Connecticut Republicans and the far-right advocacy group, The Yankee Institute, spent much of late February circulating claims about the budgetary impact of undocumented immigrants, which stemmed from an organization designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The claim that undocumented immigrants cost Connecticut some $1.3 billion has been dismissed as inaccurate by Gov. Ned Lamont, who told WNTH it sounded “totally fanciful.”
According to WTNH, the Yankee Institute, which promoted that figure on the weekly “This Week in Connecticut” show, did not reach out to state fiscal analysts at the Office of Policy and Management for information related to the fiscal impact of undocumented immigrants.
So where did that number come from?
In a Thursday press release, the Yankee Institute admitted the figure came from a 2023 report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform or FAIR. If that name sounds familiar, it might be because FAIR has been designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
That’s due to FAIR’s ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists, beginning with the group’s founder, John Tanton. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Tanton had a long history of racist statements and expressed a wish that the United States remain a majority-white country.
“As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?” Tanton asked in the 1980s, according to the New York Times.
FAIR’s apparent white supremacist statements have not been exclusive to its founder. Daniel Stein, the group’s current executive director, vilified immigrants during a 1997 interview with Tucker Carlson, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing,” Stein told Tucker Carlson, according to SPLC. “Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for.”
So while Connecticut’s Yankee Institute opted to promote “fanciful” statistics from a designated hate group, Connecticut Senate Republicans saw fit to legitimize the hate group’s messaging through a press statement, affirming the group’s statistics while attacking the governor and legislative Democrats.
“$1.3 billion with a ‘B.’ Does Gov. Lamont find that statistic absolutely shocking as we do?” Republican Senators Rob Sampson, Eric Berthel and Stephen Harding said last week.
WTNH later asked Sampson about the source of the statistics. Rather than scrutinize the work of a designated hate group, Sampson took aim at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights nonprofit that has spent decades backing litigation against extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations.
From WTNH: “Asked to respond to claims that the study was authored by a disreputable source, Sampson said, ‘I would say the same about the Southern Poverty Law Center.’”
