Since the election of Donald Trump and particularly with the recent announcement of the appointment of the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s (FAIR) former executive director, Julie Kirchner, as ombudsman of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, a rash of profiles of FAIR have appeared, mostly in far left publications (but also a few mainstream outlets).
From Mother Jones, to Vice, to Pro Publica, and even Teen Vogue (not kidding), the articles endeavor to explain how FAIR morphed from a group on the “political fringes” to one at the center of political influence in Washington. We’re flattered, of course, by all the attention, but the truth is that FAIR has always been in the mainstream of the national debate about immigration policy. It’s the Democratic Party and readers of Mother Jones, Vice, Pro Publica and Teen Vogue (?) that have moved to the radical fringes of American public opinion on immigration.
Don’t take our word for it. Take Bill Clinton’s words in his 1995 State of the Union Address. Or, Hillary Clinton’s in 2003, when she appeared on a New York radio program. Or the Democratic Party’s platform in 1996. It is only in the last decade or so that the Democratic political establishment has lurched to the radical fringes of the immigration debate, to a point where they invite illegal aliens to address their national convention, and state and local governments controlled by Democrats refuse to even turn over criminal aliens to be deported.
The distorted picture of who is on the fringes and who is in the mainstream is reminiscent of the 1950 movie classic, Sunset Boulevard. In the movie there is a famous exchange between aspiring Hollywood writer Joe Gillis and faded movie star Norma Desmond:
Joe Gillis: You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.
Norma Desmond: I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.
To all the articles and second-rate “journalists” wringing their hands and scratching their heads over why the positions on immigration FAIR has espoused for decades have been adopted by the Trump administration (and the voters who elected him), we have this response:
FAIR: We have always been a mainstream immigration policy group. It’s the Democratic Party and advocacy journalists who moved to the fringes.
Don’t take our word for it. Just ask the voters.