America's Voice Blog

Posted 04/27/10 at 10:48am By Mahwish Khan

Rachel Maddow Exposes the Network of Hate Behind Arizona’s SB 1070

Last night, Rachel Maddow exposed the network operating behind Arizona’s new SB 1070 bill -- legislation that promotes racial profiling.

From the "neo-nazi-hugging" Arizona senator, Russel Pearce, who introduced the bill, to the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR) -- designated as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center -- who wrote it (and could profit off of it!), Maddow takes a close look at who is really behind this anti-immigrant legislation. Watch:

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Posted 02/26/10 at 06:51pm By Jackie Mahendra

CIS-Zogby Polling FAIL: Cooking the Books on Latino Support for Mass Deportation

RecipeThis week the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the “think tank” of the anti-immigrant lobby, announced the results of a new CIS-sponsored Zogby poll purporting to show that people of color, including Latinos, support their mass-deportation, anti-immigrant agenda.

Coming from the same group whose leader, Mark Krikorian, recently argued that Judge Sotomayor should change her name to sound more “Anglo,” and who has previously blamed immigrants for global warming, CIS' viewpoints and strategies are clearly far from mainstream. Still, this latest effort to muddy the waters about public opinion on immigration ventures into the realm of the absurd.

CIS argues that people of color actually prefer enforcement-only approaches over comprehensive immigration reform. They claim that their “poll of Hispanic, Asian-American, and African-American likely voters finds some support for legalization.  But overall each of these groups prefers enforcement and for illegal immigrants to return home.”  The CIS “poll” amazingly found that 52% of Latinos “support enforcement to encourage illegals to go home; 34 percent support conditional legalization.” 

That's right, CIS has cooked up a plan to try to convince us that a majority of Latinos support the mass deportation of the 12 milllion immigrants living and working in the U.S. without authorization. Half-baked polling and research is nothing new for these folks, after all.

What's really going on: the questions in the CIS-sponsored Zogby poll are engineered to produce anti-immigration responses and rely solely on input from online respondents, rather than a random sample of the general population (i.e. a true random digit dial telephone poll).  The findings are a dramatic departure from the results of numerous other (credible) polls of Latino voters (see below). 

Here's a quick Public Service Announcement from FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver, who has called CIS' polling firm, Zogby, the "Worst Pollster in the World":

Zogby International conducts two types of polls. One type are conventional telephone polls. Zogby's telephone polls, while prone to somewhat wild fluctuations and subject to their share of erratic results (such as predicting a 13-point win for Barack Obama in the California primary; Obama lost by 9 points), are actually not terrible, and did fairly well on November 4th.

Zogby, however, also conducts Internet-based polls. These polls are conducted among users who volunteer to participate in them, first by signing up at the Zogby website (you can do so yourself here) and then by responding to an e-mail solicitation. These Internet polls, to the extent they rely on voluntary participation, violate the most basic precept of survey research, which is that of the random sample. And as you might infer, they obtain absolutely terrible results. 

Onto the real research. A May 2009 poll of Latinos nationwide conducted by Latino Decisions found that:

“...over 80% of Latino voters said they supported Obama’s plan that included increased border security, fines for undocumented immigrants, and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants meeting certain requirements – just 14% of Latinos opposed the president’s plan.”

Click here to read more.
Posted 01/27/10 at 09:16am By Mahwish Khan

After TPS Granted for Haitian Immigrants, Groups Rush to Demonize, Demagogue

Earlier this month, President Obama and a bipartisan group of members of Congress did the right thing by granting Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Haitian immigrants already in the United States. Granting TPS was a welcome and timely move that reinforced American values at a time of great international turmoil.

It was a move that we, and many other organizations, applauded with the advertisement to the right, which appeared in Roll Call last Thursday, January 21st.   

Since then, as Andrea Nill at the Wonk Room points out, anti-immigration policy organizations and anti-immigration legislators began spouting nonsense like, "Haiti’s So Screwed Up Because It Wasn’t Colonized Long Enough" and "Undocumented Haitians Should Be Deported, Haiti In ‘Great Need Of Relief Workers" immediately following the tragedy. Blogger Duke at The Sanctuary quotes the anti-immigration "think tank" director, Mark Krikorian, in "Krikorian: Problem with Haiti- slavery ended too soon."

