Tanton is a retired physician from Michigan and a lifelong progressive. He helped found local chapters of both the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood, and in general supported the agenda of the Democratic Party. Tat began to change in 1965, when Congress rewrote immigration law. As millions and tens of millions of immigrants entered the United States, Tanton started to worry about the effect of all those people on the environment.
Others were concerned about that, too. In 1979, Tanton started the Federation for American Immigration Reform, with the help of Warren Buffett and Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy. The group argued that higher population levels would lead to more consumption, more pollution, and more environmental degradation.
Tanton imagined that others like him would join the effort to slow mass immigration. In the words of a New York Times profile, Tanton “hoped to enlist unions concerned about wage erosion, environmentalists concerned about pollution and sprawl, and blacks concerned about competition for housing, jobs, and schools.” That’s not what happened.
Instead, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which fraudulently poses as a civil rights group used by the left to smear its opposition, devoted an entire page on its website to suggesting Tanton was a Nazi. “Tanton has for decades been at the heart of the white nationalist scene,” the SPLC charged, providing no evidence. Tanton, who lives in a nursing home and is suffering from Parkinson’s disease, could do little to defend himself.
Warren Buffett was gone by this point, reinvented as an advocate for a borderless world. Major environmental groups didn’t say a word to defend Tanton, either. Even executives at the Sierra Club, which Tanton had long supported, refused to speak up on his behalf. They’d changed their views on immigration too.
—Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools (pp. 74-76).