Anti-Immigration Hardliners Launch Fake "Progressive" Front Group

By Eric Ward, Imagine 2050. Posted April 1, 2009.

Real progressives would do well to prepare in the coming months. The civil rights organization Center for New Community announced in the most recent edition of its e-bulletin, FAIR Exposed, that the Tanton Network has launched a front group called Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR). PFIR is simply another addition to a growing list of anti-immigrant groups being set up under the Tanton Network to give the illusion that the anti-immigrant movement is broader than it really is.

This network of organizations is named after white nationalist John Tanton the founder and key leader in a network of anti-immigrant organizations, spin-offs and front groups. Key entities include Center for Immigration Studies, Social Contract Press, and the Coalition for the Future American Worker.

John Tanton is a controversial figure. The founder and a current board member of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Tanton helped secure over a million dollars in funding from a foundation known as the Pioneer Fund, a racist foundation that peddles pseudo-science claiming that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites based on cultural and biological factors. In the 1930s the Pioneer Fund distributed propaganda films developed by the Nazi Germany to public schools.

The Tanton network has made repeated attempts to recruit within progressive circles targeting environmentalists, labor and black civil rights organizations with only token success. However, with immigration reform back on the table and the majority of Americans lining up behind it, progressives are now seen by the Tanton network as a possible block to sink any attempts at creating a viable immigration system in the United States.

See more stories tagged with: racism, immigration, tanton, anti-immigrant

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