Oblivious to Colleagues’ Words, Anti-Immigration Ideologue Accuses Others of “Hate Speech”
In what just might be a textbook case of psychological projection, leading anti-immigrant ringleader Roy Beck threw around accusations of “hate speech” this week, despite the reasonable nature of the comments Beck found objectionable and his continued association with those engaging in true hate speech against Latinos and other immigrants.
Reacting to the Georgia anti-immigration measure signed into law last week that is nothing less than an unconstitutional and un-American Arizona copycat, musician Carlos Santana expressed his dismay, saying, “I am here to give voice to the invisible…I would invite all Latin people to do nothing for about two weeks so you can see who really, really is running the economy. Who cleans the sheets? Who cleans the toilets? Who babysits?” In response to these comments, Beck, the Executive Director of leading mass-deportation organization Numbers USA, went off the deep end. He called Santana’s comments “a new low in hate speech against American workers.”
According to Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice, “Watching an anti-immigrant ringleader labeling others’ comments as ‘hate speech’ is a strange mix of ironic and oblivious. Now that Mr. Beck is a self-proclaimed expert on hate speech, why does he continue to refrain from denouncing the actual hate speech from anti-immigration movement architect and Beck mentor John Tanton?”
Beck, his fellow anti-immigrant activists, and their congressional allies have long attempted to camouflage their mass-deportation strategy behind pro-worker messages – actual anti-worker voting records aside. Nothing new there. What is new is that the New York Times recently published a front-page piece that exposed Mr. Tanton’s extreme views. And as the article points out, Mr. Tanton hired and employed Beck, helped him start his organization Numbers USA, and thanked Beck for agreeing to be his “heir apparent.”
Here are some of Mr. Tanton’s views and some of his connections to Roy Beck – none of which have been denounced or disavowed:
- “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.”
– Dec. 10, 1993, letter to the late Garrett Hardin, a controversial ecology professor.
- “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?”
– Sept. 18, 1996, letter to now-deceased California multimillionaire and eugenicist Robert K. Graham.
- “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.”
– Jan. 26, 1996, letter to Roy Beck, then an employee of Tanton’s foundation U.S. Inc..
- Tanton has compared immigrants to bacteria: “In the bacteriology lab, we have culture plates. You put a bug in there and it starts growing and gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it grows until it finally fills the whole plate. And it crashes and dies.”
- Roy Beck served as an editor of John Tanton’s book, The Immigrant Invasion which, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “was so raw in its immigrant bashing that Canadian border authorities have banned it as hate literature.”
- Beck also served for many years as the Washington editor of Tanton’s anti-immigrant journal, the Social Contract Press and produced an issue called Europhobia: The Hostility to European-Descended Americans, in which one author asked, “Will non-whites continue to preserve the economic and technological infrastructure of the country and its natural environment and resources or will they, as most non-white societies do now, neglect and waste them?”
- In a letter to Beck, Tanton wondered whether “the minorities who inherit California (85% of the lower-grade school children are now ‘minorities’ – demography is destiny) can run an advanced society?” In another, he wrote, “there is scarcely any group more chauvinistic than the Orientals.”
Added Sharry, “given the recent New York Times story on Mr. Tanton and his extreme views, it comes as no surprise that hate speech is on Mr. Beck’s mind. Perhaps he should look a bit closer to home, though, before aiming the charge at others.”
America’s Voice — Harnessing the power of American voices and American values to win common sense immigration reform.
www.americasvoiceonline.org
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