Ari Rabin-Havt and Media Matters for America

Ari Rabin-Havt is the host of The Agenda, a national radio show airing Monday through Friday on SiriusXM. His writing has been featured in USA Today, The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Observer, Salon, and The American Prospect, and he has appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, Al Jazeera, and HuffPost Live.

Along with David Brock, he coauthored The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine and The Benghazi Hoax. He previously served as executive vice president of Media Matters for America and as an adviser to Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and former vice president Al Gore.

Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM ANCHOR BOOKS

Free Ride: John McCain and the Media

by David Brock and Paul Waldman

The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine

by David Brock, Ari Rabin-Havt, and Media Matters for America

On the Border of Truth

from Lies, Incorporated

by Ari Rabin-Havt and Media Matters for America

A Vintage Short

Vintage Books

A Division of Penguin Random House LLC

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Copyright © 2016 by Ari Rabin-Havt and Media Matters for America

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in slightly different form as Lies, Incorporated in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2016.

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Contents

Cover

About the Author

Also Available from Anchor Books

Title Page

Copyright

On the Border of Truth

Notes

No debate over the past decade has promised more hope for progress and yet produced so many instances of legislative failure than efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform. This issue unites traditionally progressive organizations like civil rights groups with traditionally conservative constituencies including the Chamber of Commerce and numerous other business interests. But a powerful and strident wing of the conservative movement opposes these strange bedfellows.

Opponents of immigration reform accuse its supporters, from across the political spectrum, of being disingenuous about why they want the United States to adopt a more open immigration policy. Democrats, they claim, support immigration reform because they seek to tap new pools of voters. Business interests, they believe, are looking for cheap labor so they can further drive down costs. And some insist that Hispanic and Latino civil rights organizations are looking to justify and excuse illegal behavior among their own ethnic group by giving “amnesty” to criminals who violated the law. Some even insist that Hispanic and Latino civil rights organizations are really pushing for reform in order to populate a fight for “Reconquista”—the imaginary effort to take back the American southwest for Mexico.[1]

For several decades, advocates have fought for reforms to our immigration system. Most of these proposals have contained a number of widely agreed-upon policies to toughen enforcement of current laws, such as increased budgets for border patrol and mandating an “e-verify” system to hold employers accountable when they hire those without authorization to work in the United States. The more controversial elements of these proposals are a variety of different measures to provide a path toward some sort of legal status for those already living and working in this country but without proper documentation.

Among those without documents are the individuals who were brought to America as very young children, have lived as Americans for most of their lives, and are often unaware of their undocumented status until they try to get a driver’s license. Many of these “DREAMers,” as they’ve come to be known, have no memory of the country in which they were born. Some speak only English. They want to go to college or join the U.S. military. For all intents and purposes, they are Americans.

In a political climate where comprehensive immigration was unlikely, this specific group became a priority for immigration advocates during President Obama’s first term. The DREAM Act was written to help thousands of people—provided they met stringent criteria—along the path toward documentation, legal residency, and, possibly, citizenship. After Congress failed to pass this legislation, in June 2012 President Obama issued an executive action known as DACA—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—to give DREAMers some protection against deportation.[2]

Providing protection against deportation, even for a small number of the undocumented, was a slap in the face of those opposing any sort of pro-immigrant policy reform. Many opponents of immigration reform advocate for the deportation of every person in the United States without up-to-date paperwork. The number of people in the United States without legal status has stayed at about eleven million for the last several years.[3] The resources necessary to deport that many people make it a practical impossibility. Locating, verifying lack of paperwork for, legally prosecuting, detaining—which means weeks of shelter, food, security, and medical care—all eleven million people would be a huge undertaking. Estimates place the cost of such an effort at $114 billion.[4] That is why policy makers have proposed systems to address undocumented immigrants’ status, which often involves paying fines and back taxes, undergoing a background check, proving no crime greater than minor traffic violations has been committed, and “going to the back” of the immigration line. By removing the fear of deportation, we can maintain better records of who is in the country, improve public safety services, create enforcement mechanisms, and reset our broken immigration system.

President George W. Bush is reported to have always had a personal interest in the plight of immigrants. He also recognized that the growing Hispanic and Latino share of the electorate demanded action on immigration reform. But this stance put him in the minority of his party. Some elected officials recognized the need to do something about immigration, but most Republicans in Congress refused to support anything that “smacks of amnesty.”[5] Their base was ardently opposed to immigration reform, and the legislation gained no momentum.

