British statesman George Canning once said, “I can prove anything by statistics – except the truth.” It seems anti-immigrant organization the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) believes the opposite, that reality will always lie in how they spin the “truths” they’re inventing.
In reality, however, nothing could be more false.
In January, for instance, the Immigration Policy Center blasted CIS for distorting their “data” for simple political advantage.
“Statistics are no substitute for judgment.” ~ Henry Clay
Founded in 1985 to serve as the statistical arm of an anti-immigrant network created by notorious nativist and white nationalist John Tanton, CIS, sadly, has been quoted and cited frequently by incognizant journalists, and the group’s subjective data has even been employed without qualification by elected officials and academics throughout the United States.
Since the beginning of February, however, Mark Krikorian, CIS’s head fabricator, has been increasingly under fire for his association with John Tanton and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). National civil rights organization The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported in a February 2009 Special Report that Krikorian’s relationship with Tanton and FAIR is far more extensive than he leads the public to believe.
In their report SPLC reveals a letter authored by Tanton in which he admits to a potential philanthropist that CIS’s overall facade of credibility will depend crucially on the distance the group can initially wedge and forever sustain between itself and FAIR. Tanton continues, making clear that CIS would thusly only ever begin as a project of FAIR.
Needless to say, Krikorian is still spending much of his time protecting the fragile public image of CIS.
And so reeling from the increased pressure to publicly distance itself from a recognized hate group, i.e. FAIR, is Krikorian that he has publicly responded to the Southern Poverty Law Center in his column on the conservative National Review Online. Predictably though, he spends much of his column attacking abstract notions of multiculturalism, actually failing in whole to respond to any of the stark and disturbing charges that SPLC has presented in its special report.
Even more disturbingly, Krikorian is completely refusing to discuss SPLC’s charge that much of CIS’s data isn’t, let’s say, as factual as they promise.
It would seem that real truth resides in the following mark of actuality: CIS’s leadership is just suspect as the bigoted rhetoric they’re everyday disguising as objective data.
In February the Center for New Community alerted readers via its e-bulletin “FAIR Exposed” that CIS had posted for circulation to its supporters fourteen articles from the white nationalist info-hub VDARE, a website that houses the works of numerous white nationalists and racists such as Jared Taylor and the late Sam Francis. (It is named for Virginia Dare, allegedly the “first white child born in America.”) The website also features Kevin MacDonald, who persistently accuses Jews for conspiring to destroy the United States by controlling and manipulating immigration policies.
American statesman Henry Clay once told us that “statistics are no substitute for judgment.”
Journalists and public officials have a duty to ensure that citizens have the most accurate information that will allow us to make informed decisions, i.e. to never allow us to be indirectly manipulated by the lies of racist, nationalistic bigots.
Perhaps, though, the American people must be the standard of truth, i.e. the first ones to reject in full CIS’s paper-mâché mask of respectability.