White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States From Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall by Reece Jones

Author:Reece Jones [Jones, Reece]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: political science, Public Policy, Immigration, Social Science, Race & Ethnic Relations, Emigration & Immigration
ISBN: 9780807054123
Google: MFAREAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2021-10-12T00:12:10.320523+00:00

ESTABLISHING THE TANTON NETWORK

While Tanton was building his relationship with Cordelia Scaife May and privately flirting with white supremacists in the 1980s, he demonstrated that he was a masterful organization builder as he created an antiimmigrant network similar to the conservative network that grew out of the Powell Memo. His experience with the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth familiarized him with what steps were crucial for a fledgling organization to get off the ground. These included producing documents that established what the organization stood for in direct language, identifying and cultivating key politicians who were sympathetic to the cause, and building a membership base to gather funds from and to demonstrate that the organization had broad support in the American public. In the pre-Internet era, the tried-and-true method for building an organization was through direct mail solicitations. Tanton already had access to some address lists from his previous activism, and he hired DC-based firms to manage the mailings. Tanton knew it was a money loser for a new fledging organization, but the need for a membership base made the cost worth it because it made FAIR appear to have broader support, when in fact well over 90 percent of its funding in the early 1980s came from four sources: the Pioneer Fund, Sidney Swensrud, Jay Harris, and Cordelia Scaife May.

FAIR decided to focus on illegal immigration because that was politically palatable, but all along they also argued that from time to time it was right for a country to also consider its legal immigration system and decide if it still fit the goals of the country.27 They had some early success and found sympathetic ears in both the Senate and the House as they “educated,” as they referred to it, the politicians on the impact of immigration on the environment.28

Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson became their strongest ally. At 6’7”, Simpson towered over most people, but his grandfatherly bald head and disarming smile drew people to him. He joined the Senate in 1979 and served three consecutive terms until 1997, when he did not seek reelection and instead began to lecture in public policy at Harvard. In 2010, he was tapped to lead the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, along with Erskine Bowles, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Tanton, FAIR executive director Roger Conner, and Simpson regularly traded correspondence. Simpson wrote to Tanton and Conner on March 27, 1981, that he was “ready to ‘jump in and get wet all over.’ Here we go!” In the same letter, he asked FAIR to draft language for an op-ed, which was published in the Washington Post on April 28 under Senator Simpson’s name with no acknowledgment of FAIR. The FAIR board was ecstatic. Garrett Hardin commented, “Senator Simpson says substantially the same thing we said in our ad, but at greater length and in softer language.” Roger Conner responded, “Especially since we wrote the first draft of this.”29 The clubby correspondence continued with Simpson writing to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.