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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