Following the 2012 election, advocates once again became hopeful for movement on their issue. Obama’s landslide win was in part thanks to turnout from Hispanic and Latino supporters who voted for Democrats in droves. In an election postmortem commissioned by Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, the party conceded that immigration reform and courting the Hispanic vote were vital to their future.[6]

Republican senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina joined the bipartisan Senate “Gang of Eight,” which set out to craft a comprehensive immigration reform bill that could, and did, pass the Senate.[7] The House of Representatives was a different story. With gerrymandered districts that gave “Tea Party” conservatives an outsized influence, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) chose not to risk his power by bringing the Senate immigration bill to the floor for a vote. All acknowledged that with near unanimous support among the Democratic caucus, the bill would have passed, but Boehner could not risk the backlash from his members.[8]

Anti-immigration forces wanted to avoid at all cost the perception that they were opposing immigration reform based purely on xenophobia. Therefore, they needed to supply an acceptable justification to oppose this popular piece of legislation. It was during this period that conservative think tanks, most notably the Heritage Foundation, reinvigorated their campaign of lies and falsehoods about immigration.

Under the leadership of former senator Jim DeMint, the Heritage Foundation became more closely associated with the activist base of the conservative movement. The New York Times reported in February 2014, “Long known as an incubator for policy ideas and the embodiment of the party establishment, it has become more of a political organization feeding off the rising populism of the Tea Party movement.”[9]

Heritage Action, its 501(c)(4) advocacy group, spent half a million dollars helping to lead attacks on Republican members of the House of Representatives in 2013 and 2014 for being insufficiently conservative, something that was previously unheard of in intra-party battles.[10]

Jumping full force into the immigration reform debate, two researchers at Heritage, Robert Rector and Jason Richwine, published a study on May 6, 2013, claiming that immigration reform, wrongly called amnesty in the report, would have a net cost to U.S. taxpayers of $6.3 trillion. The think tank claimed that the $9 trillion in expenditures of new government benefits for newly legalized immigrants would only be offset by $3 trillion in new tax benefits.[11] DeMint, as Heritage president, took to the cable networks to tout the results of this study.[12]

In an interview with Fox News host Martha MacCallum, he claimed, “We know over time that this [$6.3 trillion net cost] is going to increase more debt, increase taxes.” According to DeMint and Heritage, achieving legal status would allow undocumented immigrants to both take the jobs of many Americans and depress salaries overall.[13]

The study’s numerous flaws were immediately revealed, including a significant problem: the analysis began in November 2012, long before the bipartisan bill was introduced in April 2013. Robert Rector, whose official biography noted he was “dubbed the ‘intellectual godfather’ of welfare reform” has been a researcher at the Heritage Foundation for three decades.[14] When responding to critiques of the immigration bill, he acknowledged, “This analysis isn’t of the whole immigration bill….Other aspects of the bill are outside the scope of what I studied.”[15]

One section of the Heritage report incorrectly described a “loophole” in current law that allows undocumented immigrants to receive permanent residency or citizenship, thereby granting them access to benefits such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security simply if their citizen children ask for their parents to be made legal residents. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States are automatically citizens—derisively called “anchor babies” by some. According to Heritage, when these Americans turn twenty-one, they can simply “demand” their parents receive citizenship.[16]

FactCheck.org refuted this distortion, citing Erin Oshiro, a senior staff attorney at the Immigration and Immigrant Rights Program at the Asian American Justice Center. The “loophole” does not exist as Heritage described. Far from a simple way to gain citizenship just by having a citizen child, undocumented parents face long processes to achieve legal status. Oshiro explained that in order for citizen children to sponsor their undocumented parents’ legalization process, “the parents would have to return to their home country for at least 10 years before returning to the U.S. (something an immigrant living unlawfully in the U.S. for more than 21 years is unlikely to want to do).”[17]

Furthermore, the Heritage report estimated the costs of the bill over a fifty-year window, something regarded by many researchers as “highly speculative.” “We have no idea what things will look like in fifty years,” said Bob Williams of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. “In the long run, I don’t think we know what the situation will be. [The $6.3 trillion figure in the Heritage report] is not a number that anyone should put a lot of faith in.”[18]

