FAIR’s Anti–Legal Immigration Principles

Jack Martin at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) argues that I inaccurately characterized FAIR’s pledge as anti–legal immigration. On FAIR’s pledge, it states that its purpose is this:

It is therefore essential that we know whether you will support TRUE immigration reform policies.

What are FAIR’s “TRUE immigration reform policies” that the pledge references and emphasizes with blue underlined font? Here they are, in a document with the same title. One of FAIR’s points of “TRUE immigration reform” reads as follows:

End family chain migration. Family‐​based immigration must be limited to spouses and unmarried minor children. Entitlements for extended family migration lead to an immigration system that is not based on merit, runs on autopilot and fosters exponential growth in immigration.

Depending on what FAIR means exactly, such a policy change would decrease annual lawful immigration to the United States by at least 138,066 or as many as 340,000 annually if we use 2011 as a benchmark. To put that in perspective, FAIR’s TRUE immigration reform policies advocate for a decrease in legal immigration of between 13 percent and 32 percent. Sound anti–legal immigration to me. If Mr. Martin is so concerned about inaccurate characterizations of FAIR’s pledge, perhaps he should be more troubled by FAIR President Dan Stein’s reference to it as the “No New Amnesty Pledge” since most of the pledge’s points concern opposition to legal immigration and not amnesty.