Click here to read more.
Posted 01/14/10 at 04:12pm By Marjorie Valbrun

A Maribel Hastings Exclusive: The Key Players in Immigration Reform

The immigration reform movement is more sophisticated than ever, encompassing a greater diversity of support among various sectors of American society.  As the immigration debate heats up this year, America’s Voice today releases a special report, “Immigration Reform: Know the Players,” providing an indispensable reference for anyone following the issue of immigration reform.

The series, which was originally published in Spanish on MaribelHastings.com in eight thematic installments, provides background information, statistics, and other detailed information on the roles played in the urgent battle for reform by the following groups of supporters: law enforcement; undocumented students; anti-immigrant groups; the pro-immigrant movement; faith communities; farmers and agricultural laborers; business and labor interests; and, of course, the main actors: the White House, Senate and House of Representatives.

Click here to download a copy of the series “Immigration Reform: Know the Players,” or listen to the audio actuality here.

Posted 01/06/10 at 04:54pm By Jackie Mahendra

New Parody Site Begs Question: Does Anti-Immigrant Crowd Think Hate Crimes are Funny?

In "Nativist Ringleader Behind New Website Parodying Latino Group’s Anti-Hate Campaign," Andrea Nill reports:tantonspinoff copy

....Center for Immigration Truth” was launched with the goal of “present[ing] the truth behind the agenda and tactics of the radical open borders network.” The parody site, which is designed to look just like the National Council of La Raza’s (NCLR) We Can Stop The Hate website, seeks to trivialize and discredit the Latino advocacy group’s campaign against hate and misinformation in the immigration debate. Wonk Room recently discovered that GoDaddy’s domain directory reveals that the Center for Immigration Truth website is registered and run by the same man who founded and funds many of the anti-immigrant extremist groups that NCLR seeks to shed light on: John Tanton.

Looks like John Tanton didn't want to spring for that whopping $9.99/year private domain registration... Wonder if he's pinching himself now. At least it's crystal clear who is really behind this tasteless parody (GoDaddy's WhoIs directory screenshot is pictured at right). The site itself goes in circles with its "About" section (we're linked to prominently!), but the "Translate" section is also priceless, reading:

We have received requests to translate our website into foreign languages - notably, German, Dutch and Spanish.

You can translate text from any web page on this website into another language by using this translator. (LINKS TO BABEL FISH TRANSLATION SITE-- SO YOU CAN COPY AND PASTE YOUR OWN CONTENT).

GoDaddyRight, Dutch. Only one problem: this is America, folks. We speak English.

Maybe we should start a spinoff site, "Speak English or Get Babel Fish."

Nill continues with some crucial perspective on John Tanton's life work from SPLC:

The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Tanton as the “puppeteer” of the organized anti-immigration “movement”:

It is not often that a single individual is largely responsible for creating an entire political movement. But John Tanton can claim without exaggeration that he is the founding father of America’s modern anti-immigration movement. [...]

Nill argues:

In the past, Tanton has dabbled in eugenics and one his groups, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, accepted $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund, an outfit described as having “never wavered in its commitment to eugenics and ideas of human and racial inferiority and superiority.” Tanton also owns and runs the Social Contract Press which publishes the views of known white nationalists and includes pieces such as “Europhobia: The Hostility Toward European-Descended Americans.”

On the Center for Immigration Truth, Tanton sticks to degrading all of the groups which have ever challenged or criticized his network of organizations. It describes SPLC — a civil rights organization committed to the “struggle for tolerance and justice,” as a group that “shamelessly panders to peoples’ fears and profiteers from liberal White guilt in order to line its overflowing coffers.” NCLR, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization, is identified as representing “the well-funded far-left anti-enforcement mob.” Tanton even goes after the Wonk Room for “regurgitating disinformation about dedicated environmentalists.” However, the brand of environmentalism that Tanton is referring to is the one that blames global climate change and other environmental woes on immigration to the U.S.

NCLR launched its “We Can Stop The Hate” campaign in an effort to “stem the surge of hate and violence” that is currently threatening the Latino and immigrant community.

