American Legion Immigration Report Replete With Falsehoods

By Sonia Scherr, Southern Poverty Law Center. Posted August 20, 2008.

Since its founding nearly 90 years ago, the American Legion has been a fixture of community life. It has hosted Memorial Day parades to remember those who died in America's wars. It has held bingo nights and dances at its 14,000-plus posts worldwide. It has supported thousands of Boy Scout groups, sponsored a baseball program that's produced numerous professional players, and helped children living in poverty or with special needs. From World War II to the war in Iraq, the legion has fought to improve benefits for veterans and their families.

Now, America's largest veterans organization has launched another campaign -- a hard-line attack on undocumented immigrants that's at odds with the legion's mainstream image. As part of this effort, the legion, which purports to speak for 2.7 million members, recently issued a booklet that regurgitates discredited and often completely false information about how "illegals" are bringing crime, disease, and terrorism to this country, even as they wreck the economy for natives.

The legion's 34-page booklet, A Strategy to Address Illegal Immigration in the United States, asserts that "poverty, political instability, disease and war" are "on our back doorstep" because of porous borders and the failure of the government to stringently enforce immigration laws. But in making its case, the legion repeatedly cites dubious sources, ignores well-known facts and makes baseless claims -- such as the false assertion that the undocumented infected more than 7,000 people in America with leprosy during a recent three-year period.

"They're sort of trotting out old tropes to do with immigration," said Richard Wright, a Dartmouth College geography professor who specializes in immigration. "These are hackneyed stereotypes that have no place in a policy document."

That's not all. On April 28, when it released its booklet -- which was actually a repackaged version of a May 2007 legion "white paper" -- the group announced that its campaign would include letters to the editor, news releases from posts around the country, and six 60-second radio spots. These spots revisit some of the nastiest claims in the report, portraying undocumented immigrants as sex offenders, gang members, terrorists and murderers. Remarkably, they are delivered by Richard Fatherly, Kansas City chapter media adviser for the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps -- a group whose members President Bush once denounced as "vigilantes."

The Intelligence Report sought comment from the American Legion and was directed to Robert Caudell, assistant director of its Americanism and Children & Youth Division. Caudell requested a detailed list of false or misleading claims, but then declined to address those claims once he had received it. Instead, he E-mailed a general statement pointing to the legion's recommendations to the government and arguing that the Intelligence Report was simply interpreting the same facts and statistics differently than the legion. "It's quite the same when two individuals witness an identical incident," Caudell wrote. "Each has his perspective, his personal assumptions, and often a disparate ability to describe the event."

That's not the way Hispanic veterans organizations see it. Felix Vargas, a retired Army colonel and the director of government relations for the largest such group, American GI Forum, told the Intelligence Report that the booklet was misleading and untruthful and called it a slap in the face to Hispanic legionnaires. "We didn't need this distraction," said Vargas, who served as an Army Ranger and Special Forces commander in Vietnam. "The legion crusade is a disservice to both the veteran community and the nation." Added Eric Rojo, the president of Hispanic War Veterans of America and another retired colonel: "Their position is absurd and ignorant. Someone didn't sit down and check the facts." And John Amaya, a staff attorney at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, noted that 11% of the first 4,000 American casualties in Iraq have been Latinos -- and many of them are the children of undocumented residents of the United States.

The American Legion actually has been engaged with nativist groups for some time. In 2004, its national convention in Nashville, Tenn., featured Dan Stein, leader of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a strident nativist group that opposes both legal and illegal immigration. In March 2007, it held a forum on illegal immigration spotlighting nativist heavyweights like the leaders of NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies. It has allowed its posts to be used for gatherings of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. And this spring, it gave its "National Commander's Public Relations Award" to CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, who has himself regularly presented false data about immigrants.

At times in its history, the legion has made other forays into nativist politics. In 1937, the legion published A Review of Alien Isms, Revolutionary Communism and their Active Sympathizers in the United States, which linked immigrants to what was seen as the ultimate evil "ism": communism. The book claimed that immigrant children accounted for most of those attending communist summer camps and that other supposedly subversive groups were also heavily populated by immigrants. It demanded enhanced border patrols, immediate deportation of the undocumented and slashing of all immigration quotas by 90%. After World War I, when anti-Asian sentiment was sweeping the country, the legion on the West Coast championed policies that discriminated against Japanese-Americans. This attitude also affected the national legion, whose committee to investigate Asiatic immigration included a Seattle attorney who had served as president of his city's Anti-Japanese League, according to Tom Heuterman's book The Burning Horse.

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