Tea Party Nation goes further down the White Nationalist route

http://www.irehr.org/issue-areas/tea-parties/20-analysis/88-tea-party-nation-and-the-national-origins-act


President Johnson on the 1965 Immigration Act.

Tea Party Nation, the fourth largest national Tea Party faction with 42,100 online members, continues to move towards an explicit expression of white nationalism. The group has already been widely criticized for its proposal to deny voting rights for those citizens who do not own property, and for promoting anti-gay bullying. It has asserted that “American culture” will soon perish since the “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) population is headed for extinction.” Now, taking it one step further, Tea Party Nation is defending the now defunct and indefensibly racist National Origins Act of 1924.

Eliana Benador, a conservative public relations flack who was canned from her Washington Times blogging position after she speculated that Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, may have married now disgraced Congressman Anthony Weiner as part of an Islamic socialist plot to takeover America, is a new Tea Party Nation columnist. ... in a mix of racism, nativism, Islamophobia, and even old-school anti-Irish bigotry, her columns argues: abolishing the “National Origins Formula” unleashed an “invasion of America” by immigrants that are causing a reduction in “original American voters” and “bringing in a whole new texture of culture, 100% foreign to what America’s origins were as its wonderful adventure began back in 1776.”

The Racist Origins of the “National Origins Formula”

In the period between World War I and World War II, anti-immigrant sentiment surged in the United States, capped by the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act which officially codified white supremacy in American immigration policy for the next four decades. ... In this climate, anti-immigrant social movements re-emerged. Groups like the Immigration Restriction League (IRL), of which Madison Grant was a vice president, attracted prominent politicians like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. The Immigration Restriction League’s charter stated:

To advocate and work for the further judicious restriction, or stricter regulations, of immigration, to issue documents and circulars, social facts and information, on the subject, hold public meetings, and to arouse public opinion to the necessity of further exclusion of elements undesirable for citizenship or injurious to our national character.<5>

Anti-immigrant forces including the IRL were able to overcome the veto of President Wilson to pass an Immigration Act mandating a literacy test for immigrants in 1917. Though the IRL largely disappeared by the end of World War I, the nativism they helped promote continued to rise.

Surprisingly, towards the end of her column Benador quotes from President Lyndon Johnson’s October 3, 1965 signing ceremony speech for the Immigration and Naturalization Act. President Johnson declared that the National Origins system “violates the basic principle of American democracy, the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. It has been un-American in the highest sense, because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country.”

My tea party relatives say they aren't racists.

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