By
Philip Bump
National correspondent
Today at 12:43 p.m. EDT
It used to be that expressing the concern that immigration threatens to undermine America was considered unacceptable in political discussions. Most Americans believe that immigration makes the country stronger, not weaker, and such assertions hark back to the grim treatment of immigration as a political issue a century ago. Then, politicians demonized immigrants and passed laws restricting their arrival, an effort generally understood to be at odds with the country’s ideals — when it wasn’t explicitly racist.
So it’s strange to see the idea that immigrants pose a threat to the country emerging as an acceptable, if not preferred, talking point. It came up recently, as such rhetoric often does, on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, on which he argued that Democrats were encouraging wave after wave of immigrants to reshape the electorate to their advantage. We’ve repeatedly seen the ways by which political claims are used as proxies for racial ones in recent months, and Carlson’s track record makes clear that his concern is about more than there being a new counterweight to the Republican vote.
After Carlson elevated and sanitized this argument — which is popular among self-proclaimed white nationalists (for obvious reasons) — it began propagating out through his party. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) invoked it during a discussion about immigration in April, for example. But just in the past two days, two prominent Republicans have made the same argument Carlson did.
First was House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who, in a campaign ad published on Facebook, argued that Democrats were “planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION.” That was manifested, the ad said, in the left’s “plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants,” which it said will “overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”
“Overthrow our current electorate” is, of course, an odd way to frame a country in which the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, received 10 percent more votes than the Republican in the most recent election, but more on that in a moment.
She was joined by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R). In an appearance on Fox News on Thursday, he complained about the state of immigration at his state’s southern border.
“The revolution has begun — a silent revolution by the Democrat Party and Joe Biden to take over this country,” he said. After casting migration as an “invasion” — itself a historically fraught assertion — he described a dire future. “In 18 years, if every one of them has 2 or 3 children, you’re talking about millions and millions and millions of new voters,” he said. “And they will thank the Democrats and Biden for bringing them here. Who do you think they’re going to vote for? This is trying to take over our country without firing a shot.”
That “millions and millions” claim is based on Patrick’s assertion that the Biden administration is allowing millions of people to come into the country this year, an assertion that he acknowledges is based on apprehension figures. But apprehended migrants often have been quickly sent back out of the country in recent months, under a rule leveraging the coronavirus pandemic as a rationale.
Regardless, all of this melodrama misses two important points about immigration in the United States now and in the past. The first is, again, that we’ve already had this debate, resolving it in a way that led to the America we see now. The second is that these arguments are enormously shortsighted for the Republican Party.
A century ago, the country was at the tail end of decades of largely unrestricted immigration. About 1 in 8 Americans were immigrants, generally from Europe. That was particularly true of the Irish who, pushed west by the potato famine in the mid-1800s, soon became the most populous immigrant group in most eastern states. You can see how much immigration revolved around Irish arrivals in the graph below. In 1850, a bit under half of all foreign-born residents of the United States had come from that country. Polish immigrants also began arriving in large numbers in the late 19th century, constituting a larger percentage of foreign-born residents in the first half of the 20th (in part because of migration caused by the World Wars).
(The data used in these charts is from the 2006 paper “Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850 to 2000,” written by the Census Bureau’s Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung. It excludes data for 1940 and 1950 because “data on the foreign-born population by country of birth in census publications for these years are limited almost entirely to the White population.”)
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Philip Bump
National correspondent
Today at 12:43 p.m. EDT
It used to be that expressing the concern that immigration threatens to undermine America was considered unacceptable in political discussions. Most Americans believe that immigration makes the country stronger, not weaker, and such assertions hark back to the grim treatment of immigration as a political issue a century ago. Then, politicians demonized immigrants and passed laws restricting their arrival, an effort generally understood to be at odds with the country’s ideals — when it wasn’t explicitly racist.
So it’s strange to see the idea that immigrants pose a threat to the country emerging as an acceptable, if not preferred, talking point. It came up recently, as such rhetoric often does, on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, on which he argued that Democrats were encouraging wave after wave of immigrants to reshape the electorate to their advantage. We’ve repeatedly seen the ways by which political claims are used as proxies for racial ones in recent months, and Carlson’s track record makes clear that his concern is about more than there being a new counterweight to the Republican vote.
After Carlson elevated and sanitized this argument — which is popular among self-proclaimed white nationalists (for obvious reasons) — it began propagating out through his party. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) invoked it during a discussion about immigration in April, for example. But just in the past two days, two prominent Republicans have made the same argument Carlson did.
First was House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who, in a campaign ad published on Facebook, argued that Democrats were “planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION.” That was manifested, the ad said, in the left’s “plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants,” which it said will “overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”
“Overthrow our current electorate” is, of course, an odd way to frame a country in which the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, received 10 percent more votes than the Republican in the most recent election, but more on that in a moment.
She was joined by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R). In an appearance on Fox News on Thursday, he complained about the state of immigration at his state’s southern border.
“The revolution has begun — a silent revolution by the Democrat Party and Joe Biden to take over this country,” he said. After casting migration as an “invasion” — itself a historically fraught assertion — he described a dire future. “In 18 years, if every one of them has 2 or 3 children, you’re talking about millions and millions and millions of new voters,” he said. “And they will thank the Democrats and Biden for bringing them here. Who do you think they’re going to vote for? This is trying to take over our country without firing a shot.”
That “millions and millions” claim is based on Patrick’s assertion that the Biden administration is allowing millions of people to come into the country this year, an assertion that he acknowledges is based on apprehension figures. But apprehended migrants often have been quickly sent back out of the country in recent months, under a rule leveraging the coronavirus pandemic as a rationale.
Regardless, all of this melodrama misses two important points about immigration in the United States now and in the past. The first is, again, that we’ve already had this debate, resolving it in a way that led to the America we see now. The second is that these arguments are enormously shortsighted for the Republican Party.
The historical problem
One of the features of debating immigration in the United States is that it’s fairly easy to pick out very specific examples of hypocrisy on the subject. For example, there are not, to my knowledge, a lot of Native Americans with the last names of “Patrick” or “Stefanik.” The former name is of Irish ancestry and the latter Polish — both national groups that were part of large surges to the United States and both part of groups that were then derided as problematic for the cohesiveness of the nation.A century ago, the country was at the tail end of decades of largely unrestricted immigration. About 1 in 8 Americans were immigrants, generally from Europe. That was particularly true of the Irish who, pushed west by the potato famine in the mid-1800s, soon became the most populous immigrant group in most eastern states. You can see how much immigration revolved around Irish arrivals in the graph below. In 1850, a bit under half of all foreign-born residents of the United States had come from that country. Polish immigrants also began arriving in large numbers in the late 19th century, constituting a larger percentage of foreign-born residents in the first half of the 20th (in part because of migration caused by the World Wars).
(The data used in these charts is from the 2006 paper “Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850 to 2000,” written by the Census Bureau’s Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung. It excludes data for 1940 and 1950 because “data on the foreign-born population by country of birth in census publications for these years are limited almost entirely to the White population.”)
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