Posts Tagged ‘federation for american immigration reform’
 
September 28, 2012 0

Numbers USA donates $100,000 to help defend anti-immigrant ordinance in Famers Branch, Texas

The anti-immigrant group, Num­ber­sUSA, recently donated $100,000 to the Farm­ers Branch legal defense fund in an effort to help an anti-immigrant ordi­nance in the Texas town pass its lat­est round of legal challenges.

If upheld, the ordi­nance would ban all undoc­u­mented immi­grants from rent­ing prop­er­ties in the town.  Ban­ning undoc­u­mented immi­grants from rent­ing prop­er­ties is a small part of the “attri­tion through enforce­ment” plat­form cre­ated by the anti-immigrant move­ment. The platform’s goal is to make life so dif­fi­cult for immi­grants that they will “self deport” back to their coun­try of origin.

Accord­ing to finan­cial records, Num­ber­sUSA donated $10,000 to the Farm­ers Branch Legal Defense Fund in 2009, so this most recent con­tri­bu­tion of $100,000 is a ten-fold increase. Last week the full Fifth Cir­cuit Court of Appeals heard oral argu­ments on the case. If the Fifth Cir­cuit upholds the law, a key piece of the anti-immigrant movement’s “attri­tion through enforce­ment” pol­icy would be given the green light and sim­i­lar ordi­nances may spring up in towns across the country.

Another anti-immigrant group, the Immi­gra­tion Reform Law Insti­tute (IRLI), is also heav­ily involved in the Farm­ers Branch case. IRLI drafted the ordi­nance and is also defend­ing the case in court. The IRLI lawyer in the case is Kris Kobach, the Sec­re­tary of State of Kansas and author of some of the harsh­est anti-immigrant leg­is­la­tion passed in the coun­try, includ­ing Arizona’s SB 1070 and Alabama’s HB 56.

Kobach and Num­ber­sUSA have worked together pre­vi­ously. Just last month, Kobach filed a law­suit on behalf of ten dis­grun­tled Immi­gra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment (ICE) agents against ICE and the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity, stat­ing that the direc­tives both orga­ni­za­tions received from the Obama administration’s new Deferred Action for Child­hood Arrivals (DACA) pol­icy vio­lates fed­eral law.  The pol­icy allows some eli­gi­ble chil­dren of undoc­u­mented work­ers who were not born in the U.S. to apply for tem­po­rary work autho­riza­tions, and calls for ICE agents to refrain from detain­ing them. After the case was filed, Num­ber­sUSA announced that it will be fund­ing the lawsuit.

IRLI and NumbersUSA’s con­nec­tions run even deeper than just col­lab­o­rat­ing on court cases. IRLI is the legal arm of the Fed­er­a­tion for Amer­i­can Immi­gra­tion Reform (FAIR), founded by racist John Tan­ton in 1979. It was under Tanton’s lead­er­ship that IRLI formed a few years later. Tan­ton also worked closely with Num­ber­sUSA founder, Roy Beck for many years. Beck served as the Wash­ing­ton edi­tor for Tanton’s anti-immigrant jour­nal, The Social Con­tract, for a decade and inter­nal memos from Tan­ton indi­cate that he thought of Beck as his “heir apparent.”

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August 21, 2012 5

Anti-Immigrant Movement Dealt Blow by U.S. Appeals Court

On August 20, the U.S. 11th Cir­cuit Court of Appeals handed down a mixed rul­ing for recent anti-immigrant laws passed in Alabama and Geor­gia. For both laws, HB 56 and HB 87, the court fol­lowed the deci­sion of the U.S.  Supreme Court ear­lier this sum­mer regard­ing a sim­i­lar Ari­zona law (Ari­zona et al v. United States). The appeals court thus upheld pro­vi­sions in the two state laws that allowed police to check the immi­gra­tion sta­tus of peo­ple sus­pected of com­mit­ting a crime.

Mike Heth­mon

The court, how­ever, struck down other pro­vi­sions of both states’ laws, includ­ing one of the major fea­tures of the Alabama law, a pro­vi­sion that required pub­lic schools to check the cit­i­zen­ship sta­tus of new stu­dents. This is a major blow to the anti-immigrant move­ment, which saw the pro­vi­sion as a sig­nif­i­cant step towards over­turn­ing the Supreme Court’s land­mark 1982 Plyler v. Doe deci­sion, which ruled that all chil­dren, regard­less of their immi­gra­tion sta­tus, are per­mit­ted to attend K-12 pub­lic schools in the United States.

