What The Hell America!

The Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-immigrant hate group Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) has been absorbed by NumbersUSA, representing a merger between two groups dedicated to promoting anti-immigration policies and stoking population alarmism. 

CAPS announced in its winter 2023/2024 newsletter plans to merge with NumbersUSA, citing a desire to shift its focus from state to national after claiming its main mission to stabilize the population in California had been accomplished. A large swath of CAPS’ work is blaming and vilifying immigration for population growth supposedly leading to environmental degradation and societal woes. Its website now redirects to NumbersUSA.

Both groups are connected to the organized anti-immigrant network founded by the late John Tanton, a Michigan eye doctor and environmentalist turned radical population alarmist and white nationalist. NumbersUSA serves as a lobbying and grassroots arm for the movement, peddling anti-immigrant legislation, refuting and scuttling bills aimed at providing relief for undocumented immigrants and migrants, and grading lawmakers based on how they stack up with the group’s reductionist immigration agenda.

‘Focus on California no longer makes much sense’

In the final newsletter to supporters, CAPS President Ben Zuckerman said California’s population has stabilized, and thus the “CAPS Board has decided that a population stabilization organization with a focus on California no longer makes much sense.” CAPS director Dick Schneider noted that while the population in California may have stabilized, “Nevertheless and unfortunately, U.S. population will grow dramatically during the next 50 years almost entirely due to immigration.” Thus, the group merged with NumbersUSA, which has a national focus.

CAPS was co-founded in 1986 by Garrett Hardin, a close confidant of Tanton. Hardin was a respected, albeit controversial, ecologist who used his position of authority to inject his racist and anti-immigrant views into the American environmental movement.

CAPS once received money from the Pioneer Fund, a group established in the 1930s originally to pursue “race betterment” by promoting the genetic stock of those “deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution.”

Hardin was not the only controversial person employed by CAPS over the years. In 2017, El Tecolote published an exposé on Parker Anthony Wilson’s apparent white nationalist views and affiliations. Wilson worked as a public affairs director of CAPS. His relationship with the group appears to go back as far as 2012, when he received an award as part of its annual Population Awareness Awards. After the exposé, CAPS scrubbed Wilson’s name from its website and told El Tecolote it “had absolutely no knowledge” of his white nationalist ties or past activities as a teenager, adding, “Our organization is absolutely, positively, unequivocally committed to fair immigration policy that benefits ALL Americans, regardless of religion, race or socioeconomic status.”

In 2013, CAPS hired John Vinson as a senior writing fellow. Vinson is a founding member of the neo-Confederate hate group League of the South, and, according to the Anti-Defamation League, was credited with drafting the “Kinism Statement,” a set of guiding principles for a modern white supremacist interpretation of Christianity.

Another “senior writing fellow” who worked for CAPS was Frosty Wooldridge, a blogger with a history of publishing xenophobic and anti-Muslim content. In a 2015 article published at NewsWithViews.com, Wooldridge asked, “What if there were no Muslims in America?” He goes on to opine, “Wherever Muslims immigrate, they create havoc in their host countries.” Wooldridge previously served on the advisory board for the SPLC-designated anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a key organization in the anti-immigrant movement.

Ties to Tanton

Roy Beck, founder and president of NumbersUSA, was also a close friend to Tanton and once named his “heir apparent.” Both CAPS and NumbersUSA have received funds from Tanton’s now-defunct foundation, U.S. Inc. Beck, however, sought to distance himself and his organization from Tanton’s racist views on immigration.

NumbersUSA has a section of its webpage dedicated to “no immigrant bashing” and instead claims to focus on “sheer numbers of migrants admitted to the United States.”

Tanton viewed dramatically halting immigration as a means to stave off demographic changes, which he said would dilute the power of the white majority.

Beck and NumbersUSA have called for drastic shifts in immigration policy. In 2016, Beck cited terrorist attacks in the U.S. and Europe to say, “The aim should be to halt all immigration possible.” Beck told The New York Times in 2014 his goal is “to make immigration radioactive in as many places as possible.”

One of NumbersUSA’s most well-known videos shows Beck comparing human beings to gumballs to “debunk the myth that mass immigration into the United States can help reduce world poverty.”

In a 2022 report, culture and narrative change organization Define American said Beck’s gumball video was part of a “toxic narrative system” peddled by a “Great Replacement Network.”

The report states: “[Beck] proceeds to conduct a demonstration with gumballs with a clear central message: there are too many poor people in the world, and they all want to come here and take our resources. They want to come here to take over our country. Immigration will destroy us.”

Common denominators

NumbersUSA Chief of Staff Chris Pierce published a report on April 11, 2024, from a trip to the southern border where he said, “The only way we have a chance at stopping this unprecedented invasion is to use a multifaceted approach.” An “invasion” of migrants has become a go-to buzzword for the contemporary hard right, though it has been used for decades among anti-immigrant and white nationalist circles, including by Tanton, who, in 1994, co-published The Immigration Invasion.

Such rhetoric is arguably dangerous and invokes racist “great replacement”-style imagery that the country is being invaded by mostly non-white migrants. A digital footprint said to be linked to the assailant responsible for the 2019  mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, shows the same “invasion” language and fears were used to justify the attack on Latinx people, which became one of the federal government’s biggest hate crime cases.

NumbersUSA and CAPS have found common ground over the years. Both groups have sought to ground their anti-immigration agenda in environmental and conservation issues. In the early 2000s, CAPS’ Zuckerman was part of an attempted takeover of environmental group Sierra Club by anti-immigration activists.

NumbersUSA and CAPS have advocated against sanctuary policies for immigrants. This fits into a larger strategy among groups in the anti-immigrant movement to try and dismantle these policies. CAPS previously created the website StopSanctuary.com in opposition to the California Values Act (SB 54), often referred to as the “Sanctuary State” law, which limits cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration agents. The law went into effect in 2018.

CAPS and NumbersUSA have both sought to limit birthright citizenship for people born on U.S. soil, which is guaranteed under the 14^th Amendment. Repealing birthright citizenship has been a longtime policy goal of white nationalist and anti-immigrant groups. Some extremist groups often claim repealing this to be part of a way to reverse the “great replacement” and displacement of white people and the dominant culture they claim to be happening because of immigration.

Tanton himself was a proponent of rolling back birthright citizenship. CAPS previously sent action alerts to supporters calling on them to contact Congress and tell them to support legislation to “jettison birthright citizenship!” NumbersUSA has also promoted legislation to end automatic birthright citizenship, claiming it to be one of the “Six Great Immigration Solutions.”

On day one of his second term as president, Donald Trump sought to repeal automatic birthright citizenship via executive order, which was blocked days later by a federal judge. Still, the executive order was cheered on by NumbersUSA and white nationalist hate groups like American Renaissance. On Jan. 22, white nationalist “Gregory Hood,” aka Kevin DeAnna, penned a piece at American Renaissance’s website, saying: “The Great Replacement will be slowed if birthright citizenship ends, so we can expect fierce resistance. There is an effort to eliminate birthright citizenship in Congress, too, but the final decision will be up to the courts.”

NumbersUSA noted Trump’s efforts to be a longshot but praised him for fulfilling “a major campaign promise” and drawing “attention to the issue.”

Image at top: The missions of anti-immigration groups Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) and NumbersUSA call for drastic shifts in immigration policy. (Credit: SPLC)