Contact: Gabriel McMorland | 412.719.3424 | gabriel@thomasmertoncenter.org

Krystle M. Knight | 832.508.3676 | krystle@thomasmertoncenter.org

WHO: The Drop Colcom Coalition: Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA) - Pittsburgh, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action - Pittsburgh, Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) - Pittsburgh, & Thomas Merton Center

WHAT: Press conference and photo opportunities.

WHEN: Monday, February 28, 2022 at 10 a.m.

WHERE: Thomas Merton Center, 5129 Penn Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15224

To the Colcom Foundation board of directors,

We write as a coalition of labor, faith, veteran, and immigrant rights activists, and community groups who work together to make our neighborhoods a more fair, equitable, and just place for all. We call on you, the Colcom Foundation, to stop funding the network of extremist anti-immigrant white nationalist political groups you’ve long supported. We ask that you stay out of the immigration policy debate altogether, after more than two decades of funding extremist anti-immigrant organizations.

According to IRS records for 2017, Colcom devoted $34.1 million to funding anti-immigrant groups. That amount represents 81% of total giving by the foundation that year. In 2019, Colcom spent $27.3 million on anti-immigrant groups. The New York Times has estimated that Colcom has provided $180 million to anti-immigration groups since 2005. The Colcom Foundation, founded by Cordelia Scaife May, funds four of the country’s leading anti-immigrant groups. Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), NumbersUSA, and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) received the Colcom Foundation’s largest grant awards in 2019. Both FAIR and CIS have been designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and immigrant rights activists cite them as having played a key role in immigrant detention, death, and violence. In the foundation’s home city of Pittsburgh, we saw the most deadly antisemitic attack in our nation’s history perpetuated by an extremist who, because of rhetoric perpetuated by these anti-immigrant groups, blamed Jews for supporting immigrants.

Cordelia Scaife May was close friends with noted eugenicist and white nationalist John Tanton, and bankrolled his many organizations even prior to the 1996 founding of the Colcom Foundation. Tanton was the central figure in and founder of many anti-immigrant groups Colcom still funds today. Tanton, who spent years running a white nationalist publishing company, Social Contact Press, once wrote, “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”

The foundation’s mission bears no mention of its anti-immigration agenda and instead markets itself as a champion for environmental causes by addressing “overpopulation.” The overpopulation argument has long been debunked by numerous scholars and studies; overconsumption is a much more significant problem, and furthering the overpopulation argument is both factually inaccurate and ethically reprehensible. We reject the ideas promoted by Scaife May and Tanton that immigration is a major cause of ecological degradation and we fundamentally refute that overpopulation is a threat to American society.

The greenwashing Colcom engages in affects all of our communities, as the facade of environmentalism and conservation disengenuously obscures the foundation’s true goal of stoking fear of immigrants and enacting dangerous, xenophobic policies. Enjoying museums, parks, and trails with the Colcom Foundation name engraved in stone masks the truth behind their anti-immigrant agenda. Once more, we call on Colcom to stop funding organizations that promote eugenics and white supremacy.