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I don't know about anyone else, but if I'm going to watch a debate about what members of the House and Senate are considering on immigration reform, someone who is a member of an organization with ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists is the last person I'd like to see have a seat at that table. But that's exactly who CNN thought was worth bringing on to discuss the topic during this segment on The Situation Room this Monday.

Lou Dobbs may be gone, but it seems his tradition of inviting extremists on the air to discuss immigration policy remains.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has more on Stein and his group here: Federation for American Immigration Reform:

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is a group with one mission: to severely limit immigration into the United States. Although FAIR maintains a veneer of legitimacy that has allowed its principals to testify in Congress and lobby the federal government, this veneer hides much ugliness. FAIR leaders have ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists and have made many racist statements. Its advertisements have been rejected because of racist content. FAIR’s founder, John Tanton, has expressed his wish that America remain a majority-white population: a goal to be achieved, presumably, by limiting the number of nonwhites who enter the country. One of the group’s main goals is upending the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended a decades-long, racist quota system that limited immigration mostly to northern Europeans. FAIR President Dan Stein has called the Act a "mistake." [...]

Between 1985 and 1994, FAIR received around $1.2 million in grants from the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund is a eugenicist organization that was started in 1937 by men close to the Nazi regime who wanted to pursue "race betterment" by promoting the genetic lines of American whites. Now led by race scientist J. Philippe Rushton, the fund continues to back studies intended to reveal the inferiority of minorities to whites.

FAIR stopped receiving Pioneer Fund grants in 1994 due to bad publicity it received when the grants were made public. At the time, FAIR was backing California's punishing anti-immigrant Proposition 187, which would have denied education and health care to the children of undocumented immigrants in that state if it had not died as the result of court challenges. Stein and Tanton had led FAIR's efforts to win funding from Pioneer, and Stein said in 1993, before Pioneer's extremism was made public, that his "job [was] to get every dime of Pioneer's money."

There's lots more there in their full report, so go read the rest.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Almost 20,000 questions were submitted for Thursday night's Republican presidential debate, but Fox News picked the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a designated hate group, to ask the first question on immigration.

"Struggling U.S. workers continue to compete with millions of illegal aliens," FAIR's Kristen Williamson claimed in her video question. "Do you support legislation to require all employers to use e-verify in order to ensure that the people that they hire are actually legally authorized to work in the U.S.?"

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich replied by saying that the country would be better off if the e-verify program was outsourced to private credit card companies.

Although FAIR has testified to Congress more than 30 times, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) considers them to be a hate group.

"The identification of FAIR as a bona fide hate group is important," SPLC's Mark Potok wrote in 2007. "FAIR is the hub of the American nativist movement, the group that more than any other has contributed to the rancid turn the national immigration discussion has taken. With FAIR fanning the flames of xenophobic intolerance, hate groups, hate crimes and hate speech directed at foreigners and Latinos continue to rise in America."

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I guess Rick Sanchez thinks those with ties to white supremacists groups like FAIR are "respectable". Maybe someone should ask him to talk to Rachel Maddow first about what type of questions he should be asking and how you should be portraying Dan Stein if he doesn't want to make himself look like he's trying to put a smiley face on this man's extremism.

Rachel Maddow treated this man in the manner he deserved on her show and followed up with this segment fact checking his complaints about the interview.

As I pointed out in the Maddow post, FAIR has been listed as a hate group by the SPLC and rightfully so.

Answering Our Critics: SPLC ‘Smear’ Dissected:

FAIR, an organization that has been dominated for much of its life by its racist founder John Tanton, has probably done more to inject fear and bigotry into the national immigration debate than any other modern organization. Its demonizing propaganda, aimed primarily at Latinos, comes at a time when the number of hate groups continues a decade-long rise, fueled by anti-Latino hatred. At the same time, the FBI reported a 40% rise in anti-Latino hate crimes between 2003 and 2007. Those crimes decreased slightly in 2008, the latest year for which statistics are available.

What follows is a list of factors that resulted in the listing of FAIR as a hate group. More detailed information on FAIR and its founder may be found here and here. Read on...

Why someone of Latino background like Sanchez would like to give this extremist some cover is beyond me, but his show is always pretty much milk toast even when he pretends like he's going to get tough with a guest, so there's not much of a surprise here with this pathetic interview which is just pretty well business as usual for him.

SANCHEZ: All right. You heard Darrell Issa and I having this conversation a little while ago. This is an important conversation, because it's circular and it keeps going back to the very same place. And it seems silly at times. But there are people who, now, are serious-minded enough to try and come up with some kind of -- some kind of cooperative system that creates an immigration legislation for the United States.

