IREHR president Leonard Zeskind gave the keynote talk at a gathering in Topeka of more than 130 women brought together by the United Methodist Women Conferences in Eastern and Western Kansas. Zeskind talked about racism, the white nationalism and the anti-immigrant movement. He described the white nationalist origins of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Then he traced the arc of the movement that began with Pat Buchanan’s 1992 run in the Republican Presidential primaries in 1992 and California’s Prop 187 in 1994. He also showed how the Tea Party movement had picked up the slack in the established anti-immigrant organizations, information that was based on IREHR’s Special Report, Beyond FAIR. The questions following Zeskind’s presentation revealed the hunger at the base of the United Methodist Women’s Conference for hard information. IREHR will follow up with this.
