Tag Archives: population control

Never Say “Die”

Posted on July 12, 2026 by | 5 comments
Even as Population Growth Dramatically Slows, the U.N. Keeps Hyping “World Population Day”
By Steven Mosher

On July 11th, the United Nations will celebrate its 26th World Population Day. The point of this annual exercise is to raise money to promote abortion, sterilization and contraception among poor and vulnerable women by alarming us about the dangers of global population growth.

The problem with this narrative is that, in many regions of the world, the population is declining, not growing. About half the world’s population lives in “low-fertility” countries, where women have fewer than 2.1 children on average over their lifetimes. Low-fertility countries now include all of Europe (except Iceland), the Americas (17 countries), and most of Asia (19 countries). The list of low-fertility countries include China, the United States, Brazil, the Russian Federation, Japan and Viet Nam.

In other words, growth rates have dramatically declined from the late 1960s when the global population grew at a rate of 2.1% each year. That rate is now about 1% a year. The UN’s low variant projection (historically the most accurate) indicates that it will peak at around 8.3 billion in 2050. Even the medium variant projection shows population growth slowing to 0.1% by the century’s end, and turning negative beyond 2100. In either case, the population of the world will never double again.

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As these numbers suggest, fertility rates have dipped to all-time lows. The U.N.’s medium variant projection estimates that women are now averaging 2.45 children over their reproductive lifetime, while the low variant pegs this at only 2.05. The global average was 4.97 just 60 years ago. Under either variant, this number will be well under replacement by century’s end. After all, global replacement fertility—the rate needed to replace the current generation and prevent population decline—is 2.23 children per woman over her reproductive lifetime.Many developed nations are already suffering from the effects of population decline. Populations in many areas are rapidly aging as younger cohorts are becoming smaller. Social safety nets are being strained to the breaking point as fewer workers are struggling to support increasing numbers of elderly.In Japan, increasing urbanization in conjunction with falling fertility rates have resulted in a drastic depopulation of many rural towns and villages. Economic growth is being compromised as workers are in increasingly short supply. The elderly are being abandoned as their only children go on to have no children at all. There are simply too few members of the younger generation to care for them.Europe is also reeling from the effects of declining populations. In Italy, Portugal, Poland, Russia and throughout most of Southern and Eastern Europe, crude death rates exceed crude birth rates. The fertility rate for all of Europe is 1.58, well off the 2.09 replacement fertility rate, and recipe for demographic disaster.Growth rates have also slowed in many developing nations. Thailand, Myanmar, and Tunisia are all below replacement level fertility. Even once-fertile Bangladesh is projected to fall below the replacement threshold 2020. The U.N.’s medium variant projection predicts that the population of Bangladesh will begin to contract after 2060, sooner under the low variant.

China’s Planned Birth policy (one child in the cities; two in the countryside) has driven its fertility rate down to an unsustainable 1.66, far below the estimated 2.22 it needs to stabilize its population. Little girls continue to be aborted or killed at birth in shocking numbers. There are 116 boys born in China for every 100 girls, one of the most skewed sex ratios in the world. Millions of Chinese men will never marry.

In spite of this dismal picture, population alarmists continue to push for population control programs.

Under the Obama administration, population control remains a key foreign aid objective. Various agencies of the U.S. government spent a whopping of $2.77 billion on “family planning and reproductive health” in 2014, a sum of money that dwarfs spending on all other health-related assistance, such as nutrition, water supply and sanitation, malaria, pandemic diseases, and general health care.

Only HIV/AIDS received more funding at $3.42 billion, and much of this money also went to population control organizations for population control purposes. The same devices that supposedly stop the spread of AIDS also stop the “spread” of pregnancy.

Expenditures for maternal and child health care, on the other hand, came to a paltry $497 million. Yet the surest way to lower fertility is to lower infant and child mortality rates.

USAID does not exaggerate when it says that it “has been the leading donor in international family planning for more than 40 years…in most years making up 40–50% of all donor funds.”

Given that birth rates are falling farther and faster than anyone imagined possible a couple of decades ago, what’s the U.N. to do to galvanize the U.S. and the world to continue putting this kind of money into the overpopulation pot?

Change the subject, that’s what.

