This afternoon, a gunman entered the Discovery Communications building in Silver Spring, MD and appears to have taken at least one person hostage. Among his various bizarre, eco-related demands, one relates directly to immigration. The alleged hostage-taker, James Jay Lee, calls for the elimination of “anchor baby filth” and “immigration pollution”:

Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it. Call for people in the world to develop solutions to stop it completely and permanently. Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH! (The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant jobs!)

Lee’s immigration screed bears a troubling resemblance to views and policies espoused by anti-immigrant groups such as NumbersUSA, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Progressives for Immigration Reform, and others. Just this past month, FAIR released “The Environmentalist’s Guide to a Sensible Immigration Policy.” The report connects immigration to “pollution, sprawl, congestion, and ecological degradation,” complaining that “so-called environmentalists pretend as if this connection does not exist.” As usual, FAIR prescribes an overall reduction in immigration as the solution to the country’s environmental woes (in slightly more diplomatic terms).

Last month, The Nation published a story explaining the history behind the “greenwashing” of “nativism”:

Population stabilization has been taboo for progressive greens since the late 1970s. But anti-immigrationists like FAIR founder John Tanton, a former Sierra Club activist, cut their teeth on the overpopulation anxiety that permeated the environmental movement earlier in that decade. Subsequently, they used the Malthusian lingo of resource scarcity, carrying capacity (the maximum population an environment can sustain indefinitely) and overshoot (when a population exceeds its carrying capacity) to launder the image of the white nationalists with whom they became allies. When climate change became a public issue, it gave fresh impetus to what population specialist Betsy Hartmann has called the “greening of hate.”

CIS and other FAIR spinoffs like NumbersUSA and Population-Environment Balance, along with the sympathetic Carrying Capacity Network, have all touted immigration as the chief reason for the rise in greenhouse gas emissions—as low-carbon immigrants adopted the high-carbon lifestyles of the rich countries to which they had moved.

It’s not a coincidence that many of these are amongst the same groups that have always supported changing the 14th amendment to deny “anchor babies,” or the American-born children of undocumented immigrants, citizenship — long before the debate entered the political mainstream this summer. FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) is also responsible for authoring Arizona’s recently passed immigration law.

Studies by “so-called environmentalists” actually show that “immigrants, in essence, are doing precisely what planners want the rest of us to do.” UCLA professor Ali Modarres recently found that, compared to Americans, more immigrants walk, bike, bus, or metro to work and fewer drive cars in the state of California.

When President Obama condemned Arizona’s draconian and potentially unconstitutional immigration law last Friday, he predicted that “if we continue to fail to act [on immigration] at a federal level, we will continue to see misguided efforts to open up across the country.” Indeed, it’s already happening.

Last week, Wonk Room reported on the involvement of the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) — the legal arm of a designated nativist-extremist hate group — in drafting Arizona’s controversial immigration law. IRLI lawyer Michael Hethmon boasting about being “approached by lawmakers from four other states who have asked for advice on how they can do the same thing.” In the aftermath of the passage of Arizona’s law, many states and localities across the country are in fact in the middle of or about to embark on copy cat pieces of legislation:

