Since 1985, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has served as the anti-immigrant movement’s go-to think tank. The organizaton publishes dozens of reports and hundreds of blog pieces each year that are cited by elected officials and the media. But its reports have been widely criticized and...
www.splcenter.org
CIS’s veneer of legitimacy starts with its motto on the top of its website claiming the group is “low-immigration, pro-immigrant.” But the truth is that CIS was founded by white nationalist John Tanton and throughout its 30-plus years of existence, the group has promoted an immigration platform that has never strayed far from its origins. In between reports about the cost of undocumented immigration are others promoting age-old racist tropes about immigrants bringing disease into the country and blaming them for increases in crime, as well as fear-mongering around terrorism. In 2011, for instance, CIS attempted to add a “scholarly veneer” to the “terror babies” concept, arguing that birthright citizenship left the nation at risk of raising future terrorists.
The CIS reports follow a similar pattern: after posing the problem of immigration, they then shift focus to claims there are only two solutions to immigration reform – amnesty or mass deportation, and argue that neither of these options would be successful. In offering a third solution, attrition through enforcement, CIS reports focus on five main themes: 1) the relationship between ICE and undocumented immigrants, 2) immigrants are criminals and terrorists, 3) immigrants use a disproportionate amount of welfare, 4) immigrants negatively affect the U.S. economy, 5) the general public wants to reduce immigration.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) rounded up four debunked studies back in 2009. What follows is a look at more recent CIS studies, challenged by an array of immigration policy experts. When the economic analyses and arguments advanced by CIS come apart, the foundation for the “low immigration, pro-immigrant” vision of the organization shifts to what Tanton, CIS founder, said in a letter in 1993: "I've come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that."
There's much more than just this at that link. I dare you to read it all. You won't.
MBFC is far and away more credible than CIS
The
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is a far worse pile of non-credibility than MBFC. The fact that you refer to them as a source for your comments, puts your whole post in the garbage can.
The easiest way to spot an invalid report (typical of MSM) is to see its use of the
Southern Poverty Law Center. This laughingstock organization purports to list what it calls
“hate groups”. Problem is, some things in life SHOULD be hated. Hate, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing (as SPLC commonly indicates).
One can get the feeling that if this were 1943, the SPLC would crab about Americans hating Hitler and his Nazis, and Hirohito, and his Japanese imperialist invaders, all while they were killing our soldiers.
Now we have another world war. It is the international jihad (ISIS, al Qaeda, Taliban, Al Shabbab, Boko Harem, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc) vs the sane world. But just say something that goes in the direction of protecting America from these genocidists, or their subversive counterpart, the Muslim Brotherhood, and SPLC will be ragging at you as a hate group or individual.
A little background on the SPLC can clear things up about this phony organization, which has nothing to do with either “poverty” or “law”, and is primarily about stuffing their pockets with
donation$$$ from wary liberals, whom they scare to death with
exaggeration reports.
Journalists who have no ideological or financial interest in skewing the outcome one way or the other have conducted examinations of the SPLC’s nearly 40-year history. While the political leanings of the publications and journalists who undertook several of the investigations would lead one to expect a favorable evaluation of the SPLC, quite the opposite was the case.
Articles published in
The Nation, Harper’s, and even the SPLC’s hometown newspaper, t
he Montgomery Advertiser all make the same assertion: the SPLC exaggerates, and manipulates incidents of “hate” for the sole purpose of raising vast sums of money.
The Nation: In response to a letter published in the February 26, 2001 edition of the magazine from Richard Cohen (the SPLC’s president and CEO) defending the SPLC’s activities, journalist JoAnn Wypijewski questioned what the organization does with its vast war chest: The center doesn’t devote all of its resources to any kind of fight. In 1999 it spent $2.4 million on litigation and $5.7 million on fundraising, meanwhile taking in more than $44 million—$27 million from fundraising, the rest from investments.
A few years ago the American Institute of Philanthropy gave the SPLC an F for ‘excessive’ reserves. On the subject of ‘hate groups,’ though, Cohen is almost comically disingenuous. No one has been more assiduous in inflating the profile of such groups than the center’s millionaire huckster Morris Dees, who in 1999 began a begging letter,
‘Dear Friend, The danger presented by the Klan is greater now than at any time in the past ten years.’ Hate sells; poor people don’t, which is why readers who go to the center’s web site will find only a handful of cases on such unlucrative causes as fair housing, worker safety or healthcare, many of those from the 1970s and ‘80s.