The theme for this year’s World Population Day is not “Overpopulation,” but rather “Vulnerable Populations in Emergencies.” This is nothing more than an attempt to exploit the tragic and desperate conditions of the millions displaced or threatened by war, disaster or violent extremism to raise funds for population control.

Of course, it is true that the UNFPA has no qualms with pushing contraception and abortion on vulnerable populations in their time of greatest need. In its own words: “UNFPA works in emergency settings around the globe to respond to…the needs of women and girls…restoring their access to sexual and reproductive health care”.

Refugees are in desperate need of almost everything. They generally lack shelter, food, access to clean drinking water, health care—the list goes on and on.

And, for this year’s World Population Day, the U.N. wants to give them … birth control.

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The New York Times Throws in the Towel on “Overpopulation”

Posted on June 4, 2026 by | 1 comment

by Steven Mosher and Anne Roback Morse of POPULATION RESEARCH INSTITUTE

My guess is that you, gentle reader, will be as astonished as we were by the top-of-the-website New York Times article discrediting the population alarmism of the past fifty years. In “The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion” the newspaper has finally (several decades too late) thrown population control on the ash heap of discredited ideas.The article included a video interview with Paul Ehrlich, the author of The Population Bomb. He was the butterfly scientist from Stanford who scared tens of millions with the specter of overpopulation—and the population apocalypse that would supposedly result. He predicted that by the 1970’s the “population bomb” would explode—and hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in India and elsewhere. (India is still there, and doing quite well, thank you.)

But America’s “newspaper of record,” as it styles itself, failed to record the horrors themselves. It was woefully incomplete. There was no mention of the human costs when governments made population control a priority. No mention of the savage forced abortions and forced sterilizations that followed. No mention of the killing of baby girls through female infanticide and sex-selective abortion. No mention of the wasted money, the age and gender imbalances that continue to unfold and will take effect for years to come. No mention of how the overpopulation panic helped to fuel the rise of birth control use and abortion.

Instead, when citing reasons why birth rates have dropped world-wide, the article offered more benign explanations. First, improved health standards mean that couples no longer need to have 5 children in the hope that 3 survive. Second, large families are not necessary in post-agricultural society since they are not needed to work the land, and therefore only make a population dense city increasingly crowded. Third—and direct from New York City—comes the motherhood slam: “Women in many societies are ever more independent, socially and economically; they no longer accept that their fate is to be endlessly pregnant.”

In other words, the New York Times does not even begin to tell the whole story. The horrors of anti-human population control campaigns continue today.

Take India, for example. Over 60% of India’s women state they have been exposed to “family planning messaging” in the past few months; an impressive statistic considering only 64% of India’s women are literate. And the less educated are sterilized in much higher numbers. While 47% of Indian women with less than five years of education have been sterilized, only 20% of women with twelve or more years of education have accepted sterilization. Lack of consent, painful and pervasive injuries, and death from negligence disproportionately affect India’s most vulnerable. Indian women are not having fewer children because they are becoming “more independent,” but because they are being coerced into undergoing sterilization by abusive population control programs, with their saturation propaganda and sterilization camps.

“The core message of [Ehrlich’s book]—population growth outstripping food supply—resonated quite a bit with India’s elites-with the middle classes,” economist Gita Sen told the Times. “They much preferred to believe that the poor were poor because of too many children rather than being poor because of an unfair and unequal economic system.”

In China—which now has below-replacement fertility—the Planned Birth Policy allows the state to control childbearing. Anyone pregnant without a valid birth permit falls afoul of the Family Planning police, and abortion and sterilization usually follow.

Chinese human rights activist Chen Guangcheng states: “In ancient Chinese culture we had a saying that your home is your castle, and that even the king will not be allowed to come in without your permission. But now in today’s China under Communist rule, they even put their hand into your body and grab your babies out of your womb, and they kill your babies in your face.”

In Myanmar—another country where fertility levels have fallen below replacement—President Thein Sein just signed a “Population Control” bill into law. The law implicitly authorizes the use of coercion and discrimination, especially against the persecuted Rohingya minority—who are already subject to a two-child policy.

In dying Uzbekistan, the authoritarian government is coercing tens of thousands of women into sterilization.

The former president of Peru is currently on trial for crimes against humanity for a population control campaign in the 1990’s that sterilized over 300,000 indigenous women against their will.

The list goes on and on.

