Conservative immigration reform advocate addresses Sonoma County GOP

Hailing family separation policies along the nation’s southern border and calling for an end to sanctuary policies, a prominent critic of immigration told a gathering of Sonoma County Republicans on Wednesday night that the nation’s border with Mexico is “uncontrolled.”

“Can you be a sovereign nation if you can’t control your borders?” asked Susan Tully, national field director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, before a gathering of about 60 people at the Finley Community Center. “What makes you a sovereign nation?”

“Borders,” the crowd answered in unison.

A conservative nonprofit that seeks to reduce both legal and illegal immigration, FAIR has been labeled an anti-immigrant hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a distinction Tully strongly pushed back against.

“Who are they to decide?” she said. “Go through our website, and you’ll see there’s no reference to race, there’s no reference to specific groups. ... We have a policy that we need to talk about, and just talking about it makes you a racist?”

Though it does not specifically call out Tully, the center’s website describes FAIR as having leaders who have “ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists and have made many racist statements.”

Amid her presentation of statistics about deportations, Mexican drug cartels and crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, Tully stressed what she said was a need to build the wall that President Donald Trump is demanding along the border with Mexico.

“Saying this belongs to us, and we get to control it; we get to decide who comes and goes,” she said. “What else comes through the border along with those people?”

The crowd murmured in response, a few voices rising above the din: “Drugs.” “Disease.” “Crime.”

“Anything they want to bring,” Tully said.

Tully was in town at the invitation of Sonoma County Republican Party Chairwoman Edelweiss Geary as part of the group’s speaker series.

“Immigration is a very important topic, which a whole lot of people don’t seem to understand - the whole issue of not understanding that a country without borders becomes a country no longer,” Geary said. “The sanctuary state is a real issue for us, people not understanding what that means.”

Tully argued that unchecked immigration would lead to population growth and drain the country’s natural resources, though some demographers and economists have warned that immigration is vital to sustaining a workforce in the face of a record low US fertility rate and the aging of the baby boomer generation.

“This is a runaway train that we could stop if we need to, but we can’t if we can’t dialogue, if we can’t talk about (immigration) without all of the emotion that seems to go with this,” Tully said. “Somehow, you are just a person who is called a name, always with the ending of -IST - racist, protectionist, isolationist, nationalist. Go down the list.”

You can reach Staff Writer Christi Warren at christi.warren@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @SeaWarren.