Even immigration restrictionists stay away from the GOP’s “invasion” rhetoric

The Republican use of the term “invasion” is putting party officials at odds with the advocates of immigration restrictions behind much of the party’s ideological framework on the issue.

The term became a mainstay of Republican political rhetoric ahead of the November elections, but its use as a descriptor of the situation on the southern border was widely criticized as inaccurate and incendiary, even by groups like the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). . and US Numbers.

At a House Natural Resources Committee hearing earlier this month, Rep. Delia Ramírez (D-Ill.) outlined the dangers of the so-called “Grand Replacement Theory,” in the process accusing CIS Director of Policy Studies Jessica Vaughan , of using the term , which Vaughan vehemently denied.

“I don’t use that term. This is not appropriate for the border discussion,” said Vaughan, who often appears as the face of immigration restrictionism in congressional hearings.

Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) — a hardliner who has called for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to be removed from office for not prioritizing border legislation — presided over the hearing on the impacts of the cartel in Indian Country and later allowed Vaughan a full rebuttal.

“The implications for me, my organization and our work are completely wrong. We reject the ideas that she was attributing to us, and I consider this to be a distraction from discussing a really serious public policy problem, a public safety problem that is certainly very serious for the representatives of Indian Country here, and a distraction from this,” Vaughan said.

“We need to be able to address these issues without name-calling or defamation of motives.”

Immigrants, civil rights and human rights advocates have for decades publicly criticized and questioned the motives of groups like CIS, NumbersUSA and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which share fundamental origins.

The three groups were founded directly or indirectly by John Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist who promoted an unorthodox vision of population control and environmentalism through reducing immigration that has been widely criticized as eugenic.

At one point, Tanton was involved in financing a film version of “The Camp of the Saints,” a 1973 novel that is seen as fundamental to the theory of the Great Replacement.

The groups in the Tanton network are partially funded by the Colcom Foundation — a collaboration between Tanton and Cordelia Scaife May, an heiress to the Mellon-Scaife family fortune — which calls for restrictions on immigration so that “the USA can stabilize and gradually decrease its population, thus reducing its ecological footprint”.

And the three groups provided much of the ideology, insider knowledge and even manpower for the Trump administration’s restructuring of the immigration system.

However, they publicly reject the invasion terminology that Republicans have adopted.

“No, we don’t, and I know Jessica Vaughan, I heard her say that she doesn’t think we should use it – on our end. And I mean, here’s the thing. There are two questions here: one is whether it constitutes an actual hack,” said Eric Ruark, director of research at NumbersUSA.

“The first part is that it’s hard to argue that it’s an invasion when they’re invited, right? Number one, people don’t show up armed at the border.”

Ruark added that there are concerns about incidents like the “bum rush” at the border in Texas in March and tensions between migrants and the Border Patrol, “but there are no widespread attacks, you don’t know – they’re turning themselves in, they’re getting fingerprints and then being released, even though they are inadmissible, but that does not constitute something that would be called a trespass, in our opinion.”

Republicans, however, encouraged by former President Trump, who has used the term in the context of immigration since at least 2018, are all about calling migration “an invasion.”

Senator Tim Scott (RS.C.), a potential Trump running mate, on Friday used the term in a post on social media blaming President Biden for the number of people entering the United States through the southwest border.

The rhetorical question has taken on real consequences in the fight between Texas and the federal government over immigration jurisdiction.

The Constitution allows states to participate in war if “actually invaded,” a provision that Texas officials cited to justify state crackdowns, although three appeals courts in the 1990s rejected the idea that an increase in numbers migration qualifies as an actual invasion.

In January, the issue reached the House Judiciary Committee, which held a hearing to examine federal versus state jurisdiction, where Republicans largely argued that the issue was legal, and Democrats responded that it was purely political.

Whether legal or political, language can have serious consequences, say critics of the rhetoric that appears to have replaced its ideological foundations.

“They’re crazy and they’re causing harm to the country, not just in terms of policy, but in terms of their rhetoric — and it’s no coincidence that the El Paso shooter, the Buffalo shooter, the Pittsburgh shooter, and I think I’m losing at least one more, and perhaps more than that, everyone cited invasion rhetoric in their pre-shooting manifestos and social media posts,” said Mario H. Lopez, president of the conservative Hispanic Leadership Fund and a longtime critic Tanton network date.

Tanton groups do not engage in the political use of invasion language and do not repudiate politicians who use it, but they remain wary of possible consequences.

“When Donald Trump talks about this, he’s a double-edged sword here, because he talks — he raises the issue, but he’s not very good at the political aspects of it,” Ruark said.

Despite their stylistic differences, immigration restriction advocates and Republican hardliners share a common short-term goal: passing more legislation based on HR2, an aggressive bill passed by the House but ignored by the Senate in May.

Meanwhile, Mike Johnson is embroiled in a fight with some of his former Freedom Caucus allies for refusing to hold Ukraine aid hostage to Senate passage of HR2 and instead proposing the End Catastrophe Act on the Border, which included elements of HR2, but failed in the House on Saturday when a bipartisan coalition led by Johnson approved a $95 billion foreign aid package, including $61 billion for Ukraine.

The bill was seen as an appeasement to the party’s right, but it never stood a chance as it needed a two-thirds majority to pass under suspension of the rules.

Hardline Republicans, including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia) and Bob Good (Virginia), preemptively dismissed the new border bill as a distraction, with Greene dismissing it as a “shiny object.”

This type of political disputes reflects Trump’s “double-edged sword”, as the Tantan groups have never before exerted as much political influence as they do now, although their allies in government present a tone and language that restrictionists have publicly avoided.

Groups like NumbersUSA have spent decades cultivating an image as a sober, calm, immigrant-friendly voice on the restrictionist side of the immigration debate, but their longtime critics say support for doomed bills like HR2 belies that notion.

“If you cared about real border security, you would propose and support things that bring order and that are a simpler, fairer and more efficient legal process, because that is the only thing that will stop illegal immigration,” he said. Lopez.

“The most efficient, orderly process for legal immigration – that’s the only thing. You can’t turn off any quote-unquote ‘magnet’ – the term they use – because the magnet is none of the things they say it is. The magnet is America itself.”