An integral figure in the anti-immigrant movement for over three decades, Stein and his organization have orchestrated countless attacks on immigrants ranging from drafting restrictionist policies to arguing that immigrants are “getting into competitive breeding.” FAIR President Dan Stein told The New York Times in 2017 that Americans would “be perfectly fine if we didn’t have another immigrant for 50 years,” and has publicly supported the Trump Administration’s family separation policy. Some of Stein’s former colleagues at FAIR, like Julie Kirchner and Robert Law, took up positions within the Trump Administration. While commenting on FAIR’s new found influence, Stein stated that he was “surprised they haven’t hired more people out of the stable of our organization.”
About
- FAIR President Dan Stein, who has been a leading figure in the anti-immigrant movement since the 1980s, was a mentee of white nationalist John Tanton and has referred to him as a “Renaissance man,” including in a glowing eulogy after his passing.
- In his tribute, Stein called Tanton a “selfless giver,” “remarkable giant,” stated that he was “interested in history and the future, in population policy…assimilation,” and that he “made those ideas move with incredible success over time.” Stein closed the tribute by hailing Tanton as a “gift to the nation.”
- Stein has served as president of FAIR since 2003 and as a FAIR staffer for over 35 years. He’s worked alongside a number of current FAIR staffers, as well as others who have left to join other anti-immigrant groups or the Trump Administration, including Mark Krikorian, Julie Kirchner, Robert Law, Elizabeth Jacobs, John Zadrozny and Dale Wilcox.
- In a New York Times profile on Cordelia Scaife May, Stein praised her, saying, “We occupied the space before anybody, and the people who helped found the organization and fund the organization, including Mrs. May, were people of enormous foresight and wisdom…They would be gratified over the fact that we’ve seen these ideas championed at the highest level.” May, one of the primary funders of the anti-immigrant movement in the U.S., believed the country was “being invaded on all fronts,” by immigrants who “breed like hamsters.”
- As leader of the country’s most prominent anti-immigrant organization, Stein has exhibited blatant animus toward immigrants. He has previously lamented the repeal of overtly racist immigration laws passed in the 1920s as a “great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance” and a form of “revenge.” Stein also noted that repealing these laws “will continue to create chaos down the line.”
- Stein and FAIR have spent decades advocating for policies designed to shrink the overall immigrant and refugee population in the U.S. FAIR’s power and influence in the Trump Administration has led to harsh immigration policies such as the rescission of DACA, ending TPS for over 300,000 individuals, family separation at the border, refugee reductions, legal immigration cuts, a Public Charge rule, and increasing arrests and deportations of undocumented and documented immigrants. In some cases these deportations have resulted in immigrants returning to countries where they are persecuted and at risk of slavery.
- As reported by The New York Times, Stein’s group wrote in its 2018 federal tax filing that the election of President Donald Trump presented “a unique opportunity” to enact policies such as “building the wall, ending chain migration, rolling back dangerous sanctuary policies,” and “eliminating the visa lottery.”
- Stein, whose former colleagues have taken up positions within agencies responsible for implementing immigration policy such as USCIS, told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette in June 2019: “you can assume we have contacts throughout the (Trump) administration.”
- For many years, Stein was a contributor to Tanton’s journal, The Social Contract.
- In March of 2019, Stein posed for a photo with Congressman Andy Biggs, after he was invited to speak at a House Border Security Caucus meeting.
Anti-immigrant Views
- In 1997, Stein derided immigrants as un-American. “Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing.” Stein told The Wall Street Journal. “Many of them hate America; hate everything that the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans.”
- Although Stein has spent decades demonizing immigrants, he dismissed connections between FAIR’s ideology and views expressed by the El Paso shooter who targeted Latinx people in August 2019.
- FAIR’s self-described mission is to “reduce overall immigration… [including] legal immigration levels from well over one million presently to 300,000 a year… to manage growth” and “address environmental concerns.” For years, FAIR called for a moratorium on all immigration before changing its stance.
