "had some role back in the mid-80s in helping rustle up money for CIS," but added that he and Tanton had no "personal relationship." TSCP has published a number of racist texts, including a English language translation of the French novel Camp of the Saints, a book penned by Frenchman Jean Raspail. The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University works to increase the knowledge of the cultures, economies, histories, environment and contemporary affairs of Latin America; foster cooperation and understanding among the peoples of the Americas; and contribute to democracy, social progress and sustainable development throughout the hemisphere. Research proposals are accepted from all disciplines, but must be directly related to the region.. Laughlin was the most prominent eugenics advocate prior to WWII and went on to co-found the racist pseudoscience promoting Pioneer Fund, which Tanton had close ties to through the 90s. To do that, Tanton needed an independent think tank, which came to fruition in 1985, called the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Vaughan wrote, “One legacy of TPS has been its contribution to the burgeoning street gang problem in the United States.” A 2008 report authored by CIS fellow David Seminara referred to immigrants as “Third-World gold-diggers.” In the same report, he wrote, “The use of fraudulent marriage petitions is prevalent among international terrorists.”, In 2010, another CIS fellow David North attempted to blame teenage obesity on immigrants in a piece titled, “Farfetched? — CIS research director Steven Camarota arguing that the children of immigrants are prone to criminality in response to research showing that immigrants commit less crime than the native U.S. population, 2008, “Perhaps the simplest way to approach [skills-based immigration] would be to admit anyone who scores above 140 on an IQ test.” — CIS executive director Mark Krikorian advocating for an IQ test component in a draconian immigration policy regime, The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal, 2008, “There are real differences between groups, not just trivial ones that we have to notice more than we should. But a number of publications also contain bigoted language demonizing immigrants from all walks of life and making a mockery of CIS’s “pro-immigrant” tagline. For credibility, this will need to be independent of FAIR, though the Center for Immigration Studies, as we’re calling it, is starting off as a project of FAIR.” The next day, Tanton wrote to Gregory D. Curtis in Pennsylvania where he again described CIS as a “project,” writing, “We’re in the process of setting up independent projects both the Center for Immigration Studies, and the Litigation Program.”. A study conducted by the SPLC and the Center for New Community (CNC) found that CIS circulated over 2,000 pieces of material from racist websites or penned by white nationalists, including three pieces published on the AMREN website. It is the worst kind of deception, but politicians, the conservative media and some Americans eat it up because it always looks somewhat legitimate at first glance.” CIS has also defended the usage of “anchor babies” and released a report on “terror babies,” popular concepts among the nativist movement. April 2, 2021 In Russian Roulette In this episode of Russian Roulette, Heather sits down with Michael J. Does Illegal Immigration Facilitate Teenage Obesity?” Also in 2010, following the BP oil spill, then CIS writer Phil Cafaro attempted to blame immigrants for the spill, writing, “Population makes a difference — and immigration levels make a difference to our overall population,” before concluding, “In the long-term, regarding efforts to create a sustainable society, these demographic trends loom a lot larger than whether or not BP or Halliburton made some greedy, foolish decisions to cut corners in the Gulf.”. "He wrote us a check, I think it was a year ago," he said of Tanton. “First of all, 72 individuals, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, have been implicated in terroristic activity in the United States who hail from those seven nations, point one,” Miller said on NBC’s Meet the Press. CIS has also worked with Border Patrol in the past, most notably during border tours that the group organizes on both the US/Mexico and US/Canada borders. Krikorian says today’s immigrants “look” a lot different than immigrants from 100 years ago. I would think being hung, drawn, and quartered is probably too good for him.” — CIS senior policy analyst Stephen Steinlight at a Tea Party meeting, 2014, “It's ironic — it's illegal for them to work, but they’re working for the immigration service in a sense...I don't have any problem with it in principle. These immigrants, he claims, have intense difficulties with assimilation such as learning English, transnationalism, and “affirmative action for immigrants.”. Krikorian says in denying immigrants access to jobs, identification, housing and “in general making it as difficult as possible for an illegal immigrant to live a normal life here,” undocumented individuals would “self-deport.”