Why a Banking Heiress Spent Her Fortune on Keeping Immigrants Out (NYT)

Last edited Wed Aug 14, 2019, 09:13 PM - Edit history (2)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/anti-immigration-cordelia-scaife-may.html

Why a Banking Heiress Spent Her Fortune on Keeping Immigrants Out
Newly unearthed documents reveal how an environmental-minded socialite became an ardent nativist whose money helped sow the seeds of the Trump anti-immigration agenda.
By Nicholas Kulish and Mike McIntire
Aug. 14, 2019



She was an heiress without a cause — an indifferent student, an unhappy young bride, a miscast socialite. Her most enduring passion was for birds.

But Cordelia Scaife May eventually found her life’s purpose: curbing what she perceived as the lethal threat of overpopulation by trying to shut America’s doors to immigrants.

She believed that the United States was “being invaded on all fronts” by foreigners, who “breed like hamsters” and exhaust natural resources. She thought that the border with Mexico should be sealed and that abortions on demand would contain the swelling masses in developing countries.

An heiress to the Mellon banking and industrial fortune with a half-billion dollars at her disposal, Mrs. May helped create what would become the modern anti-immigration movement. She bankrolled the founding and operation of the nation’s three largest restrictionist groups — the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies — as well as dozens of smaller ones, including some that have promulgated white nationalist views.

Today, 14 years after Mrs. May’s death, her money remains the lifeblood of the movement, through her Colcom Foundation. It has poured $180 million into a network of groups that spent decades agitating for policies now pursued by President Trump: militarizing the border, capping legal immigration, prioritizing skills over family ties for entry and reducing access to public benefits for migrants, as in the new rule issued just this week by the administration.




A letter to a young cousin in the 1980s.








Stephen Miller, the architect of President Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, is a longtime ally of FAIR. Doug Mills/The New York Times