It looks like Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies is going to win this year’s anti-immigrant scrooge award! Congratulations to Steven, he’s beaten out dozens of other candidates within the anti-immigrant movement to take home this year’s big honor.
Not only does Camarota like to bash immigrants, he also likes to deny Christmas gifts to poor children. Mr. Camarota has represented his organization well. To clinch the prize he managed to trample the holiday spirit and the American spirit at the same time! Let’s take a look back at Camarota’s five scroogiest moments.
5. Along with his colleagues, Mark Krikorian and Jessica Vaughn, Camarota has furthered the myth that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes by holding panels called “Immigration and Crime: New Studies Examine Crime among Immigrants, Local Enforcement Efforts” and reports meant to stir up fear about “criminal immigrant gangs”.
4. Camarota didn’t stop there though, coming in at number four is what he told Time magazine last year, “even if immigrants are less likely to commit crimes, their children and grandchildren may be more likely to end up on the wrong side of the law.”
3. He supported a proposition in California that would deny U.S. citizen children welfare benefits because their parents are undocumented. This is what he told the L.A. Times, “When people come into the U.S., even illegally, they cross more than a physical barrier; they cross a moral barrier.”
Denying children social services to solve California’s budget crisis is low even by CIS’s standards.
2. Over the last year Center for Immigration Studies has distributed nearly fifty articles to its members and supporters from the website VDARE. VDARE is a white nationalist website that is named after Virginia Dare, allegedly the first white child born in North America. The love goes both ways; Steven Camarota’s “research” is often relied upon by the website’s contributors.
1. The comment that took the cake was also the most recent. Camarota told a Tennessee newspaper that ‘charities have the right to set requirements, even if it means children of illegal immigrants go without toys.’ And there it is, the scroogiest anti-immigrant comment of the year.
Those are just a handful of reasons Steven Camarota is this year’s big winner. Mr. Camarota will have to provide proof of citizenship and a social security number in order to collect his prize…a lovely lump of coal.