Interview With Author Bill Hawkins, Immigration Reform Proponent Dan Stein

02/24/2003

Fox News: The O'Reilly Factor

O'REILLY: Thanks for staying with us. I'm Bill O'Reilly.

In THE FACTOR "Follow-Up" Segment tonight, last week, we told you that the Ford Foundation has donated almost $60 million to immigration groups that want to keep American borders open.

Two footnotes: The Ford Foundation has nothing to do with the Ford Motor Company. And THE FACTOR factor wants all Americans, no matter where they come from, to have freedom and a happy life.

But we also want to be protected from illegal immigration.

Joining us now from Washington, William Hawkins, the author of the book "Importing Revolution: Open Borders and the Radical Agenda," and Dan Stein, executive director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Now I also want to tell you that we have tried for more than two weeks to get somebody from the Ford Foundation to give their point of view. They choose not to.

So, Mr. Hawkins, take it away. Why is this foundation so intent on having liberal border policy?

WILLIAM HAWKINS, AUTHOR< "IMPORTING REVOLUTION: OPEN BORDERS AND THE RADICAL AGENDA": Well, I think you have to go back to when they started this big funding of open border groups, and it goes back to the '60s.

Now you can look at it one way and say -- and this is the way the Ford Foundation would sell it -- is that it was a natural outgrowth of the civil-rights movement of the '60s, that the civil-rights movement was about blacks and that -- and that it would be expanded to cover other minority groups, mainly Hispanics.

But there's a fundamental difference, though, that I think goes beyond this because the blacks -- American blacks have been here for generations and generations. In fact, they have a longer lineage here than a lot of immigrant groups that we think of now as nativists.

There was other things going on in the '60s as well, though, and that was the anti-war movement, the Vietnam War, which the left saw as the West versus the Third World.

And they're looking at bringing other people in, in the case of open borders, bringing people from -- from Mexico but other Third-World countries -- mainly Mexico but other places as well -- and what they were -- saw in the '60s was that the American working class had become the middle class, had become part of the establishment.

We all remember or heard of how the hard hats, the construction workers, went out into the streets and fought against the anti-war demonstrators, against the hippies, that the working class had become middle class, had essentially, from the left's perspective, sold out.

So what do you do? Well, you bring in a new working class. You bring in a class from the Third World, which can be kept alienated, will be less educated, impoverished, less skilled, will be at the bottom of the rung of the economic ladder, and can essentially be expected to be -- to stay there, to a large extent.

This group then gives you a new constituency, a new alienated proletariat, that can then fulfill the left's dream of a vanguard of the revolution...

O'REILLY: Now...

HAWKINS: ... or at least...

O'REILLY: Now, when you say revolution, do you mean socialistic revolution? Is that it?

HAWKINS: Well, a left-wing socialist revolution. It -- you know, it may translate into something milder than that.

O'REILLY: OK.

HAWKINS: It may just translate into a large block...

O'REILLY: Wow. That's a -- that's a pretty...

HAWKINS: ... of Democratic voters.

O'REILLY: All right. Now that's a pretty sophisticated scenario.

Do you buy that, Mr. Stein?

DAN STEIN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, FEDERATION FOR IMMIGRATION REFORM: I don't think there's any question that the principles involved in the Ford Foundation now -- the current president Susan Berresford, her predecessor Franklin Thomas, and the people who -- on the staff who control the giving of the Ford Foundation -- have as its objective to destroy the immigration controls of this country, and they have funded organizations, litigation, ethnic lobbies, and others that have worked mightily for 30 years to dismantle and destroy U.S. interior immigration law enforcement.

The ethic is to create, of course, a multiethnic or multicultural society. They use very neg -- very objective language when they try to describe the grants, but what, clearly, Susan Berresford and others want to do is carry on an agenda that carries -- goes all the way back to Emma Goldman and the radicalization of labor movements in 1910 and '20, Bill, to create essentially a population that the left elite can control...

O'REILLY: That's interesting.

STEIN: ... a number...

O'REILLY: So you're agreeing with Mr. Hawkins that this Ford Foundation, extravagantly wealthy, basically wants to create a society that steers away from capitalism...

STEIN: Right.

O'REILLY: ... into a much more government-oriented, liberal...

STEIN: They're trying to bring in people who will challenge the capitalist system, in their view, and...

O'REILLY: That -- that's unbelievable to me that that would be going on, Mr. Hawkins. Can you prove it?

HAWKINS: Well -- well, one of the first things the Ford Foundation did was they created a group called MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Foundation, and this -- this was a radical alternative group to what was then the mainline Hispanic political group, which was LULAC, which was the League of United Latin American Citizens.

And it's important to know that LULAC had the world "citizen" in its title. It was a middle-class, Hispanic movement which stressed assimilation. They wanted a policy that would move their people up.

Of course, there was -- there were -- they had a civil-rights agenda. They didn't want to be discriminated against. But they wanted to move into American society, be good citizens, be Americanized, and take their place in the United States.

MALDEF was set up to counter this group, to set up a radical group, which would be opposed to assimilation, and they...

O'REILLY: It's unbelievable.

HAWKINS: ... wanted a group that would defend the notion of...

O'REILLY: You know, I -- I've got to stop you because we don't -- we don't have a lot of time, but I -- I'm hearing all of this, and I'm just astounded.

And, once again, this has nothing to do with the Ford Motor Company, so you can buy Ford projects.

But this foundation, with all of this money, is actively undermining our security here. They don't want...

STEIN: But remember, Bill -- Bill, the multicultural curriculum, which is destroying the traditional canon of American history, can't succeed unless you change the ethnic base of the society. Ford's objective is to work to radically overhaul the ethnic basis of American society to bring about the change that they desire, and the American people...

O'REILLY: Yes, but they're white -- white rich people?

STEIN: It's all -- it's all on our Web site that...

O'REILLY: Yes, I know. I know, I know, I know. But they're white rich people running this. They're not...

STEIN: No, but that's -- that's typical. A paternal elitist, leftist liberalism that requires this population you can control in order to try to manipulate it politically. This idea...

O'REILLY: And it's working. It's working because...

STEIN: Well, remember, Bill -- Bill, in the 1960s, Congress had to go in in response to the Ford Foundation's political funding and rewrite the law of charitable foundations to stop the Ford Foundation from giving partisan political money to the friends of Robert Kennedy, and so the last major change Congress -- Congress needs to go back and investigate the Ford Foundation.

O'REILLY: Absolutely.

Gentlemen, thank you very much. We appreciate it. A real eye-opener.