STATE	BILL	STATUS
Utah	Require immigrants to carry proof of status, require law enforcement officers to question anyone they believe is in the country illegally, and target employers who hire or transport undocumented immigrants.	Legislation still has to be drafted, but Rep. Stephen Sandstorm (R) claims he “has the support to do it.”
Georgia	Nathan Deal (R), who is running for Governor, wants to propose legislation that mirrors Arizona’s.	Tentatively pending Deal’s election.
Colorado	Today, Colorado gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis (R) said that if he were governor, he would seek to pass something “very similar” to what Arizona enacted.	Tentatively pending McInnis’ election.
Maryland	State Delegate Pat McDonough (R) “plans to start sending a survey to every candidate for the General Assembly — along with the candidates for governor — asking them whether they agree with Arizona’s approach.”	McDounough’s survey will start being circulated this week as he hopes to “know who is in favor of the Arizona bill and who is not” by this summer.
Ohio	Butler County Sheriff Rick Jones and Ohio Rep. Courtney Combs (R) sent a letter to Gov. Ted Strickland asking him “to employ” his “leadership role” “to assure legislation is passed that will mirror” Arizona’s.	Strickland’s press person says he “hasn’t had an opportunity to review Arizona law” and is concerned it might be unconstitutional.
North Carolina	Local anti-immigrant groups claim that lawmakers have told them that “the chances similar legislation will be filed here is over 95%.”	The same groups also concede that such legislation wouldn’t “get far” in their state.
Texas	Republican state Rep. Debbie Riddle of Tomball says she plans to push for a law similar to Arizona’s.	Riddle says she will introduce the measure in the January legislative session.
Texas	Farmers Branch, a Dallas suburb of 30,000 people, passed an ordinance written by IRLI lawyer Kris Kobach which would prevent landlords from renting houses or apartments to undocumented immigrants.	Last month, a U.S. District judge ruled the ordinance unconstitutional. IRLI is helping Farmers Branch repeal the District judge decision.
Missouri	The state legislature is considering a law, likely written by Kobach, that would make it unlawful for any person to conceal, harbor, transport, or shelter “illegal aliens” and would also make it a crime for undocumented immigrants to transport themselves.	The bill has been referred to the Missouri House International Trade and Immigration Committee.
Oklahoma	Restrict the ability of undocumented immigrants to obtain IDs or public assistance, give police authority to check the status of anyone arrested, and make it a felony to knowingly provide shelter, transportation or employment to the undocumented.	After IRLI filed an amicus brief in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in support of HB 1804, the court refused to reconsider its decision that prohibits Oklahoma from enforcing two of the main parts of HB 1804.
Nebraska	Residents in Fremont Nebraska likely will vote in July on a proposed ordinance to ban the “harboring,” hiring and renting to undocumented immigrants.	Last Friday, the Nebraska Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that there was no authority to stop an election on the ordinance following a petition filed by Kobach.

The more controversial and problematic a law is, the more IRLI lawyers stand to make if they’re involved. Since September 2006, Farmer’s Branch has spent $3.2 million on the legal fight and may have to spend an additional $1.13 million. In Arizona, IRLI lawyer Kris Kobach makes about $300 per hour to train Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s officers in immigration matters. Kobach has kept busy because Arpaio is currently the subject of a racial profiling investigation by the Department of Justice and has 2,700 lawsuits sitting on his desk as a result of his immigration policing tactics.

Arizona might be their biggest profit-making venture yet considering the fact that civil rights activists are confident the new law will make it to the Supreme Court and there is even talk of the federal government suing the state of Arizona. However, IRLI’s gain is Arizona’s loss. Not only will Arizona’s legislation cost the state in terms of litigation fees, if the law succeeds in reaching its goal of ridding the state of undocumented immigrants, it’s estimated that Arizona will lose $26.4 billion in economic activity, $11.7 billion in gross state product, and approximately 140,324 jobs.

As Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) mulls over whether she will sign or veto a bill, SB-1070, recently passed by the Arizona legislature that would set up some of the most draconian immigration laws in the country, other states are already “watching to see whether they should follow in the state’s footsteps or stand back.” Michael Hethmon, general counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) — which helped draft the language of SB-1070 — has stated that he has been “approached by lawmakers from four other states who have asked for advice on how they can do the same thing.” Hethmon boasts that “what’s happening in Arizona just didn’t pop out of nowhere. It’s the latest step in a fairly deliberate process.” Hethmon’s troubling remarks beg the question of who is behind an organization that is strategically working on developing costly and ineffective policies that empower states and localities to take immigration law into their own hands.

IRLI is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant group that has most recently been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Immigration Reform Law Institute calls itself, “America’s only public interest law organization working exclusively to protect the legal rights, privileges, and property of U.S. citizens and their communities from injuries and damages caused by unlawful immigration.” However, the Center for New Community (CNC), has another take on what IRLI stands for. According to CNC, IRLI’s “primary purpose is to push legal causes that unfairly target immigrant communities.”

In a nutshell, the IRLI has been behind most, if not every, local legislative immigration crackdown over the past few years. IRLI has taken part in a class action suit against California educators for allowing immigrant students to attend school. They have been behind a series of initiatives to prohibit members of local communities from renting to undocumented immigrants and sued Secretary Michael Chertoff and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), despite his aggressive workplace raids. In California, the Immigration Reform Law Institute has also aligned itself with a state ballot initiative aimed at overturning the 14th Amendment citizenship requirements and ending pre-natal and non-emergency care and child welfare checks that benefit the U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants. IRLI lawyer Kris Kobach makes about $300 per hour to train Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s officers in immigration matters. Kobach is kept busy considering Arpaio is currently the subject of a racial profiling investigation by the Department of Justice and has 2,700 lawsuits sitting on his desk as a result of his immigration policing tactics. A recent documentary investigated the role IRLI played in an anti-immigrant ordinance proposed in Prince William County:

IRLI may identify itself as a “public interest law firm,” but its efforts come with a serious price tag. The National Employment Law Project has shown that “ill-conceived immigration ‘enforcement only’ approaches” carry “grave economic risks.”

