Where Trump Gets His Fuzzy Border MathIn contrast, the SPLC (as I document in my current Taki’s column “SPLC 2: The Search for More Money,”) is indubitably respectable.Meet the far-right “think tank” working to legitimize the immigration crackdown.
BY LAURA RESTON
March 10, 2017
… Those numbers were cooked up at the Center for Immigration Studies, a small advocacy operation in Washington that emerged, early on in the campaign, as Trump’s go-to source for research about migrants and the dangers they pose. …
CIS, however, is far from a reputable scholarly organization. …
The group has also embraced thinkers expelled from more polite conservative circles. Last year, CIS began publishing the works of Jason Richwine, a right-wing analyst who was forced to resign from the Heritage Foundation after it discovered that in his Ph.D. dissertation he had advocated banning Hispanic immigrants because their IQs were lower than those of whites. Even conservatives were appalled. “Now CIS is falling down the same Alt Right pit that Tanton for years has denied courting!” the conservative news site Red State observed. CIS, it seemed, had become too radical even for the mainstream GOP.. …
Trump, however, has made CIS respectable. “He legitimized them in a very big way,” says Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Thanks to Trump, the group is now routinely and respectfully cited by mainstream news outlets as a “conservative think tank,” with no mention of the kind of “alternative facts” it promotes about immigration. … But when anti-immigration screeds cooked up by CIS are presented as serious research reports, the lies are harder to spot—and play a far greater role in shaping public policy.
