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The plan was for Lamm, who was chair of FAIR’s advisory board, and Frank Morris, who was on the Center for Immigration Studies board, to run for seats in 2004, along with a Cornell University environmental scientist named David Pimentel, who had written extensively for The Social Contract.

A letter the Sierra Club received from the Southern Poverty Law Center alerted him that they all had ties to Tanton.

While the Southern Poverty Law Center publicly branded the takeover attempt as racist, news broke that a wealthy California investor, David Gelbaum, had pledged $100 million on the condition that the club never stand against immigration.

In August 2008, the Center for Immigration Studies promoted Kolankiewicz’s research, publishing a joint study arguing that “immigration to the United States significantly increases world-wide CO2 emissions.”

In February 2010, as Republicans gathered for the prestigious annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., the Center for Immigration Studies’ longtime executive director, Mark Krikorian, sat on a panel about immigration reform in front of a packed audience, along with Robert Rector from the Heritage Foundation and Steve King, the lightning-rod congressman from Iowa.