[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 149 (Thursday, October 30, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11406-S11407]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF NATIVISM

  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I would like to highlight an article 
from the October 2 issue of the Wall Street Journal written by Tucker 
Carlson.
  It is important to recognize the valuable contributions that 
immigrants make to this country. Groups that refuse to recognize that 
legal immigration makes a positive contribution to the productivity and 
vitality of our country ignore the history of our Nation and exploit 
irrational fears. Mr. Carlson has done an exemplary job of exploring 
the initiatives and history of such anti-immigration organizations.
  I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

              [From the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 2, 1997]

                   The Intellectual Roots of Nativism

                          (By Tucker Carlson)

       When the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform issued its 
     final report on Tuesday, Dan Stein, executive director of the 
     Federation for American Immigration Reform, stood ready to 
     comment. Responding to a recommendation that the U.S. 
     citizenship

[[Page S11407]]

     oath be modified to strike antiquated words like 
     ``potentate,'' Mr. Stein told the Los Angeles Times, ``If the 
     oath of [allegiance] is too hard for the immigrants to 
     understand . . . we're admitting the wrong immigrants.''
       In the debate over immigration policy, no single group has 
     received more attention than FAIR, a Washington-based 
     nonprofit that claims a membership of 70,000. For close to 20 
     years, in books, monographs, op-eds and thousands of 
     newspaper stories, FAIR has made the case for tighter 
     national borders. And while the group's goal seems clear 
     enough--to curtail immigration into the U.S.--its ideology is 
     harder to pin down. FAIR's supporters include both the 
     conservative magazine National Review and former Colorado 
     Gov. Richard Lamm, a Democrat; Pat Buchanan as well as Eugene 
     McCarthy. Where does FAIR stand politically? It's hard to 
     say, says Mr. Stein: ``Immigration's weird. It has weird 
     politics.''


