AN ANTI-IMMIGRATION GROUP'S SPIN ON THE ENviRONMENT

We are of the mind that if you give the anti-immigration policy wonks enough time, pretty soon they can find a way to blame Adam and Eve getting thrown out of the Garden of Eden on immigration. They can’t find anyting positive about immigration, at least not the nonwhite variety. Here comes the Center for Immigration Studies with yet another attempt to make immigration look bad. Now they make the argument that you can’t go green if you’re going brown – as in the brown skin of the Hispanics they hate so much. It was a rather corny debate to be honest, and after a while, you tend to just block out much of the crap the CIS says, especially since it all goes back to why they don’t like immigration. But with the World’s Second Darkest White Supremacist Marcus Epstein floating around the “panel discussion” they had (see video), we can pretty much cut to the chase here and call them out as the Nazis they are.

One People’s Project

WASHINGTON, DC—A anti-immigration group sponsored a panel discussion Aug. 25 on yet another argument to justify halting immigration: It’s bad for the environment.

The Center for Immigration Studies, one of the scores of anti-immigration organization founded by Michigan ophthalmologist and reputed white nationalist John Tanton that is known for putting out reports on immigration with false or misleading claims being at the heart of each, held this panel to further the notion that, according to a report written by Colorado State University Professor Philip Cafaro and Winthrop Staples III, “a serious comment to environmentalism entails ending America’s population growth by implementing a more restrictive immigration policy”. Among Cafaro’s fellow panelists was Steven Camarota of the CIS, who once saw controversy for suggesting in a TIME magazine interview that “even if immigrants are less likely to commit crimes, their children and grandchildren may be more likely to end up on the wrong side of the law” and pushed for less focus on climate change regulations and more immigration caps. Also on the panel was Don Weeden, whose Weeden Foundation has routinely given money to Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS). According to the website Imagine2050.com, CAPS staffer Rick Oltman is a member of the white nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), and as the Western Regional Coordinator for the hate group also founded by Tanton, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), shared the podium with fellow CCC member Virginia Abernathy.

The caliber of panelists raised a red flag with observers even before the conference, so much so that the lone voice of dissent on the panel, Andrew Light of the Center for American Progress, questioned the reasoning behind dragging the topic of immigration into a conversation about population, arguing that more focus should be placed on reducing the carbon footprint of those who are in the US — regardless of how they entered the country. According to an article by ThinkProgress, he also pointed out that even if he were to accept the premise put forward by the CIS that people should live in parts of the world where they would do less harm, it would make more sense to actually encourage migration away from regions of high biological diversity along the equator to places of less bio mass, like the US.

Camarota considered it “absurd” when a member of the League of United Latin American Citizens called out the CIS as a hate group, questioning the group’s credibility in matters such as immigration, the environment and population control. Ironically there were a number of individuals attending the conference that have also been seen at white supremacist conferences in the past. One of them was Marcus Epstein, who was seen talking with organizers prior to the event. Epstein was the executive director of Pat and Bay Buchanan’s group the American Cause as well as Tom Tancredo’s Team America PAC. Earlier this year, Epstein pled guilty to, in a drunken stupor, attacking an African American woman and calling her a racial slur in 2007. According to reports he is no longer working for the American Cause.

While the CIS has not been listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group, it does refer to it as Southern Poverty Law Center has described CIS as “the nativist lobby’s supposedly ‘independent’ think tank” which “has never found any aspect of immigration it likes.”