“This more mainstream version of the replacement theory hides behind justifications that the criticism of changing American demographics is about politics and power. It’s a narrative so prevalent on the right that nearly half of Republicans believe that immigrants are being brought to the country for political gains. According to a poll conducted in December by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 47 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement that “there is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views.”
But those justifications are built on false assumptions about American demographics and immigration: that white people will soon be a minority in this country, that immigrants and non-white voters are all Democrats, and that no longer being the majority group means a loss of power. When those assumptions are torn down, the true justifications for these fears become transparent.
The theory’s first inaccurate assumption is that white Americans will soon become a minority population. But using any nuanced reading of the data, that’s not true. Yes, in 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau published a population projection that by the year 2044, non-Hispanic white Americans would no longer be a numerical majority in the country. But not being the majority is not the same as being a minority: Even in that projection, non-Hispanic white Americans would still make up a plurality of the population compared with any other race. And non-Hispanic white Americans are not the only white Americans. When you include American Latinos who identify as solely white, you wind up with “more than 70 percent of the population identifying at least in part as white in 2044 and over two-thirds in 2060,” according to research published last year in the journal “Perspectives on Politics.””
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“The same research showed that presenting the demographic-shifts story as “majority-minority by 2044” prompts white Americans to say they feel more anxious and less hopeful. But when you present the same demographic changes in a more nuanced (and accurate) narrative around a rise in multiculturalism and Americans who identify as more than one race, white Americans’ self-reported anxiety was lower, even compared with a control group presented with basic facts about demographic changes with no narrative framing, according to the same study.
It’s almost like inaccurately framing demographic shifts as a zero-sum game leads to inaccurate perceptions among Americans that can amplify fear and resentment.”
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“Another plot hole in the mainstream replacement narrative is the assumption that immigrants will solely support the Democratic party. Stefanik’s campaign ran a Facebook ad in September that echoed replacement-theory rhetoric. “Radical Democrats” were planning “a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION,” the ad claimed. “Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”
Carlson, too, has repeatedly warned of a so-called Democratic plot to “import an entirely new electorate from the Third World and change the demographics of the U.S. so completely they will never lose again.”
But even he concedes that this narrative is flawed, pointing out in his show last week that many non-white and immigrant voters are, in fact, Republican. In the 2020 election, roughly 2 in 5 Latino voters cast a ballot for then-President Donald Trump. And, as my colleague Alex Samuels has written, messaging about racial grievances might, perhaps counterintuitively, attract some Latino voters to the Republican Party. In fact, the GOP attracts voters from every racial group, and while white voters may be its base, not all nonwhite or immigrant voters are Democrats.”
“In 2020, the general fertility rate in the US hit its lowest level on record, and provisional data for the first six months of 2021 showed a 2 percent decline in the number of births compared to the same time period in the previous year.
And what’s happening in the US is taking place in much of the rest of the world, as people are slower to marry and slower to have children.
That trend has helped contribute to what will be one of the dominant themes of the 21st century: the slowdown of population growth, especially in developed countries, and the eventual shrinking of the number of human beings on the planet.”
“Record numbers of Venezuelan migrants have crossed into the United States from Mexico in recent months, hoping to apply for asylum. U.S. immigration authorities reported 24,819 Venezuelan border crossers in December 2021, compared to just 200 one year prior.
Despite the compelling case many Venezuelans have for seeking refuge in the U.S., the Biden administration is denying many of them that opportunity. Instead it is quietly deporting them to Colombia—a policy that resembles a controversial Trump administration practice.”
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” In March 2021, Biden’s DHS announced an 18-month “temporary protected status” for Venezuelans already present in the U.S. That designation, which protects migrants from expulsion, is reserved for people fleeing an “ongoing armed conflict,” “an environmental disaster, or an epidemic,” or “other extraordinary and temporary conditions.” The designation applies to 320,000 Venezuelans in the U.S. but excludes newcomers, despite the Biden administration’s explicit recognition that America should be a safe haven.”
