Yesterday, anti-immigrant group Center for Immigration Studies wrote a blog bashing Herman Cain for his call for an electrified border fence. CIS slammed Cain’s “thoughtless remarks,” also calling them “ill-informed and ill-considered comments.” Mother Jones responded this morning slamming CIS, and providing some examples of “thoughtless” remarks that CIS staffers have made this year.
With that article in mind, we decided to offer up a collection of a top ten “tasteless” (actually downright racist) remarks that CIS has gone on record with over the past few years. Enjoy:
- After the tragedy and horror of the earthquake in Haiti at the beginning of 2010, Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Tanton Network group Center for Immigration Studies stated, “my guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.”
- On April 27, 2011, Mark Krikorian wrote an article on National Review where he called Muslims a “vicious people.”
- In a November 2008 report, CIS staffer David Seminara called immigrant women, “Third-World gold diggers.”
- In 2008, CIS director of policy studies, Jessica Vaughan, argued that the Temporary Protection Status for refugees has contributed to “the burgeoning street gang problem in the United States.”
- In 2009, Mark Krikorian lamented the pronunciation of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s last name stating, “While in the past there may well have been too much social pressure for what sociologists call Anglo-conformity, now there isn’t enough.”
- In a September 2011 blog for National Review, Krikoirian stated, “I think Jew-hatred is so deeply rooted in the Arab and broader Islamic world that even governments that would want to help end the citizenship limbo of Palestinian refugees and their descendants would hesitate, fearing popular uprisings and Islamist attack.”
- According to the Southern Poverty Law Center: in 2008, shortly after the failure of Washington Mutual Bank, Krikorian found a press release recently issued by the bank that celebrated its inclusion on a list of “Business Diversity Elites.” He posted the news release at National Review Online with the headline “Cause and Effect?” — a clear suggestion that Washington Mutual’s commitment to opening its ranks to Latinos had caused its financial collapse.
- In May of this year, CIS staffer David North ludicrously stated that “gay couples do not reproduce.”
- In a September 2010 blog, CIS staffer David North blamed undocumented immigrants for the historic high rates of teenage obesity in the United States.
- In a 2011 memo, CIS fellow James R. Edwards proposed “broader grounds for exclusion” when considering visa applicants, and stated that “In-depth examination of visa applicants’ beliefs and attitudes toward Western democracy and liberty could be part of the screening process.”