To recap, check out a video we produced last year, exposing the Tanton network of anti-immigrant organizations. Sadly, it's just as relevant today, considering John Tanton and his followers appear to think that a rise in violent hate crimes is something to make fun of.

Watch the video, "Wolves:"

Posted 01/05/10 at 10:00am By Jackie Mahendra

Latest CIS Poll on Faith and Immigration Raises Eyebrows

FaithSomething is clearly amiss when it comes to the latest Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) polling on immigration. Not that it’s a huge surprise, coming from the same "think tank" whose leader recently argued that Judge Sotomayor should change her name to sound more “Anglo...”

In December, the anti-immigration organization hired the polling firm Zogby International to conduct a survey that claims to have found broad opposition among people of faith for comprehensive immigration reform.  While it’s unsurprising that CIS would try to push back against recent public proclamations in support of immigration reform from Catholic, evangelical, and Jewish faith leaders, by steering poll results toward the organization’s desired conclusions, the poll runs smack into some fairly troubling breaches of methodology.

Not only did questions in the CIS-sponsored Zogby poll appear engineered to produce anti-immigration responses, but, most importantly, those who participate in online panels, on which the results were based, are simply not a random sample of the general population in the fashion that a true random digit dial telephone poll is.

So great are the discrepancies that Dr. Robert P. Jones, president of Public Religion Research, concludes in a recent memo:

The CIS/Zogby poll has serious methodological shortcomings, and results should be viewed with considerable caution.

Incidentally, for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Zogby conducted an October 2008 poll of 1,000 U.S. Catholics nationwide that showed broad support for immigration reform.  The poll found that “69 percent of Catholics polled supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, provided they register with the government; 62 percent supported the concept if they were required to learn English.”  

Instead of the online only, opt-in methodology, the USCCB poll relied on the tried-and-true method of a random telephone sample.  In other words, it asked an actual sample of people what they thought.

Click here to read more.
Posted 09/17/09 at 12:40pm By Jackie Mahendra

FAIR’s Annual “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” Event Brings A Whopping 50 Supporters to DC

Washington Post Vigil PicAfter a huge push to drive up turnout, and after event organizers promised to storm Congress with anti-immigration citizen lobbyists this week, a mere fifty (yes, 50) people showed up for the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s (FAIR) annual “Hold their Feet to the Fire” event in Washington, DC this week.

Ironically, a prayer vigil held by faith leaders in support of immigration reform – organized at the last minute – turned out twice that number of people on Monday to pray for a return to moral debate on immigration. The pro-reform vigil was highlighted on the front page of the Washington Post Tuesday (picture at right):

"We must clearly say shame, shame, shame on those who depend on our immigrant brothers and sisters, use them and often abuse them, and then turn against them with their racism and hatred," said Bishop Minerva Carcaño, who helped put together the vigil.

As a show of political force, FAIR’s failure to turn out real people this week is a good reminder about the anti-immigrant lobby. It has a long history of generating lots of noise (phonecalls, faxes, and more) and scaring Congress into making terrible policy decisions, while failing to deliver on the angry threats with actual votes -- or actual people at events, in this case.  In 20 of 22 competitive elections in the 2008 cycle where immigration was a top issue, the hard-line anti-immigrant candidate lost to a candidate with a more expansive view of immigration reform.

FAIR adFAIR, a designated hate group, is asking members of Congress to support an immigration agenda that has more to do with xenophobia and intolerance than real solutions to our dysfunctional immigration system.

As Washington Post reporter, Spencer S. Hsu, reported Monday, America's Voice helped launch an ad early this week to let Congress know who was coming to town:

This all came about as America’s Voice Education Fund, Campaign for Community Change, the Center for New Community, and the Service Employees International Union paid for an advertisement to run in Roll Call, asking that members of Congress not meet with the anti-immigrant group, stating that “extremist groups, like FAIR, shouldn’t be allowed to write immigration policy.”

Revealing of the group’s anti-immigrant views, the ad begins with a quote from FAIR’s founder, John Tanton:

"As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?"