With the party split on how to proceed on immigration reform, the report was not unquestionably accepted as it might have been on other issues. Conservatives had other research available that, unlike the Heritage report, did properly account for the economic growth driven by immigration. Douglas Holtz-Eakin—who served on George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, was the director of the Congressional Budget Office for two years, headed up economic policy for Senator John McCain’s 2008 campaign, and was even a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute[19]—published a study in April 2013 indicating the clear economic benefits of passing immigration reform. As Holtz-Eakin explained: “A benchmark immigration reform would raise the pace of economic growth by nearly a percentage point over the near term, raise GDP per capita by over $1,500, and reduce the cumulative federal deficit by over $2.5 trillion.”[20]

As the study’s suspicious conclusions were analyzed, its authors also attracted attention, particularly Jason Richwine, a Harvard Ph.D. who earned his degree during a fellowship at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.[21]

On May 8, two days after the Richwine report was published, The Washington Post posted excerpts from Richwine’s 2009 doctoral dissertation, titled “IQ and Immigration Policy,” in which Richwine argued “the average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations.” Richwine further asserted that the consequences of a large “low-IQ” population “are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market.”[22]

Worse yet, Richwine argued that I.Q. levels are tied to genetic makeup, writing “the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ” and further specifically targeted Latin American immigrants in his thesis: “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.”[23]

The use of I.Q. as a measure with which to compare populations has been a controversial element of social science for decades. In the 1990s, political scientist Charles Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, published The Bell Curve, a book arguing that “social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.”[24]

Daniel Strauss at Talking Points Memo described the book’s reception: “Critics denounced it as racist, saying it essentially argued that African-Americans aren’t as intelligent as white Americans because of genetic differences. In 1994 Bob Herbert, then a columnist at The New York Times, described the book as a ‘scabrous piece of racial pornography masquerading as serious scholarship.’ ”[25]

Richwine, who personally thanked Murray for his guidance, writing, “I could not have asked for a better primary advisor,”[26] based his dissertation on similar arguments, but took them a step further to make “a strong case for IQ selection…since it is theoretically a win-win for the U.S. and potential immigrants.” He even went so far as to offer messaging advice to make I.Q.-based selection more palatably and politically viable for those seeking to exclude immigrants based on their supposed genetic predisposition to a low I.Q.[27] To many, this was a step in the direction of eugenics and a bridge too far.

The condemnations were swift and came from all sides. Hours after The Washington Post‘s expose, Heritage tried to distance itself from their researcher with a statement from a vice president, claiming Richwine’s past work did “not reflect the positions of The Heritage Foundation or the conclusions of our study on the cost of amnesty to U.S. taxpayers, as race and ethnicity are not part of Heritage immigration policy recommendations.”[28]

But Heritage’s attempts to push Richwine aside were disingenuous at best. The idea that a think tank could hire a researcher almost immediately out of graduate school, with no knowledge of the subject of his doctoral dissertation, is absurd. Richwine wrote and published numerous reports, in addition to testimony and other writings, for Heritage during his time there.[29] Furthermore, Richwine had spoken openly about his beliefs even before completing his thesis—there was no attempt at hiding his belief in genetic superiority.

In 2008, while a fellow at American Enterprise Institute, Richwine appeared on a panel with Mark Krikorian, executive director of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies. During the discussion, Richwine openly promoted the ideas in his thesis—most prominently that some racial groups are intellectually inferior. “Races differ in all sorts of ways, and probably the most important way is in IQ,” Richwine said. He continued by flatly stating that race and I.Q. must be a factor for public policy decisions: “These are real differences, and they’re not going to go away tomorrow, and for that reason we have to address them in our immigration discussions and our debates.”[30]

Richwine’s beliefs about race and I.Q. highlight the strong undercurrent of racism that drives a significant part of the anti-immigrant political constituency in America. And Heritage’s phony statistics on the cost of immigration reform were meant to create a false impression of the negative impact immigration legislation would have on the economy. Both Richwine’s dissertation and the Heritage report he wrote are examples of how research can be manufactured to justify an ideological belief.

Behind much of this ideological battle is one man, neither a politician nor a political scientist, but an ophthalmologist from northern Michigan. Richwine is just one small part of a vast, interconnected, financially flush anti-immigrant movement that owes its existence to Dr. John Tanton.

—

Tanton is an unlikely leader of the anti-immigrant movement, but for thirty years he has been its godfather, founder, and fund-raiser, building an infrastructure that has been the source of nearly every lie told about immigrants in this country.