These are the true “unrealized horrors” of Ehrlich’s mad tale. The past half century has seen tens of millions of men and women sterilized without their consent and tens of millions of women forcibly aborted. These men and women are owed more than a one-off article from The New York Times saying, “Oh, oops. I guess we were all wrong.”

The New York Times conveniently fails to mention that it helped to fan the flames of the overpopulation panic. It advocated setting up population control programs, and editorialized on behalf of the billions of dollars in funding that continues to fuel the anti-people movement down to the present day. A mea culpa would be nice, but we aren’t holding our breath.

And lest we forget, the grim game of controlling human numbers continues, albeit under a different name. Today, efforts to disable women’s reproductive systems are called “reproductive health” programs. Orwellian, isn’t it?

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46 Population Control Quotes That Show How Badly The Elite Want To Wipe Us All Out

Posted on May 30, 2026 by | 3 comments

Many Eyes Watching - Public Domain

The global elite are absolutely obsessed with reducing the size of the global population. As you will see from the quotes in this article, our “world leaders” think about the “problem” of overpopulation a lot. Many of them are absolutely convinced that it is the greatest problem that humanity if facing today. So what do they believe should be done about it? That is where there is disagreement. Some argue for very forceful measures, while others prefer a “softer” approach. But the vast majority of them do agree that humans are a “plague” upon the earth and that we will literally destroy the planet if we are left to our own devices. To the elite, everything from global warming to our growing economic problems can be directly traced back to the lack of population control. They warn that if nothing is done about the exploding population, we will be facing a future full of poverty, war and suffering on a filthy, desolate planet. They complain that it “costs too much” to keep elderly patients that are terminally ill alive, and they eagerly promote abortion for babies that are “not wanted” because they would be “too much of a burden” on society. Anything that reduces the human population in any way is a good thing for those that believe in this sick agenda. This twisted philosophy is being promoted in our movies, in our television shows, in our music, in our public schools, and it is being taught to our smartest students at colleges and universities on the planet. The people promoting this philosophy have very, very deep pockets, and they are actually convinced that they are helping to “save the world” by trying to reduce the size of the human population. In fact, many of them are entirely convinced that we are in a “life or death” struggle for the fate of the planet, and that if humanity does not willingly choose to embrace population control soon, then a solution will have to be “forced” upon them.

Yes, I know that all of this may sound like something out of a science fiction novel. But there are a whole lot of people out there that are absolutely obsessed with this stuff, and many of them are in very prominent positions around the globe.

The following are 46 population control quotes that show just how badly the global elite want to wipe us all out…

1. Charles Darwin (his thinking is at the foundation of so many of our scientific theories today): “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

2. Bill Gates: “The problem is that the population is growing the fastest where people are less able to deal with it. So it’s in the very poorest places that you’re going to have a tripling in population by 2050. (…) And we’ve got to make sure that we help out with the tools now so that they don’t have an impossible situation later.”

3. UK Television Presenter Sir David Attenborough: “We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now”

4. UN Under-Secretary-General Baroness Valerie Amos: “Population growth puts increased pressure on everything else…Girls and women must be educated. Even a few years’ basic education leads to smaller families.”

5. Paul Ehrlich, a former science adviser to president George W. Bush and the author of “The Population Bomb”: “Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism… of sexism… of religious intolerance… of war… of gross economic inequality. But if you don’t solve the population problem, you’re not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever problem you’re interested in, you’re not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem.”

6. Dave Foreman, the co-founder of Earth First: “We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox.”

7. CNN Founder Ted Turner: “A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

8. Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso about medical patients with serious illnesses: “You cannot sleep well when you think it’s all paid by the government. This won’t be solved unless you let them hurry up and die.”

9. David Rockefeller: “The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.”

10. Richard Branson: “The truth is this: the Earth cannot provide enough food and fresh water for 10 billion people, never mind homes, never mind roads, hospitals and schools.”

11. Environmental activist Roger Martin: “On a finite planet, the optimum population providing the best quality of life for all, is clearly much smaller than the maximum, permitting bare survival. The more we are, the less for each; fewer people mean better lives.”

12. HBO personality Bill Maher: “I’m pro-choice, I’m for assisted suicide, I’m for regular suicide, I’m for whatever gets the freeway moving – that’s what I’m for. It’s too crowded, the planet is too crowded and we need to promote death.”

