Sponsors/Authors of AZ and Fremont Laws Have Ties to Known Hate Groups

Many of the recent measures by local and state officials to pass restrictive immigration laws have a shared a common source and champion in a Kansas attorney and law professor who works for the legal arm of a designated hate group. In fact, Kris Kobach, who wrote the controversial immigration law recently passed in Arizona, also led the appeal for the Fremont voter initiative recently allowed back on the ballot by the Nebraska State Supreme Court. Kobach is a University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor and counsel for the Immigration Law Reform Institute, the legal arm of FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform). IRLI is behind numerous other initiatives similar to Arizona’s new law and a lawyer for the group stated that since last week lawmakers in four other states looking to do the same thing have already approached them.

FAIR has been designated as a nativist hate group, due to its ties to white supremacist groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a watchdog group that monitors and reports the activities of hate groups within the US. FAIR was founded by John Tanton, an outspoken racist and “architect of the modern anti-immigration movement,” who wrote that to maintain American culture, “a European-American majority” is required. Tanton founded other anti-immigrant organizations including the innocuous sounding Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA. He also owns a publishing company, The Social Contract Press, which publishes white supremacist literature.

The voter initiative in Fremont would make it illegal to harbor, hire, or rent housing to undocumented immigrants within the city limits. Similar laws written by Kobach did not withstand legal challenge in Pennsylvania and Texas. IRLI is also behind a California ballot initiative that seeks to overturn the citizenship requirements of the 14^th Amendment, which allows grants citizenship everyone born in the U.S., as well as, end pre-natal care (sound familiar?), non-emergency care, and child welfare payments that benefit U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants. Kobach was also behind a recent bill in the Nebraska Legislature, LB1001, which sought to repeal the DREAM Act, which provides in state to undocumented immigrants that graduate from Nebraska high schools and promise to seek citizenship. The bill stalled, but Kobach is covering his bases and is currently suing the state of Nebraska seeking the DREAM Act’s repeal.

Kobach had previously worked as former US Attorney General John Ashcroft’s top immigration adviser. While at the Department of Justice he developed a program called the National Security Entry-Exit Program, which closely monitors men from Muslim and Arab countries and requires them to complete a process of special registration upon arrival and departure from the US. Needless to say the program is subject to criticism as institutionalized racial profiling. He unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2004, losing by 11 percentage points (only eleven?) after his opponent ran commercials accusing him of being a racist. Kobach countered the commercials by accusing his opponent of associating with groups that support “homosexual pedophilia.” His reference was to his opponent’s support of the Human Rights Campaign, which is a mainstream LGBT rights organization that in no way endorses pedophilia. Still an aspiring politician Kobach served as chairman of the Kansas Republican party from 2007-09 and is currently running for Kansas Secretary of State. Not only did he write the Arizona law, but he also stands to profit from it. According to a recent deposition by the Chief Deputy of the Maricopa County (Phoenix) Sheriff’s office, it was revealed that Kobach is under contract to make “either $250 and hour or $300 an hour” to train all of the nearly 900 deputies on how to enforce federal immigration law.

The sponsor of the immigration bill in the Arizona State Senate, Russell Pearce, has his own history of ties to white supremacists. According to the New York Times, in 2006, he came under fire for speaking fondly of a 1950s deportation program called “Operation Wetback,” and for sending out email to supporters that included an attached anti-Semitic article from a neo-nazi group. A year later he appeared in a widely circulated photograph with a man who was the featured speaker at a neo-nazi conference. Yet, in 2009, after being forced out of the state house of representatives, he was elected to the state senate by 56 percent of the vote in his Mesa district. Why is this man repeatedly reelected? What is wrong with the people of Mesa?

The laws themselves are shameful, but that they are being written and sponsored by those with known ties to hate groups is appalling. Sure, the new Arizona law has drawn plenty of attention, but where has the outrage been up until now? Like we talked about in class, how do we reframe this into a human rights argument that would appeal to the voters in Mesa? Or Fremont? What common ground do we have with someone who knowingly votes for a candidate with ties to neo-nazi groups?