Tanton launched the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in 1979. At the time, immigration, both legal and unauthorized, was on the rise. The 1965 Immigration Act had eliminated the national origins quotas that had limited immigration to European (and overwhelmingly white) countries since the 1920s. This policy change, alongside geopolitical and global economic shifts, brought new immigrants to the United States from Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Some groups, like David Duke’s Klan Border Watch and other white power organizers, responded to newcomers violently. But on Capitol Hill, there was a desire to encourage immigration rather than restrict it. Some supported humanitarian refugee resettlement, while others wanted to recruit workers or help unite families. There was no appetite for a mass deportation force, which would threaten civil rights and make America less free. And so, Tanton wrote, “a countervailing force must be built.”
Tanton was an unlikely leader for a radical movement. An ophthalmologist who lived and worked in Petoskey, Mich., Tanton was drawn to the immigration issue via an unusual path. An avid birdwatcher and beekeeper, Tanton joined the burgeoning environmental movement in the 1970s. He soon turned his attention to issues of population growth, seeing too many people overusing too few fragile resources. His solution? “Passive eugenics” and limits to the size of the human community. Since white native-born birthrates were dropping and the source of the country’s population growth was immigration, Tanton believed that cutting immigration was critical.
But calling to restrict immigration was a sensitive subject. The public embraced the label “nation of immigrants” and, historically, immigration exclusion was shot through with racism and bigotry. Since the civil rights movement, excluding immigrants based on race or national origin was understood to be chauvinistic and backward. Tanton wanted to make sure FAIR was seen as “middle of the road” — not racist — and worked continuously to set it apart from the more emotional, hate-driven white nationalists who shared his goals.
FAIR — and a growing network of organizations founded or funded by Tanton, including the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), NumbersUSA and the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) — avoided explicit discussions of race. For example, when anti-immigration supporters were angry about the growing presence of Spanish language translations in official documents, FAIR didn’t take on the issue of bilingualism. Rather, Tanton launched U.S. English, an organization that advocated for “official English” policies in states across the country. These initiatives sent a clear message to Spanish-speaking residents, immigrant and citizen alike, that they were unwelcome.