Tomorrow at 7pm in Heller School, there will be a very interesting debate about US immigration policy. The event, hosted by Heller’s Immigration Working Group, will include Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies and Rinku Sen, Executive Director of The Applied Research Center.
Fairly innocuos organizations, right? Wrong.
According to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (if you are interested in reading the report, email me), the Center for Immigration Studies was founded by a white supremacist named John Tanton, who also founded NumbersUSA and Federation for American Immigration Reform, in order to crank out reports and statistics that blame immigration and immigrants for America’s problems. Tanton is not just another a right-wing nutcase like Rush Limbaugh or Newt Gingrich. This guy has been associating himself with Holocaust deniers and members of the KKK for a long time. CIS calls itself independent but it is not. It is a think tank of the nativist lobby in the US.
Should Steven Camarota and others from groups like the CIS be allowed to come speak at Brandeis? Yes. Should they be allowed to leave without being forced to explain their words and writings? No.
Rest assured, Camarota will come here tomorrow night not about to say anything even slightly racist, because he knows his audience. He’s coming in the hope that he will be able to make the extremist, nativist point of view sound knowledgable and intellectual. Luckily, as Brandeis students, we know better than to accept his bullshit.
Come to this debate of US immigration policy, tomorrow, Wednesday night at 7pm in Heller School’s Zinner Forum, but first do your research so you can ask Camarota to explain his xenophobic and racist writings, and make him rethink his anti-immigrant stance.