It’s not an overstatement to say that the modern immigration restriction movement owes its existence to one man: a charismatic eye doctor from rural Michigan named John Tanton. Once described by a former ally as “the most influential unknown man in America,” Tanton spent decades building a network of anti-immigration groups from the ground up, transforming post–World War II nativism from a fringe view held by a small group of white supremacists into a mainstream political movement. Tanton, a veteran of the mid-century conservationist and population control movements, saw population growth as a major hurdle to long-term sustainability. Trying to convince his fellow nature lovers of the connection between international migration and environmental ruin, Tanton founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, in 1979, dedicating himself to reversing the demographic changes that had taken hold in America in his lifetime. Over the next three decades, Tanton would found and help provide funding for a constellation of anti-immigration advocacy groups, including the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), U.S. English, and NumbersUSA.
Tanton was born in Detroit in 1934, a decade after the Immigration Act of 1924 put the first permanent numerical limits on immigration in US history. The legislation capped immigration from Europe and allocated slots using a quota based on the composition of Americans’ national origins as of the 1890 census. The effect was an immediate and drastic reduction in immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe: More than a million European immigrants arrived in the United States in 1907; in 1925, that figure was just over 160,000. As a result of the act, Southern and Eastern Europe were no longer the main source of immigrants to the US. (African and Asian migration were effectively banned; no restrictions were implemented on migration from Latin America.)
The 1924 law kept America overwhelmingly white and Western European through Tanton’s young adulthood. But in 1965, a year after he graduated medical school, the country changed forever. The Immigration Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, overturned the national-origins quota system, replacing it with one that prioritized family reunification. The new law more than doubled the number of immigrant visas issued each year and didn’t count the immediate relatives of US citizens against these quotas. At the same time, Hart-Celler imposed numerical limits on Latin American and Caribbean migration for the first time in US history, unwittingly creating the conditions for a rise in unauthorized migration decades later. The law led to new patterns of immigration that slowly shifted America’s racial composition. The descendants of the Southern and Eastern European immigrants who had been considered unassimilable decades earlier were, after a rocky start, incorporated into the American melting pot; the newcomers, meanwhile, were regarded with hostility, accused of being inferior to the generation of immigrants who had come before them.