. Krikorian, in a recent Reddit AMA, attempted to distance himself from Taylor, writing, “Sorry, I never "promoted" him. In 1991, he told him about former Klan leader David Duke's campaign for governor of Louisiana that year, which he described as based on "the excesses of affirmative action and illegitimate pregnancy." A 1994 Tanton letter also shows that he was critical to raising funds for CIS. (First Place Winner), Through programs, grants, fellowships, and activities, DRCLAS strives to provide support and resources for students, faculty, and scholars working in and on Latin America.Â. When Tanton started CIS as a FAIR project in 1985, Graham was a member of the FAIR board. It’s just not there.” Despite its efforts to “vehemently deny racist motivations” as Gardiner points out in the case of FAIR, the group is capable of “playing to racialized fears.” Among the millions of words both written and uttered by CIS staffers, including Krikorian, are a litany of examples of attacks on Latinos, Muslims and immigrants in general. The Taylor-Krikorian connections don’t stop there. — CIS executive director Mark Krikorian on anti-Muslim conspiracist Frank Gaffney’s radio show, 2014, “There’s no court that will stop Obama from doing anything. In 1958, Pearson founded the Northern League, a “Pan-Nordic cultural organization” dedicated to convincing Northern Europeans to recognize “their common problems and their common destiny,” and to come to “an appreciation… of the threat of biological extinction with which we [i.e. The 36,000 number promoted Rep. Lou Barletta, a close ally of the anti-immigrant groups to write an op-ed citing the first CIS report where he claimed its release was “the day immigration reform died.”. No such reprimand occurred when Steinlight, speaking a Tea Party gathering in Texas in 2013, said the following about Mexican immigrants: “Within a few years, I promise you, and I love it when they say, ‘oh, those people don’t care about political rights, they just care about jobs.’ Do you know how long they will be here before the political activists get engaged in that community, and foment something that will look like the civil rights movement for African Americans, but I can promise you it will be a lot bloodier.” At another Tea Party event in 2014 in Texas, Steinlight anticipated President Trump’s Muslim ban by calling for the return of something similar to the McCarran Internal Security Act, which excluded communists and fascists from emigrating to the United States, but applied to Muslims. Steinlight and other CIS staffers have not been shy about promoting their strong ties with agencies now under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a department formed long after Tanton wrote his strategic memos. He has also routinely attacked influential Americans of color. Bristow is now the white nationalist movement’s go-to lawyer. One article CIS circulated was authored by Holocaust-denier John Friend who has described the Holocaust as a “manufactured narrative, chock full of a wide variety of ridiculous claims and impossible events, all to advance the Jewish agenda of world domination and subjugation.”, Another piece CIS circulated is from Rense.com, a site full of Holocaust-denial material which published a birthday ode to Adolf Hitler in 2015 including lines like, “You NEVER built Jewish gas chambers,” and “You removed Jews and their Zionist agenda from positions of power in banking, media and politics, but only after World Zionism declared World War on Germany In 1933 and proved their hatred for the German people.” The piece refers to Jews as “predators” and includes lines like, “How come that the Jews are so rich? Hired in 2005 by Krikorian, CIS’s senior policy analyst Stephen Steinlight perhaps best epitomizes the organization’s general distaste of modern, that is to say largely nonwhite, immigrants. In 2002, Lutton joined the editorial advisory board of the antisemitic Occidental Quarterly publication. Kobach first began experimenting with this policy on a smaller scale, helping to draft and then defend legislation like Ordinance 5165 in Fremont, Nebraska, which barred undocumented individuals from renting property. He adds that Colombian communities in the United States would “serve as a base of operations for FARC attacks in the United States in the event of war.”, On Mexicans he says, “It could well be that there are cultural or other reasons that Mexican immigrants are especially deficient in institution building, but they nonetheless reflect a broader trend in modern society.” Krikorian adds, “But Mexico, already the eight-hundred pound gorilla of immigration policy, is the eight-thousand-pound gorilla with regard to sovereignty, due to its domination of the immigration flow, its proximity, and the historical resentments that many of its people harbor toward our country.”