How FAIR's Activists And Radio Supporters Are Preparing For The Immigration Fight

MediaMatters

The timing must have seemed too good to be true. And in the end, it was.

On Tuesday, the same day the Federation for American Immigration Reform kicked off its annual "Feet to the Fire" media and lobbying event on Capitol Hill, the "Gang of Eight" released its bipartisan immigration reform package. The bill's arrival is the biggest event in immigration politics in half a decade, and FAIR's organized presence could only be seen as a fortuitous start to its plan to kill any bill containing a path to citizenship. But the landing of the legislation wasn't quite the national story FAIR expected, and neither was FAIR's event. On Wednesday, guns overshadowed immigration when the Senate voted down another high-profile bipartisan bill. Celebrating this front-page defeat was the National Rifle Association, whose outsized role in the gun debate FAIR imagines for itself in the immigration debate.

The comparison is flattering to FAIR, but like the group's ideas about immigration, it enjoys an ever-thinner margin of overlap with political reality. The NRA may be a punch line in much of the country, out of step with national opinion and internal membership polls, but the gun group still draws ritual genuflections from Republican presidential hopefuls, and its press conferences enjoy close media scrutiny. FAIR is more of a shadowy outlier.

Despite FAIR president Dan Stein's 2013 convention-program claim that "we could not be more relevant," the group is less relevant than ever. After three decades of advocating single-mindedly punitive immigration policies often dripping with racial bile, few elected officials above county sheriff risk public association with the scandal-plagued outfit, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designated a hate-group in 2007. Sen. Marco Rubio, possibly the biggest GOP star contending for 2016, reportedly plans to conduct radio interviews at the event, but he and FAIR stand so far apart on the issue of immigration that Politico has described his appearance at the event as walking "into the lion's den."

As the political ground shifts following November's election, the conservative media has begun to move with it, shifting away from the Nativism that flows naturally from Stein's view that the 1965 Immigration Act -- which ended the racial quotas of the 1920s -- was "a form of revengism" against "Anglo-Saxon dominance." Many of the most influential national right-wing talkers have "evolved" on immigration issues in the months since Barack Obama's reelection. So have powerful voices on Fox News, which appears to be moderating its style-guide on immigration lexicon in hopes of both reeducating the base and winning Latino viewers and voters. The new signals on the right doesn't mean Bill O'Reilly and his prime-time colleagues at Fox will ever be seen marching behind a La Raza banner, but they have stepped away from "no amnesty" absolutism. This shift hasn't escaped the notice of Rush Limbaugh, who has suggested he may be the last media lion standing on FAIR's side of the line.

That day hasn't come yet. FAIR-style rhetoric is still popular on talk radio and with some hosts on Fox. The result is conservative-media schizophrenia. The buzzwords of the new Republican Realism are often just one commercial break from the sounds of Tucker Carlson slandering immigrants as welfare-addicted gang members who harm American workers, Neil Cavuto casting undocumented immigrants as part of an "illegal invasion," and Brian Kilmeade joking about undocumented students using "night vision video" footage of themselves to win scholarships.

This post-2012 split was audible on radio row at the Park Phoenix, which FAIR sees as America's best and last line of defense against a path to citizenship.