Dan Stein, president of FAIR
When Hurricane Sandy hit, some hard-line GOP’ers took exception to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s supportive words for President Obama. When the attacks on our embassies occurred in Eygpt and Libya, Mitt Romney was widely denounced for attempting to spin the attacks for the benefit of his campaign. Back in September, Breitbart News roundly criticized Democrats in the Senate for politicizing veterans in order to manufacture an excuse for violating the debt-ceiling deal.
After the massacres carried out by Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo and Utoya, Norway, ranking Islamophobe Pamela Geller was quick to claim that the tragedy had clearly been carried out by bloodthirsty Muslims. After long-time committed neo-Nazi skinhead Wade Michael Page stormed into a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, shooting police and worshipers, killing some, head of VDARE, Peter Brimelow (a white nationalist that FAIR founder John Tanton has supported financially in the past) simply wrote, “What are Sikhs doing in Wisconsin anyway?”
Politicizing, indeed.
Which brings us to the press release issued by the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR) on Wednesday, December 12, titled: “Obama Administration’s Failure to Arrest Illegal Alien Senate Intern: Failure to Arrest Illegal Alien Senate Intern Demonstrates Obama Administration Cannot Be Trusted to Enforce Immigration Laws.” (Emphasis ours.)
The title of FAIR’s press release alone stinks of one thing and one thing alone-fear. Nevermind its sheer length, which is more suited for a 400-page dissertation authored by a University of Chicago PhD candidate publishing ground-breaking, abstract theories of Organic Chemistry.
For the first time since 2007, and with GOP legislators presently turning a kind ear towards the issue, FAIR and it’s sister organizations in the anti-immigrant movement are truly terrified that they’ll be powerless to stop the measures of immigration reform that seem destined for passage from bill-into-law. Mark Krikorian, head of one such sister organization, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), has even been quoted as saying, “I think at some point amnesty for some people is inevitable.” Yet with the discovery of an unauthorized immigrant who is a convicted sex offender working as an intern in the office of Democratic Senator Robert Menendez (NJ), FAIR has quickly launched torpedoes at that which Krikorian deems a certainty.
The press release warrants closer examinaton:
- “Today’s revelations also underscore the inherent dangers in granting illegal aliens amnesty, whether through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the DREAM Act, or a ‘comprehensive’ immigration reform bill.”
- “It has been clear for years that the Obama administration has been politicizing enforcement of U.S. immigration laws [….] said Dan Stein,” president of FAIR.
Together, these two quotes boldly evidence FAIR’s anti-immigrant messaging schema, boiled down and distilled here into transparency-a transparency that begs the following questions: what exactly does FAIR do other than politicize anything and everything having to do with “U.S. immigration”; and what does the first bullet point translate to other than an absurd, blanket condemnation of every DREAMer, of every unauthorized immigrant present in our country?
FAIR and Stein’s bigoted sentiments as they are evidenced most recently in this “politicizing” press release-in the first bullet point especially-are disgraceful. But the anti-immigrant movement doesn’t care. For Dan Stein and those like him, “illegal is illegal.” For them, any immigrant is potentially a criminal hiding in plain sight. A potential job thief. A potential human trafficker. A potential drug-runner. A potential member of MS-13. A potential public service abuser. And, of course, all of “those people” join in celebrating together the so-called “Balkan-izing” of American culture and civilization.
Point being, Stein and those like him want to convince us all that “illegal truly is illegal” because, if they can convince us of that, a human can never truly be human beyond that point, and then we can all simply live in a reductive, dichotomous world of either American or un-American.
But, hey, what’s political about that.