Twitter Rakes in Cash From Anti-Immigrant Bigots

The group’s name is bland enough: Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR). It doesn’t explain its specific position on immigration—it could want to expand or limit it, but the word reform doesn’t tell us anything either way. That meaningless name is helpful for evading scrutiny, which is perhaps why, as Alex Kotch reports in Sludge, the “prominent anti-immigrant organization has spent $934,000 on Twitter ads, and Twitter sees no problem with this.”

A little under $1 million in promoted tweets over a few years might not seem like a lot of money for Twitter, which collected $727 million in ad revenue in the second quarter of 2019 alone. However, the issue here is not about the amount spent, as Kotch explains. It’s about how the content appears to violate Twitter’s policies on ad content, which in theory bans “hateful content,” and “organizations, groups, or individuals associated with promoting hate, criminal or terrorist-related content.”

“The views of FAIR are repugnant,” James Tomsheck, who led internal affairs at Customs and Border Patrol from 2006 to 2014, told the New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer in 2018. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls it “America’s most influential anti-immigrant organization.”

The group promotes anti-immigrant legislation at the state and national levels, and even gets involved in local matters; recently, in Frederick, Md., FAIR representatives came to local protests to support a sheriff sued for racially profiling a Latina grandmother.

In September, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that FAIR funded travel costs for 191 sheriffs across the country (including two from eastern Oregon) to attend political events in Washington, D.C., including appearances at “Badges and Angels,” which OPB described as “a press conference with the relatives of people killed by undocumented immigrants,” which FAIR refers to as “angel families.”

FAIR also has ties to white nationalist groups like VDARE and the Council of Conservative Citizens. According to Kotch, current FAIR President Dan Stein “said that the passage of [the] 1965 immigration act that ended a racist quota system limiting immigration to mostly northern Europeans was ‘a mistake.’ ”

Twitter’s ad policies state it will not accept content “intended to incite fear or spread fearful stereotypes about a protected category, including asserting that members of a protected category are more likely to take part in dangerous or illegal activities.”

In terms of FAIR’s individual posts that might violate that stated policy, Kotch points to tweets that claim undocumented immigrants are associated with a spike in crime, and a current tweet that makes allegations about undocumented immigrants and rape.

The promoted tweet, which also includes a video, reads: “People who break the law to enter the United States are not suddenly inclined to obey it once they cross the border. And Montgomery County is a textbook case-in-point that clearly demonstrates a significant connection between illegal aliens and crime.” There are others implying that sanctuary cities are dangerous and asking that such a policy be stopped.

Kotch references at least one organization, Presente, a Latinx social justice group, that’s tried to get Twitter to stop allowing promoted tweets by FAIR. Its online petition says: “It’s one thing to try and balance free speech and hate speech, it’s entirely another to take money and promote the views of a hate group like FAIR, that exists entirely to harm and reduce the amount of immigrants in this country.”

When asked by Sludge about the ads, Twitter global director of public policy communications, Ian Plunkett, simply provided a link to the company’s ad policies and said, “We’ve nothing further to share at this time.”