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September 19, 2018 - Image 14

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Wednesday, September 19, 2018 // The Statement
6B

country schoolhouse, he credited most
of his education to being self-taught,
and he had excelled at his studies in
MSU. However, Tanton found himself
feeling out-classed by his peers who
came from wealthier upbringings and
East Coast Ivy Leagues, and he was
ultimately not awarded a scholarship.

Still taking pride in how far he had

made it in the Rhodes Scholarship pro-
cess, Tanton entered the University of
Michigan Medical School following his
graduation from MSU. In Ann Arbor, he
continued to excel at his studies, mar-
ried a fellow student and completed an
ophthalmology residency in 1964. Fond
of their rural upbringings, the Tantons
moved to Petoskey, Mich., a small town
in the north of the state famed for its
freshwater polished stones that bear
the town’s name, and John Tanton
became one of the few ophthalmologi-
cal surgeons in the region.

Tanton has been a meticulous hoard-

er of letters, news clippings, and other
correspondence that began at this
time, and his public file in the Bentley
Library paints an incomplete portrait
of a dizzyingly busy community activ-
ist and outdoors enthusiast.

According to a résumé he saved in

his folder, at the time he held positions
including president of the Northern
Michigan Planned Parenthood, as well
as various state and national positions
in the Sierra Club, League of Conser-
vation Voters and other local conser-
vation clubs — all while practicing
medicine. In local news clippings from
that time, he is referred to as a promi-
nent local environmentalist. In an

article published by North Woodscall
in 1977 about Tanton’s appointment to
the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore
Advisory Commission, he’s introduced
as a “Petoskey surgeon” and “one of
Michigan’s leading environmentalists.”

The doctor considered himself an

eccentric philanthropist willing to sup-
port causes he felt others weren’t will-
ing to touch. He once wrote to a medical
colleague that despite donating 10 per-
cent of his income to charity, he and his
wife chose to “treat (our) contributions
as venture capital and put them into
high-risk areas that are struggling to
get started … where we hope our pit-
tance can make a difference.”

It was around the mid-1970s that Tan-

ton’s interests fixated him on human
migration, leading him to believe it
threatened environmental conserva-
tion by draining resources, hurt the
economic well-being of developing
nations
by
draining
highly-skilled

workers and hurt the working class
and environment of nations receiv-
ing immigrants by straining resources

and labor markets. The issue that kept
discussions about limiting migration
out of the mainstream, Tanton would
write in 1975 in an essay tying migra-
tion control and conservationism, was
America’s unique history as a nation of
immigrants. Tanton himself expressed

a discomfort with the country’s history
of violent racism and xenophobia.

“This visceral reaction (to immigra-

tion restrictions) is understandable, as
most of us have immigrant roots, and
we feel compromised,” Tanton wrote.
“An aversion to discussing immigra-
tion is also understandable in light of
the seamy history surrounding past
efforts to limit immigration. These
were marked by xenophobia and rac-
ism, and gave rise to the likes of the
Know-Nothing political party, and the
Ku Klux Klan.”

However, according to Tanton, this

unseemly history was insufficient rea-
son for limits to migration to become
a fair topic of debate. Nonetheless, his
writings would come to exhibit the
xenophobia and racism of which he

noted of in 1975.
S

ensing that his liberal
Planned
Parenthood

and
conservationist

colleagues weren’t willing to
put immigration on the table as
a means to control population
growth, Tanton struck out with
several like-minded associates
to raise several thousand dol-
lars and establish FAIR in 1978
as a D.C.-based issues-advocacy
group. Tanton would continue
practicing medicine in Peto-
skey, except for a brief hiatus
when he and his family moved
to Arlington, Virg., in 1981. The
group drove grassroots and
media advocacy campaigns, and
took advantage of access with
sympathetic policymakers from
both parties on Capitol Hill.

“It was great working on the

population problem as long as
we could flagellate ourselves
for being bad people by hav-
ing too many children,” Tanton

said in 1989. “But then the birth

rate fell precipitately during the 1970s,
at the same time that the immigration
rate was going up.”

Tanton’s entry to this issue was

largely reactive to a transformation
of U.S. immigration that began the
preceding decade. Since 1921, U.S.
immigration laws had placed strict
limits on the number of people admit-
ted from outside of Northern Europe,
crafted specifically to exclude certain
groups deemed undesirable and pre-
serve a white anglophone majority in
the country. This was nullified by the
Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which replaced
the racially-biased quota system with
criteria favoring those with high-value
skills and familial ties to U.S. residents.

Simultaneously, the development of

the American Southwest created a new-
found demand for cheap agricultural
labor from Latin America composed of
both illegal and legal migrants. These
two forces would begin driving a demo-
graphic change in the U.S.

Tanton’s goal wasn’t to revert Amer-

ica’s immigration policies to the 1921
status quo, which he considered to be
too openly prejudiced.

“At times, our immigration policy has

actually been rather racist,” he ironi-
cally told the Houston Chronicle in
1981.

In Tanton’s words, the early goal of

FAIR was to allow immigration restric-
tion to become a socially acceptable
topic of political debate. He and his
colleagues hoped to also transcend the
political spectrum with a what he con-
sidered centrist anti-immigration plat-
form that would ostensibly avoid the
open bigotry of the past. Of the initial
five board members of the organiza-
tion, he described only one as “on the
conservative side,” himself and anoth-
er board member as centrists and the
other two as liberals. On a day-to-day
basis FAIR also vocally opposed federal
programs for migrants in the courts of
law and public opinion.

“You want to appeal to a person’s

emotions but to do it in a way that’s still
respectable,” Tanton said in 1989.We
didn’t want somebody reading back to
us in a Congressional committee some-
thing that we didn’t want to live with.”

In its initial years, FAIR was cautious

of its messaging, wary of using “dema-
gogic” appeals that could sully its pub-
lic image as racist. However, Tanton
would note that this allowed parallel
groups to emerge to FAIR’s right that
advocated for similar policies in much
more inflammatory terms.
B

y 1982, Tanton and a subset
of his colleagues came to be
frustrated with FAIR’s moder-

ate messaging points and began explor-
ing the use of inflammatory linguistic
and cultural wedge issues to drive their
anti-immigration message. By then, his
writings increasingly came to reflect a

“In the decade that followed the opening newspaper

quote, Tanton would become one of the preeminent

national voices to limit American immigration, both ille-

gal and legal, and his life’s work has made him one of the

most consequential figures in shaping the modern anti-

immigration movement in this country.”

Amelia Cacchione/Daily

The Bently Historical Library on North Campus.

THE NATIVIST
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