Anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA is continuing to solidify its ties to white nationalists despite Executive Director Roy Beck’s claims to the contrary. National civil rights organization Center for New Community recently made public a new video produced by NumbersUSA, “Immigration 103-American Trauma: Jobs and the Economy.” Its title aside, what their piece actually spotlights is NumbersUSA’s marrow-deep involvement with individuals affiliated with a network of groups created and maintained by white nationalist John Tanton.
According to Beck, their June 5th release serves as a “a soapbox to explain how elected leaders use high immigration to drive down the wages of — and throw out of work [sic] — many of the country’s most vulnerable citizens….” However, Beck and NumbersUSA are intentionally ignoring the following two facts: that the notion that immigrants are presently destroying the economy is utterly false, and that eight of the ten experts underpinning the “validity” of their claims are all players within the aforementioned John Tanton Anti-Immigrant Network, a web that enfolds political extremists such as white nationalists.
In an attempt to stoke their brand of anti-immigrant hysteria throughout American society, NumbersUSA blatantly ignores a recent report by Rob Paral & Associates that, according to the Immigration Policy Center:
“demonstrates that, even in the midst of the current economic recession, there is no correlation between the presence of immigrants in the labor market of a particular locale and the unemployment rate among native-born whites, blacks, Latinos, or Asians.”
The Immigration Policy Center also points out that Beck and NumbersUSA are conveniently “forgetting” yet another study, one conducted in 2006 by economist Giovanni Peri of the University of California-Davis.
Peri found that between 1990 and 2004 nearly 90% of native-born workers holding diplomas of a high school level or higher actually experienced wage gains that were directly attributable to immigration into U.S. society.
Perhaps NumbersUSA’s psuedo-experts are failing to tangle with these studies because to do so would foul-up their attempts to manipulate the American public into assuming their all-encompassing worldview of anti-immigrant bigotry. Perhaps this is why they are also failing to make transparent the backgrounds of their “experts.”
- One such “expert” is Roan Garcia-Quintana. Viewers might find it both relevant and poignant to know that Garcia-Quintana was also a participant at the white nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens’s (CofCC)2008 national conference. The Council of Conservative Citizens is the reconstituted White Citizens’ Councils which fought any and all attempts to cease segregation during the 1960s.
- Another is Dan Stein, President of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which was founded by white nationalist John Tanton, who remains a current FAIR board member.
- Also relevant and poignant is the fact that FAIR has willfully accepted over 1.2 million dollars from the anti-black Pioneer Fund. When asked by a journalist to answer for the Pioneer Fund’s racist ideology, Stein said, “I don’t give a shit what they do with their money….”
- Robert Rector and John Fonte, two more of NumbersUSA’s “experts,” are both contributors to Social Contract Press (SCP), a white nationalist periodical headed by John Tanton and Wayne Lutton. An active leader of the Council of Conservative Citizens, Lutton also writes for the anti-Semitic Occidental Quarterly.
In a February 2009 interview in the civil rights publication The Intelligence Report, published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Roy Beck works overtime to whitewash his kindred associations with John Tanton and his anti-immigrant network when, in fact, he himself worked for Tanton prior to pioneering NumbersUSA.
Beck’s and NumbersUSA’s worldview of bigotry is a but cavernous drug-like dependency on vapid rhetoric, with this video just their most recent offering of hollowness. And with its launch, Beck has elevated himself beyond what might be the head-space of a drug addict to that of a full-on drug pusher.
In this instance, at least, the difference is immense.