“Migrants in detention centers aren’t free to leave facilities whenever they want to shop for baby formula. Legally, essential products must be provided to migrant children that the government has detained. “Facilities will provide access to…drinking water and food as appropriate,” reads the 1997 Flores settlement that addressed the treatment of migrant children. A 2015 Customs and Border Patrol document on detention standards noted that “food must be appropriate for at-risk detainees’ age and capabilities (such as formula and baby food).” These legal standards predate the Biden administration.
Nor would diverting baby formula away from immigrant detention centers ease supply chain woes in a meaningful way. Ursula—the facility Cammack singled out on Twitter—holds around 1,100 detainees. The number of American parents who rely on formula to feed their infants is on the order of millions. Though several Republican lawmakers and right-leaning news outlets are agitating about the “pallets of baby formula for all of the illegals who are crossing into the United States,” none have been able to say exactly how much formula is going to detention facilities or how often shipments are arriving.
The baby formula shortage is indeed a huge problem. About 40 percent of top baby formula brands are out of stock right now, and producers are warning that shortages could last for several months. But the shortage wasn’t caused by the government’s legal duty to feed the kids it has confined. “Much of the current shortage is rooted in a February recall of formula after a suspected bacterial outbreak at an Abbott Nutrition plant in Michigan,” explains Reason’s Eric Boehm. And while we could re-fill those shelves with formula from abroad, tariffs and quotas “make it burdensome and costly to import the supplies that are now desperately needed.”
You can’t solve the national shortage by making it harder for undocumented parents to feed their babies. Instead of looking for immigrant scapegoats, lawmakers should tackle the trade and regulatory policies that helped create the current shortage.”
“Under the Public Health Services Act of 1944, codified in Title 42 of the U.S. Code, federal health officials may issue orders intended to curb the cross-border spread of diseases. Rarely invoked before the pandemic, Trump administration officials looked to Title 42 in late March 2020 as a way to stop migrants from crossing U.S. land borders. Would-be migrants could no longer cross into the United States from Canada and Mexico after the CDC’s Title 42 order, ostensibly because they posed contagion risks. The order has been used almost exclusively to expel migrants at the southern border, and CBP officials have carried out 1.7 million expulsions under its authority.
Its implementation has proven to be largely counterproductive and harmful to migrants. Those expelled under Title 42 faced nearly 10,000 incidents of kidnapping, torture, rape, and other violence after being sent to dangerous border towns in Mexico, according to Human Rights First. What’s more, because Title 42 does not penalize repeat crossings, the recidivism rate rose and the total number of CBP apprehensions spiked. This led to inflated reports of chaos and unprecedented migration at the U.S.-Mexico boundary, which only helped fuel the false argument that President Joe Biden is overseeing an open southern border.
Immigration advocates have long criticized the public health order for the barriers it poses to asylum seekers. Under U.S. immigration law, migrants are legally permitted to seek asylum—a process they must begin either on American soil or at a port of entry. An immediate expulsion under Title 42 means that migrants can’t present their cases for asylum, risking a return to the dangerous conditions many of them have fled.
From the very beginning, public health officials have questioned the efficacy of Title 42 in curbing the spread of COVID-19, noting that the virus was already spreading in American communities and that migrants posed a comparatively minor risk. The CDC’s director of Global Migration and Quarantine, Martin Cetron, refused to support the Trump administration’s initial order. Lawyers at the Department of Health and Human Services and CBP pressured the CDC to issue the order, but the agency refused until former Vice President Mike Pence ordered the borders closed. Since that initial scuffle, more than three-quarters of Americans have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, making the health order’s stated justification even more tenuous.”
“There is also the massive accountability issue here. The CBP has authorization to use force against not just foreign travelers at the border but also against Americans within 100 miles of border crossings, and yes, some of them have gotten overly violent with citizens, just like members of other law enforcement agencies. As a federal government agency, the CBP is supposed to operate with transparency about its behavior and the behavior of its agents.
The communications between officers can help establish intent to engage in misconduct or violent behavior. The ability of a government agent to conceal or delete these messages impacts the ability to investigate and, when necessary, prosecute bad behavior. And when the federal government fails to police misconduct on its own, the ability to delete these messages also makes it harder for outside media outlets or accountability organizations like CREW to monitor what’s going on.”
