The New York Times ran an extensive profile last week on the godfather of "attrition through enforcement" immigration policy, John Tanton. Tanton is the founder of Numbers USA, Federation for American Immigration Reform, and the Center for Immigration Studies, three organizations that make up much of the institutional backbone of the immigration restrictionist movement. "Attrition through enforcement" is perhaps best exemplified by the approach of Arizona's SB 1070 law: Make life as miserable as possible for undocumented immigrants, and they'll leave and never come back.
The basic thrust of the piece is that restrictionists are concerned that their agenda may be tainted by Tanton's beliefs about why immigration was bad:
Then The Arizona Republic revealed the contents of a memorandum he had sent to friends before a brainstorming session. “Will Latin-American migrants bring with them the tradition of the mordida (bribe)?” he asked. “As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?”
Latino fertility rates caused him special alarm: “those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down!”
It's one of the weirder aspects of American political correctness that saying something like this in simple terms is considered beyond the pale, while expressing similar sentiments through some kind of watered down euphemism makes them okay. So while CIS may have criticized Tanton for his "tin ear," it's not really hard to find CIS' Mark Krikorian pointing out that one reason to oppose immigration reform is because Latinos tend not to vote Republican. Tanton's view, that immigration is really a political power struggle between whites and nonwhites, isn't really that different from the views of many restrictionists in practice.
