Last year Connerly ran a full page ad in the June 8, 2007 Washington Times advocating an amendment to the draft immigration reform act of 2007 that would have barred immigrants whose status would have been regularized by the legislation from benefitting from affirmative action.

Speaking of potentially legalized Latino immigrants under the proposed bill, Connerly said “all this talk of going to the back of the line is B.S. They would go to the front of the line. The minute they are Americans, they move in front of white males and in some cases white women.”

Also signing the full page ad was Peter D. Schaeffer, a new member of the board of directors of Connerly’s ACRI. Schaeffer, a software architect with the Massachusetts-based DataDirect Technologies, contributed $62,703 to Connerly’s Prop 54 campaign in California. (Jessie Mangaliman, “Bay Area Activist Would Bar Door to Others: ‘The Anti-Immigrant Immigrant,’” San Jose Mercury News, May 11, 2004.) Schaeffer is on the board of the Diversity Alliance for a Sustainable America (DASA), a Richard Scaife-funded group that calls for a total moratorium on immigration. Yeh Ling-Ling, the executive director of DASA, has been described as “the Ward Connerly of the anti-immigrant movement” by Eric Ward, the field director of the Chicago-based Center for New Community.

Peter Schaeffer also donated to Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) in December 2007, the right wing anti-immigrant group that endorsed Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist [PDF] for Congress in September 2005.

Another signatory of Connerly’s full page Washington Times ad was Stuart H. Hurlbert, a San Diego State biology professor who is on the board of directors of Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS). CAPS has received financial support from the Pioneer Fund, which was founded in 1937 and has funded eugenics research. Earlier this year, when the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative (MoCRI) was in desperate straits for volunteer signature gatherers, Hurlbert reportedly forwarded Ward Connerly’s plea for volunteers on National Review Online to Jeff Schwilk, head of the anti-immigrant vigilante group the San Diego Minutemen, who stoutly endorsed Connerly’s plea and urged “Minuteman friends and allies” to pour into Missouri to help.