13. Al Gore: “One of the things we could do about it is to change the technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to stabilize the population, and one of the principal ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women. You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children to have, the spacing of the children… You have to educate girls and empower women. And that’s the most powerful leveraging factor, and when that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices and more balanced choices.”

14. MIT professor Penny Chisholm: “The real trick is, in terms of trying to level off at someplace lower than that 9 billion, is to get the birthrates in the developing countries to drop as fast as we can. And that will determine the level at which humans will level off on earth.”

15. Julia Whitty, a columnist for Mother Jones: “The only known solution to ecological overshoot is to decelerate our population growth faster than it’s decelerating now and eventually reverse it—at the same time we slow and eventually reverse the rate at which we consume the planet’s resources. Success in these twin endeavors will crack our most pressing global issues: climate change, food scarcity, water supplies, immigration, health care, biodiversity loss, even war. On one front, we’ve already made unprecedented strides, reducing global fertility from an average 4.92 children per woman in 1950 to 2.56 today—an accomplishment of trial and sometimes brutally coercive error, but also a result of one woman at a time making her individual choices. The speed of this childbearing revolution, swimming hard against biological programming, rates as perhaps our greatest collective feat to date.”

16. Colorado State University Professor Philip Cafaro in a paper entitled “Climate Ethics and Population Policy”: “Ending human population growth is almost certainly a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for preventing catastrophic global climate change. Indeed, significantly reducing current human numbers may be necessary in order to do so.“

17. Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin Eric R. Pianka: “I do not bear any ill will toward people. However, I am convinced that the world, including all humanity, WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us.”

18. Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General from 1997-2006: “The idea that population growth guarantees a better life — financially or otherwise — is a myth that only those who sell nappies, prams and the like have any right to believe.”

19. Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, UN Under-Secretary-General from 2000-2010: “We cannot confront the massive challenges of poverty, hunger, disease and environmental destruction unless we address issues of population and reproductive health.”

20. Detroit News Columnist Nolan Finley: “Since the national attention is on birth control, here’s my idea: If we want to fight poverty, reduce violent crime and bring down our embarrassing drop-out rate, we should swap contraceptives for fluoride in Michigan’s drinking water.

We’ve got a baby problem in Michigan. Too many babies are born to immature parents who don’t have the skills to raise them, too many are delivered by poor women who can’t afford them, and too many are fathered by sorry layabouts who spread their seed like dandelions and then wander away from the consequences.”

21. John Guillebaud, professor of family planning at University College London: “The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights. An extra child is the equivalent of a lot of flights across the planet.”

22. Pope Francis: “Some people think that — excuse my expression here — that in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits. No. Parenthood is about being responsible. This is clear.”

23. Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama 1950-present: “The growth in population is very much bound up with poverty, and in turn poverty plunders the Earth. When human groups are dying of hunger, they eat everything: grass, insects, everything. They cut down the trees, they leave the land dry and bare. All other concerns vanish. That’s why in the next 30 years the problems we call ‘environmental’ will be the hardest that humanity has to face.”

24. Democrat strategist Steven Rattner: “WE need death panels. Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget.”

25. Matthew Yglesias, a business and economics correspondent for Slate, in an article entitled “The Case for Death Panels, in One Chart”: “But not only is this health care spending on the elderly the key issue in the federal budget, our disproportionate allocation of health care dollars to old people surely accounts for the remarkable lack of apparent cost effectiveness of the American health care system. When the patient is already over 80, the simple fact of the matter is that no amount of treatment is going to work miracles in terms of life expectancy or quality of life.”

26. Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger: “All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class”

27. Gloria Steinem: “Everybody with a womb doesn’t have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal chords has to be an opera singer.”

28. Jane Goodall: “It’s our population growth that underlies just about every single one of the problems that we’ve inflicted on the planet. If there were just a few of us, then the nasty things we do wouldn’t really matter and Mother Nature would take care of it — but there are so many of us.”

29. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

30. Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger: “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

31. Salon columnist Mary Elizabeth Williams in an article entitled “So What If Abortion Ends Life?”: “All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides.”

32. Paul Ehrlich: “Basically, then, there are only two kinds of solutions to the population problem. One is a ‘birth rate solution,’ in which we find ways to lower the birth rate. The other is a ‘death rate solution,’ in which ways to raise the death rate — war, famine, pestilence — find us.”