Why the organization continues to keep ‘Poverty’ (or even ‘Law’) in its name can be ascribed only to nostalgia or a cynical understanding of the marketing possibilities in class guilt. The Nation’s opinion of the SPLC has only diminished with the passage of time. Syndicated columnist Alexander Cockburn wrote a scathing article entitled “King of the Hate Business,” for the April 29, 2009 edition of the magazine. In his piece, Cockburn lambasted the SPLC and its founder, Morris Dees. Noting the election of Barack Obama and solid Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, Cockburn observed,
“It’s also horrible news for people who raise money and make money selling the notion that there’s a right resurgence out there in the hinterland with legions of haters ready to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of Mein Kampf tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other.” Cockburn, like just about everyone else who has examined the SPLC’s record, noted the organization’s shameful record of
hyping hate for profit.
What is the archsalesman of hatemongering, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, going to do now? Ever since 1971, U.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with his fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of a hate-sodden America in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC.
Harper’s: In the November 2000 edition, Washington editor Ken Silverstein published an exposé of the SPLC and its tactics and operational activities. Entitled “The Church of Morris Dees,” Silverstein concluded that the SPLC
“spends most of its time—and money—on a relentless fundraising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate."
In a follow-up in March 2007, Silverstein noted that not much had changed since his 2000 article. Back in 2000, I wrote a story in Harper’s about the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Alabama, whose stated mission is to combat disgusting yet mostly impotent groups like the Nazis and the KKK. What it does best, though, is to raise obscene amounts of money by hyping fears about the power of those groups; hence the SPLC has become the nation’s richest “civil rights” organization.
The Montgomery Advertiser: the city’s leading newspaper, began scrutinizing the SPLC, headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama, as early as 1994. In 1995, the Pulitzer Board nominated the Advertiser’s eight-part series of investigative reports as a finalist for its distinguished Pulitzer Prize. In a May 1999 seminar at Harvard University’s Nieman Center, then managing editor Jim Tharpe described the SPLC’s efforts to intimidate his reporters during their investigation:
“Our series was published in 1995 after three years of very brutal research under the threat of lawsuit the entire time.” Like Harper’s and The Nation, the Advertiser’s investigation concluded that the SPLC was little more than a
hugely successful fundraising operation that delivered little of what it promised to its donors. Tharpe stated:
"The Center was building up a huge surplus. It was 50-something million at that time; it’s now approaching 100 million, but they’ve never spent more than 31 percent of the money they were bringing in on programs, and sometimes they spent as little as 18 percent. Most nonprofits spend about 75 percent on programs."
A sampling of their donors showed that they had no idea of the Center’s wealth. The charity watchdog groups, the few that are in existence, had consistently criticized the Center, even though nobody had reported that. By looking at 990s, what few financial records we did have available, we were able to corroborate much of that information, many of the allegations they had made, the fact that the Center didn’t spend very much of its money that it took in on programs, the fact that some of the top people at the Center were paid very high salaries, the fact that there weren’t minorities in management positions at the Center. But the Advertiser’s investigative reporters found something even more remarkable for an organization that prides itself on “exposing” racism in others.
The newspaper was able to corroborate institutional racism within the SPLC. Addressing Harvard’s Nieman Center, Tharpe stated:
"There was a problem with black employees at what was the nation’s richest civil rights organization; there were no blacks in the top management positions. Twelve out of the 13 black current and former employees we contacted cited racism at the Center, which was a shocker to me. As of 1995, the Center had hired only two black attorneys in its entire history."
None of these 3 publications had any obvious political or economic interest in discrediting the SPLC. In fact, Tharpe, whose newspaper was literally next door to the SPLC’s headquarters, noted,
“They [SPLC officials] were friends with people at the paper; we hung out with them.” Nevertheless,
all three, after closely examining the SPLC, independently arrived at the conclusion that the organization is not a credible or objective source of information.
