All's FAIR

The president of the Sunflower Republican Women's Club finished leading the Pledge of Allegiance, and Kris Kobach stood up and introduced himself as a candidate for Kansas' 3rd Congressional District.

It was September 11, 2003, and Kobach's campaign was just 2 months old as he addressed the mostly gray-haired crowd of more than 200 people at the Rev. Jerry Johnston's First Family Church in Overland Park. Kobach appeared to have ideal qualifications: a bachelor's degree from Harvard, a law degree from Yale, a short stint on the Overland Park City Council, a spot in Attorney General John Ashcroft's Department of Justice.

Kobach wasn't shy about touting that last one. He had served as Ashcroft's point man on immigration policy, he said, and had helped design the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Kobach had been going on for almost 30 minutes when he seemed to remember why he was there. He was supposed to introduce the main speaker, Phyllis Schlafly.

For four decades, Schlafly has reigned as the Iron Lady of ultraconservative politics. Golden blond and vigorous at age 79, she could count stopping the Equal Rights Amendment on her purse string of victories. Her Eagle Forum Political Action Committee has remained small but potent; long associated with Pat Buchanan's wing of the Republican Party, she has written favorably about his argument that declining "European" birthrates and increasing Mexican immigration pose a demographic danger to the United States. She has continued to manage a formidable propaganda operation from her home outside St. Louis in Alton, Illinois, and she led the "immigration reform" caucus during Republican Party platform negotiations this past August.

Schlafly spent the evening scaring the crowd with a long list of woes brought about by immigration -- both legal and illegal. The "illegals" brought drugs, crime and disease into the country, she claimed. And those on proper visas were stealing middle-class and white-collar jobs from Americans like those who had joined her Eagle Forum. At times, her attack on free-trade treaties and cheap-labor-loving multinational corporations made her sound like a militant trade unionist. "Powerful people want open borders," she said.

Early in the race, political observers believed that Kobach was too far from the center to be electable. As he campaigned, though, Kobach gained credibility and steam. His platform grew to include opposition to taxes, gay marriage and abortion rights. After he upset the less aggressive Adam Taff in a tough August 3 primary, the party flew in Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, considered a moderate by most, and Vice President Dick Cheney to give Kobach their seal of approval.

Yet the immigration issue that first defined his candidacy and the gun lobby support that he picked up along the way remain the most salient aspects of his campaign -- and the ones that may be most troubling to moderate Republicans and crossover Democrats in November.

This past January, Kobach took part in a debate on Bush's proposed immigration policy changes. The event was sponsored by the University of Missouri-Kansas City's chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Federalist Society (an organization of conservative-movement attorneys), and the newly created Mid-America Immigration Reform Coalition. Bush had proposed an accelerated visa-application process for low-wage workers entering the country and possible amnesty for those already here without documents. The other main speakers, Michael Cutler, a retired Immigration and Naturalization Service agent; Mira Mdivani, an immigration lawyer; and Dolores Arce-Kaptain, director of UMKC's Program Alianzas, argued the technicalities of identification cards issued by the Mexican government and whether illegal immigrants should be able to apply for American driver's licenses. The Overland Park Police Department had supported this plan, arguing that it was better to have drivers on the road with proper registration and proof of insurance.

Kobach easily commanded the conversation, however, and he opposed consular IDs, driver's licenses and Bush's amnesty plan.

In the audience of 125 that night sat a group of seven people who had met before the larger forum. Called together by Susan Tully, the Midwest representative of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the group had little direction at that point and had spent its time complaining about matters such as Mexicans who cross the border simply to access American hospital care. Tully lives in Wisconsin, and she was beginning a FAIR organizing drive in the area.

Started in 1979 by John Tanton, FAIR has been mired in controversies over its own funding sources and the beliefs of its founder. Though the group itself refrains from race-baiting, it has not escaped the shadow of Tanton. In 1986, Tanton published an article in which he argued: "To govern is to populate ... Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile? ... 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?"

FAIR didn't endorse those words, but Tanton remains on its corporate board of directors. FAIR's political action committee, the U.S. Immigration Reform PAC, takes money from Tanton and his wife. The couple has donated a reported $4,000 already this year. And between 1979 and 1994, FAIR received more than $1.2 million from an obscure foundation known as the Pioneer Fund, founded in 1937 to advance causes such as scientific racism (the theory that social problems and solutions are rooted in biology and genetics). The Pioneer Fund dropped its open admiration for Hitler's Third Reich after World War II, but it still bankrolls outfits such as American Renaissance, which promotes the idea that the United States is a "white nation" and that brown-skinned immigration should be completely stopped. Other recent grants have gone to the American Immigration Control Foundation in Virginia, according to documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service.