Are White Nationalists Behind A Worker Surveillance Push?

A nonprofit with hate group ties is using a major GOP apparatus to push a controversial employee verification system to crush immigration.

By Helen Santoro, The Lever

This election season, an anti-immigration nonprofit with ties to hate groups is pushing conservative lawmakers to expand a controversial worker surveillance tool that critics say is discriminatory and harms businesses and workers.

At a recent American Legislative Exchange Council gathering of conservative lawmakers and corporate lobbyists, the nonprofit NumbersUSA hosted a workshop promoting E-Verify, a government website used to screen workers’ immigration status. Mandating that employers use E-Verify would allow “state legislatures to take control of [the immigration] situation,” said Andrew Good, NumbersUSA’s state government relations director, adding that “Illegal immigration costs the taxpayers in your states billions of dollars” and “you don’t know who is touching your food.”

While NumbersUSA is now a free-standing entity, the organization was originally established in 1996 as part of a foundation run by John Tanton, a white nationalist who wrote that “a European American majority” is required to maintain American culture. Tanton also founded several organizations designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremists nationwide, and once said the founder of NumbersUSA was his “heir apparent.”