Over­turn­ing Plyler v. Doe has been one of the anti-immigrant movement’s key long-term goals; many major anti-immigrant groups have spo­ken openly about over­turn­ing the deci­sion. In Novem­ber 2011, for exam­ple, the anti-immigrant group Fed­er­a­tion for Amer­i­can Immi­gra­tion Reform (FAIR) wrote hope­fully about what Alabama’s HB 56 might accomplish: “Thus, the col­lec­tion of immi­gra­tion data regard­ing K-12 stu­dents in Alabama (and indeed in other states) could pro­vide con­crete evi­dence needed to revise the Supreme Court’s hold­ing in Plyler v. Doe.” FAIR’s legal arm, the Immi­gra­tion Reform Law Insti­tute (IRLI), actu­ally helped draft HB 56. In a 2011 inter­view with the New York Times, Mike Heth­mon of IRLI said that the even­tual goal was to chal­lenge Plyler v. Doe.

Sim­i­larly, the Cen­ter for Immi­gra­tion Stud­ies, a major anti-immigration think tank, pub­lished a report in 2005 by Mark Levin that claimed that the Pyler v. Doe deci­sion “is per­haps the most egre­gious of the Court’s immi­gra­tion rul­ings.” For­mer Ari­zona State Sen­a­tor Rus­sell Pearce, for many years the lead­ing anti-immigrant voice in Ari­zona, also floated the idea of forc­ing undoc­u­mented chil­dren to pay tuition to attend pub­lic schools in his state. This, of course, would have been in direct vio­la­tion of the Plyler v. Doe ruling.

The court’s deci­sion on the school pro­vi­sion is thus not only a sig­nif­i­cant civil rights deci­sion that pro­tects chil­dren.  It also thwarts one of the key planks of the anti-immigrant movement’s agenda.

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August 3, 2012 0

New Documentary Portrays Negative View of Immigration in the U.S.

Den­nis Lynch

A new doc­u­men­tary, “They Come to Amer­ica,” writ­ten and directed by Den­nis Lynch, a for­mer entre­pre­neur turned film­maker, has caused quite a stir in anti-immigrant cir­cles over the past cou­ple of months. In the doc­u­men­tary, Lynch trav­els the coun­try inter­view­ing peo­ple about undoc­u­mented immi­gra­tion. Lynch talks to fig­ures from anti-immigrant groups such as Num­ber­sUSA and the Fed­er­a­tion for Amer­i­can Immi­gra­tion Reform (FAIR). Lynch also inter­views Glenn Spencer of the anti-Hispanic hate group Amer­i­can Bor­der Patrol.

Lynch attempts to por­tray both sides of the immi­gra­tion debate by inter­view­ing peo­ple on the “pro-immigrant” side of the spec­trum, as well as undoc­u­mented immi­grants, but the film’s con­clu­sions are clear: undoc­u­mented immi­gra­tion has no pos­i­tive impact on the United States. In sub­se­quent inter­views, Lynch fur­thers his argu­ment by claim­ing that the United States needs to lower the amount of legal immi­grants it admits per year – a posi­tion taken by many anti-immigrant groups.

Lynch spends a lot of time on cam­era with Roy Beck, founder of the anti-immigrant group, Num­ber­sUSA. Beck pre­vi­ously worked as the Wash­ing­ton Edi­tor of The Social Con­tract, an anti-immigrant jour­nal pub­lished by racist John Tan­ton. Beck also spoke at the 1996 national con­fer­ence of the Coun­cil of Con­ser­v­a­tive Cit­i­zens, a white suprema­cist orga­ni­za­tion. Jack Mar­tin from FAIR is also inter­viewed at length. FAIR, which pro­motes extreme anti-immigration views, was founded by Tanton.

In the film, Lynch also speaks with Michael Cut­ler, a for­mer fel­low for the anti-immigrant group Cen­ter for Immi­gra­tion Stud­ies (CIS), another group that Tan­ton helped to cre­ate. Cut­ler cur­rently is a Senior Writ­ing Fel­low for the anti-immigrant group Cal­i­for­ni­ans for Pop­u­la­tion Sta­bi­liza­tion (CAPS).

Lynch has begun a tour to screen the film. Not unex­pect­edly, local anti-immigrant orga­ni­za­tions are host­ing the screen­ings. On July 17, two groups that FAIR lists as local affil­i­ates, Tex­ans for Immi­gra­tion Reduc­tion and Enforce­ment (TFIRE) and Immi­gra­tion Reform Coali­tion of Texas (IRCOT), along with Stop the Mag­net, a Houston-based group ded­i­cated to get­ting anti-immigrant mea­sures on the bal­lot in Hous­ton, screened Lynch’s film.

On July 12, Lynch was on “The Ruthie Report,” a radio show hosted by Ruthie Hendrycks who runs the anti-immigrant group, Min­nesotans Seek­ing Immi­gra­tion Reform (MINNSIR). MINNSIR is also listed on FAIR’s web­site as a local affil­i­ate for Minnesota.

In Mary­land, Lynch’s film will be jointly hosted on August 8 by the anti-immigrant group Help Save Mary­land (HSM). HSM is listed on FAIR’s Web site as a local affil­i­ate for Mary­land. HSM has also worked closely with FAIR’s legal arm, the Immi­gra­tion Reform Law Insti­tute (IRLI).

On August 10, the film will be shown at an anti-immigrant con­fer­ence in North Car­olina.

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