The Anti-Immigration Crusader

By Jason DeParle, The New York Times, April 17, 2011

A few excerpts are included below. Read the complete article. See this letter from John Tanton to the New York Times in response to this article.

Three decades ago, a middle-aged doctor sat outside his northern Michigan home and saw a patch of endangered paradise.

A beekeeper and amateur naturalist of prodigious energy, John Tanton had spent two decades planting trees, cleaning creeks and suing developers, but population growth put ever more pressure on the land. Though fertility rates had fallen, he saw a new threat emerging: soaring rates of immigration.

Time and again, Dr. Tanton urged liberal colleagues in groups like Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club to seek immigration restraints, only to meet blank looks and awkward silences.

“I finally concluded that if anything was going to happen, I would have to do it myself,” he said.

Improbably, he did. From the resort town of Petoskey, Mich., Dr. 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...

Rarely has one person done so much to structure a major cause, or done it so far from the public eye. Dr. Tanton has raised millions of dollars, groomed protégés and bequeathed institutions, all while running an ophthalmology practice nearly 800 miles from Capitol Hill....

Petoskey, population 6,000, hugs Lake Michigan in a forested area known for sailboats and summer homes. Dr. Tanton has spent most of his adult life there, chopping wood, keeping bees and growing kale...

Regretting what he saw as the limits of his rural education, Dr. Tanton compensated with autodidactic zest. He started a Great Books Club, read up on macroeconomics and polished his foreign language skills by subscribing to a German newspaper. The results included a wide-ranging mind and at times a tone deafness. He is a former farm boy who calls colleagues “chaps.”

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...

In December 2007, the Southern Poverty Law Center dubbed FAIR a “hate group.” In Chicago, the Center for New Community tracked “Tanton’s empire of fear and prejudice.”...

Despite such attacks, the groups remain influential...

Read the complete article.

See this letter from John Tanton to the New York Times in response to this article.