What Is The Soros Funded, Church-Backed National Immigration Forum?

on June 15, 2013

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by Marjorie Jeffrey (@marjoriejeffrey)

The Evangelical Immigration Table, which organizes Evangelicals for legalizing 11 million illegal immigrants, is a program of the George Soros funded National Immigration Forum (NIF). Although recently repackaged in moderate wrapping, NIF has for 30 years fought for open borders and entitlements for illegal immigrants, while aligning with far leftist groups.

NIF was founded in 1982 by Dale Frederick Swartz, a man with close ties to the National Lawyers Guild, an organization once identified by Congress as “the legal bulwark of the [U.S.] Communist Party.” The radical National Lawyers Guild, which has also received funding from George Soros’ Open Society Institute, launched its own National Immigration Project in the early 1980s, which seems to share the goals of the NIF.

The NIF currently asserts the following as its four core principles:

• Immigration Reform and Workforce Needs – Shaping the policies necessary to make our immigration system serve the national interest, meeting the needs of our economy, workers, and families.

• Integration and Citizenship – Creating the opportunities necessary for immigrants to succeed and contribute to the growth and prosperity of America.

• Borders and Interior Enforcement – Developing fiscally responsible and humane policies that protect America and promote commerce, while respecting the rights of workers and employers, families, and communities.

• State and Local Immigration Developments – Promoting the principle that immigration law and enforcement are federal responsibilities.

NIF’s record on the last two principles is shaky at best. They have never supported border security, nor federal enforcement. For it, “federal enforcement” is code for no enforcement at all. The NIF’s current goal is to legalize all illegal immigrants with a clean criminal record – that is, not including their violation of federal law by entering the country illegally.

Prior to its support for the immigration legalization efforts of the late 2000s, the NIF opposed proposed immigration reforms of 1996, particularly the effort to expedite deportations of illegal aliens, and in particular non-citizens who committed “minor” crimes. NIF also opposed the denial of welfare benefits to illegal aliens. In particular, it opposed the creation of a National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. The plan as proposed by then U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft would apply only to nationals of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Syria who were here on non-immigrant visas; certain non-immigrant visa-holders from other countries that posed an “elevated national security risk” by the State Department and the INS; and certain foreign national non-immigrant visa-holders in whom the Justice Department had a special interest. The system only existed for a couple of years before it was suspended in 2003.

NIF also opposed the Clear Law Enforcement for Criminal Alien Removal (CLEAR) Act, H.R. 2671, which would have empowered state and local police to enforce federal immigration laws. It opposes making knowledge of English a requirement for citizenship, and strongly opposed the 2010 Arizona immigration enforcement law, which deputized state officials to enforce existing statutes that the federal government refused to enforce. NIF opposes an electronic work authorization system, commonly known as E-Verify.

Prior to creating the Evangelical Immigration Table, the NIF co-sponsored the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride Coalition (IWFRC), alongside ACORN, the National Council of La Raza, and the National Immigration Law Center. Other formal endorsers of the IWFRC included the ACLU, the Communist Party USA, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Democratic Socialists of America, MEChA (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan), and radical linguist Noam Chomsky. (The man, himself!)

Strange bedfellows, indeed.

NIF looks like it’s been trying to clean up its act lately, to conceal its extremist roots and make open borders more palatable to the mainstream American. Its current President, Ali Noorani, on the surface appears to be a sort of palatable liberal activist. But the NIF is still supported by MALDEF (Latino Legal Voice for Civil Rights in America), the ACLU, the National Immigration Law Center, La-Raza, and the AFL-CIO.

The National Immigration Forum is just one of many immigration advocacy groups with ties to the National Council of La Raza. La Raza, of course, means “The Race”. The organization receives millions of dollars in federal grants each year, and ostensibly serves as a lobbying organization for open borders and immigration reform. But the militant wing of the La Raza movement is a 1960s radical organization known as MEChA, or the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan. MEChA in its founding principles advocates ethnic cleansing of parts of the U.S. West. Former MEChA activists are commonly groomed by La Raza and raised to positions of power within the organization and outside of it.

Current NIF board members with especially close ties to the La Raza movement and MEChA include Angelica Salas and Esther Lopez. Denyse Sabaugh, current Vice Chair of the NIF Board, is the former President of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a group with Marxist and foreign terrorist ties. Demonstrating its more moderate recent image, board members also now include former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, a Catholic bishop, a pastor, and labor union officials.

Thanks to funding from Soros and other large leftist philanthropies, NIF has crafted a superficially more moderate image of late. But its history is pretty hardcore leftist and hostile to border security. Participants in NIF’s Evangelical Immigration Table might reconsider their involvement.

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