. The man Tanton recorded his oral biography with was a close friend, Otis Graham, who helped grow CIS during its early years before the arrival of its current executive director, Mark Krikorian, in 1995. Former FAIR executive director Julie Kirchner also was hired to a position at USCIS. In his letter congratulating Krikorian in February 1995, Tanton wrote, “I have tried in particular to help with fund-raising through the years, and have been able to steer some small amounts of money toward CIS.” Less than a year before Krikorian joined CIS, Dan Stein was recording his own oral biography with Tanton. “, In another 1986 memo to a file kept for the purpose of eventually writing an autobiography, Tanton described CIS as an organization over which he had direct control, as opposed to others that he said were "one level removed from our control." "It was the first check I have seen from him in nine or 10 years ... We have no institutional relationship. The book gained more notoriety during the 2016 election campaign after reports that Trump’s senior advisor and Breitbart executive Stephen Bannon was a major fan of the novel. TSCP also publishes a quarterly journal, The Social Contract (TSC), which has routinely published nativist screeds authored by influential white nationalists including the late Sam Francis, Patrick Buchanan, and Peter Brimelow. In early 2014, as the prospect of comprehensive immigration measures diminished, CIS again relied on leaks from its friends in DHS to publish two reports. One white nationalist who has routinely cited CIS figures is Jared Taylor, one of the most prominent white nationalists of the past quarter century. What began as a reflection of IRCA in 1987 has evolved into CIS's core policy. This was a key goal of Tanton’s, first described in a memo he wrote back in 1986. CIS’s much-touted tagline is “low immigration, pro-immigrant,” but the organization has a decades-long history of circulating racist writers, while also associating with white nationalists. In total, CIS staffers have testified over 100 times, and 11 times since the beginning of 2016. In 2017, he described civil rights leader John Lewis as, “Like a grown man who won the big game in high school and never stops talking about it.” After Justice Susan Sotomayor was appointed in 2009, Krikorian took to National Review Online to say that Americans should not be “giving in to” the “unnatural” pronunciation of her last name. Though there is no explicit evidence of collusion between Tanton, Krikorian and Dan Stein, FAIR’s president, all three have attempted to change the narrative, attempting to put some distance between FAIR, Tanton, and the think tank. Krikorian wrote a review of Brimelow’s infamous anti-immigrant book Alien Nation, calling it a “flawed jewel.” CIS also published Brimelow in a 1998 colloquy titled “What, Then, Is the American, This New Man?”. Fifty-one pieces circulated by CIS were written by Brimelow. Happy now?” — CIS executive director Mark Krikorian on Twitter, 2016, "We send out a weekly roundup of immigration commentary from all sides, including people we don't agree with. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears,” a comment indistinguishable from Krikorian’s following the Haitian earthquake in 2010. Kobach has also attended a TSC Writers Workshop. Supports undergraduate and graduate or professional students conducting thesis or dissertation research related to Latin America and the Caribbean. Alright? Tanton stated, “We actually donated several of our board members and donors to the Center for Immigration Studies as it was called – Gene Katz became one of their important donors. Being arrested in illegal status in New York, and being sent home to Lima or Sydney is a major disincentive, and the individual either will not try again, or will not try again quickly,” he says. CIS fellow John Miano has written dozens of pieces for VDARE, dating back to 2001, and in 2016 attended VDARE’s Christmas party. In his National Review column he wrote, “The narrowest solution would be to restore the principle of “ideological exclusion” to U.S. immigration law. CIS staffers have also written articles for VDARE throughout the years. The number is chosen because it constitutes both a form of demographic riposte to the hated figure of the six million Jewish victims of Nazism that Muslims believe confers vast moral and political advantages on Jews and, secondly, it allows Muslims to claim they have already achieved numerical parity with American Jews.” Krikorian, for his part, called Muslims a “vicious people” writing in National Review in 2011, “Well, I’m afraid that in the Islamic world democracy faces the problem of a vicious people, one where the desire for freedom is indeed written in every human heart, but the freedom to do evil.” In July of 2017, as tensions mounted in Jerusalem, Krikorian tweeted that Palestinians want to “exterminate the Jews.”. CIS reports have been widely criticized and debunked by groups such as the Immigration Policy Center and the CATO Institute. Tanton described in his oral biography that CIS “has gone on to be quite successful” and that most certainly is the case in part due to the group working hard to distance itself from its founder, while at the same time fostering relationships with elected officials and government agencies. At his perch at the National Review and on Twitter Krikorian has asked “How many rapists & drug-dealers are the anti-deportation radicals protecting?” and argued that Mexico’s “weakness and backwardness has been deeply harmful to the United States.” Krikorian has called Mexican-American journalist Jorge Ramos a “white-Hispanic ethnic hustler” and riffed that if the U.S. was a police state, as Chelsea Manning claimed, then “this mentally ill traitor would have been dumped in a shallow grave years ago.” In one exchange on Twitter, Krikorian tried to whitewash the role eugenicists played in the 1924 