John Tanton’s political activism was triggered by a desire to protect the environment. “A beekeeper and amateur naturalist of prodigious energy,” he “had spent two decades planting trees, cleaning creeks and suing developers.” Tanton believed that population growth was the culprit behind the environmental problems he was witnessing. The number of native-born Americans wasn’t rising, so Tanton surmised that immigrants to the United States were responsible for the rapidly growing population.[31]

A leader at local chapters of Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club in the 1960s and ’70s, Tanton tried to get both groups to fight against immigration but failed. Tanton said he “finally concluded that if anything was going to happen, I would have to do it myself.”[32]

From his home base in northern Michigan, he built a movement whose influence has been staggering. The groups he founded strike fear in the hearts of politicians, particularly Republicans, and maintain a vast and passionate grassroots network whose members are willing to call and write to politicians, show up at protests, and do the hard work of making change. To that effect, Tanton has built a movement that has, since Reagan’s immigration reforms in the 1980s, had the ability to halt any political conversation about immigration in its tracks.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a widely respected civil rights organization known for taking on neo-Nazis and other hate groups, compiled a list of the groups Tanton has influenced:

American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF), 1983, funded

American Patrol/Voice of Citizens Together 1992, funded

California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR), 1994, funded

Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), 1996, funded (founded separately in 1986)

Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), 1985, founded and funded

Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), 1979, founded and funded

NumbersUSA 1996, founded and funded

Population-Environment Balance 1973, joined board in 1980

Pro English 1994, founded and funded

ProjectUSA 1999, funded

The Social Contract Press 1990, founded and funded

U.S. English 1983, founded and funded

U.S. Inc. 1982, founded and funded[33]

Of these organizations, the three that have done the most to negatively shape attitudes toward immigrants in this country are the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), NumbersUSA, and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).

In many ways, Tanton’s network has been more influential than better-known lobbying organizations like the National Rifle Association. It has ensured that no matter how close Congress comes to taking action on immigration, the legislative process ultimately is paralyzed by fear.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) credits Tanton’s efforts with halting George W. Bush’s immigration reform plans in 2007. On the Senate floor he stated NumbersUSA provided “the overwhelming grassroots response” that “was most evident when citizens called Capitol Hill in such volume that it shut down the Senate’s telephone system.”[34]

The Center for Immigration Studies, which produces highly biased “research,” was a critical part of the coalition that defeated the DREAM Act.

But Tanton’s groups also have the power to pass legislation, particularly in conservative states. This includes Arizona’s controversial SB 1070 law that allows local law enforcement to demand immigration documentation from anyone whom they have a “reasonable suspicion” of being an undocumented immigrant.[35] SB 1070 was drafted by Kris Kobach, who worked for the Tanton-connected Immigration Reform Law Institute, which is the public-interest law affiliate of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and who would go on to be elected secretary of state in Kansas.[36]

While many of the groups in Tanton’s network were initially framed as middle of the road, they have long since shed that veneer. FAIR holds a conference at a hotel in the shadow of the Capitol, attracting a radio row with some of the most partisan and anti-immigrant hosts on the airwaves. Their message is not the call for inclusion expressed by the Republican National Committee’s roadmap in 2012. Instead, the “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” event is a gathering of individuals who are extremely upset about the state of our country and focus their anger on its most recent arrivals.[37]

This is not unique to twenty-first-century politics. It is a strategy from an old playbook dating back to the Know-Nothing Party of the nineteenth century, whose platform was based on a suspicion and hatred of new immigrants. In fact, anti-immigrant sentiment is even older than the republic. In 1753, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter decrying the dilution of our culture caused by German immigrants who, according to the founding father, were “generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation, and as Ignorance is often attended with Credulity when Knavery would mislead it, and with Suspicion when Honesty would set it right; and as few of the English understand the German Language, and so cannot address them either from the Press or Pulpit, ‘tis almost impossible to remove any prejudices they once entertain.”[38]

Tanton pledged, when he began his work, that his views were not based on bigotry. However, private writings, donated to the University of Michigan, demonstrate his disturbing ideology. In the 1990s, Tanton encouraged employees of FAIR to subscribe to American Renaissance, which was published by the New Century Foundation, “a self-styled white supremacist think tank.” According to the Anti-Defamation League: “The journal promotes pseudo-scientific studies that attempt to demonstrate the intellectual and cultural superiority of whites and publishes articles on the supposed decline of American society because of integrationist social policies.”[39]

Tanton has accepted money from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation that donated money to white supremacists, and has clearly tolerated others within his movement who hold abhorrent views of racial minorities.[40] A Pioneer grantee from 1969 to 1976 was William B. Shockley, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist better known for his racist views on the genetic superiority of Caucasians.[41]

