Lake Worth candidate Scott Maxwell affiliated with racist, anti-immigrant hate groups

Former Lake Worth City Commissioner, Scott Maxwell, is running for election. Recent research has exposed his affiliations with organizations deemed ‘hate groups’ by Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Anti-defamation League (ADL) for their racist and xenophobic bigotry.

In May 2009, Scott Maxwell boasted about hosting Steven Camarota, Director of Research for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), an anti-immigrant think tank, on his radio show entitled ‘Connecting the Dots’, through his website BorderControlNow.com . In a special report earlier this year, SPLC presented the untold history of CIS and their founding. An excerpt from report can be viewed below, along with a link to the full article:

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/nativist_cis.jsp

From SPLC:
“Although the think tank bills itself as an “independent” organization with a “pro-immigrant” if “low-immigration” vision, the reality is that CIS has never found any aspect of immigration that it liked.

“There’s a reason for that. Although you’d never know it to read its materials, CIS was started in 1985 by a Michigan ophthalmologist named John Tanton—a man known for his racist statements about Latinos, his decades-long flirtation with white nationalists and Holocaust deniers, and his publication of ugly racist materials. CIS’ creation was part of a carefully thought-out strategy aimed at creating a set of complementary institutions to cultivate the nativist cause—groups including the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and NumbersUSA. As is shown in Tanton’s correspondence, lodged in the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Tanton came up with the idea in the early 1980s for “a small think tank” that would “wage the war of ideas.”

Earlier examples
Maxwell’s affiliations are also noticeable in a posting on the website of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), where Maxwell is credited with defeating a local effort for Consular IDs in collaboration with FAIR:
http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=research_researchc733

In 2007, SPLC added FAIR to their list of organized hate groups due to their ties to known racists and a long track record of bigotry.

FAIR is so bad that the SPLC has them on their "Hate Watch" and periodically updates their on-going anti-immigrant efforts.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2012/08/10/how-do-we-know-fair-hate-group-let-us-count-ways

SPLC Report: Nation’s Most Prominent Anti-Immigration Group has History of Hate, Extremism:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-splc-report-nations-most-prominent-anti-immigration-group-has-history-of-hate-extremism-58660442.html