                        in favor of infanticide

       Certainly FAIR does. Consider the group's connection to 
     Garrett Hardin, a University of California biologist who 
     became moderately famous in the 1960s for his essay ``The 
     Tragedy of the Commons,'' a polemic against population growth 
     and Americans' ``freedom to breed.'' Mr. Hardin, now in his 
     80s, was for many years one of the more active members of 
     FAIR's board of directors, writing and speaking extensively 
     under the group's auspices. He is now a board member 
     emeritus, and his ideas are still influential at FAIR; just 
     this spring, Mr. Stein quoted ``noted immigration scholar and 
     thinker Garrett Hardin'' in testimony before the Senate.
       What are Garrett Hardin's ideas? ``Sending food to Ethiopia 
     does more harm than good,'' he explained in a 1992 interview 
     with Omni magazine. Giving starving Africans enough to eat, 
     Mr. Hardin argued, will only ``encourage population growth.'' 
     His views got less savory from there. In the same interview, 
     the ``noted immigration scholar'' went on to criticize 
     China's notoriously coercive population control programs on 
     the grounds they are not strict enough. He also argued 
     against reducing infant mortality in undeveloped nations and 
     came out foursquare in favor of infanticide (``in the 
     historical context,'' as the Omni reporter put it), which he 
     declared ``an effective population control.''
       ``In all societies practicing infanticide,'' Mr. Hardin 
     explained to the reporter, who happened to be five months 
     pregnant at the time, ``the child is killed within minutes 
     after birth, before bonding can occur.'' Not surprisingly, 
     Mr. Hardin wasn't shy about his enthusiastically pro-choice 
     views: ``A fetus is of so little value, there's no point in 
     worrying about it.''
       What does eliminating children have to do with immigration? 
     According to Mr. Hardin, just about everything. ``Because 
     widespread disease and famine no longer exist, we have to 
     find another means to stop population increases,'' he 
     explained. ``The quickest, easiest and most effective form of 
     population control in the U.S., that I support 
     wholeheartedly, is to end immigration.''
       At FAIR, Mr. Hardin's views are considered well within the 
     pale. Founded in 1979 by a Michigan ophthalmologist named 
     John Tanton, FAIR has from its inception been heavily 
     influenced by the now-discredited theories of Thomas Malthus, 
     an 18th-century English clergyman who predicted that the 
     world's food supply would soon fail to keep pace with its 
     rising population. During the 1970s, Dr. Tanton, now FAIR's 
     chairman, did his part to reduce world population by founding 
     a local Planned parenthood chapter and running the group Zero 
     Population Growth. With the birthrate of native-born 
     Americans declining, however, Dr. Tanton says he soon 
     realized that the key to population control was reducing 
     immigration. Unless America's borders are sealed, Dr. Tanton 
     explained to the Detroit Free Press this March, the country 
     will be overrun with people ``defecating and creating garbage 
     and looking for jobs.'' To this day, FAIR's ``guiding 
     principles'' state that ``the United States should make 
     greater efforts to encourage population control.'' Several 
     months ago, the group organized a ``bicentennial event'' to 
     commemorate Malthus's ``Essay on the Principle of 
     Population.''
       Mr. Stein, the organization's current executive director, 
     doesn't deny that Malthusian fears of overpopulation are 
     ``central'' to FAIR's mission. Nor does he flinch when 
     confronted with Mr. Hardin's views of killing newborns. 
     Instead, Mr. Stein defends Mr. Hardin by pointing out that 
     his colleague has never supported ``involuntary, coercive 
     infanticide.'' (As opposed to the voluntary kind?) As for the 
     Chinese government's well-documented campaign of forced 
     abortions and sterilization, Mr. Stein describes it as an 
     ``international family-planning program.''
       Perhaps most telling, Mr. Stein appears to embrace Mr. 
     Hardin's long-standing support of eugenics. In his interview 
     with Omni, Mr. Hardin expressed alarm about ``the next 
     generation of breeders'' now reproducing uncontrollably ``in 
     Third world countries.'' The problem, according to Mr. 
     Hardin, is not simply that there are too many people in the 
     world, but that there are too many of the wrong kind of 
     people. As he put it: ``It would be better to encourage the 
     breeding of more intelligent people rather than the less 
     intelligent.'' Asked to comment on Mr. Hardin's statement, 
     Mr. Stein doesn't even pause. ``Yeah, so what?'' he replies. 
     ``What is your problem with that? Should we be subsidizing 
     people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and 
     not subsidizing those with high ones?''
       Several years ago FAIR was forced to defend itself against 
     charges of racism when it was revealed that the organization 
     had received more than $600,000 from the Pioneer Fund, a 
     foundation established in 1937 to support ``research in 
     heredity and eugenics.'' Mr. Stein did his best at the time 
     to downplay Pioneer's nasty reputation. ``My job is to get 
     every dime of Pioneer's money,'' he told a reporter in 1993. 
     But an unpleasant odor remained.
       FAIR also has repeatedly been accused of hostility toward 
     Hispanics and the Catholic Church. Mr. Stein claims the 
     charges are nothing more than ``orchestrated attacks from 
     some of these fervent, out-of-control zealots on the so-
     called religious right.'' (And, he warned me, I had better 
     not imply otherwise: ``I will call you at home and I'll give 
     your wife my opinion of the article if I don't like it,'' he 
     said heatedly.) But Mr. Stein does little to disprove his 
     critics. In one widely quoted outburst, he suggested--that 
     certain immigrant groups are engaged in ``competitive 
     breeding.'' He told me: ``Certainly we would encourage people 
     in other countries to have small families. Otherwise they'll 
     all be coming here, because there's no room at the Vatican.''
       There are reasonable critics of immigration, but Dan Stein 
     is not one of them. Which makes it all the more puzzling that 
     a number of otherwise sober-minded conservatives seem to be 
     making common cause with Mr. Stein and FAIR. According to 
     National Review editor John O'Sullivan, FAIR, ``until very 
     recently, never saw the political right as sympathetic to the 
     cause. That was an obvious error.'' An error Mr. O'Sullivan 
     has done his best to correct: Over the past several years, 
     National Review has touted FAIR's positions in its editorials 
     and published several articles by FAIR employees.


                       `these central americans'

       FAIR itself has made a conscious play for the support of 
     social conservatives, running ads that blame immigration for 
     ``multiculturalism,'' ``multilingualism,'' ``increasing 
     ethnic tension'' and ``middle-class flight.'' Mr. Stein 
     claims that many immigrants are left-wing ideologues, making 
     conservatives FAIR's logical allies. ``Immigrants don't come 
     all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing,'' he says. 
     ``Some of them firmly believe in socialist or 
     redistributionist ideas. Many of them hate America, hate 
     everything the United States stands for. Talk to some of 
     these Central Americans.''
       Two years ago Insight, a magazine published by the 
     conservative Washington Times, referred to ``the conservative 
     Federation for American Immigration Reform.'' And last year 
     Republican strategist Paul Weyrich allowed FAIR to co-produce 
     more than 50 hour-long programs dealing with immigration for 
     National Empowerment Television, his conservative network. 
     Clearly, FAIR's overtures to the right are paying off. But do 
     conservatives who embrace FAIR know all they should about the 
     object of their affections?

                          ____________________