Cordelia Scaife May, a reclusive heir to the Mellon banking and industrial fortune, saw population growth as one of the biggest causes of environmental degradation. She was an early backer of birth control and family-planning organizations. She funded a group that promotes chemical sterilization of women around the world.
<p>And she believed that immigration was leading to domestic population growth that would exacerbate environmental problems. That’s why when she died in 2005, she left her $404 million fortune to the Colcom Foundation, which gives much of its money to groups that advocate for lower rates of immigration. Her bequest earned her the top spot on the Philanthropy 50 that year.
People on both sides of the immigration debate agree that May’s dollars have been crucial to laying the policy and advocacy groundwork that have found their most powerful ally in President Trump, whose efforts to restrict immigration were key to his election and policy agenda.
“You can easily make the argument that, pound for pound, Ms. May’s gift to create Colcom has had one of the most significant influences in American public debate of any in the history of the United States,” says Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, one of the groups that has received funding over decades from May and Colcom. “It has guided and shaped a unique public dialogue around an issue that has become central to the whole American prospect.”
Grants, Controversial and Otherwise
Over time, Colcom has given about half of its funding to groups, including FAIR, that push for less immigration, $180 million total since May died, the New York Times estimates.
Some of that aid is controversial. One critic, the Southern Poverty Law Center, says Colcom money has gone to a group that published the writings of white nationalists and Holocaust deniers and another that promotes racist conspiracy theories. The groups reject the criticism, and John Rohe, vice president for philanthropy at Colcom, says the foundation is pro-immigrant and only supports race-neutral policies. He says such neutrality is a litmus test for groups that it funds.
Colcom’s other funding is far less controversial: It supports nonprofits in Pennsylvania, mostly in the Pittsburgh area where May lived, that work on environmental or community issues and the arts.
Valuable Support
According to their informational tax returns, Colcom’s funding has been substantial for groups like FAIR, which received just over half of its contributions from Colcom over the past several years. FAIR opposes amnesty for undocumented people who live in the United States. It advocates for lowering the number of legal immigrants to the United States from around 1 million a year to 300,000 and halting illegal immigration.
It has been able to pursue those goals over a long period, says Stein, because of Colcom’s support.
“People who give to FAIR, one of the things they want to know is, are you credible? Do you have reach? Do people hear your message? Can you get the word out?” says Stein.
NumbersUSA, another group that receives about half of its annual funding from Colcom, according to recent tax filings, rallies grassroots support for decreasing immigration and curbing employment of undocumented workers.
The Chronicle’s 20th annual ranking of America’s biggest donors was topped by Michael Bloomberg and followed by the hotel magnate Barron Hilton, then Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, and his wife, Wendy. The top five on the list each gave more than $1 billion to charity last year.
Roy Beck, CEO of NumbersUSA, says the group does not discuss or disclose specific donors but says that having sustained support from a foundation is crucial because many of the nation’s biggest grant makers that support immigration work are opposed to the views of his organizations and others that May favored. “Scrounging for money all the time is the kind of thing that causes nonprofits to lose their way,” he says. “They become captives of their direct-mail operations. It’s been very important [to have sustained funding]. We have been able to stick with our principles.”
Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York University School of Law, notes that important as Colcom’s money has been, the groups it supports are still fairly small. FAIR had total contributions ranging from $7.4 million to $26.5 million in recent years. Giving to NumbersUSA ranged from $4.2 million to $9 million.
“When you go to their offices, they’re little ragged operations,” says Chishti. “But for a kind of rickety set of organizations, they have had an oversized influence on American immigration politics.”
Other Administrations
Groups funded by May have been successful in steering the immigration debate under several presidents, not just Trump. When President George W. Bush pushed for immigration-law changes in 2006, it was NumbersUSA that rallied its members to oppose the measures. “They generated 1 million letters, faxes, and emails to members of Congress that scared the hell out of them,” says Chishti. And because of all the opposition, Bush’s plan failed.
Today NumbersUSA has 6.7 million followers, among the most of any nonprofit on Facebook. That is just below NPR, with 7.1 million, and more than People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, with 5.2 million.
FAIR has been at the nexus of shaping policy ideas and mobilizing grassroots support. Every year it brings 70 talk-radio deejays to Washington to put members of Congress and immigration policy advocates on the radio together to advance conservative views on immigration. It uses its large online presence to push or attack policies at the local and national levels. “Having the resources to do those things has been enormously valuable,” Stein says.
While FAIR has long been influential, it is having a heyday during the Trump administration, where some of its staff members have moved into White House roles. “Hopefully the fact that the administration has hired some of our folks is a reflection of the high level of professionalism and credibility that FAIR represents as an organization,” Stein says. “It also demonstrates the long-term value of the investment that Colcom and other foundations and individuals, and many Americans over many years, have invested in the organization.”
NumbersUSA has also had an impact on the Trump administration. It encouraged the White House to make it harder for people to apply to the diversity visa lottery, which admits people on a faster track from countries that are underrepresented in traditional immigration systems. And Beck says it has also influenced Trump’s efforts to limit the practice of allowing green-card holders and citizens to sponsor some family members for permanent residence — something these groups call chain migration.
Critics charge that the groups Colcom funds have aided President Trump in other ways that go beyond promotion of public policy. They say these nonprofits provide the research and policy arguments that undergird the rhetoric that Trump, his supporters, and others use to spread misinformation about immigration and hatred of immigrants.
Some of the organizations that Colcom funds have appeared on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups. FAIR appears there, as does the Center for Immigration Studies and U.S. Inc., which supports the Remembrance Project, a group that publicizes stories of American citizens killed by undocumented immigrants.
The Center for Immigration Studies sued the Southern Poverty Law Center over the designation and is appealing a judge’s ruling to dismiss the case. Stein denies that race or xenophobia plays any role in his organization’s work. He says there is no evidence his group belongs on the list.
Nonprofits can certainly argue for lowering immigration without being racist or xenophobic, Chishti says. But even if the groups funded by Colcom don’t express bias, he says they often provide the intellectual underpinnings for those that do. “They know exactly how to surround that anxiety with policy arguments,” he says.
That fuels exactly the kind of anger and fear that Rohe, Stein, and Beck say they want to avoid, Chishti says.
Stein said in an email that FAIR discourages intolerance of groups “based on immutable characteristics” and that it enjoys such broad support because its positions are empirically based and carefully considered.
Information NumbersUSA distributes is accurate, says Beck, and it has admonished people not to direct their anger toward immigrants, even those illegally in the U.S.
But the racially heightened nature of the immigration debate may be limiting the effectiveness of some of the groups Colcom supports, says Chishti. “The problem is that people have dismissed them as racists and xenophobes and therefore not even tried to understand the nuance [in their positions],” Chishti says. “Ultimately, to think about having a national consensus on immigration, you have to talk to these people.”
