A white tax attorney, William W. Chip, has started a non-profit from his home in Washington D.C. called Black America for Immigration Reform (BAIR). Despite the name, reform is not what he and his cohorts are after. They want to gain more acceptance of their xenophobic and racist ideas. By trying to bring the Black community in, they intend to disguise their motivations just as various hate groups like the Proud Boys have done in a bait-and-switch-style operation.
Chip is a contributor to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a leading hate group disguised as a think tank. The group is part of the John Tanton network of policy institutes that advocate for restricting immigration using the same rhetoric the Ku Klux Klan uses – bolstered by grossly manipulated data. He has routinely written, albeit baselessly, about how immigration could harm poor Black Americans while making racist posts on social media about non-white immigrants.
The language these groups use echoes that of John Tanton himself.
The late John Tanton was an ophthalmologist and white nationalist who was very vocal about his xenophobic views. He founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in 1979. If you noticed the similarities in the acronyms, it’s likely because of the unoriginality that racists have shown for decades. The point is to seemingly create a more robust ethnonationalist movement in the United States to eliminate immigration from the Global South.
While CIS and FAIR regularly circulate white nationalist and often racist content, many major media outlets have cited them and refuse to call them what they are: hate groups. For example, in a recent article, POLITICO referred to them as, “one of the leading think tanks that advocates for restricting immigration” despite being debunked constantly by reputable policy groups such as the CATO Institute, the Immigration Policy Center, and many more.
Regardless of whatever case he makes and white supremacist-aligned non-white people he recruits, make no mistake, Chip holds quite a disdain for Black people too. It’s worth noting that Chip was the senior counsel for the Department of Homeland Security under former president Donald Trump. Yes, the only address on the tax information for BAIR belongs to the same guy who is blatantly racist and was once a Trump official who defended human rights abuses.
With the level of misinformation we’ve been subjected to since the advent of social media, it pays to know where you’re getting your information from. In a world where white supremacist actors disguise themselves as non-white people online and when more non-white people are buying into white nationalist beliefs for profit, be aware of where the content you post is coming from.
While BAIR seems like a one-man operation now, it’s only expected to grow from here. Don’t be surprised to see inflammatory non-white people on his staff soon.