Tanton defended the Pioneer Fund’s support of studies designed to demonstrate the genetic superiority of white people, writing, “It would take a bold person indeed to predict exactly where the question of the relative roles of nature vs. nurture will eventually settle out. Some of my opponents object to these studies, and have transferred their objections to me and immigration policy questions.”[42]

In 2002, the Southern Poverty Law Center published an article on the opening of NumbersUSA’s Capitol Hill office where “The Citizens Informer, a white supremacist tabloid put out by the Council of Conservative Citizens hate group, was available.”[43] Dylann Roof, whose racism drove him to murder nine black congregants during a Bible study at an AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015, was inspired in part by the writings of the CCC.[44]

Most damning was a series of strategy documents that came to be known as the WITAN[45] memos. Leaked in 1988, these memos were written for the anti-immigrant movement’s retreats in which Tanton himself elaborates on the positions of the group. In one document, Tanton referred to Latino immigration to the United States as a “Latin onslaught,” asking questions such as “Will Latin American migrants bring with them the tradition of the mordida (bribe), the lack of involvement in public affairs, etc.? What in fact are the characteristics of Latin American culture, versus that of the United States?”[46]

Additionally, Tanton questioned the economic value of immigration, “What are the consequences of having so many ill-educated people coming in to low paying jobs?” He also did not shy away from citing plainly racist tropes about immigrants’ high birth rate, asking, “Can homo contraceptivus [Whites] compete with homo progenitiva [Hispanics] if borders aren’t controlled? Or is advice to limit one’s family simply advice to move over and let someone else with greater reproductive powers occupy the space?”[47]

In a 1993 letter to ecology professor Garrett Hardin, Tanton wrote, “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”[48]

To the executive director of NumbersUSA, Roy Beck, Tanton wrote, “I have no doubt that individual minority persons can assimilate to the culture necessary to run an advanced society but if through mass migration, the culture of the homeland is transplanted from Latin America to California, then my guess is we will see the same degree of success with governmental and social institutions that we have seen in Latin America.”[49]

In 1996, Tanton wrote to “eugenicist” Robert K. Graham, “Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less? Who is going to break the bad news [to less intelligent individuals], and how will it be implemented?”[50]

This series of letters creates a clear track record elucidating Tanton’s positions. While he might have begun as an environmentally minded progressive, by the 1980s he had become an anti-immigrant bigot, and through his support and founding of anti-immigrant groups, he was able to spread out and amplify his beliefs.

Along with their general bigotry, the lies created by these groups help to fuel the noxiousness of the immigration debate. Among their many tactics is scaring up fear and hatred of immigrants by exaggerating the frequency with which undocumented immigrants commit violent crimes.

In 2013, FAIR produced a chart claiming that while U.S. citizens could serve time in prison for crimes ranging from altering a Social Security card to tax evasion, undocumented immigrants would simply be “exonerated and legalized.” The implication was that a special protection from prosecution existed for undocumented immigrants, and not for legal immigrants or even citizens. This was simply untrue. Immigration reform did not exempt immigrants from following the law or facing criminal prosecution.[51] However, the point of FAIR’s chart was not accuracy. It was to paint a picture of a permissive attitude toward immigrants and their supposed crimes, while whites served time for lesser offenses.

Dan Stein, the president of FAIR, wrote an op-ed for FoxNews.com stoking racial resentment by claiming the Senate immigration reform bill “would give illegal immigrants tax amnesty.” He explained, “The bill requires aliens to only pay taxes that the IRS has assessed at the time they apply for RPI [Registered Provisional Immigrant] status.” Stein continued, “If the IRS had no knowledge that the individual had been working here, there would obviously be no tax liability assessed and the alien has nothing to satisfy for the purpose of getting RPI status.”[52]

This was simply a misreading of the legislation. “The bill states that immigrants may not receive provisional status until any federal tax liability is satisfied in accordance with regulations to be established by the Secretary of the Treasury,” Media Matters noted.[53] Immigrants could lie on their tax forms, but this, too, was already a crime and one that would affect the process of achieving legal status.

