Pro-Migration Activists Accelerate ‘Hate’ Campaign Vs. Immigration Reformers

Pro-migration activists are escalating their race-themed “Hate” PR campaign against critics of federal migration policy– even though many recent polls show the critics are mainstream, multi-racial, and multiplying.

The argument for curbing immigration “is just a white nationalist argument that America should be for white people, and everybody else is somehow subpar and doesn’t belong,” said Heidi Beirich, who named her activist group, The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

The GOP has “benefited enormously from [establishment] media outlets actively normalizing anti-immigrant hysteria,” according to an op-ed published by the Los Angeles Times.

“This movement has very sinister origins, right? Racist eugenicist beliefs that have shaped the ideology,” claimed Lola Ibrahim, the director of the Migrant, Immigrant & Refugee Rights Alliance. She spoke at a December 9 online meeting of progressives seeking to minimize media coverage of Americans’ views about immigration.  

The mainstream groups include the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), NumbersUSA, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and the Immigration Reform Law Institute.

“The point is to intimidate people and prevent them from articulating these mainstream policy views,” responded CIS director Mark Krikorian. He continued:

If they can shut us up, they have a good chance of preventing these views from being articulated by politicians and writers. [If] so, they would’t have political effect because even if people agree with you, if no one is talking about those issues and no politicians are running on them, then people’s opinions and views can’t translate into policy.

It is somewhat successful but not nearly as much as they want. Obviously, concerns about excessive immigration are breaking out of the box that these groups would like to confine them to. It’s not just [President Donald] Trump — Trump was more a manifestation of that happening rather than the cause of it. 

Multiple polls show the public is increasingly opposed to the federal government’s economic policy of cheap labor migration. That policy cuts Americans’ wages, raises their housing costs, and diverts politicians from national problems of productivity, alienation, health, education, research and prosperity.

For example, the left-wing Equis Research group reported December 13 that almost 51 percent of Latinos want to rollback asylum migration, and 45 percent want to reduce legal immigration:

A YouGov poll reported in November that 63 percent of whites, 52 percent of Hispanics — and 40 percent of blacks — believe President Joe Biden has not been tough enough on migration:

YouGov’s June 2021 and September 2021 polls showed that Americans are evenly split on whether immigration is good for the United States — and also that support for migration is dropping rapidly.

For example, in June, 20 percent of Americans said immigration made the United States worse off. By September, that percentage had almost jumped to 32 percent — basically level with the percentage who believe that immigration makes America better off.

The GOP “worse off” number jumped from 32 percent to 55 percent. The share of swing-voting independents who say immigration made the country “worse off” jumped from 20 percent to 35 percent. That share was a few points above the 31 percent of independents who say immigration makes America better off.

“There’s a huge jump, especially among Republicans, in those who are skeptical of immigration,” said Krikorian, adding:

That is going to reflect itself in the positions and rhetoric of politicians,  however hard the Chamber of Commerce trust as well … Even those who are not heavily invested in following politics are are coming to the conclusion that we’re just taking too much immigration, that we need a break.

In an early December poll of 1,250 likely voters, Rasmussen Reports showed that 43 percent of Hispanic respondents favor cutting migration to less than half of the current legal inflow of 1 million. Thirty-seven percent of Hispanic want to raise migration levels.

In a second question, Hispanics were asked: “When businesses say they are having trouble finding Americans to take jobs in construction, manufacturing, hospitality, and other service work, what is generally best for the country?”

Sixty-eight percent said that it is “better for businesses to raise the pay and try harder to recruit non-working Americans even if it causes prices to rise.”

Just 21 percent of Hispanics said it is” better for the government to bring in new foreign workers to help keep business costs and prices down.”

Unsurprisingly, the pro-migration activists repeatedly complained that their side is losing political battles to public opinion.

“We still have FAIR and CIS and Numbers USA playing a very important role in policy … and now we also have sections of the Republican Party, unfortunately, that are motivated by these ideas,” Beirich said in the December 9 event.

 

“It’s really big today, unfortunately. And that is part of the reason why we haven’t seen any real successful attempt to even try to reform our system, since like, 2013,”said Beirich, who used to run a “Hatewatch” blog for the Southern Poverty Law Center.  “That’s the sad state of affairs.”

The reform groups have “had an amazingly outsized impact on American life for decades, as they’ve moved, as Heidi said, you know, really rapidly from the margins to the mainstream and expanded so dramatically,” Devin Burghart, director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, said December 9.

The activists also portrayed groups that oppose the federal extraction-migration policies as hating migrants, not just opposing the government’s pro-migration policies. “That elaborate [reform] network has been really good at creating the illusion of widespread support for anti-immigrant policies,” said Burghart.

The activists were eager to portray the growing opposition as racist, instead of based on pragmatic concerns about society and economics.

“They’re absolutely both bald-faced racist and eugenicist,” said Hassan Ahmad, an immigration lawyer.

“If ever, ever, there was something that should not have made its way from the margins to the mainstream it would be the great replacement conspiracy theory,” Beirich complained, adding:

Let me just define it for those who don’t know what it is. This is actually an idea created by a Frenchman that was exported to the United States, and what it argues is that white people in historically white countries are being “replaced” by people of color, usually, usually immigrants.

So it’s a bit of a twisted history in which extremists, you know, are arguing that the United States somehow was a white country, which, of course, is not true of this country’s history. And that immigration patterns are replacing those white people with people who shouldn’t be here, and who are the wrong color …

We now have some pretty prominent people in the United States who have asserted that the great replacement theory is actually not a conspiracy, but a real thing. And they include, for example, Fox News host Tucker Carlson who has used this language quite a few times on his program. He’s got millions of viewers, so all I can think of is this is mainstreaming white supremacy.

The answer is that giant social-media corporations must suppress “rabidly anti-immigrant material,” said Beirich. “We really have to make these companies do what they say they’re going to do, which is not support hateful content.”

The Los Angles Times op-ed, written by Jean Guerrero, is also pushing media companies to censor the reform groups, saying:

Top-tier news outlets also keep giving prominence to organizations that peddle anti-immigrant views, including those classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform [FAIR] and the Center for Immigration Studies [CIS] …

Media Matters for America said it found that since January 2019, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Associated Press published 203 articles that cited those groups or the ideologically aligned NumbersUSA, often without “sufficient context” about their backgrounds.

The activists also want to minimize the public’s funding of the immigration reform groups. Burghart said he is investigating the funding of the immigration reform groups:

We found that [several] private foundations provided massive, massive financial support to the movement over the years, over the last four decades in particular. We found nearly 200 foundations have donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to 50 different anti-immigrant organizations over the years. With that sizable war chest, those coffers have been filled with that generous foundation support. And though complete figures aren’t available yet for even 2020, we uncovered [that] in 2020 alone, these groups raised $23.8 million in foundation support.

That money supports millions of dollars in online and television advertising, influential national think tanks that cloak nativism in a wonky veneer for policymakers and providing ideological cohesion to the movements, legal groups that reshape immigration policy in the courts, so-called “English-only’ groups that use language issues to stir anti-immigrant sentiment, grassroots groups — including paramilitary vigilantes — to stoke fear and mistrust, and front groups — groups led by people of color, or aimed at environmental constituents or conservative or progressive groups …

The U.S. government’s post-1986, bipartisan, economic policy of extraction migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and raises their housing costs.