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After Stacking Subcommittee, Anti-immigrant Lawyer Complains That It’s Not Fair

Ian Smith is really, really upset –– or at least he wants us to think so.

A blogger for the conservative National Review, Smith wrote a piece in the wake of last week’s House Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee hearing on birthright citizenship entitled, “How Congressional Democrats Try to Control the Immigration Debate.” In the piece, he bizarrely alleged that Democrats controlled the panel and went on to charge that they had “launched a barrage of personal attacks on an 85-year-old law professor testifying that birthright citizenship is unconstitutional.”

The idea that Democrats controlled the panel is frankly ridiculous. The subcommittee, like the House itself, is controlled by Republicans. And it was the panel’s leadership that stacked last week’s hearing with three out of four witnesses who openly advocate removing the birthright citizenship clause in the 14th Amendment. One of those witnesses, Jon Feere, is a fellow with the anti-immigrant group Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a “think tank” that puts out hundreds of reports blaming immigrants for America’s ills.

This isn’t the first time the debate has been weighted heavily toward a conservative perspective. At previous hearings on immigration in the House and Senate this year — both of them controlled by the GOP — no fewer than 11 witnesses active in the organized anti-immigrant movement have testified.

And this is not some unforeseen happenstance. Stacking both the House and Senate Judiciary Subcommittees on Immigration has been an objective for the modern anti-immigrant movement and its founder, white nationalist John Tanton, for decades.

In 1986, Tanton distributed a series of secret memos outlining his grand strategy for creating a viable and impactful anti-immigrant movement. In them, he warned of a coming “Latin onslaught” and complained about Latinos’ allegedly low “educability,” as well as discussing his “long-range project” for advancing nativist immigration policies.

“We should make every effort to get legislators sympathetic to our point of view appointed to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, and their Immigration Sub-Committees. Think how much different our prospects would be if someone espousing our ideas had the chairmanship! If we secure the appointment of our people as freshmen members of the committee, we will eventually secure the chairmanship. Remember: we’re in this for the long haul,” Tanton wrote in the first memo in the series, under a section titled “Infiltrate the Judiciary Committees.”

Following the 2014 mid-term elections, Tanton (not for the first time) got his wish. The Senate Judiciary Committee tipped in favor of the Republicans, many of whom were sympathetic to the nativist cause and willing to work with anti-immigrant groups.

That’s what makes Smith’s outrage so absurd.

While Smith accused the subcommittee’s Democrats of unfairly attacking University of Texas law professor Lino Graglia, he also alleged that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) “had heavy input in the Democrats’ smear campaign.” He was apparently referring to the fact that the one witness advocating leaving the 14th Amendment intact was SPLC President Richard Cohen.

If anyone really merited criticism, it was the Republicans who invited Graglia, a man with a history of racist statements, to testify. In 1997, Graglia told a press conference that black and Latino students were “not academically competitive.”

In his article, Smith went on to attack Sheila Jackson Lee, a black Democratic member of the committee from Texas. Smith claimed Lee’s sympathetic questioning of Cohen “no doubt sent Barbara Jordan, the late true immigration reformer and fellow Texas Democrat rolling in her grave.” For years, the anti-immigrant movement has used Jordan, an African-American woman who believed in limiting immigration, as a cover to veil their racist beliefs.

Perhaps it is no surprise that Smith would come out swinging — his biography at the National Review identifies him as an attorney at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), the legal arm the Tanton-founded Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which is listed by the SPLC as an anti-immigrant hate group.

The current leader of FAIR is Dan Stein, who used to head up Smith’s IRLI, where he remains on the board today, before making the shift to FAIR in the 1980s. In 1997, in a fairly typical FAIR statement, Stein warned: “Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing. Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans.”

Smith may have been genuinely angry that not every witness in the hearing parroted his own point of view. But the fact is that we live in a democracy, and even though Smith and his party now control both houses of Congress, they will still have to listen to a little dissent.

 

 

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