Thread: Rhode Island group linked to controversial foes of illegals

Rhode Island group linked to controversial foes of illegal immigration


01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, June 29, 2008


By Karen Lee Ziner
Journal Staff Writer




In early 2006, the national Federation for American Immigration Reform sent an emissary to Rhode Island as part of a national grassroots organizing effort against illegal and mass immigration.


"Region by region, FAIR is helping to build a network of grassroots groups dedicated to fighting for immigration reform in their part of the country," the organization stated on its Web site ( www.fairus.org). New England is emerging as a highly successful battleground, with a growing network of reformers and legislative successes under their belts."


FAIR credited Sandra Gunn, then the organization's Eastern field representative, with helping launch a host of such groups in New England.


Gunn came to Pawtucket, one of at least four similar New England stops within a week, at the invitation of William "Terry" Gorman, a 68-year-old retired postal worker and member of FAIR since 1997. Gorman, increasingly frustrated, wanted to organize his own local campaign against illegal immigration.


Gorman and his wife were among the eight people at the organizational meeting on Feb. 28, 2006, of Rhode Islanders for Immigration Law Enforcement. Gunn provided start-up strategy, literature from FAIR and advice to the new members, Gorman said. She kept the press out.


Gorman said the Rhode Island group has grown to 450 members. Gorman's voice has become prominent in the rancorous local debate over illegal immigration. He lent vocal support to Governor Carcieri's executive order, issued in March, to curb illegal immigration in Rhode Island. He testified at the State House on numerous immigration-related bills that failed in the General Assembly this year. He frequently speaks on talk radio programs that RIILE deems supportive of its cause.


But Gorman's and RIILE's association with FAIR, a controversial national organization that critics deem extremist, has received less attention –– until recently.


The issue was raised in Rhode Island on a recent talk radio program, when Ramon Martinez, president of Progreso Latino, called Gorman a white supremacist and urged him to disassociate from FAIR, including by removing a link to the group from RIILE's Web site ( www.riile.org). Immigrant advocacy groups also raised the FAIR connection after a nationally publicized incident in March involving a member of Gorman's group. The member, David Richardson, demanded to see the Social Security card of a man who was speaking Spanish with a friend in Richardson's Providence plumbing supply store. The incident led to a local "Stop the Hate Speech" campaign, aimed in part at Gorman's group.


Gorman also blamed the negative publicity on his recent exclusion from a governor's advisory panel. The diverse group will review complaints and concerns as the executive order is implemented.


Founded in 1979 by John Tanton, FAIR describes itself as a nonpartisan organization with at least 250,000 members and supporters. It advocates improved border security, an end to illegal immigration and reduction of immigration levels to 300,000 a year.


But some say FAIR presents a moderate veneer that masks racial bias and ties to extremist groups. The critics include the Southern Poverty Law Center, which labels FAIR a hate group, the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil-rights and advocacy organization, and the Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913 to combat anti-Semitism and bigotry of all kinds.


I NOTICE THAT THE REPORTER HAS PRESENTED TWO SIDES; ONE WITH THE ALLEGATIONS FROM THEIR OPPONENENTS TO DESCRIBE ONE SIDE AND IT'S OWN SELF PUFFERY TO PRESENT THE OTHER


Gorman takes exception — as does FAIR's president, Dan Stein. Stein called the Southern Poverty Law Center's allegations "fraudulent and misleading" and "an effort to shut down our movement, which is working to promote interior immigration law enforcement."


Said Gorman, "People are telling everybody I'm a racist, I'm a bigot, I'm a white supremacist … I'm not a white supremacist. If the Southern Poverty Law Center would say FAIR is a racist group, and RIILE in turn is a white supremacist group, nobody believes that except people who are losing the argument [on illegal immigration] and resorting to name-calling."


Gorman suggests that local clergy, community advocates and others who protested the governor's order "are fueling the flames" by telling people that RIILE is "out to get" all immigrants.


"If they would just shut up and protect legal immigrants, our problems would go away," Gorman said. "When they [say] 'Stop the Hate,' Terry Gorman and his group don't hate illegal immigrants. We just think they shouldn't be here."