33. Alberto Giubilini of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and Francesca Minerva of the University of Melbourne in a paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics: “[W]hen circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible. … [W]e propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide,’ to emphasize that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus … rather than to that of a child. Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk.”

34. Nina Fedoroff, a key adviser to Hillary Clinton: “We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can’t support many more people.”

35. Barack Obama’s primary science adviser, John P. Holdren: “A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.

The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.”

36. David Brower, the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club: “Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license … All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”

37. Maurice Strong: “Either we reduce the world’s population voluntarily or nature will do this for us, but brutally.”

38. Thomas Ferguson, former official in the U.S. State Department Office of Population Affairs: “There is a single theme behind all our work–we must reduce population levels. Either governments do it our way, through nice clean methods, or they will get the kinds of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it…”

39. Mikhail Gorbachev: “We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.”

40. Jacques Costeau: “In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it.”

41. Television personality Kate Humble: “There are far too many people in the world…I think one of the most environmentally friendly things you can do is not to have children.”

42. Finnish environmentalist Pentti Linkola: “If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating if it meant millions of people would die”

43. Author Dan Brown: “Overpopulation is an issue so profound that all of us need to ask what should be done.”

44. Prince Phillip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II and co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund: “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”

45. Ashley Judd: “It’s unconscionable to breed, with the number of children who are starving to death in impoverished countries.”

46. Charles Darwin: “With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”

There is so much more that could be said about all of this.

If you would like to learn more, the following are 10 of my previous articles about the population control agenda of the global elite…

#1 “The Population Control Agenda Is Being Relentlessly Pushed In American Public Schools”

#2 “They Love Death”

#3 “From 7 Billion People To 500 Million People – The Sick Population Control Agenda Of The Global Elite”

#4 “Al Gore, Agenda 21 And Population Control”

#5 “The Green Agenda Is About Getting Rid Of As Many Humans As Possible”

#6 “Governments Around The World Are Eagerly Adopting The Strict Population Control Agenda Of The United Nations”

#7 “Is The UN Using Vaccines To Secretly Sterilize Women All Over The Globe?”

#8 “Hillary Clinton: Population Control Will Now Become The Centerpiece Of U.S. Foreign Policy”

#9 “Obamacare Architect Says Society Would Be Better Off If People Only Lived To Age 75”

#10 “Why Does The U.S. Government Have An ‘Office Of Population Affairs’?”

So what do you think about all of this?

Do you agree or disagree with the sick population control agenda of the global elite?

Article authored by Michael Snyder, the author of The Beginning Of The End and Get Prepared Now!

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E-Verify: Immigration Reform’s Threat To Legal Workers

Posted on April 22, 2026 by | 4 comments

My comments in red:

Don’t be deceived! Federal mandated E-Verify HR 2164 will create a National Workforce Management. Do not be deceived. Goals 2000 is in place, School to Work is in place, Secondary, Elementary Education Act is in place, and ALL THAT IS LEFT IS THE GLOBAL WORKFORCE! How would you like to go through the government data base for employment? Link This is what E-Verify does, for everyone! Read Marc Tucker’s letter to Hillary.

All that is left to finish their agenda is the workforce and they will hide that in “inconspicuous legislation.” What a more perfect place than illegal legislation.

Anti-illegal immigration organizations are pushing e-verify, FAIR and Numbers USA. Most of the anti-illegal organizations were founded by John Tanton. And just who is John Tanton?

Here is a list of his network, and please notice population control and eugenics. John Tanton M.D. is “publisher of The Social Contract and served as editor for its first 8 years. He is a retired eye surgeon whose boyhood on a farm made him into an ardent conservationist and advocate for the environment.

His conviction that continued human population growth was a large part of the conservation problem led him to chair the National Sierra Club Population Committee (1971-74), and to the national board of Zero Population Growth (1973-78, including a term as president, 1975-77).

In 1979, Tanton shifted his focus towards fighting immigration to reduce the U.S. population, and organized the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) based in Washington, D.C. Since then, Tanton has formed, funded, or otherwise been affiliated with many prominent anti-immigration organizations, in what has been termed the John Tanton Network.

