CIS reports have been widely criticized and
debunked by groups such as the Immigration Policy Center and the CATO Institute. Alex Nowasteh, an Immigration Policy Analyst at CATO said in early 2017, "Oh, I'm convinced that [CIS executive director Mark Krikorian is] wrong about all the facts and issues. They're wrong about the impact of immigrants on the U.S. economy and on U.S. society.” Speaking about CIS to Univision in August of 2017, Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez stated, "Their research is always questionable because they torture the data to make it arrive at the conclusion they desire, which is that immigrants are criminals and a burden on the U.S. and our economy. It is the worst kind of deception, but politicians, the conservative media and some Americans eat it up because it always looks somewhat legitimate at first glance.” CIS has also defended the usage of “
anchor babies” and released a report on “
terror babies,” popular concepts among the nativist movement.
While capable of appearing as a sober-minded policy analyst in some settings, longtime CIS executive director Mark Krikorian’s contributions to the immigration policy debate rarely rise above petulant commentary dashed with extremist statements. Often, these statements are highly revealing.
At his perch at the
National Review and on Twitter Krikorian has
asked “How many rapists & drug-dealers are the anti-deportation radicals protecting?” and argued that Mexico’s “weakness and backwardness has been deeply harmful to the United States.” Krikorian has
called Mexican-American journalist Jorge Ramos a “white-Hispanic ethnic hustler” and
riffed that if the U.S. was a police state, as Chelsea Manning claimed, then “this mentally ill traitor would have been dumped in a shallow grave years ago.” In
one exchange on Twitter, Krikorian tried to whitewash the role eugenicists played in the 1924 Immigration Act only to stop responding when Harry H. Laughlin’s role in advancing the legislation was mentioned. Laughlin was the most prominent eugenics advocate prior to WWII and went on to co-found the racist pseudoscience promoting
Pioneer Fund, which Tanton had close ties to through the 90s.
More recently, CIS has been in the headlines for its connections to Trump Administration adviser Stephen Miller, a man who in college
collaborated with white nationalist Richard Spencer to bring another white nationalist,
Peter Brimelow, onto campus for a debate on immigration. Miller has been instrumental in pushing for anti-immigrant policies in the Trump White House and has regularly drawn from CIS. In early 2017, Miller made the rounds on national media defending the Trump administration’s Muslim ban by citing the CIS. “First of all, 72 individuals, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, have been implicated in terroristic activity in the United States who hail from those seven nations, point one,” Miller said on NBC’s
Meet the Press. Fact-checkers at
The Washington Post debunked the talking point, which collapsed several categories of crimes related to terrorism to reach a higher number, and awarded it “Three Pinocchios.”