In 2006, the State of Colorado passed a series of bills meant to deny public services to undocumented immigrants, create a new penalty for use of fraudulent documents, enroll all state departments in the federal Basic Pilot program, and require state police to enforce immigration laws. One year later, eighteen state departments had spent a total of $2.03 million on implementation of the new laws and identified zero undocumented immigrants.

In Riverside, New Jersey, a town of 8,000 spent $82,000 in legal fees defending its restrictive immigration ordinance which penalized anyone who employed or rented to an undocumented immigrant.

Currently, IRLI is helping Farmers Branch, a small town of 30,000 people in Texas, repeal a federal district judge decision which deemed the town’s rental ban ordinance unconstitutional. Since September 2006, the town has spent $3.2 million on the legal fight and may have to spend an additional $623,000 this year.

Prince William County supervisors ultimately decided against moving forward with the police enforcement of the immigration law after they found that the price tag would be a minimum of $14 million for five years.

Though the Arizona law is poised to pass, IRLI stands to profit even more from the legislation once it becomes the law of the land. The ACLU has stated, in unequivocal terms, that SB-1070 is downright unconstitutional in that it exacerbates racial profiling and violates the constitution’s Supremacy Clause. If Arizona’s law really is the “leading edge” as Hethmon suggests, IRLI will continue to benefit from the exploitation of the nation’s broken immigration system and the insecurity and fears that come with it.

Last week, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio cited a federal law which allows him to determine if someone is an “illegal” based on their clothing, speech, and conduct. However, Matt Bunk of the Arizona Capitol Times points out that no such language exists in any federal immigration law and that the document that Arpaio continuously referenced and passed out at a press conference is actually a legal analysis published by a designated hate group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is conducting an investigation into allegations of racial profiling and civil rights abuses on behalf of Arpaio’s deputies who have been empowered to enforce immigration law on the streets of Maricopa County by virtue of the 287(g) agreement they have with federal immigration authorities. When the Department of Homeland Security handed Arpaio a new contract that will only allow his agency to check the immigration status of jail inmates, Arpaio defiantly pledged to continue going after immigrants just as he’s always done and cited a federal law which he claimed justified the controversial tactics his deputies employ.

But Bunk was puzzled when Arpaio passed out a copy of Section 8, USC 1324 which stated that “evasive, nervous, or erratic behavior; dress or speech indicating foreign citizenship; and presence in an area known to contain a concentration of illegal aliens” should help officers determine whether a person is in the country illegally. However, there isn’t any citation of that text in the actual US federal code. The language Arpaio cites is present in a document posted by a hate group which explicitly warns that it is only an analysis of federal law and should not be used as a substitute for legal advice.

Arpaio initially told Bunk that the document he disseminated was an actual copy of US code which the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had confirmed as valid. When pressed, Arpaio admitted that the document might not be part of federal law. Nonetheless, he insisted that it doesn’t make a difference whether the text he cites is law or analysis:

“I thought it was a law. I don’t know what you call it. I still think there’s a federal law out there that gives me the authority to do this, I might not have the right one, but there is one out there. When they [ICE] won’t take them, I’ll take them to Border Patrol. So let’s see what happens now. How can you tell Border Patrol that you can’t take them? If mine are illegal and they don’t take them, are they going to take the other ones that they find?”

Arpaio still believes there’s a law somewhere out there that allows him to “detain an individual for a brief warrantless interrogation.” His next immigrant “crime sweep” is scheduled for later this week.

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) has received a lot of attention for calling President Obama a liar last night when he asserted that undocumented immigrants will not benefit from health care reform. Most commentators and politicians have denounced Wilson’s unruly behavior, though not enough have bothered to highlight the inherent fallacy of his accusations. Undocumented immigrants are in fact explicitly barred from receiving any health care benefits under both the House and Senate bills and a closer look at all those who restlessly suggest otherwise sheds some light on the radical nativist underpinnings of their anti-health care reform crusade.

To begin with, Wilson is a member of the Southern heritage group, Sons of Confederate Veterans, which favors secession and defends slavery is stock full of white supremecists and right-wing extremists. Crooks and Liars further reports that, as a state legislator, Wilson went against his own party and voted with seven lone right-wingers to keep the Dixie Rebel flag flying over the South Carolina state capitol building.