“U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been using the policy implemented at the onset of the pandemic to immediately expel migrants apprehended at the border, while progressives, pro-immigration activists and institutions such as the United Nations and Doctors Without Borders have rebuked the policy for shutting the door on thousands of desperate families and stranding them in unsafe camps with limited options.
Almost everyone in this debate recognizes that the necessity of Title 42 to prevent Covid transmission is a pretense. Public health experts have long contended that the rule is scientifically baseless. In fact, officials in the previous administration explored enacting the policy before the pandemic by using the flu and measles as justification. But the benefits of repealing or leaving in place Title 42 are not as straightforward as either border security or human rights advocates claim, which both sides would be wise to understand as they argue the political merits of the administration’s next moves. If approached smartly, rescinding Title 42 could lead to a more secure and prosperous America rather than the chaos that some warn of.
Proponents of keeping Title 42 in place assert that the quick expulsions are needed because they give officials greater ability to intercept and turn back more migrants. A recent report from the Migration Policy Institute notes that Title 42 expulsions can take as little as 15 minutes, while removals under standard immigration law, which require more procedures and paperwork, can often take an hour and half.
But the procedural steps that Title 42 bypasses are critical for the U.S.’s ability to target smuggling networks and discourage repeat crossings. This is why Border Patrol agents warned in a 2021 report from the Government Accountability Office that Title 42 “negatively affected enforcement” because the expulsions gave them no time to collect intelligence from migrants concerning nearby smugglers and other illegal activity.
The quick expulsions under Title 42 also cut corners in ways that prevent authorities from deterring migrants as they attempt to reenter the country. Before the pandemic, officials were able to use criminal prosecution, fines and other penalties to deter people from repeatedly crossing the border. This is because apprehended migrants were being processed under standard immigration law. Title 42, however, is a provision that exists under health law, which means that authorities are incapable of issuing penalties for reentry against migrants who are expelled under this provision. Border Patrol officials have stated that because of Title 42, migrants now try to cross multiple times a day. Since the pandemic expulsions began, repeat crossings jumped from 7 percent in 2019 to 26 percent in 2020. It’s not unheard of for people to make as many as 30 attempts at crossing in just the span of a few weeks.”
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“But even when considering all the security liabilities that Title 42 is responsible for, proponents of the policy are correct in saying that Biden needs a plan in place as he works to rescind the program. This plan must include interagency coordination that rapidly expands capacity as more families arrive to claim asylum. The administration must also work with humanitarian organizations to ensure that they’re in the best position possible to monitor and shelter migrants — and that their capacity is being fully utilized.
At the same time, advocates for ending Title 42 as well as the Biden administration must acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of people who are being expelled under the policy haven’t been families seeking asylum, but rather single adults fleeing extreme economic deprivation and in search of work. In February alone, more than 90 percent of Title 42 expulsions were single adults — the vast majority from Mexico. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has acknowledged this reality and urged Biden several times last year to work with him to expand guest worker programs for the U.S., Mexico and the Northern Triangle. Though the Biden Administration recently suggested a willingness to do so, it has not yet provided any details.
It’s critical that Biden’s post-Title 42 strategy includes increased access to guest worker programs. Extensive research shows that when expanded legal channels are paired with border security measures, illegal immigration rapidly declines. This was exactly what happened in the mid-1950s when the U.S. government expanded their agricultural worker program for Mexicans, which caused illegal immigration to collapse by 95 percent in just 5 years. Border Patrol saw the success of the agricultural program and warned that restricting it would cause “a large increase in the number of illegal alien entrants into the United States.” But in 1960, the Department of Labor did just that, causing employer use of the program to drop by 30 percent in just one year while Mexican apprehensions increased by 55 percent. When the program was eliminated altogether, apprehensions continued to grow, reaching nearly 1 million in 1976.”
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“With a surge at the border and a shortage of workers, maintaining Title 42 has done nothing to solve either crisis — aside from creating more jobs for human smugglers. Though the Biden administration is right to rescind Title 42, chaos at the border will continue to drive headlines and the U.S. economy will limp forward until Biden prioritizes expanding legal channels for those in pursuit of a better life.”
