Video: The White Supremacist Roots of Arizona’s Immigration Law
Rachel Maddow uncovers the people behind Arizona’s new immigration law: neo-Nazis, white supremacists, nativists, and eugenicists. Lovely.
The main guy taking credit for the new law is Kris Kobach — a Birther who’s running for Kansas secretary of state. But his Birtherism is the least offensive thing about Kobach.
His campaign Website brags, “Kobach wins one in Arizona.” He’s also an attorney for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of an immigration group called FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
FAIR was founded in 1979 by John Tanton, who’s still listed as a member of FAIR’s board of directors. Seven years after he started FAIR, Tanton wrote this, “To govern is to populate. Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile? 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?”
For nine of the first years of FAIR’s existence, the group reportedly received more than $1 million in funding from something called the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund describes itself as based “in the Darwinian-Galtonian evolutionary tradition and eugenics movement.” For the last 70 years, the Pioneer Fund has funded controversial research about race and intelligence, essentially aimed at proving the racial superiority of white people. The group’s original mandate was to promote the genes of those “deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution.”