THE SOUTHERN Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights organization known for successfully suing the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups, designated FAIR a hate group last December. It called its founder, retired ophthalmologist Tanton, "a major architect of the contemporary nativist movement." Tanton remains on FAIR's board of directors.
Mark Potok, executive director of the center's Intelligence Project, said the reasons for the designation include Tanton's "long history of anti-Hispanic and anti-Catholic bigotry."


FAIR "has accepted more than one million dollars from an openly white supremacist group, the Pioneer Fund," said Potok. FAIR "promotes racist conspiracy theories, and a number of its staffers, board members and advisory board members have been members of, or attended hate group meetings all over the country."


Potok said FAIR "has put forth conspiracy theories — for example, the idea that Mexico, the United States and Canada are secretly planning to form a single country to be called the North American Union."


And, the theory "that Mexico is secretly planning to reconquer the Southwest of the United States." Potok notes that FAIR puts those theories on its Web site: "they actually push them as true." (Stein said FAIR stopped accepting money from the Pioneer Fund in 1994).
Potok also cited letters Tanton wrote to colleagues on FAIR's staff in 1986, known as the "WITAN Memos." The center published the memos after they were leaked in 1988.


In them, Tanton warned of a coming "Latin onslaught," questioned the "educability" of Latinos, raised concerns that Latino immigrants would "bring with them the tradition of the mordida (bribe), suggested that "high Latino birth rates would lead 'the present majority to hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile'?" and proposed dubbing an immigration moratorium "The Pause That Refreshes."


The law center has also examined a network of groups it says Tanton founded and/or financed, including FAIR, the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA, U.S. English, and the Social Contract Press — a publishing organization the center designates as a hate group.


Said Stein, FAIR's president, "The Southern Poverty Law Center provides no definition of a 'hate group' and offers no objective criteria that it uses to classify organizations as such. The SPLC appears to think that it can stick this label onto any organization it wishes, including long-standing, highly regarded immigration reform organizations such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) without being challenged as to its motivations or methodology."


Stein added, "RIILE, whatever the merits of what they are doing or not doing, they deserve to be assessed independently. This has nothing to do with RIILE, and I just can't imagine why they should be subjected to this kind of reputation-smearing when they've done nothing to warrant it."


Of the WITAN memos, Stein said, "You can argue that there's some in-artful phrasing in the document … but it's a discussion document, not a position paper. It was never a public document in the first place. It's over 20 years old, and I'm not sure what merit it has."


POTOK SAID "there's no question" that FAIR has been helping grassroots groups around the country "in terms of giving them advice, providing them with model legislation," and has been "a major player in spreading anti-immigrant statutes and ordinances." He said the law center has found no evidence that FAIR is financing any of the groups.


Other organizations accuse FAIR of spreading hate speech and "demonizing immigrants," and hiding behind a curtain of moderateness.


Janet Murguía, president of the 40-year-old National Council of La Raza, said, "We do believe the broader public needs to be educated not only about how these groups exist, but how they've been going from the extreme corners of the debate to front and center, in terms of the rhetoric and activity."


Robert O. Trestan, Eastern states civil-rights counsel for the Anti-Defamation League, said FAIR is helping to start "smaller organizations around the country that are helping fuel hatred toward immigrants. That's what these groups are doing — demonizing immigrants."
Trestan said this starts with "the type of language" these groups use.


"They'll often characterize immigration as 'invasion' — they'll characterize immigrants as 'crossing the border in hordes.' These are terms that people are familiar with. It helps inflame a certain divisiveness," Trestan said.


He said some groups justify restricting immigration by claiming "that immigrants bring disease or health risk … so you have sort of average citizens suddenly being bombarded with images of immigrants invading the United States, bringing health risks and disease with them."


ORGANIZERS of the local "Stop the Hate Speech" campaign, part of a broader effort by the National Council of La Raza, warned against that sort of hate speech after the incident involving David Richardson, the RIILE member and plumbing-supply store owner.
Gorman both defended and distanced himself from Richardson. He took umbrage at the campaign's accusations.


But he and other RIILE members have raised the images of disease-ridden immigrants that the Anti-Defamation League and the National Council of La Raza, and others, have referred to. And, despite statements that RIILE is opposed to illegal — but not legal — immigrants, he and other members often blur the lines.


