Meet John TANTON, most powerful Unknown: anti-immigrant "centrist/Lib"

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/us/17immig.html

The Anti-Immigration Crusader

.... ...From the resort town of Petoskey, Mich., Dr. (John) Tanton helped start all three major national groups fighting to reduce immigration, legal and illegal, and molded one of the most powerful grass-roots forces in politics. The immigration-control movement surged to new influence in last fall’s elections and now holds near veto power over efforts to legalize any of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

One group that Dr. Tanton nurtured, Numbers USA, doomed President George W. Bush’s legalization plan four years ago by overwhelming Congress with protest calls. Another, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, helped draft the Arizona law last year to give the police new power to identify and detain illegal immigrants. A third organization, the Center for Immigration Studies, joined the others in December in defeating the Dream Act, which sought to legalize some people brought to the United States illegally as children. ....

Dr. Tanton founded local chapters of Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club and became the national president of Zero Population Growth. Unable to interest colleagues in fighting immigration, he formed FAIR in 1979, pledging in his proposal to make it “centrist/liberal in political orientation.” The first director, Roger Conner, had made his mark as a liberal environmental advocate.

Then, as today, there were serious liberal arguments for lower immigration. FAIR hoped to enlist unions concerned about wage erosion, environmentalists concerned about pollution and sprawl, and blacks concerned about competition for housing, jobs and schools. ....

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