To: Cornell Law School
Cornell just invited a hate group leader to speak
Cornell Law School has invited the executive director of a known hate group to speak on campus this Friday, October 5. Mark Krikorian is the leader of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that puts out junk science targeting immigrants. Please tell Cornell that hate is NOT welcome on campus.
Why is this important?
This Friday, my alma mater Cornell Law School is hosting a conference for Dreamers — immigrant youth who came to this country as children — called “Dreamers and Beyond: Our Broken Immigration System.”
The problem? Cornell has invited Mark Krikorian, executive director of the anti-immigrant hate group Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) to speak.
CIS is recognized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for many reasons, including the more than 2,000 times CIS has distributed white nationalist and Holocaust-denying content. CIS is also part of a shadowy anti-immigrant network of groups linked to white supremacist and pro-eugenicist beliefs. If you’ve seen what the Trump Administration is doing on immigration — deporting moms and dads while separating children from their families — these ideas come from CIS.
Krikorian himself refers to immigrants as “illegal aliens” and once tried to school Sonia Sotomayor on how to say her own name. He’s said that “Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough” and referred to Univision anchor Jorge Ramos as a “white-Hispanic ethnic hustler”.
That Cornell would ask Krikorian to speak at a conference about the future of Dreamers is bizarre. That they extended a campus invitation to a known hate group leader is unacceptable.
We don’t have much time before this conference. Please sign our petition and share with as many people as you can.
Kica Matos
Cornell Law School Class of ‘99