Kris Kobach Tagged As a “New-Wave Nativist”
BY CAROLYN SZCZEPANSKI
The Southern Poverty Law Center released its second list of anti-immigrant “nativists” today, and Kris Kobach, a UMKC law professor and chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, made the top 20. Calling the profile a “hit piece,” Kobach tells The Pitch that the SPLC report is riddled with errors.
Based in Alabama, the SPLC identifies and tracks the activities of hate groups. In recent years, the nonprofit has highlighted the growth of anti-illegal-immigration organizations such as the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. But, according to the SPLC, it’s not just the Minutemen who are having a negative influence on immigration policy.
In their quarterly magazine, Intelligence Report, released this week, the SPLC profiles 20 activists it brands “new-wave Nativists.”
“The net effect of their collective effort,” the magazine says in its introduction, “has contributed mightily toward darkening the skies of an already harsh political and social climate, with the tone of the national debate on immigration growing nastier by the day and with Latinos increasingly being subject to discrimination and violence.”
According to the SPLC, one of the men who has been a leader in that collective effort is Kobach.
In their short “snapshot,” the SPLC describes Kobach as a far-right Christian fundamentalist who’s been accused of inflating his law credentials and taking money from racists in his 2004 run for Congress. He’s also the “the man behind many of the deeply flawed anti-illegal-immigrant laws passed recently,” the SPLC says, including ordinances in Pennsylvania and Missouri that punish employers and landlords for hiring or housing undocumented immigrants. (The bio also cites a Pitch profile of the immigration professor in January 2007.)
Kobach says SPLC has it all wrong. In fact, federal judges in the past three months have upheld municipal and state laws that the UMKC professor helped craft. In January, a federal judge ruled that the Kobach-assisted, anti-illegal-immigration ordinance in Valley Park, Missouri, did not violate federal law. Last month, an Arizona judge upheld a law that requires employers to check the status of its workers or risk losing their business license if they’re caught with undocumented employees. Kobach also helped Arizona lawmakers author that bill.
The chair of the Kansas GOP also takes issue with SPLC’s nativist label, calling it a “gross distortion” of his views.
“I think that one of the greatest tragedies in our system is that legal immigrants have to wait so long to be reunited with their family members,” he tells The Pitch in an e-mail. “I want legal immigration to be more efficient, so fewer people are tempted to break the law. I do not agree with nativists — who are opposed to all immigration, legal and illegal — at all. But, of course, that doesn’t fit the SPLC’s agenda, so they leave out the truth.”