He is also closely affiliated with a number of white supremacist organizations such as the Pioneer Fund. Tanton’s close relationships with white nationalists and eugenics is documented at the Center for New Community.

Reposted from Forbes

By David Bier

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 21: U.S. Secretary of ...

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano speaks during a news conference to announce the launch of E-Verify Self Check service March 21, 2026 in Washington, DC. The service will allow individuals in the United States to check their employment eligibility status before formally seeking employment. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Ken Nagel thought it would be no problem to hire his daughter at his Phoenix restaurant. He had not considered that Arizona’s new employment verification system, E-Verify, would deem her ineligible to work. E-Verify, which attempts to screen out unauthorized immigrants by checking employees against federal databases, failed his daughter, a U.S. citizen. “It was just another frustration,” Nagel told The Arizona Republic.

Despite its problems, Congress and the president will consider a national E-Verify mandate in immigration reform proposals this spring. President Obama called for “a system to give employers a reliable way to verify that their employees are here legally.” But E-Verify is not reliable and shifts enforcement costs onto citizens.

According to E-Verify’s government audit, a national mandate would deem 1.2 million to 3.5 million legal employees, like Ken Nagel’s daughter, initially ineligible to work. In 2008, Intel, the computer chip maker, put its new employees through E-Verify and 12 percent were declared ineligible. A firm representative told officials that resolving the errors took a “significant investment of time and money, lost productivity and many hours of confusion, worry and upset.”

The government’s numbers also project 770,000 erroneous final non-confirmations (FNCs), which require employers to fire the worker. For example, E-Verify denied employment to Juan Carlos, a naturalized U.S. citizen, after the State Department failed to notify the Social Security Administration of his status change. He lost his job and had to pay $400 for a new naturalization certificate to clear his name.

When informed of these facts, the Illinois legislature barred the state’s employers from voluntarily using E-Verify until the SSA and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can demonstrate that they could clear errors within three days. Rather than attempt to demonstrate the program’s reliability, DHS has sued the state over the law.

As the Obama administration has increased workplace fines for hiring unauthorized workers, businesses are understandably interested in a “safe harbor” from such threats. Unfortunately, E-Verify is not it. The administration is already fining employers in states that mandate E-Verify for technical violations of its regulations, which are costing employers thousands of dollars.

E-Verify forces employers to take responsibility for immigration enforcement—a governmental responsibility. A 2011 Bloomberg Government report found that a national E-Verify mandate would cost businesses $2.7 billion. “Employers have to spend money on training or staff time,” said Jason Arvelo, the report’s author. Economic research has shown employees pay these costs with lower wages.

For all the costs it imposes, employers cannot even rely on E-Verify to prevent unauthorized hires. In 2009, E-Verify’s audit found about 50 percent of them slipped through. In fact, the largest raid of unauthorized workers in U.S. history happened in 2006 against an employer that used E-Verify. “It is not a magic bullet for every kind of problem,” explained then-DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff.

E-Verify’s most serious threat is to privacy. The system’s guilty-until-proven-innocent approach could be applied to any activity, not just employment, and to any area of law, not just immigration law. It would be Americans’ cyber-passport that, like a regular passport, is used to prove identity and restrict access.

Arizona and Alabama have made it unlawful to rent to unauthorized immigrants, or to transport them, or, more nebulously, “to aid” them. If it is worth imposing E-Verify’s flawed, costly system on law-abiding citizens to prevent unauthorized employment, why not unauthorized transportation, rent, or sales?

E-Verify’s application has no logical limit. If the government fails to stop illegal downloads, should they require every American to verify their identity before accessing the Internet? What about monitoring gun ownership? Do not believe that E-Verify will not succumb to the same mission creep as the Social Security card, which left its original purpose in the dust long ago.

In 1986, Congress asked for a small privacy concession from Americans: just fill out the I-9 form and hand over copies of personal identification. Now it wants a much more intrusive measure, E-Verify. When E-Verify fails to end illegal immigration, Congress will be back with a national biometric ID, as already proposed by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY).

All these measures admit that the U.S. government does not believe it can create a system that stops illegal immigration at the border. Rather than admit defeat, America needs the only proven solution to the problem: an accessible legal pathway for immigrants. What it does not need is more surveillance, more regulations, and more bureaucracy between employers and employees.

David Bier is an immigration policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

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