In an interview last year, Gorman said RIILE is concerned about the "return of diseases like tuberculosis, whooping cough and who knows what else" being brought into the country by illegal immigrants. He also said, "The diluting of American culture" is one of RIILE's largest concerns.


"The more signs there are in Spanish, the more bilingual state literature [voter instructions, etc.], and the more interpreters that are provided in our courts and hospitals, the more our culture is diluted," Gorman said.


During testimony at the State House, discussions on talk radio and in interviews, Gorman has raised concerns about the "number of babies being born to illegal aliens." If American women are having "fewer and fewer babies," and the number of births at Women & Infants keeps increasing, he has testified, then the increase must be due "to babies being born to illegal alien women."


Gorman's "anecdotal" information from hospital staff leads him to believe that roughly 70 percent of those mothers are undocumented immigrants.


GORMAN said he joined FAIR nine years ago because he was upset about men he suspected were Colombian immigrants working at a local factory, receiving state aid for English instruction. As his frustration deepened, he reached out to FAIR.


"I called FAIR and said I was starting a group here in Rhode Island, and did they have any advice? And I got called back and said they'd be glad to have Sandra Gunn stop by and help us along the way," he said.


"We talked on the phone, and she came to a meeting and told us some information about immigration reform. I didn't take it to be a recruiting mission for FAIR. It was FAIR offering us some assistance to get started. Basically that's the only association we've had."


At the first meeting, Gorman said, Gunn advised members "to advertise and make calls to talk radio, and send letters to the editor and telephone legislators to basically tell them your opinion." She provided a book on immigration issues and other literature.


Gorman said Gunn advised keeping the press out of their meetings, "because somebody could say something that was — even a little risqué and it could be interpreted the wrong way, and that would be the headline."


"Sometimes I've asked Immigration [Reform] Law Institute — that's their [legal] arm — for an opinion, or did they have any information on a state's law.


Other than that, that's all we do. I've probably been in contact with FAIR four times in the last year and a half. I get their e-mails from them. I send them a donation of $25 every year."


Gorman said he attended a FAIR meeting in Chicago in early 2006, after RIILE started.
Another attendee said the meeting was for people FAIR had tapped from across the country to be its state advisers.
Gorman said that was not his understanding. He has sought information from several other groups founded by Tanton or established by FAIR, including the Center for Immigration Studies.


Gorman has encouraged RIILE members to join FAIR, but he doesn't know how many have done so.


FAIR lists Gorman's group as 1 of 66 links to grassroots groups on its Web site; and Gorman maintains a link to FAIR on his Web site.


Gunn left FAIR and took a job in February 2007 as a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice. She left seven months later, according to a Justice Department human-resources spokesperson. Gunn could not be reached for comment.


Gunn's successor, Susan Tully, said FAIR gets involved when members and activists "call us, saying they want to bring awareness to their communities.

We start with suggesting they get a number of people, and we'll sit down and talk with them. If they want to get a group started –– we help them get organized."


Tully added: "They're never an actual organization of FAIR. We're not like the Minutemen.
We don't have anything like that. All of the groups that we help are individual groups. Some of them are individuals. Some are activist groups. We tell them how we can make an impact."


GORMAN SAID the accusations that he (and RIILE by association) espouses white supremacy and racism have hurt the group.


That harm includes dissuading people "in the legal immigrant community" from stepping forward with information on voter fraud involving illegal immigrants, or work sites that employ illegal immigrants.


He complained that advocacy groups, local ministers and others "tell the legal immigrants that we hate them, and that's why I wasn't put on that [governor's advisory] panel. They were afraid, because of the accusations … that RIILE is a racist organization — they were afraid that the legal immigrants wouldn't come and tell that panel about abuses to the legal immigrants if RIILE was on that panel because RIILE is racist."


Gorman said, "I would like to be part of that, to help protect legal immigrants, but the perception that has been created by all these groups is that we're bad. And the worst part is we're against Hispanics in general. That's so far from the truth."


But he remains resolute.
"I think I've given up trying to counter the accusations," he said. "They aren't going to stop."


"We will become bigger and stronger. We have become 'David' of the David and Goliath fame, and that's what we're going to do," he said.
"And as Admiral John Paul Jones said in the Revolutionary War, 'We have not yet begun to fight!'?"


kziner@projo.com


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© 2008 , Published by The Providence Journal Co., 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.

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