How Corporate Wealth Finances Mass Immigration

mong the many ethnic interest groups pushing for unlimited immigration and multiculturalism is a radical Hispanic organization that once was a back-alley legal clinic for obscure leftist street agitators. Now, thanks to the world's largest banks, oil companies, and tax-exempt foundations, it is one of the most powerful multiculturalist pressure groups in America.

Like other left-wing fringe groups that today are major players in establishment politics, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund - known as MALDEF - got its start in the late 1960's. During the Vietnam war, MALDEF cut its teeth in radical politics by aiding Hanoi's sabotage of the American war effort by counseling young men on how to avoid the draft and, according to MALDEF's own official history, giving "legal advice to hundreds of Chicanos arrested during anti-war marches."

The lawyers and ideologues who worked for MALDEF apparently were not much different from the Left's other saboteurs to whom the Johnson and Nixon administrations gave free reign in that tumultuous era. By organizing minority resentment against America's majority white population, MALDEF agitated for what today constitutes the American Left's growing list of political and financial goals - namely, welfare for illegal aliens, open borders, cheap labor for corporations, bilingual education for foreign populations, preferential hiring for minorities, and other racial entitlements including the re-drawing of electoral districts to guarantee political office for Hispanic and other non-white candidates.

Alien to America's political traditions, MALDEF's radical agenda languished in the obscurity of fringe politics until it attracted the attention of the corporate cheap labor lobby. With help from the well-connected Jack Greenberg, who was head of the NAACP's legal defense fund, MALDEF soon fell under the guiding hand of finance-capital. Greenberg arranged for Bill Pincus of the Ford Foundation in Manhattan to deliver more than $2 million into MALDEF's war chest as "seed money." That's when MALDEF started on the road to power.

With $7.9 billion in holdings and hundreds of staffers, the Ford Foundation is one of the single largest repositories of corporate wealth in America. Through MALDEF the Ford Foundation was able to fashion a new battering ram that corporations could use to smash the barriers against cheap labor and other cultural "prejudices" that big business believes inhibit the smooth international flow of goods and services.

The Ford Foundation's strategy was to steer MALDEF away from petty, unproductive street agitation and into the policymaking arena of the federal courts. Through a series of federal court cases, including many before the U.S. Supreme Court, MALDEF sought to impose by judicial dictate what couldn't be won through the democratic process.

In San Antonio v. Rodriguez, for example, MALDEF argued for a racially-based transfer of wealth. MALDEF claimed that since local school districts populated by Hispanics had less money than white school districts, the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection was denied to Hispanics. MALDEF wanted the federal court to take money from the mostly white districts and distribute it to Hispanic school districts. Although MALDEF lost that case, its prestige was dramatically enhanced by its bold new role as a respectable courtroom water-carrier for corporate multiculturalist ideology.

According to Social Science Quarterly, "MALDEF attempted to implement the Ford Foundation's suggestions through a variety of different strategies... But as its loss in San Antonio revealed, MALDEF acted too quickly and did not sufficiently 'prime' the Supreme Court either through frequent appearances as amicus curiae ["friend of the court"] or the use of test cases."

After the San Antonio case, MALDEF made a number of changes. The appointment of a seasoned and well-connected Wall Street lawyer, Vilma S. Martinez, to lead MALDEF gave it access to major political leaders. California Gov. Jerry Brown appointed Martinez to the Board of Regents at the University of California, and President Jimmy Carter put her on his Advisory Board of Ambassadorial Appointments. Under Sanford Rosen, the new litigation director, MALDEF executed the Ford Foundation's strategy more carefully, filing amicus curiae briefs and pursuing constitutional test cases.

Courtroom victories soon followed. In one landmark decision, MALDEF successfully ended the federal practice of classifying Hispanics as white, thus opening the door to federally-mandated privileges for millions of Latin aliens flooding across the Mexican-U.S. border.

Today, MALDEF works to block attempts by middle Americans to control or reduce immigration while it pursues its agenda on behalf of "la raza." Learning from MALDEF's success, two other open-border Hispanic groups, the National Council of La Raza and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) also moved into the corporate orbit. LULAC, which once urged its members to become culturally assimilated loyal citizens of the U.S., learned its lesson quickly. As corporate and foundation donations filled its coffers, LULAC suddenly changed its strategy by posing as a leader of oppressed people and agitated not for assimilation, but for multiculturalism.

The political muscle behind MALDEF and its imitators can be measured by the contributions they receive from the biggest names in American business. Corporations with household names like American Express, ARCO, AT&T, Chevron, Dayton Hudson, Du Pont, Exxon, Gannet, General Electric, General Mills, Kroger, Pacific Telesis, Southwestern Bell, and many others often give annual amounts of $10,000 or more.

Although it once pretended to be an adversary of American capitalism, MALDEF has discovered that taking orders from the crown jewel of capitalist financial power can be especially rewarding. Between 1968 and 1992, the Ford Foundation supplied MALDEF with more than $18 million.