As a federal lawmaker, Wilson became a member of the House Immigration Reform Caucus (HIRC), a group of (mostly Republican) representatives founded by former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) with the mission of stopping “the explosive growth in illegal immigration,” “reversing the growth in legal immigration,” and halting “amnesties.” Other notoriously anti-immigrant members of HIRC include Steve King (R-IA), who described immigration as a “slow-motion Holocaust,” and Lamar Smith (R-TX), who equates undocumented immigrants with “terrorist weapons.” HIRC members Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), and King all proclaimed that undocumented immigrants would receive health care benefits long before Wilson’s outburst. The two Republican representatives, Rep. Nathan Deal (R-GA) and Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV), who proposed amendments to the House health care bill that would’ve added stringent citizenship verification mechanisms are active members of the HIRC as well. Heller and Deal also lead the fight to overturn the 14th Amendment and end the policy of automatically granting anyone who is born in the country US citizenship.

Wilson’s reaction last night was certainly out of line, but his indefensible fit of temper was illustrative of a larger discussion taking place amongst HIRC members and anti-immigrant groups who see the health care debate as yet another opportunity to promote their nativist agenda by advancing illogical fears, misplaced anger, and calculated misinformation. HIRC is now headed by Brian Bilbray (R-CA) — a former lobbyist for the anti-immigrant hate group, Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The Center for New Community reports that FAIR paid him almost $300,000 for work on its behalf between May 2002 and July 2005. Since then, Bilbray has announced his intentions to “work closely” with groups such as FAIR and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), another “FAIR spin-off group” that has been identified as part of the “nativist lobby.” It comes as no surprise that HIRC’s health care reform haters have regularly relied on the shoddy “expertise” of FAIR, CIS, and their sister-group, NumbersUSA, to promote the myth that undocumented immigrants will be covered under the bill. Another anti-immigrant group, Americans for Legal Immigration (ALIPAC), has gone as far to call Wilson a “brave Congressmen” for calling Obama out on his “lie” and have advised their membership to personally thank him.

Wilson has co-sponsored several pieces of English-only legislation and supported efforts to report undocumented immigrants who seek emergency medical care. In 2006, he declared “it is time to curtail the invasion of illegal aliens.”

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Yesterday, Dan Stein, Executive Director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) — an anti-immigrant designated hate group — appeared on MSNBC’s Dr. Nancy claiming that his years of experience tell him that “illegal aliens” will receive coverage if health care reform passes:

STEIN: Well, I’ve been working this issue for almost thirty years. The way H.R. 3200 is drafted, this is the way it’s drafted: illegal aliens can qualify for the public plan. And the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is pushing to retain that language. And for the affordability credits for the subsidy, if one member of the family is here legally, then the entire family can qualify. And most importantly, there’s no way to verify that eligibility standard. So, the bottom line is, based on all these years of watching and experience at FAIR, we know illegal aliens under this bill will get health care.

Watch it:

You’d think thirty years of experience would’ve taught Stein that undocumented and legal immigrants alike rarely qualify for public benefits and health care reform doesn’t look like it’s going to be any exception. If Stein had actually done his research and read the drafted health care reform legislation, he would’ve noticed that Sec. 242 and 246 explicitly state that only individuals who are lawfully present in US will receive any of the benefits provided in the bill. That language also applies to affordability credits, meaning that only family members who are “affordable credit eligible individuals” will receive government assistance and “affordable credit eligible individuals” are defined as someone who is lawfully present in the US. Even the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — which Stein cites as pressing for inclusion of the undocumented — has issued a statement supporting coverage only for “legal, law abiding” immigrants who pay their “fair share.” In fact, the bill “severely restricts” health care benefits even for legal immigrants.

Ultimately, Stein has his own agenda and it has little do with health care. Today, the Washington Independent reports:

“As the heat gets turned up on the health care reform debate, anti-immigrant activists are using the issue to whip up fear and anger toward immigrants, portraying them as a costly and burdensome drain on any taxpayer-supported U.S. health care system. Angry questions about illegal immigrants getting health care at town hall meetings across the country have put many lawmakers on the defensive…The protesters are spurred on in large part by immigration restrictionist groups who are using the health care debate to spread fears about immigrants.”

Anti-immigrant rhetoric aside, Executive Director of Voto Latino Maria Teresa Kumar — who appeared on the same segment opposite of Stein — also pointed out that the more people who are included in any health insurance plan, the more costs for everyone involved go down.