However, and this is very important, can he find that cooperation from others? And I want to introduce you to somebody now. It's a lot harder to do what Darrell Issa was saying he wants to do when you try -- when you have to try and convince some of those on the anti- immigration front. Folks like FAIR who are very respectable in their opinion but they're very, very strident in their opinion about this.

So, I want you to hear now from that side of the story. Here's Dan Stein. He's the leader of this group.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

STEIN: The basic problem, Rick, is that, you know, you're hung up on this amnesty concept. Do you think the amnesty issue is what's preventing progress at the federal level?

SANCHEZ: Yes.

STEIN: That's not the case. Clearly, everybody on our side opposes amnesty.

The issue here --

SANCHEZ: So, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. You just said everybody on our side opposes amnesty. Let me just be clear about what you just said.

Are you saying when you say that to the American people, everybody on our side opposes any legislation that would allow someone presently living in the United States who's not legal to in any way have a path to citizenship so that he can acquire residency?

STEIN: Well, if the person can acquire it through lawful means like marriage to a U.S. citizen or what-have-you, but, you know, if they've fallen out of status, willfully disregarded U.S. immigration law, I wouldn't have given Obama's aunt asylum for example.

Look, the laws are laws. Laws matter. It is impossible for somebody to live here illegally, violating immigration law and not violate a lot of other laws as well, tax laws, withholding laws, involving fraudulent documents --

SANCHEZ: Well, no, no, no.

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Thom Hartmann talks to the SPLC's Heidi Beirich about John Tanton, the anti-immigrant zealot behind the new Arizona "show me your papers" law and with ties to about every white nationalist/anti-immigration group in the United States. The SPLC has more on Tanton here: The Tanton Files: FAIR Founder’s Racism Revealed.

As Hartmann and Beirich pointed out, we've watched this same sort of reaction to every single immigrant group that's come to the United States and every time they're wrong.

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Rachel Maddow followed up on her interview with FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) President Dan Stein and did some fact checking on the claims he made. As I noted they already started doing that at her blog the night of the interview.

They updated their post with the information she reported in this segment here -- Revised: Record contradicts Dan Stein:

Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, wants you to believe his group never gave money to Protect Arizona Now, and especially not when self-proclaimed "ethnic separatist" Virginia Abernethy was a top official. Asked about reports that FAIR had contributed to Protect Arizona Now, Stein told us last night:

"First of all, we never gave that organization a dime. And secondly, even if we were going to give them a dime, we wouldn't have given them a dime with Virginia Abernethy associated with it."

Let's go to the record. An account from the Chicago-based Center for New Community notes Abernethy's appointment was announced on July 26, 2004. By August, it was making headlines in Arizona. The Arizona Secretary of State records a contribution to PAN of $50,000 from FAIR and another $50,000 from the FAIR Congressional Task Force on April 1, 2004. The next month, on May 11, FAIR gave Pan another $25,500 -- and the FAIR Congressional Task Force gave PAN $25,000. The next month, on June 11, FAIR gave PAN $50,000 and its Congressional Task Force gave $55,000. Read on...

Rachel takes the President of FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) to the woodshed in this interview over his organization's motivations for supporting Arizona's new "show me your papers" law and his group's racist history. He attacked Maddow and the Southern Poverty Law Center and claimed they were just trying to smear him.

The SPLC has more here -- Answering Our Critics: SPLC ‘Smear’ Dissected:

The suggestion that the SPLC worked surreptitiously with La Raza and others to designate FAIR a hate group is false; the decision to list the organization was made by the SPLC alone, based on almost a decade of SPLC research. We make no apologies for sharing that research with others in the human rights community, including La Raza, which we consider an important ally.

FAIR, an organization that has been dominated for much of its life by its racist founder John Tanton, has probably done more to inject fear and bigotry into the national immigration debate than any other modern organization. Its demonizing propaganda, aimed primarily at Latinos, comes at a time when the number of hate groups continues a decade-long rise, fueled by anti-Latino hatred. At the same time, the FBI reported a 40% rise in anti-Latino hate crimes between 2003 and 2007. Those crimes decreased slightly in 2008, the latest year for which statistics are available.

What follows is a list of factors that resulted in the listing of FAIR as a hate group. More detailed information on FAIR and its founder may be found here and here. Read on...

The Rachel Maddow blog already started fact checking Stein on their site (h/t Laffy):

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