- Executive director of Human Rights First
- Supports open borders policies and uncontrolled immigration
Michael Posner has been the executive director of Human Rights First since its founding in 1978. HRF describes itself as a group that "works in the United States and abroad to create a secure and humane world by advancing justice, human dignity and respect for the rule of law." In practice, HRF is an open borders group that opposes all government efforts to control illegal immigration and strengthen American national security. Posner received his B.A. in history from the University of Michigan and his J.D. from UC Berkeley; before coming to HRF, he worked for the law firm of Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal. He has taught at Yale Law School and is a visiting Lecturer at Columbia Law School.
Posner and HRF have supported an open-border immigration policy since the group's inception. Posner worked with the late Arthur Helton to gain asylum for 2,000 Haitian immigrants who stormed U.S. shores in 1982 (Helton, incidentally, founded the Forced Migration Project for George Soros' Open Society Institute). There was subsequently a dramatic rise in Haitian gang-related crime in the 1980s. Additional self-declared "triumphs" for HRF and Posner include the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA), which gave torture victims in other countries the ability to seek remedy in U.S. courts. While this may seem, at first blush, like a worthwhile practice, in fact it is now being used to attack the anti-Communist government in El Salvador for murders committed by underlings. It risks the possibility of U.S. soldiers being put on trial for doing nothing more than making POWs stand for "unreasonable" lengths of time. It allows terrorist states to condemn Israel, which has long allowed its interrogators to keep suspected terrorists awake for long stretches and to shake them, violently, to get information. For these reasons, the U.S. Justice Department resisted the TVPA and similar legislation.
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