The advertisement goes on to feature Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-CA), Rep. Steve King (R-IA), Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who have all had a history of collaboration with FAIR and other anti-immigrant groups. Also featured on the advertisement is – surprise, surprise – fear-mongering news anchor Lou Dobbs, who is causing CNN a lot of pain this week for broadcasting his radio show live from FAIR's festivities.

Take action now to Fight FAIR and let Congress know you want real solutions on immigration.

Also, check out media coverage of the hate rally so far:

Click here to read more.
Posted 07/15/09 at 01:31pm By Jackie Mahendra

Anti-Immigration Groups Show True Colors, Attack Sotomayor and NCLR

Sonia SotomayorJust in case Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) leading the attack on Sonia Sotomayor's alleged "racism" wasn't enough pot calling the kettle black, this just in.

In a press release,  ALIPAC, one of the nation's most vocal anti-immigration advocacy groups, takes a stab at Sotomayor's membership in NCLR (National Council of La Raza), a mainstream Hispanic equivalent to the NAACP.

Sonia Sotomayor is a member and supporter of the racist group La Raza which supports Amnesty and welfare benefits for illegal aliens," said William Gheen of ALIPAC. "Her membership in this racist group, along with her racist 'wise Latina' comments and her court decisions against the firefighters in New Haven, tells us that Sonia Sotomayor shows a pattern of bigotry that should not be welcomed on the Supreme Court!

So, apologies to the Center for Immigration Studies, but its head Mark Krikorian no longer wins the award for most absurd line of attack on the President's Supreme Court nominee. Nope, William Gheen clearly distinguishes himself there.

And in case you're wondering what NCLR is all about, and where they get their racist evil dollars, Rachel Maddow summed it up nicely for Tom Tancredo:

 

Posted 03/03/09 at 01:53pm By Web Team

FAIR is not a Hate Group, says President Dan Stein

Dan SteinThe media is starting to tell it like it is, and the Nativists are getting even more restless.

In “Leader says FAIR is no hate group,” FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) President Dan Stein takes issue with a recent article by the Frederick News-Post Online, chronicling the quiet—but sinister—rise of hate groups across the country.

The piece cited the latest report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which argues:

As a result of rising animosity, spawned by the national debate over illegal immigration, the economic recession and the election of President Barack Obama, the number of national hate groups is increasing in America, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The report, which tracked hate groups by state, noted that the number of such groups in the U.S. rose from 602 in 2000 to 926 in 2008. The number of hate groups rose about 4 percent from 2007 to 2008, according to the report, released Thursday.

Stein, the leader of FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform), challenged the reporting of his group’s status, saying, "FAIR stands behind 30 years of constructive and highly ethical conduct for what we believe is proper immigration reform."

In addition to “30 years of ethical conduct,” here are some other highlights of FAIR’s work:

  • FAIR was founded by a supporter of eugenics, John Tanton, with funds from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation committed to the belief that some races of people are genetically and intellectually superior to other races. Tanton continues as a leader of FAIR and sits on its board of directors.

  • FAIR employed and continues to employ known anti-Catholic bigots, including Rosanna Pulido, who said of the Catholic Church in the United States: What better way to fill your pews and fill your offering coffers than with inviting in and giving sanctuary to illegal aliens? . . . What is being passed off right now by the Catholic Church is not Catholicism. It has nothing to do with Christianity or the Bible.

  • FAIR's Executive Director Dan Stein has been an author and editorial board member for the Social Contract Press. FAIR Board member Sharon Barnes has also been on the editorial advisory board. Social Contract publishes the work of numerous white nationalists such as John Vinson, who wrote that God prefers racial separation and that the South should secede from the United States to protect white people.

  • FAIR has well-documented connections to the racist hate group Council of Conservative Citizens, formed out of the old White Citizens Council. The Council of Conservative Citizens has described black people as "a retrograde species of humanity." FAIR staffer Rick Oltman has spoken at Council events, as did FAIR field coordinator Dave Ray. Similarly, Council leaders Sam Francis and Jared Taylor have spoken at FAIR run forums.  

Clearly nothing to be concerned about here!

For more information, check out Southern Poverty Law Center’s new interactive map, which charts the rise of hate crimes, and race-based violence across the country. You can add your name to take a stand against hate.