Immigration Act only to stop responding when Harry H. Laughlin’s role in advancing the legislation was mentioned. He stated, “If I had my druthers, we would bring back something like the McCarran Act, in the 50s which barred communists and fascists on the grounds that they believe in things that are subversive to the Constitution. Founded in 1985 by John Tanton, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has gone on to become the go-to think tank for the anti-immigrant movement with its reports and staffers often cited by media and anti-immigrant politicians. David North explains in his 1987 article that immigrants need to be treated as poorly as possible so that they themselves choose to leave, alleviating the work of immigration enforcement. Justicia Restaurativa en Colombia y las Humanidades / Restorative Justice in Colombia and the Humanities, Spring 2021 Eduardo Matos Moctezuma Lecture to Be Delivered by Ann Cyphers of Mexico's National Autonomous University, Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Launches Forum to Track Rewriting of Chilean Constitution. Tanton donated his correspondences to the University of Michigan and among the conversations with Klan lawyers and white nationalists, his role in establishing CIS is made clear. Krikorian sounded a similar note in 2004, when he testified before an immigration subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in 2009 estimates it would cost the federal government $635 million, an additional $10 million in compliance costs, and at least $200 million to the private sector alone. Decades of psychometric testing has indicated that at least in America you have Jews with the highest average IQ, usually followed by East Asians, and then you have non-Jewish whites, Hispanics and then blacks. Following the tragic shooting death of Kate Steinle in San Francisco in July of 2015 by an undocumented immigrant, CIS and other anti-immigrants used it as an opportunity to attack so-called “sanctuary cities.” CIS published a map of sanctuary jurisdictions on its website which prompted a backlash. We have published and spoken, myself and my staff, millions of words and there is nothing in there that you’re gonna be able to say that is based on a sort of using a religious or racial or ethnic criteria in running our immigration policy. ", The narrative about CIS’ independence, especially from a white nationalist like Tanton, is key to the organization being seen as credible in the Beltway. E-Verify is an integral component of attrition through enforcement according to Krikorian. A week earlier, Steinle’s father, who was with her on the night she died, provided quotes in a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle titled, “Leave Kate Steinle Out of the Immigration Debate.” “I don’t know who coined ‘Kate’s Law,’” Jim Steinle, stated, “It certainly wasn’t us.” In 2015, Steinle said in an interview that his family is not opposed to sanctuary policies. Fjordman was cited over 100 times in the manifesto of racist mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011. Founded in 1985 by John Tanton, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has gone on to become the go-to think tank for the anti-immigrant movement with its reports and staffers often cited by media and anti-immigrant politicians. I include the New York Times and their editorials on immigration are usually things we completely disagree with, and we include a pretty broad range, including some sites that publish other material that frankly i find kind of objectionable. This affects all people — not just the undocumented. CISâs much-touted tagline is âlow immigration, pro-immigrant,â but the organization has a decades-long history of circulating racist writers, while Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s). In 2016, CIS fellow John Miano spoke at the gathering, while Krikorian did the year before, and Jessica Vaughan, CIS’s director of policy studies, spoke in 2012. The first claimed that ICE “released 68,000 aliens with criminal convictions” in 2013 and the second cited internal DHS metrics claiming that 36,000 immigrants awaiting the outcome of their deportation proceedings were released by DHS under President Obama’s watch that same year. Alex Nowasteh, an Immigration Policy Analyst at CATO said in early 2017, "Oh, I'm convinced that [CIS executive director Mark Krikorian is] wrong about all the facts and issues. CIS reports and blog pieces have also been widely discredited and debunked by groups like the Immigration Policy Center and CATO Institute that criticized CIS in 2015 for exaggerating immigrant welfare use. During Sessions’ rebuttals Kephart could be seen sitting behind the Senator. Liz Paddok left the main FAIR board and went over to the Center for Immigration Studies board. Graham did hold the role of executive director and others that were not specified. But five years prior to this, Krikorian was exposed to Richwine’s views on race and IQ in a panel discussion organized by the American Enterprise Institute to discuss Krikorian’s book, The New Case Against Immigration. While capable of appearing as a sober-minded policy analyst in some settings, longtime CIS executive director Mark Krikorian’s contributions to the immigration policy debate rarely rise above petulant commentary