WASHINGTON — Three decades ago, a middle-aged doctor sat outside his northern Michigan home and saw a threat emerging: soaring rates of immigration.
Time and again, John 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 Petoskey, Mich., 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 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 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.
"He is the most influential unknown man in America," said Linda Chavez, a former aide to President Ronald Reagan who once led a Tanton group that promoted English-only laws.
While Tanton's influence has been extraordinary, so has his evolution — from apostle of centrist restraint to ally of angry populists and a man who increasingly saw immigration through a racial lens.
Mindful that the early-20th-century fight to reduce immigration had been marred by bigotry, Tanton initially emphasized FAIR's identity as a "centrist group" and made arguments aimed at liberals and minorities. He allowed few local FAIR chapters, warning that a stray demagogue might "spoil the whole effort." Early supporters included Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and Warren E. Buffett.
Now FAIR's signature event is an annual gathering of talk radio hosts, where earnest policy pitches share time with the kind of battle cries Tanton once feared. This year's event mixed discussion of job losses in cities with calls to use Tomahawk missiles on Tijuana drug lords, while a doubter of President Barack Obama's birth certificate referred to "the undocumented worker" in the White House. Leading allies include Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, whose sweeps of Latino neighborhoods around Phoenix have prompted a federal civil rights investigation.
While the whole movement grew more vehement as illegal immigration increased, Tanton seemed especially open to provocative allies and ideas. He set off a storm of protests two decades ago with a memorandum filled with dark warnings about the "Latin onslaught." Word soon followed that FAIR was taking money from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation that promoted theories of the genetic superiority of whites.
Tanton, who remains on the FAIR board, denied charges of racial bias and donated his papers to the University of Michigan to show that he and colleagues "are not the unsavory types sometimes alleged."
Supporters of immigrant rights are mining those files as part of a fierce — critics say unfair — campaign to label him a racist and discredit his broader cause. Some have gone as far as calling FAIR a "hate group."
Tanton, 77, declined interview requests, citing problems from Parkinson's disease. That leaves his files to speak for themselves.
Allies of Tanton say their accusers are discrediting themselves with a guilt-by-association campaign that twists his ideas and projects them onto groups where, they say, his influence long ago waned. Still, few of those allies are willing to defend all the views he expresses in his files.
Tanton founded local chapters of Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club and became the national president of Zero Population Growth. 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.
A few prominent Democrats lent support, but most liberal groups saw immigrants, even illegal ones, as minorities to be protected, rather than economic rivals. In 1985 FAIR spun off a free-standing research group, the Center for Immigration Studies, intended "to make the restriction of immigration a legitimate position for thinking people," as Tanton put it.
The next year FAIR faced a defining fight over the first major immigration bill in more than 20 years. It created penalties for employers who hired illegal workers but legalized several million people already here. With FAIR sharply split, Tanton pushed it to support the compromise, but the penalties proved ineffective and the amnesty was marred by fraud.
No one at FAIR would think of compromising on legalization again.
FAIR was founded on complaints about the immigrants' numbers, not culture. But Tanton feared that they were failing to assimilate. He formed a new group, U.S. English, to oppose bilingual education and demand that government agencies use English alone.By 1988, Tanton had a high-profile director in Chavez and ballot measures pending in three states.
Soon followed the news that FAIR had received grants from the Pioneer Fund, whose most famous grantee was William B. Shockley, the Nobel-winning physicist who argued that for genetic reasons, blacks are intellectually inferior to whites.
Chavez resigned, Buffett stopped supporting FAIR, and any hope of significant liberal support vanished."The fear was that one ugly person could tar the larger movement, and sadly, ironically, it turned out that person was John Tanton," said Patrick Burns, who was then FAIR's deputy director.
Tanton acknowledged his shift from his colorblind arguments, but the "uncomfortable truth," he wrote, was that those arguments had failed. He corresponded with Sam G. Dickson, a Georgia lawyer for the Ku Klux Klan, who sits on the board of The Barnes Review, a magazine that, among other things, questions "the so-called Holocaust."
Still, few friends confronted him.
FAIR first glimpsed the power of populist action with the passage of Proposition 187, the 1994 ballot initiative in California barring illegal residents from most social services. But victories came more slowly on Capitol Hill, where immigrant groups stood with business lobbies eager for foreign labor. The man who most changed that was Roy Beck, who spent several years as Washington editor of The Social Contract, Tanton's journal. Beck formed Numbers USA in 1997 to help pipe the growing populist anger into congressional offices. Tanton helped him raise money and housed the group for four years under his U.S. Inc.
A folksy entrant to a fiery debate, Beck appeared to share little with the white nationalists in Tanton's circle. He calls himself a racial liberal and argues that lower immigration would raise the wages of native-born blacks. He put a picture of Barbara Jordan, a black civil rights leader and politician he considered an ally, on the Numbers USA website.
The big war broke out in 2007, after Bush proposed a systemic overhaul including a path to citizenship for most illegal immigrants. Supporters said it would free millions of people from fear and exploitation; opponents argued that it would reward lawbreakers and encourage more illegal immigration.
FAIR rallied talk show hosts. The Center for Immigration Studies churned out studies of the bill's perceived flaws. Numbers USA jammed the Capitol's phones.
Their success became the stuff of lore.
For supporters of granting legal status, the vote was a total rout. "Let's face it, they kicked our butt," said Frank Sharry, who led a business-immigrant coalition that supported the bill.
A new network formed of loosely affiliated liberal groups with a more confrontational bent. It seized on one name: John Tanton.
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."
Sharry's new group, America's Voice, warned Congress not to meet "with extremist groups like FAIR." Its online video combines pictures of Tanton and Beck with images of Klan members and Nazis.
(Despite such attacks, the groups remain influential. Georgia legislators passed a bill last week much like the Arizona measure that FAIR helped draft.)
Dan Stein, the president of FAIR, said opponents were suddenly focusing on Tanton — now in his 32nd year on the board — to silence a policy debate they had lost.
"Is FAIR responsible for everything he said in his private correspondence? No," he said. "I love John, but he's had no significant control over FAIR for years."