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The 05/14/07 print copy of The Nation has on the back page an ad by an anti-immigration group calling itself "The Coalition for the Future American Worker" (CFAW).   The spokesperson in the ad, T. Willard Fair (who until recently worked for Jeb Bush and now works for Charlie Crist as the Florida State Board of Education chair, where he is a strong proponent of charter schools) , claims to be a noted civil rights leader and says that we must fight illegal immigration.  (This is all hard on the heels of The Nation's running lots of letters by people who purport to be very liberal yet want to string up illegal immigrants.)

This set off all sorts of alarm bells in my head, so I decided to do some Googling.  Follow me past the jump to see what I found.

 

Here is the Wikipedia entry for CFAW: "The Coalition for the Future American Worker is an umbrella coalition of organizations in America seeking to convince President Bush to change his immigration policy. It includes professional trade groups and grassroots citizens organizations, and has run advertisements in several states, including Pennsylvania. Their spokesman is Roy Beck."

Hmmmm.   Roy Beck.  Why does his name sound familiar?

Here's the Wikipedia entry for Roy Beck: 

Roy Beck is a former journalist and public policy analyst who has served as the Executive Director of NumbersUSA since 1997. Previously, Beck was the Washington DC editor of John Tanton's magazine The Social Contract, and a frequent speaker on population and immigration issues.
He is former Washington D. C. bureau chief of Booth Newspapers. Beck's April 1994 article in the Atlantic Monthly, "The Ordeal of Immigration in Wausau," brought national media attention and commentary to the issue of mass immigration. Beck has also served as the spokesperson of the Coalition for the Future of the American Worker which ran television ads that Rep. Martin Frost (D-Texas) called "racist".[1] According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he has links to racist groups.[2]

He certainly does.  Check out The Social Contract Press' idea of a good book:  Jean Raspail's Camp of the Saints, which is praised by white-power dingbats like Jared Taylor:
The Camp of the Saints puts the white man's dilemma in the most difficult terms: slaughter hundreds of thousands of women and children or face oblivion. Of course, a nation that had the confidence to shed blood in the name of its own survival would never be put to such a test; no mob of beggars would threaten it.[1]
CFAW ran some charming TV ads during the 2006 elections, too:
 Dark-skinned immigrants loitering on street corners. A dark-skinned immigrant running from a pursuing police car.

Those are just two of the racially charged images flashing across TV screens this election season in a big-money campaign by anti-immigration groups.

The objective: steer voters away from Republicans and Democrats who support guest-worker programs and other immigration reforms, including those proposed by President George W. Bush.

One of the prime targets, Rep. Martin Frost (D-Texas), condemned the ads as racist; his Republican challenger, Pete Sessions, found them so repugnant he joined Frost in calling for them to be yanked off the air in their district. That opinion has been seconded by the campaign's two most powerful targets, Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).

The ads were placed on the air by the Coalition for the Future of the American Worker, a front group for radical anti-immigration groups including the nation's largest and wealthiest, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

(These groups' ties run deep. The head of FAIR, Dan Stein, is president of the Coalition. The Coalition's spokesperson is Roy Beck, head of another anti-immigration group created by the founder of FAIR.)

Still think that these are nice people for you to associate with, Mr. T. Williard Fair?

Roy Beck is also the founder and president of NumbersUSA, as well as a big wheel in the anti-immigrant movement, as this Public Eye listing indicates.  The big move now seems to be to run these racist groups as false-flag operations; they run ads in progressive and/or centrist magazines, and take care to use progressive-sounding buzzwords like "diversity" when in fact they are fighting against the concepts represented by these words.  Another prong of this attack would be indicated by the efforts to spur persons to write letters to progressive mags using the old "I'm a liberal, but…" scam familiar to longtime C-Span viewers.

Oh, yes:  The Nation isn't  the only mag to be running ads from Roy Beck's CFAW.  The New Republic has been, too.  I strongly suspect that this is all being done because some immigration-reform legislation is coming up before Congress soon, and the racist anti-immigration folks want to play off blacks against Hispanics in the hopes of weakening our side.  [UPDATE:  And they're doing so using bogus 'statistics' that have been repeatedly refuted.]

Now, The Nation has a long tradition of running ads from anyone who wishes to pay for them, in keeping with their philosophy of encouraging dialogue.  That's well and good — in fact, most reputable news and opinion sources (including this one) have similar policies.  But even as we let them advertise on our sites, we have a right to point out things about these groups that they don't want you to know.  

Related posts:

  1. Jon Voight: Obama is a “False Prophet”
  2. A Line in the Sand Against Beck
  3. Late Night: It’s The False Equivalencies, Stupid.
  4. Glenn Beck Compares Dude with Jewish Name to Hobbits
  5. Can white liberals keep their eye on the prize when racism comes a knockin?