The war on aliens: the Right calls the shots.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Cover Story

The story begins with fleets of ships anchored off the coasts of Europe and the United States. Crammed with ragged, starving refugees from the Third World, and trailing a terrible stench of human waste, the rusty, creaking vessels form the front lines in a massive invasion of the North. The European and American governments are paralyzed by the emergency - unable to fire a shot at the unarmed invaders, and hopelessly mired in political debates about what to do. To make matters worse, the Western liberal media denounce as "racists" all those who propose defending the borders, and issue utopian proclamations of brotherly love, thus preparing the way for an unprecedented assault on Western civilization....

This is a scene from The Camp of the Saints, a French white-supremacist novel by Jean Raspail. Left-wing antiracists are the villains of the story - traitors who throw open the doors and make it possible for the "invasion" of the West to take place:

"One would empty out all our hospital beds so that cholera-ridden and leprous wretches could sprawl between their clean white sheets. Another would cram our brightest, cheeriest nurseries full of monster children. Another would preach unlimited sex, in the name of one, single race of the future.... Still another would turn our supermarkets over to the barefoot, swarthy horde: |Can't you see it now! Hundreds of thousands of women and children, smashing their way through those gigantic stores, stuffing their mouths with food, beside themselves with pleasure.'"

Raspail wrote his book in 1973 - well before news stories about Haitian and Chinese refugees spurred a flurry of concern over "uncontrolled migration," before Europe tightened its asylum policies, before polls showed that most Americans think immigration is "bad for the country."

In July, Newsweek illustrated what it called the "immigration backlash" with a cover depicting the Statue of Liberty up to her nose in a rising tide of boat people. Earlier in the summer, a similar graphic appeared on the cover of the right-wing magazine Chronicles, with a horde of pointy-eared, demonic creatures scaling a wailing Liberty, under the headline Bosnia, U.S.A. Pictures of the Statue of Liberty in distress have rapidly become an op-ed-page cliche, as have water metaphors, with so many waves of immigrants flooding, inundating, leaking in, seeping through, and drowning the nation.

In just the last few months, what were once considered right-wing views on immigration - that the United States is being "invaded" by the Third World, that immigrants pose a threat to the American economy and way of life, and that the borders need military fortification - have become part of the accepted wisdom. Politicians are running to get ahead of the trend. Senator Barbara Boxer, the liberal Democrat from California, has proposed bringing in the National Guard to help seal the border with Mexico. California's Republican governor, Pete Wilson, has proposed a constitutional amendment that would deny US. citizenship and social services to the children of illegal immigrants. And President Clinton has announced a plan to tighten the asylum process and beef up the Border Patrol.

In the current anti-immigration climate, America's newcomers have become the lightning rod for almost all of our nation's anxieties and ills.

How has Raspail's dystopian vision moved from the lunatic fringe into the mainstream of the immigration debate?

Part of the backlash against immigrants results from the simple facts of increased worldwide migration, a constricting U.S. economy, and a series of high-profile news stories showing refugees and terrorists coming into the United States. But the current anti-immigration climate also owes a lot to the calculated efforts of conservative individuals and groups.

John Tanton has probably done more than any other individual to shape the current anti-immigration movement in he United States. An ophthalmologist who lives in Petoskey, Michigan, Tanton provokes strong reactions. Friends describe him as "eclectic" and "brilliant." Opponents consider him a menace. A conservationist who was once president of Zero Population Growth, Tanton has built a network of more than a dozen organizations whose overlapping aims include conservation, population control, restricting immigration, and making English the official language of the United States.

In 1978, Tanton broke with Zero Population Growth to pursue his interest in the connection between population and immigration, and set out for Washington to found the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) - the most visible group in his network.

Regularly cited in the media as an expert source on immigration, FAIR provides statistics and data on immigration to members of Congress. The group lobbies for tighter security on the borders and a cap on annual legal immigration, and it was a driving force behind the 1986 legislation mandating employer sanctions for those who hire undocumented workers.

In July, the media watchdog group with the same acronym, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting - which has taken to calling itself "the good FAIR" to distinguish itself from the anti-immigration group - issued a report pointing out that Tanton's Federation for American Immigration Reform receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Pioneer Fund, a group founded in 1937 by a millionaire who advocated sending American blacks back to Africa, and who promoted the work of Nazi eugenicists in Germany. Today, the Pioneer Fund bankrolls most of the major eugenics research in North America - including a study at the University of Western Ontario of comparative cranium and gonad size and IQ distribution among blacks, whites, and Asians.

FAIR's executive director, Dan Stein, is irked by the suggestion that receiving money from the Pioneer Fund compromises his group. "I don't give a shit what they do with their money," he says. "My job is to get every dime of Pioneer's money.... And if they don't like what Pioneer is doing with the other grantees - you know, whatever their name is [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] - why don't they take it up with Pioneer? Why are they picking on us?"

The news about the Pioneer Fund is not the first scandal to plague Tanton's groups. In 1988, trouble erupted at U.S. English - a group he helped found to press for English as the official language of the United States - over a memo in which Tanton posed a series of hypothetical questions, referring to what he called "the Latin onslaught." "Will Latin American immigrants bring with them the tradition of the mordida (bribe), the lack of involvement in public affairs, etc.?" Tanton wrote. "Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile?... On the...