- Stein’s statements on immigrants have often echoed sentiments expressed by Tanton; he once posed the idea of prioritizing reproduction based on IQ score: “Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not subsidizing those with high ones?”
- In a statement marking the 50th anniversary of the Immigration Act of 1965, Stein lamented the increase of the U.S.’s immigrant population: “Mass immigration is radically transforming our nation without any identifiable public interest that is being served…No one is questioning the potentially catastrophic consequences.”
- Stein claimed that late Senator Ted Kennedy’s immigration policies were: “a great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris, and the immigration laws from the 1920s were just this symbol of that, and it’s a form of revengism, or revenge.”
- In an op-ed for the Daily Caller in March 2016, Stein advocated for attrition through enforcement, which has the same goals as mass deportation, saying, “we should deport illegal aliens when we catch them… Enforcing laws isn’t cheap, but it is the cost of not enforcing our immigration laws that is prohibitively expensive. And, no, our economy would not collapse.”
- On CNN, Stein praised President Trump’s executive orders on immigration, saying that the recent deportations were an effort to “reclaim our schools, our hospitals, and our communities.”
- On then-candidate Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States, Stein said, “as a practical matter …. unless somebody’s got a better idea, sounds like it makes pretty good sense to us.”
- Stein supports ending birthright citizenship: “[the current] erroneous interpretation of the 14th Amendment is defeating the operation of U.S. immigration controls.”
Anti-immigrant Activity
- Stein has publicly supported the Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy and downplayed the severity of family separations. “I think the administration is spot-on. FAIR supports the policy,” Dan Stein said on Fox and Friends in 2018. Additionally, Stein’s group wrote multiple blog posts supporting the measure.
- In FAIR’s Immigration Priorities for the 2017 Presidential Transition paper published in November 2016, the group called for Trump to “immediately revoke the orders authorizing the DACA, DACA+ and DAPA schemes; and revoke all work, identity, and immigration status documents issued pursuant thereto.”
- FAIR repeatedly lashed out at President Trump for having kept DACA in place for awhile, calling it “an illegal executive overreach.” After the Trump Administration rescinded DACA, FAIR spent close to a million dollars torpedoing bipartisan legislation in the U.S. Senate through lobbying efforts, paid media, and misleading communications targeting family-based immigration.
- From 2001-2018 Stein’s group spent over $3.6M in lobbying dollars, and from May 2018 to August 2019 the group spent more than $850,000 on Facebook ads attacking immigrants.
- The FAIR President serves on the board of Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), which helped initiate and draft Crane v. Napolitano, the suit that pitted ICE against DACA and set the stage for United States v. Texas. Stein has held joint press events with IRLI and has defended former IRLI lawyer Kris Kobach in the past.
- IRLI and FAIR filed a joint amicus brief on behalf of FAIR in support of Texas at the Supreme Court.
- In a December 2014 op-ed, Stein derided the Obama Administration’s creation of DAPA and the expansion of DACA as an effort “to re-engineer this society” that “will make the nation ungovernable.”
- In FAIR’s major policy report, it floated the idea of eliminating certain immigration programs altogether including TPS, and in the same report it proposed that DHS make undocumented immigrants ineligible for the program.
- After a judge blocked President Trump’s move to terminate TPS for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan, Stein backed Trump in a press release issued by FAIR, “When the Trump Administration moved to restore the integrity of the TPS program by terminating the designations for El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan, it was acting fully within the scope of its authority.”
- In a 2018 interview with NPR, Stein exclaimed, “It is beyond ludicrous to suggest that TPS should be extended any longer. There’s simply no basis for it.”
- In a policy paper, FAIR called for asylum seekers determined to have a “credible fear” of persecution to be detained for the entirety of their immigration proceedings. Because the process of applying for asylum can take months and even years, this would mean individuals could be detained indefinitely.
- Long before the Trump Administration announced New Credible Fear Standards for asylum seekers and refugees, Stein’s group proposed providing “New Definitions” for persecution.