Stein had a history of false attacks on the Senate immigration bill. He had previously claimed, “Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy will not even allow hearings on a bill”[54]—when at the same time, one could have easily read in public news reports that “Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy has formally announced an April 17 hearing on comprehensive immigration reform legislation.”[55]

Another of Stein’s claims, that “Democrats will not agree to border security and other enforcement requirements as a prerequisite to amnesty,”[56] was easily refuted by the Associated Press. Undocumented immigrants “could begin to get green cards in 10 years but only if a new southern border security plan is in place, employers have adopted mandatory electronic verification of their workers’ legal status and a new electronic exit system is operating at airports and seaports.”[57]

Another lie put forward by the members of John Tanton’s network is that allowing more legal immigration puts both job prospects and working conditions for African-Americans at risk.

Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute told the House Judiciary Committee this was “an especially pernicious myth….As with most other Americans, few African Americans compete directly with immigrant workers.”[58]

Griswold went on to cite a 1997 report from the National Research Council that concluded:

None of the available evidence…suggests that in the aggregate the economic opportunities of black Americans are substantially reduced by immigration….Some black workers have lost their jobs to immigrants, especially when they live in a place with a large concentration of immigrants. But the vast majority do not live in such places, and their economic opportunities are determined by other things.[59]

These findings were reflected by numerous other studies conducted on the subject over the years. But this topic had been a personal obsession of Tanton, who also raised the issue in his WITAN memos. Just because the data proved otherwise did not mean the Tanton network would stop spreading these lies.

The purpose of these lies was clear: to muddy the waters, making it impossible for a complex piece of legislation with various moving parts to get through Congress. Additionally, they sought to provide palatable justification for clearly racist sentiments. This was the specific goal of the anti-immigrant movement. Like those opposed to confronting climate change, or passing gun safety legislation, they knew that if you can tell enough lies, you can halt progress.

The power of the Tanton network is that these lies would be amplified not only throughout the echo chamber created by the loosely affiliated organizations, but also by Fox News and the vast network of anti-immigrant radio hosts who frequented the FAIR conference.

Reporters who covered these issues without accepting anti-immigrant lies are simply biased, according to the members of the Tanton network. Thus, immigration policy in this country has stalled for at least the last decade with little hope of passage without a significant change in the makeup of Congress. Part of the brilliance of John Tanton, who is no longer an active public participant in the immigration debate, is that he organized these groups in such a way that they are no longer strategically or financially dependent on his leadership, but will continue to fight for the ideology he espoused.

Falsehoods spread during the immigration debate raised the emotional ire of an anti-immigrant constituency who would express that rage in emails and phone calls to Congress, not to mention water-cooler conversations with friends, so that these misrepresentations ultimately seeped into the political zeitgeist, where falsehoods are converted into one side’s truth. This conversion has occurred on a number of issues. In the next chapter we will examine the lie that “more guns” means “less crime,” something that has been consistently discredited by researchers yet is repeated ad nauseum by those who steadfastly fight against limitations on gun ownership.

Notes

1.  Solange Uwimana, “Right-Wing Media Seize on Muñoz Appointment to Renew Attacks on NCLR,” MediaMatters.org, January 13, 2012, mediamatters.org/research/2012/01/13/right-wing-media-seize-on-muntildeoz-appointmen/186147.

2.  “Frequently Asked Questions: The Obama Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA),” National Immigration Law Center, www.nilc.org/FAQdeferredactionyouth.html.

3.  Jeffery Passel and D’Vera Cohn, “Unauthorized Immigrant Population Stable for Half a Decade,” Pew Research Center Fact Tank, July 22, 2015, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/22/unauthorized-immigrant-population-stable-for-half-a-decade/.

4.  Philip E. Wolgin, “What Would It Cost to Deport 11.3 Million Unauthorized Immigrants?” Center for American Progress, August 18, 2015, www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/news/2015/08/18/119474/what-would-it-cost-to-deport-11-3-million-unauthorized-immigrants/.

5.  Holly Bailey, “Bush’s Spanish Lessons,” Newsweek, May 28, 2005, www.newsweek.com/bushs-spanish-lessons-110249.

6.  Rachel Weiner, “Reince Priebus Gives GOP Prescription for Future,” Washington Post, March 18, 2013, www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2013/03/18/reince-priebus-gives-gop-prescription-for-future/.

7.  Elise Foley, “Senate Immigration Reform Bill Passes with Strong Majority,” Huffington Post, June 27, 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/27/senate-immigration-reform-bill_n_3511664.html.

8.  Ibid.

9.  Jennifer Steinhauer and Jonathan Weisman, “In the DeMint Era at Heritage, a Shift from Policy to Politics,” New York Times, February 23, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/us/politics/in-the-demint-era-at-heritage-a-shift-from-policy-to-politics.html?_r=0.

