Lead anti-immigration group had ties to extremist group formed by Nazi sympathizers
by John Aravosis (DC) on 5/12/2010 04:10:00 PM
From the Southern Poverty Law Center:
During the heated debate leading up to the 1994 vote on
California’s Proposition 187, a punishing anti-immigrant ordinance that would have denied social services to undocumented immigrants had it not been rejected by the courts, an
embarrassing truth about the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) was revealed. Press reports disclosed that FAIR, a major backer of Prop 187, was also a major grant recipient of the Pioneer Fund, a racist organization established by Nazi sympathizers in the 1930s to pursue “race betterment.” As of that year, FAIR had received a total about $1.2 million from Pioneer, which primarily funds race and IQ studies intended to reveal the inferiority of minorities and to this day describes its grant recipients, generally, as “race realists.” Perhaps the press furor would have died down if FAIR had decided to sever its relationship with Pioneer after the fund’s nature was exposed. But it chose not to.
FAIR ended its financial relationship with Pioneer, which as a foundation must publicly disclose recipients of its grants, in 1994. But it did not end the private relationship of top FAIR officials with leaders of the fund. An SPLC review of John Tanton’s private papers, which are stored at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, shows how close the relationship between the leaders of Pioneer and FAIR principals has been for three decades, even in the wake of the 1994 scandal. Not only did Tanton carry on a close correspondence with Weyher and his partner at Pioneer, John Trevor Jr., he also visited both at their homes. (In one instance, he took his staffer Roy Beck, who now runs NumbersUSA, to visit Trevor in Florida.) And at a 1997 gathering organized by Tanton at the New York Racquet & Tennis Club — three years after FAIR had stopped taking Pioneer Fund money — Tanton brought FAIR board members Henry Buhl, Sharon Barnes and Alan Weeden to a meeting with Weyher. Held expressly to discuss fundraising efforts to benefit FAIR, the meeting was memorialized in a Feb. 17, 1997, memo that Tanton wrote for his “FAIR Fund-Raising File.” A year later, on Jan. 5, 1998, Tanton wrote to Trevor to thank him for his personal “handsome contribution” to FAIR.
more:
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2010/05/12/the-fair-files-working-with-the-pioneer-fund/via:
http://www.americablog.com/2010/05/lead-anti-immigration-group-had-ties-to.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
