Kris Kobach’s immigration law is the product of white nationalism

Last week, a federal district court began trial in Fish v. Kobach, challenging Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s notorious documentary proof of citizenship law, which prevented more than 35,000 Kansans from registering to vote from 2013 to 2016. Kansas’ draconian law requires voter registrants to provide documentation proving citizenship — such as a passport, a birth certificate, or naturalization papers — before being added to the state voter rolls, even though Americans must already affirm citizenship to be registered to vote.

Kansas’ onerous law violates the National Voter Registration Act and disproportionately impacts people of color. Nearly nine percent of voting age African Americans lack access to birth certificates and passports, compared with 5.5 percent of whites. The plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, are now fighting to have the law struck down permanently.

A federal court blocked the law in May 2016 and that injunction was affirmed later that year. For his part, Kobach has been less than forthright in the case. A federal magistrate sanctioned Kobach in 2017, fining him $1,000, for his “deceptive conduct and lack of candor.”

That Kobach is the architect behind and enforcer of a discriminatory law reminiscent of poll taxes and Jim Crow is not surprising, given Kobach’s close associations with white supremacists and history of championing discriminatory policies. For years, Kobach has sought to exclude certain groups from the democratic process and society at large.

As a fellow for the George W. Bush administration, Kobach helped establish the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which required immigrants from Middle Eastern countries to register with the federal government. The program, started in 2002, was discontinued in 2016.

Kobach is the progenitor of the horribly inaccurate Interstate Crosscheck System, which is supposed to compare voter lists across states to allegedly detect people registered in two states. In reality, the system disenfranchises people with similar names. African Americans and Hispanics have a one-in-nine and one-in-six chance, respectively, of being flagged as potentially ineligible by Crosscheck.

Kobach also authored Arizona’s shameful Show Me Your Papers law, which gave local and state law enforcement authority to stop anyone and demand proof of citizenship. The Supreme Court struck down core provisions of the law in 2012.

Taken together, Kobach’s discriminatory policies — the Muslim registry, Interstate Crosscheck, Show Me Your Papers, and now his documentary proof of citizenship law — can be traced to his affiliations with white nationalists.

At Harvard University, Kobach was mentored by Professor Samuel Huntington, author of the controversial book “Clash of Civilizations,” described by postcolonial scholar Edward Said as “a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed today against Arabs and Muslims.”

Fast forward to 2015, when Kobach spoke at an event hosted by the Social Contract Press, which publishes race-baiting pieces like “America’s Lax Refugee Program Admits Culturally Inappropriate and Dangerous Foreigners” and another by white supremacist John Vinson arguing that God prefers racial separation.

Currently, Kobach serves as counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of the extremist group Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR. FAIR was founded by white nationalist John Tanton, a eugenicist and defender of racial quotas for immigrants, and has counted among its employees Joseph Turner, who said Mexican immigrants were turning California into a “third world cesspool“. Last year, Kobach cited holocaust denier and white nationalist Peter Gemma in an October column for Breitbart, while another white nationalist, Marcus Epstein, was spotted at a November fundraiser for Kris Kobach’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Kansas’ documentary proof of citizenship law, which disenfranchises voters of color, is another example of Kobach’s white nationalist ideals. The court was right to block the law in 2016 for violating the National Voter Registration Act, and it must do so again — this time for good.

This story was originally published March 15, 2018 at 1:18 PM with the headline "Kris Kobach’s immigration law is the product of white nationalism."