10.  Molly Ball, “The Fall of the Heritage Foundation and the Death of Republican Ideas,” Atlantic, September 25, 2013, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/the-fall-of-the-heritage-foundation-and-the-death-of-republican-ideas/279955/.

11.  Robert Rector and Jason Richwine, “The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer,” Heritage Foundation, May 6, 2013, www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/05/the-fiscal-cost-of-unlawful-immigrants-and-amnesty%20to-the-us-taxpayer.

12.  Justin Berrier, “Right-Wing Media Push Heritage’s Latest ‘Fatally Flawed’ Immigration Study,” MediaMatters.org, May 6, 2013, mediamatters.org/research/2013/05/06/right-wing-media-push-heritages-latest-fatally/193922.

13.  Ibid.

14.  “Robert Rector,” The Heritage Foundation, www.heritage.org/about/staff/r/robert-rector.

15.  “The Immigration Bill’s ‘$6.3 Trillion Price Tag,’ ” FactCheck.org, July 3, 2013, www.factcheck.org/2013/06/the-immigration-bills-6-3-trillion-price-tag-2/.

16.  Robert Rector and Jason Richwine, “The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer.”

17.  FactCheck.org, 2013.

18.  Ibid.

19.  “Douglas Holtz-Eakin,” American Action Forum, americanactionforum.org/experts/douglas-holtz-eakin.

20.  Douglas Holtz-Eakin, “Study: Immigration Reform, Economic Growth, and the Fiscal Challenge,” American Action Forum, April 9, 2013, americanactionforum.org/research/study-immigration-reform-economic-growth-and-the-fiscal-challenge.

21.  Pema Levy, “AEI Steers Clear of Dissertation Richwine Wrote While at AEI,” Talking Points Memo, May 9, 2013, talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/aei-steers-clear-of-dissertation-richwine-wrote-while-at-aei.

22.  Dylan Matthews, “Heritage Study Co-author Opposed Letting in Immigrants with Low IQs,” Washington Post, May 8, 2013, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/08/heritage-study-co-author-opposed-letting-in-immigrants-with-low-iqs/.

23.  Ibid.

24.  Charles Murray, Southern Poverty Law Center, www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/charles-murray.

25.  Daniel Strauss, “Can’t Unring That Bell: Jeb Bush Says He’s a Fan of Charles Murray’s Books,” Talking Points Memo, April 30, 2015, talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/jeb-bush-charles-murray-the-bell-curve.

26.  Levy, “AEI Steers Clear of Dissertation Richwine Wrote While at AEI.”

27.  Matthews, “Heritage Study Co-author Opposed Letting in Immigrants with Low IQs.”

28.  Benjy Sarlin, “Heritage: ‘Race and Ethnicity’ Not Part of Our Immigration Recommendations,” Talking Points Memo, May 8, 2013, talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/heritage-race-and-ethnicity-not-part-of-our-immigration-recommendations.

29.  “Jason Richwine,” The Heritage Foundation, www.heritage.org/about/staff/r/jason-richwine.

30.  Hilary Tone, “UPDATED: Heritage Report Author: Hispanic Immigrants May Never Reach IQ Parity with Whites,” MediaMatters.org, May 8, 2013, mediamatters.org/blog/2013/05/08/heritage-report-author-hispanic-immigrants-may/193962.

31.  Jason Parle, “The Anti-immigration Crusader,” New York Times, April 17, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/us/17immig.html.

32.  Ibid.

33.  “John Tanton’s Network,” Southern Poverty Law Center, www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2015/john-tantons-network.

34.  “Senator Jeff Sessions Recognizes NumbersUSA in the Congressional Record,” NumbersUSA.com, May 11, 2012, www.numbersusa.com/content/news/may-8-2012/sen-jeff-sessions-recognizes-numbersusa-congressional-record.html.

35.  “Arizona’s SB 1070,” American Civil Liberties Union, www.aclu.org/feature/arizonas-sb-1070.

36.  Anh Phan, “The Top 5 Things You Need to Know About Kris Kobach,” Center for American Progress, June 26, 2012, www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/news/2012/06/26/11661/the-top-5-things-you-need-to-know-about-kris-kobach/. Also see: Van Lee, “Kansas City Star on the Ever-Controversial Kris Kobach.” America’s Voice (blog), April 9, 2012, americasvoice.org/blog/kansas-city-star-on-the-ever-controversial-kris-kobach/.

