The CIS was founded by historian Otis L. Graham alongside eugenicist and white nationalist John Tanton in 1985 as a spin-off of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

[4] The Southern Poverty Law Center designated CIS as a hate group with ties to the American nativist movement.

[10][11][12][13][14][15] The CIS began as the research arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and became a separate entity in 1986.

[16] According to immigration historian Carly Goodman, Tanton created CIS as a separate entity from FAIR so that they could produce research that had a greater appearance of objectivity.

[30] CNN wrote that "Politifact has mostly debunked those claims, concluding that US-born children do little in the long term to help their immigrant parents.

"[37] At a June 2018 event hosted at CIS, outgoing acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Thomas Homan, defended the policy.

[39][40] CIS seeks an end to "Optional Practical Training" work permits, which foreign students who attend American universities can use to obtain internships.

[41] CIS publishes books and posts on its website a variety of announcements, research reports, memoranda, op-eds and articles, panel discussion transcripts, Congressional testimony, and videos.

CIS is a member of the advisory board of Project 2025,[44] a collection of conservative and right-wing policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power should the Republican nominee win the 2024 presidential election.

Tanton is a retired Michigan ophthalmologist who opposed immigration on racial grounds, desired a white ethnic majority in the United States and advocated for eugenics.

[48][12][49] The SPLC's 2009 report charged that "FAIR, CIS and NumbersUSA are all part of a network of restrictionist organizations conceived and created by John Tanton" who they said had "deeply racist" views, and said that the group had "frequently manipulated data" in order to promote anti-immigration goals.

It cited CIS's repeated publication of white nationalist and anti-Semitic writers, its employment of an analyst known to promote racist pseudoscience, its association with John Tanton, and its record of publishing reports that it said hyped the criminality of immigrants.

[6] Notre Dame Law School professor G. Robert Blakey, the author of the 1970 RICO statute, described CIS's filing as "not too thoughtful" and said its legal claims lacked merit.

Politifact, when evaluating Frum and Romney's statements, noted that CIS's report "does acknowledge that 'no estimate of illegal immigration is exact'.

"[70][73] Norman Matloff, a UC Davis professor of computer science, wrote a report featured at CIS arguing that most H-1B visa workers, rather than being "the best and the brightest", are mostly of average talent.

[80] Caitlin Dickson, writing in the Daily Beast said that ICE had "highlighted key points that CIS failed to address.

"[81] Muzaffar Chishti, the New York director of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, said that the CIS report was "a select presentation of a set of facts without any comparative analysis that can lead to misleading conclusions.

[84] In September 2016, CIS misrepresented the findings of a comprehensive state-of-the-art report on the academic immigration literature by the National Academies of Sciences.

CIS headlined its own summary of the report, "National Academy of Sciences Study of Immigration: Workers and Taxpayers Lose, Businesses Benefit.

"[25] A 2018 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study cited CIS's misrepresentation, which was repeated by President Trump, as an example of unscrupulous actors with ulterior motives who make it difficult for researchers to communicate scientific findings to the public.

[26] Stephen Miller, a senior White House policy adviser, used the data provided by CIS to justify President Trump's 90-day travel ban, earning him "Three Pinocchois" from the Washington Post Fact-Checker (its second-worst rating).

[27][64] The 18-member panel of economists, sociologists, demographers and public policy experts, and chosen by the National Academies of Science, concluded that undocumented immigrants had a net positive fiscal impact.