dashed with extremist statements. Those large donations were key because CIS does not do direct-mail fundraising. While CIS and its position within the Tanton network has been on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) radar for years, what precipitated listing CIS as an anti-immigrant hate group for 2016 was its repeated circulation of white nationalist and antisemitic writers in its weekly newsletter and the commissioning of a policy analyst who had previously been pushed out of the conservative Heritage Foundation for his embrace of racist pseudoscience. Eight years later, in 1994, Tanton wrote that he was still setting what he called "the proper roles for FAIR and CIS. A Time for Diplomacy - 2021 Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, Jr. Lecture on International Studies In the year 2019-2020, DUCIGS organized and co-sponsored over 240 events; awarded research and travel grants to over 200 students and faculty; and continued to ⦠Journalists, as well as civil rights groups such as the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League, reported on a the racist nature of Richwine’s Harvard dissertation in which he claimed, “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.” Richwine’s beliefs in IQ differences between the races are prevalent not only in anti-immigrant circles, but also white nationalist ones. Only Jews are offended by the question because they are too arrogant and insecure to recognize [sic] that every stranger, not necessarily a Jew, is being asked from time to time who is he and what makes him tick.”. Donald Trump’s rise to power brought CIS and the rest of the nativist movement closer to the White House and closer to shaping immigration policy than ever before. The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) argues that John Tanton âplayed no part in its organizationâ as they state their founder is Otis L. Graham. Writing in his regular column on the conservative National Review Online nine days after the natural disaster, Krikorian remarked, “My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.” (His emphasis). Tanton would send Krikorian suggestions and also included him in letters penned to white nationalists. In sum, we’ll witness the unmaking of America.” — CIS senior policy analyst Stephen Steinlight commenting on the prospect of 2014 immigration reform passing, 2014, “Send him back to Liberia so it’s on their dime.” — CIS executive director Mark Krikorian on the Liberian immigrant who was diagnosed with ebola in Texas, 2014, "We have to have security against both the dishwasher and the terrorist because you can't distinguish between the two with regards to immigration control." Despite having no “institutional relationship” with Tanton, it is clear through Tanton’s correspondences that the two men stayed in contact throughout the years. When CIS came up, Stein admitted that both organizations shared office space but also stated, “Yes, CIS was never a project of FAIR, but it was a bit of a spin-off.” This is a bit of a whitewash of the facts contained in Tanton’s memo almost 10 years earlier where he specifically states that CIS was starting off “as a project of FAIR.”, In a correspondence to the SPLC as well as testimony before Congress, Krikorian has also pushed this narrative. The CNC detailed the relationships between CIS and these agencies at length in a 2015 report titled, “Blurring Borders: Collusion Between Anti-Immigrant Groups and Immigration Enforcement Agencies.” Speaking specifically about CIS, it reads, “In a July 2014 appearance on the internet radio show Cotto & Company, CIS Senior Policy Analyst Stephen Steinlight admitted that a recent CIS publication that inspired multiple Congressional inquiries could not have been done "without our ongoing good connections with whistleblowers in agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” As recently as March 31, 2015, CIS’s Jessica Vaughan published analysis based on, as she opaquely phrased it, “DHS statistics, which have not been released to the public, but were obtained by the Center.”. Regnery also founded the Charles Martel Society, the publisher of the racist and antisemitic journal Occidental Quarterly. In 1995, another CIS transfer from FAIR occurred, this time in the person of Krikorian. In a report Steinlight wrote for CIS four years before he joined the organization titled, “The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography,” Steinlight painted American Muslims as Jew haters, writing, “For reasons that appear simultaneously self-evident and self-serving, spokespersons from the organized Muslim community regularly cite the figure of six million Muslims. Both bills allow law enforcement to racially profile individuals when there is “reasonable suspicion” they are undocumented. VDARE was founded by English white nationalist Peter Brimelow, a former National Review contributor who now is seen as a key player in the racist Alt-Right movement. Brimelow’s relationship with CIS dates back decades, when Tanton would write to him and Krikorian. Race is different in all sorts of ways, and probably the most important way is in IQ. But if they are important sites of immigration news, we include them because the whole point is, see the broad spectrums of views and judge for yourself.