37.  “Immigration Issue Spotlights Capitol Hill Media Marathon April 15th and 16th,” PR Newswire, April 13, 2015, www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/immigration-issue-spotlights-capitol-hill-media-marathon-april-15th-and-16th-300065090.html.

38.  Benjamin Franklin, “Letter to Peter Collinson,” May 9, 1753, teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-to-peter-collinson/.

39.  “Extremism in America: Jared Taylor/American Renaissance,” Anti-Defamation League, January 11, 2011, www.adl.org/combating-hate/domestic-extremism-terrorism/c/extremism-in-america-jared.html.

40.  Heidi Beirich, “John Tanton’s Private Papers Expose More than 20 Years of Hate,” Southern Poverty Law Center, November 30, 2008, www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2008/john-tanton’s-private-papers-expose-more-20-years-hate.

41.  “William Shockley,” The Southern Poverty Law Center, www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/william-shockley.

42.  John Tanton, “The Puppeteer Replies,” The Social Contract Press, January 22, 2003, www.thesocialcontract.com/answering_our_critics/puppeteer.html.

43.  “John Tanton Is the Mastermind Behind the Organized Anti-immigration Movement,” Southern Poverty Law Center, June 18, 2002, www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2002/john-tanton-mastermind-behind-organized-anti-immigration-movement.

44.  Josh Sanburn, “Inside the White Supremacist Group that Influenced Charleston Shooting Suspect,” Time, June 22, 2015, time.com/3930993/dylann-roof-council-of-conservative-citizens-charleston/.

45.  For the definition of WITAN, see Encyclopaedia Britannica: “Witan, also called Witenagemot, the council of the Anglo-Saxon kings in and of England; its essential duty was to advise the king on all matters on which he chose to ask its opinion. It attested his grants of land to churches or laymen, consented to his issue of new laws or new statements of ancient custom, and helped him deal with rebels and persons suspected of disaffection. Its composition and time of meeting were determined by the king’s pleasure.” www.britannica.com/topic/witan.

46.  ‘WITAN MEMO’ III, October 10, 1986, www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2015/witan-memo-iii.

47.  Ibid.

48.  “John Tanton,” Southern Poverty Law Center, www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/john-tanton.

49.  Ibid.

50.  Ibid.

51.  Salvatore Colleluori, “Washington Examiner Cites Misleading Chart to Claim Undocumented Immigrants Will Avoid Criminal Consequences,” MediaMatters.org, June 25, 2013, mediamatters.org/blog/2013/06/25/washington-examiner-cites-misleading-chart-to-c/194601.

52.  Dan Stein, “Gang of Eight’s Plan Would Give Illegal Immigrants Tax Amnesty, Too,” FoxNews.com, April 30, 2013, www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/04/30/gang-eight-plan-would-give-illegal-immigrants-tax-amnesty-too.html?intcmp=trending.

53.  Salvatore Colleluori, “Another False Immigration Amnesty Claim: Tax Edition,” MediaMatters.org, May 1, 2013, mediamatters.org/blog/2013/05/01/another-false-immigration-amnesty-claim-tax-edi/193858.

54.  Dan Stein, “GOP Should Reject Immigration Plan,” Politico, April 10, 2013, www.politico.com/story/2013/04/5-reasons-gop-should-say-no-to-immigration-plan-089896.

55.  Carrie Dawn, “Leahy: Hearing on Comprehensive Immigration Reform Set for April 17,” NBC News, April 10, 2013, firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/10/17689511-leahy-hearing-on-comprehensive-immigration-reform-set-for-april-17?lite.

56.  Stein, 2013, www.politico.com/story/2013/04/5-reasons-gop-should-say-no-to-immigration-plan-089896.

57.  “Senate Immigration Plan Would Stiffen Border Security, Increase Surveillance,” Associated Press, April 10, 2013, www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/04/10/senate-immigration-plan-would-stiffen-border-security-increase-surveillance/.

58.  Salvatore Colleluori and Solange Uwiman, “What the Media Should Know About the Anti-immigrant DC March for Jobs,” MediaMatters.org, July 15, 2013, mediamatters.org/research/2013/07/15/what-the-media-should-know-about-the-anti-immig/194875. Also see: Testimony of Daniel Griswold, Senate Judiciary Committee, judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/Griswold01262011.pdf [inactive].

59.  Ibid.

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