From the NYT:

With Ally in Oval Office, Immigration Hard-Liners Ascend to Power

By NICHOLAS KULISH

APRIL 24, 2017

… For years, a network of immigration hard-liners in Washington was known chiefly for fending off proposals to legalize the status of more people. But with the election of a like-minded president, these groups have moved unexpectedly to offense from defense, with some of their leaders now in positions to carry out their agenda on a national scale. …

Julie Kirchner, who served for a decade as executive director of the organization, also known as FAIR, is now working as an adviser to the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. Kellyanne Conway, before she was known for campaign work and spirited defenses of Mr. Trump on cable television, worked regularly as a pollster for FAIR.

Mr. Trump’s senior White House adviser, Stephen Miller, worked tirelessly to defeat immigration reform as a staff member for Senator Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general. Gene P. Hamilton, who worked on illegal immigration as Mr. Sessions’s counsel on the Judiciary Committee, is now a senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of the Border Patrol and ICE, where Mr. Feere is working. Julia Hahn, who wrote about immigration for Breitbart — with headlines like “Republican-Led Congress Oversees Large-Scale Importation of Somali Migrants” — has followed her former boss, Stephen K. Bannon, to the White House as a deputy policy strategist.

Daniel Tichenor, an immigration politics scholar at the University of Oregon, called it “highly unusual” in the post-World War II era to have proponents of sharply reduced immigration in such high-ranking positions.

It’s been common for Presidents to say they favor immigration moderation …

“You would have to go to the 1920s and 1930s to find a comparable period in which you could point to people within the executive agencies and the White House who favored significant restrictions,” Mr. Tichenor said. …

That’s unfair to Eisenhower.

The groups’ growing influence has also brought renewed scrutiny to their inflammatory statements and shared nativist roots. The Center for Immigration Studies, FAIR and another group, the grass-roots organizer NumbersUSA, all were founded or fostered in their early stages by the activist John Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist who had an outsize influence on the immigration debate through his organizing efforts.

I expect one of these days to get a fundraising letter from the SPLC asking me to help them raise a billion dollars to build a time machine to send a cyborg assassin back into the past to kill Dr. Tanton as a baby.

And Hitler, too.

But Tanton first.

Dr. Tanton came under sharp criticism for corresponding with white nationalists and for couching the fight to reduce immigration as a racial and demographic struggle. “For European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that,” Dr. Tanton once wrote to a friend, elsewhere expressing his fear of a “Latin onslaught.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been quick to point out how the Center for Immigration Studies has circulated articles “penned by white nationalists, Holocaust deniers, and material from explicitly racist websites,” and added the immigration center to its list of active hate groups.

I’ve never quite understood why the SPLC is so lunatic in its obsession with Petoskey eye doctor / environmentalist John Tanton. Does anybody notice how odd it is?

Why is Tanton the Great White Whale for Captain Deehab and his jolly pirate crew?

Did Morris get a particularly lucrative response once to mentioning Tanton’s name?

[Comment at Unz.com]