THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

In early April the Center for Immigration Studies--one of America's principal anti-immigration groups--suggested using American taxpayer dollars to promote "family planning" in Central America, worried that Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) have a younger-than-average population with more women in child-bearing years and that "the further south one ventures from the States. . . the more births."

Here's how CIS put it:

Girls under the age of five currently will, 25 years from now, be in their peak years of fertility, and that cohort will be twice as large as that of the 25- to 29-year-olds now. Even with a sharp reduction in the number of births per 1,000 women, the total number of births in the nation will keep on climbing.

Making birth control more available than it is now--thus giving women in the Northern Triangle more control over childbearing decisions--and using federal dollars to expand these services, would seem to be a cornerstone for any development assistance strategy.

You might think that this is an odd proposal, but these two ideas--opposition to immigration and desire to limit reproduction in populations seen as "less"---have a long history of keeping one another company.

The three most influential anti-immigration groups in politics today are the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA, and the Center for Immigration Studies. All three groups were founded in part by John Tanton).

Tanton was an anti-population crusader who founded local chapters of Planned Parenthood and was president of the group Zero Population Growth. As global fertility rates fell, he focused more on opposing immigration. Bankrolled by a similarly obsessed heiress, Cordelia Scaife May, Tanton established a propaganda machine devoted to criticizing immigration from a perspective that mixed radical environmentalism and white nationalism.

Tanton and May didn't just want to keep people out of their back yard. They wanted to keep them off their planet.

Thus Tanton, whose groups fight against what he called a "Latin onslaught," also advocated for government policy to limit the years in which all American women could permissibly bear children, specifically "restricting childbearing to the years of maximum reproductive efficiency, between the ages of 20 and 35." And May worried that when it came to immigrants, "their most dangerous contribution of all" was that they "breed like hamsters."

May was arguably the less mentally stable of the two. She lived as a recluse for most of her adult life, had no children, suggested that her brother had murdered her husband, and committed suicide at the age of 76. She was also a big fan of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. In one letter to Sanger, May wrote, "I have always admired and tried to take a part in the work that you started."

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