ROCKVILLE, Md. — The words used to describe Dan Stein vary depending on whom you ask.
For someone who agrees with his super-restrictive immigration policy ideas, Stein is a kind of prophet whose decades of advocacy as president of the right-wing Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) are finally bearing fruit in president Trump's second term.
For others, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights nonprofit, Stein is closer to an extremist, spreading nativist ideas in a country freshly open to what were previously fringe ideas about mass deportations and eliminating birthright citizenship.
The one thing on which everyone can agree: Stein has been an undeniable influence on immigration policy in Washington D.C in the recent decade, and a go-to source for media looking for a reliable anti-immigrant perspective in roundtables and debates.
While many of President Trump's most restrictive immigration policies are considered new, they have actually been pushed on the fringes of Republican politics for decades by hard-right advocates, including Stein.
"The reason why I believe FAIR has been so effective under my leadership is simply related to the fact we are able to spin out — and this is one of the gifts I have — the implications of what a policy will do over time based on past experience, how something will ramify," Stein told NPR in a recent interview.
Making up for lost time
Pushing the idea that illegal immigration creates a burden on American taxpayers, makes the country less safe, depresses wages and undermines employment for native-born Americans, Stein has also claimed large numbers of immigrants are bad for the environment. And he's advocated for ideas that were once obscure, unpopular and on the periphery of policy debates, including ending birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents with temporary or no legal status.
"If everybody here illegally has a child that's a citizen, it generates things like birth tourism," Stein said.
It's an idea Trump has embraced. The president's efforts to end birthright citizenship is being challenged in the courts, but Stein is elated the debate has gone from far right fringe legal theory all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
From his retirement perch in suburban Maryland, he's excited at the immigration crackdown underway by the president including increased deportations, tapping the Alien Enemies Act to remove Venezuelan migrants to a prison in El Salvador, mass- cancellation of foreign student visas, and efforts to end birthright citizenship.
"Everything about what Donald Trump is trying to do right now is make up for lost time," Stein said.
Throughout his long tenure at FAIR, Stein argued for immigration reforms and changes that were often far out of the mainstream and often debunked by economists and researchers who found migrants are less likely to be incarcerated than white, U.S. born people, and according to a 2024 research paper from the private nonprofit organization National Bureau of Economic Research, immigration "had a positive and significant effect" on wages of less educated U.S.- workers.
John Rohe, one of Stein's fellow anti-immigration advocates, has known and collaborated with him since the 1980s. He says for a long time it felt like they were shouting in the wilderness.
"Was it (advocacy) effective back then?" Rohe asked. "I'm sorry to say but no one was listening."
Rohe said Stein more often than not was demonized instead.
Now more people are listening. Some of Stein's staffers are in positions of power - and have the ear of the White House.
FAIR's former government relations director, Robert Law, has been nominated for a senior post at the Department of Homeland Security.
FAIR's current executive director, Julie Kirchner, served as a senior official at DHS on immigration issues in Trump's first term.
And Stein, in his retirement, is hoping they help carry out even stricter restrictions including a strict cap on any legal migration. And he says the government should consider what the newcomers can offer American society before being granted a visa or a pathway to citizenship.
"Are they going to be people who can expand the productive potential of the US economy? Are there going to be people who can invent the technological equivalent of the next airplane?" Stein elaborates, drawing a distinction between highly skilled white-collar migrants, people including Alexander Hamilton, Albert Einstein and Elon Musk, and those who would in his view take jobs away from American low-wage workers.
"Are they going to be people who come in and basically, you know, our service workers, bus boys, restaurants, cleaning dishes?" Stein philosophizes. "If you bring in people who are competing as substitutes for American native-born labor, you're going to either displace them, or you're going to drive down wages and working conditions."
Still, he continues to support slashing programs like Temporary Protected Status, humanitarian parole for people fleeing persecution and violence in their home countries, and specific initiatives such as Uniting for Ukraine, a program which allows Ukrainians fleeing the war get temporary refuge in the U.S.
"These refugees seem to be doing well in this country," Stein said. "Is that really the priority? Is that what we are trying to establish? What's the purpose of admitting people over time?"
When pushed on the idea that people with protected status should be returned to countries like war-torn Ukraine, Stein again reached far back into history to claim, incorrectly, that asylum was supposed to be only for people like "an ambassador or something" who are in the U.S. on business when revolution breaks out back home.
Instead, he says, today people are leaving their home nations simply "because it's poor and people like me don't get treated very well, and so I just want to live in the US where, you know, I can be happy."
Under current immigration law, asylum is not granted for economic hardship.
FAIR's history of inflammatory comments landed it on a list of anti-immigrant hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2008.
"FAIR works to kind of maintain this veneer of legitimacy," says Caleb Kieffer, a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Like Trump, he says, Stein has long vilified immigrants and asylum seekers. "But then when you really start to kind of peel back their decades-long history, what you find is ugliness, xenophobia, ties to white nationalists, ties to eugenics."
FAIR's founder, ophthalmologist John Tanton, pushed for white nationalist policies, including encouraging only certain people with specific traits to reproduce — what is called "passive eugenics."
For decades Stein carried the torch of FAIR — as press secretary at the beginning, later as president. He served as a contributor for Tanton's quarterly journal 'The Social Contract', which billed itself as an exploration of the "trends, events, and ideas that have an impact on America's delicate social fabric."
In the newsletter, which continued to publish until Tanton's death in 2019, Tanton often compared immigration restrictions to a diet– cutting back on both the type and amount of food in order to ensure a long, healthy future.
For his part, Stein says he sees backlash as part of the job and totally expected when you're pressing ideas that will rattle the status quo.
"You don't achieve a certain level of influence without being criticized," Stein said.
Newly retired, Stein is staying active in immigration debates and is cheering on Trump's ongoing crackdown, even as he finds himself with more free time.
"There's so much to this story," Stein said. "Eventually, I'm sure I'll write more on it, once I get a little chance to complete my cooking classes and get back to the trombone."
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