December 18, 2010

The legal affiliate of a designated “hate group” provided assistance for Rep. Stephen Sandstrom’s enforcement-only Arizona-style immigration bill for Utah. The Immigration Reform Law Institute is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, commonly referred to as FAIR. FAIR is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center on the strength of writings, quotes, and correspondence by FAIR’s founder and board member, John Tanton. For example, in one of his letters from 1996, housed in the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, Tanton states that “for American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority and a clear one at that”, and asks “whether the minorities who are going to inherit California ... can run an advanced society?” Rep. Sandstrom met with the law institute’s general counsel, Michael Hethmon, on at least two occasions last spring. But, of course, the Orem Republican claims he has never heard of Tanton, never heard anything racist coming from Hethmon in their conversations, and said he knew nothing of FAIR’s hate-group designation. “I have to look at my own personal motivations, and I think they’re good and sound and they’re based on rule of law. They’re not in any way racist in any way shape or form,” Sandstrom said. “Anything that is based on hate or exclusionary issues for Hispanic people I would absolutely denounce.” You mean like the law you sponsored? Of all the groups he could have chosen to get advice from, why that one? I’ve read a lot of history about the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1920s and 30s, and the more I hear the rhetoric of anti-immigration groups like FAIR and The Minutemen Project, the more it sounds like the Nazis. They were preoccupied with a “final solution to the Jewish question”, just like the immigration groups are preoccupied with finding a solution to the immigration problem. The ethnic hatred they espouse, and that is codified in these laws, makes me sick and is very dangerous.