“Immigrant advocates and public health experts — and many top Democrats — for months have pushed back on the Biden administration’s continued use of Title 42, calling it unlawful, inhumane and not justified by public health considerations. They’ve argued that the policy, enacted in March 2020, has been utilized not to keep Covid-19 out of the U.S., but to keep migrants from seeking asylum, a legal right under U.S. and international law.
“It’s long overdue for Title 42 to end,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said in a joint statement. “Title 42 is a public health regulation that should never have been used as a border enforcement policy, and its misguided implementation put countless people in danger and wreaked havoc on our asylum system that desperately needs repair.””
“Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s short-lived policy of requiring state troopers to conduct secondary inspections of trucks crossing into Texas from Mexico cost the United States almost $9 billion in just 10 days, Axios reported Tuesday.
The policy, which Abbott enacted on April 6, snarled truck traffic at the border and led to a protest by Mexican truckers that stopped trade at some major crossings. On April 15, Abbott ended the double inspections, for which he’d received withering criticism from both sides of the border and the aisle, after striking deals with the governors of the four Mexican states that border Texas.
Per Axios, Abbott implemented the policy “in response to the Biden administration’s announcement that it would lift Title 42,” a Trump-era public health policy that denied migrants entry into the United States.
An analysis by the Perryman Group showed that the U.S. lost an estimated $8.97 billion in GDP due to delays at the border, while Texas alone lost $4.23 billion.”
“Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has long held that his state is facing an “invasion,” which consists of thousands of migrants crossing into the United States from Mexico over the Rio Grande. Now, in an attempt to resist “the Biden open border policies” he claims are endangering Texans and compromising national security, Abbott is prepared to implement a policy that drew scrutiny as soon as he announced it.
“To help local officials whose communities are being overwhelmed by hordes of illegal immigrants,” said Abbott, “Texas is providing charter buses to send these illegal immigrants who have been dropped off by the Biden administration to Washington, D.C.””
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“immigration advocates and those with a passing respect for individual rights pointed out that Abbott’s proposal, as stated, is both immoral and illegal. Transporting migrants across state lines against their will “sounds dangerously close to federal felony kidnapping,” argued Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council. Further, Title 8 of U.S. Code Section 1324(a) states that “any person who…knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, transports, or moves or attempts to transport or move such alien within the United States by means of transportation or otherwise…shall be punished.”
Perhaps those snags are why the governor’s office has since softened its tone on busing migrants north. A press release published after the press conference stressed that “a migrant must volunteer to be transported” in order to board a bus or flight to Washington, D.C.”
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“the new busing policy sits atop a heap of misguided, expensive, and dubiously legal initiatives the governor has undertaken in order to keep migrants out of his state—people who have the right under U.S. immigration law to seek asylum in Texas.
This policy comes from the man who proposed building a border wall of his own after former President Donald Trump’s never came to fruition. Abbott’s project, which is ongoing, ran into many of the same issues as Trump’s—exorbitant costs, tension between federal and state jurisdiction, and the need for egregious eminent domain claims in order to get the job done (not to mention a lack of widespread support). “The elected officials in border communities don’t support [Abbott’s] plans,” American Civil Liberties Union of Texas attorney David Donatti told Reason last year.
The governor’s border-securing mission—Operation Lone Star—has been similarly fraught. While Abbott and other state officials bragged about “more than 11,000 criminal arrests, drug seizures that amount to millions of ‘lethal doses,'” and tens of thousands of undocumented immigrant referrals to the federal government for deportation, watchdogs reported “arrests of U.S. citizens hundreds of miles from the border,” “claiming drug busts from across the state,” and changing statistics and metrics of success, according to The Texas Tribune. Several Texas National Guard soldiers stationed at the border committed suicide during the operation, while dozens more criticized the mission’s execution in an internal survey. With its spotty track record, the still-active Operation Lone Star costs taxpayers more than $2.5 million each week.
With that background in mind, it isn’t surprising that Abbott would opt for a blusterous anti-migrant spectacle that comes at the expense of Texas taxpayers and neglects any humanitarian or legal obligations to asylum seekers.”