The Racist Roots of the Anti-Immigration Tanton Network

Mario H. Lopez, May 14, 2021

"In early April the Center for Immigration Studies—one of America’s principal anti-immigration groups—suggested using American taxpayer dollars to promote “family planning” in Central America, worried that Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) have a younger-than-average population with more women in child-bearing years and that “the further south one ventures from the States. . . the more births.”

Here’s how CIS put it:

Girls under the age of five currently will, 25 years from now, be in their peak years of fertility, and that cohort will be twice as large as that of the 25- to 29-year-olds now. Even with a sharp reduction in the number of births per 1,000 women, the total number of births in the nation will keep on climbing.

Making birth control more available than it is now—thus giving women in the Northern Triangle more control over childbearing decisions—and using federal dollars to expand these services, would seem to be a cornerstone for any development assistance strategy.

You might think that this is an odd proposal, but these two ideas—opposition to immigration and desire to limit reproduction in populations seen as “less”—-have a long history of keeping one another company."