Center for Immigration Studies senior research fellow and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jerry Kammer exposed how the SPLC engaged in gross distortions of the founder of FAIR [Federation for American Immigration Reform] and the Center for Immigration Studies, John Tanton, to impute alleged racism on everyone engaged in activism to limit both mass illegal and legal immigration. Tanton, a Michigan eye doctor, espoused zero population growth and sounded the alarm over the demographic and cultural consequences of uncontrolled migrant waves hitting our shores. As the SPLC itself acknowledged, Tanton arrived at his view from the political left and served on the liberal Sierra Club’s population committee.
The “hate” police made much hay over Tanton’s embrace of Jean Raspail’s 1970s dystopian French novel of mass migration run amok, Camp of the Saints. Tanton had bought the publishing rights and brought the long-forgotten but prophetic work back into print in 1994. For the SPLC, this was an unconscionable endorsement of a “lurid,” “racist,” “race war novel” that is “revered by white supremacists.” The hate hunters apparently overlooked a 1994 cover story by two mainstream historians in the liberal magazine The Atlantic, comparing Raspail’s novelistic vision to real-life immigrant floods across the West. In the 8,400-plus word essay, “Must It Be the Rest Against the West?” Yale historian Paul Kennedy and Yale history Ph.D. student Matthew Connelly explained their academic interest in the novel:
Why revisit this controversial and nowadays hard-to-obtain novel? The recovery of this neglected work helps us to call attention to the key global problem of the final years of the twentieth century: unbalanced wealth and resources, unbalanced demographic trends, and the relationship between the two. Many members of the more prosperous economies are beginning to agree with Raspail’s vision: a world of two “camps,” North and South, separate and unequal, in which the rich will have to fight and the poor will have to die if mass migration is not to overwhelm us all. Migration is the third part of the problem. If we do not act now to counteract tendencies toward global apartheid, they will only hurry the day when we may indeed see Raspail’s vision made real. ■
[Excerpt from Michelle Malkin’s Open Borders Inc. Who’s Funding America’s Destruction? Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2019, pp. 201-202. See page 58 for Martin Witkerk’s review.]