Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

When Smith took over the immigration subcommittee, he hired an attorney named Cordia Strom, who had served as the legal director of a far-right anti-immigration organization called the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The brainchild of a white supremacist ophthalmologist from Michigan named John Tanton, FAIR had been operating at the fringes of US politics since its founding in the late 1970s. Tanton’s goal was to “infiltrate the judiciary committees,” he wrote in 1986. “Think how much different our prospects would be if someone espousing our ideas had the chairmanship!” Smith turned the bill writing over to Strom, who authored it in isolation and then made revisions during conference committee meetings, while the House and Senate versions of the bill were being reconciled. Democrats didn’t see the changes Strom made until four days before the final vote. One immigrants’ rights advocate told The Texas Observer, “We would start to lobby on it, and when we went to offices, some of them would say, ‘we didn’t even know this provision was in there.’ ”