The pro-immigration reform movement has long been familiar with the Tanton network, a body of anti-immigrant organizations (some considered to be hate groups) all founded by a single man—John Tanton. Tanton was associated with white supremacists and eugenicists, corresponding with Ku Klux Klan lawyers and writing screeds like about how a “European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” While Tanton is now largely a figurehead, his groups (NumbersUSA, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and the Center for Immigration Studies) go on, and continue to campaign against immigration reform despite Republican strategists and pundits now widely believing that the GOP must support immigration legislation in order for them to survive.
A few weeks ago, Republicans began lifting up the Tanton network’s background and history, pushing the party to reconsider their willingness to listen to these groups, whom some Republicans say are masquerading as conservative. Tanton’s support for immigration restrictions was one manifestation of his belief in strict population control, which also led him to back abortion, sterilization, and other policies now considered unacceptable by conservatives. Now many Republicans are attacking NumbersUSA, FAIR, CIS, and other groups associated with Tanton for hiding origins shrouded in anti-conservative policies. As Mario H. Lopez, president of the conservative Hispanic Leadership Fund, wrote in National Review this week, “not being honest about associations—particularly when they are rooted in an attack on human life itself—ought to be unacceptable.”
As USA Today this weekend wrote, connections between the Tanton groups and an anti-population growth ideology abound, and help explain why the groups are against immigration (including legal immigration):
According to its website, NumbersUSA President Roy Beck’s “greatest concern” is population growth — that his “grandchildren’s grandchildren” will “live packed in a highly-regimented country approaching a billion people.” In his book The Case Against Immigration, he wrote that America has become “a nation of too many immigrants”…
Like NumbersUSA, FAIR argues, as they did in a 2009 report, that “the United States is already overpopulated.” In his book, The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal, Krikorian called immigration “a government-administered population policy,” that is “just like Communist China and the Soviet Union” (p. 188).
Which is a problem because—as author David Bier wrote, “Conservatism is not an anti-immigration, anti-population growth ideology.”
On the heels of this story comes a new Center for New Community report, “The Quinacrine Report: Sterilization, Modern-Day Eugenics, and the Anti-Immigrant Movement,” which details the connections between the Tanton network and Quinacrine, a drug used in coercive sterilization.
Quinacrine–which is dangerous and potentially deadly when used in female sterilization–was used in forced sterilization programs that existed in the US during the first half of the twentieth century. Its use as a sterilization drug has been met with condemnation from reproductive health advocates around the world, and it has garnered very little interest from the mainstream medical community, aside from concerns of the drug’s potential to be used coercively. Yet individuals—like Tanton—who have a history of promoting eugenics and population control have been known to champion Quinacrine, and individuals who shared this support are still in positions of power within the Tanton network organizations.
The Center for New Community’s new report takes a closer look at the effect that eugenics campaigns had on states like North Carolina, which is currently considering reparations to surviving victims of a decades-long forced sterilization program that continued into the 1970s.
As the Center for New Community Executive Director Jill Garvey said, “The findings highlighted in the Quinacrine Report pull back the curtain on the population control agenda of certain anti-immigrant groups, and trace the lineage of eugenics from forced sterilization campaigns in the 1900s to the coercive sterilization efforts underway today. Past generations of Americans were horrified by eugenics. Americans today should be equally horrified by the Quinacrine sterilization effort.”
