“Dime con quien andas y te dire quien eres ... Tell me who you associate with, and I’ll tell you who you are.”
In opening remarks, Guillermo Perez ended his statement by speaking in Spanish, then translating. It was a key point that would be stressed during a rally Thursday morning Downtown outside the office of the Colcom Foundation — a group known for its historic immigrant population-control campaigns and hefty funding of national immigration-reform groups.
Several members of local immigrant rights activist groups gathered near Stanwix Street and the Gateway T station and held signs critical of Colcom, asking that local civic and environmental nonprofit groups reject support from them. Members from the Pittsburgh Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, Thomas Merton Center, Veterans for Peace and Bend the Arc participated.
Moderated by Mr. Perez, president the Pittsburgh chapter of the LCLAA, additional members from each group also spoke and called for Pittsburgh to “drop Colcom,” and reject support from the organization during the brief rally that lasted less than an hour. The occasion marked the launching of a public campaign calling for thousands of groups in southwestern Pennsylvania to end their association with Colcom.
Founded in 1996 by Cordelia Scaife May, a philanthropic conservationist who served as chairman until her death in 2005, the Colcom Foundation has poured millions into a network of groups that have backed policies now pursued by President Donald Trump: militarizing the border, capping legal immigration, prioritizing skills over family ties for entry and reducing access to public benefits for migrants, according to the New York Times.
The foundation supports and helps fund many groups that have nothing to do with immigration reform or population control, however. The American Bird Conservancy, Tree Pittsburgh and the League Of Women Voters Of PA Citizen Education are a few examples.
“I cannot say that they’ve only done bad things,” said Ben Gutschow, a junior at Winchester Thurston School and member of the youth-led environmental movement Fridays for the Future PGH. “Planting trees, providing crucial funds and promoting a positive quality of life, I consider a good thing [by the Colcom Foundation]. But if we must compromise our values to allow discrimination, there should be no such place for this foundation here in Pittsburgh.”
“I am tired and fed up with being told to go back to my country,” Mr. Gutschow said during Thursday’s protest.
In line with remarks made by Mr. Perez during the rally’s opening, others called for local business entities to “cease legitimizing” the Colcom name, “until they divest from this mission of hatred and fear,” said Dan Galvin, of Veterans for Peace.
“Colcom’s racist ideology shifts the blame toward the blameless and away from those who are most responsible for the environmental threats we face — namely those who poison our planet through fossil fuels.”
At the end of Thursday’s protest, participants handed out green pieces of paper listing a number for the foundation. “Call the Colcom Foundation and ask them to STOP funding white nationalist hate groups,” the paper reads.
Several local civic and environmental groups are listed on the foundation’s website as major grant recipients last year, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies. Nearly 70 Pittsburgh organizations received grants of $50,000 or more in the fiscal year ending fin June 2019, according the foundation’s website. The total amount of grants paid that fiscal year was $30,709,777.
Despite the criticism, the foundation’s vice president, John Rohe, said Thursday the foundation is “pro-immigrant, and has zero-tolerance for the white nationalists.” As the child of German immigrants himself, he said it’s a misconception to think the organization is against immigrants.
“To be concerned about the level of immigrants due to overpopulation is not anti-immigrant,” he said. “We hope to nurture the American dream for people who do come here.”
The foundation’s goal, according to Mr. Rohe, is to consider the long-term sustainable level of immigration. “How do we protect jobs and wages for underprivileged people in the U.S.?” he said. Protesters claimed Thursday that the foundation hides anti-immigrant sentiments in environmentalism. Yet, Mr. Rohe said he invites everyone, including the groups who protested Thursday, to an “informed conversation” in a “pro-immigrant, racially neutral manner.”
“The long-term solution is to think of what level of immigration incentivizes employers to pay a living wage and to employ dignity upon labor,” he said. “If you flood the labor pool, wages will be reduced, competition for jobs will reduce opportunities. We have 40 states that are confronting water issues in the foreseeable future.”
“If we ignore these issues, it will be the underprivileged minorities who will be the first to pay the price.”
Lacretia Wimbley: lwimbley@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1510 or on Twitter @Wimbleyjourno.
BREAKING: Immigrant rights activists are gathering right now Downtown on Stanwix Street outside the Colcom Foundation, which funds millions of dollars to anti-immigrant groups. pic.twitter.com/K35QZ63G0u
— Lacretia Wimbley (@WimbleyJourno) March 5, 2020
Supporters and organizers from each of the four protesting groups stand holding signs that read "Colcom is racist" and "Everybody's got a right to live," as a member from each take turn speaking. pic.twitter.com/LCsfl0AJL5
— Lacretia Wimbley (@WimbleyJourno) March 5, 2020
The rally wrapped up as protesters chanted these words in spanish: "Hey Colcom we're here and we're in the fight." pic.twitter.com/tHfENUPKac
— Lacretia Wimbley (@WimbleyJourno) March 5, 2020
First Published: March 5, 2020, 4:46 p.m.
