Foreign governments and international bad actors are exploiting the U.S. immigration system as a weapon. On Ben Shapiro’s show on Tuesday, he explained how they are doing it.
Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, is the author of the brand new book, The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon. He tells Shapiro he was shocked by what he learned in doing the book, which details how Mexico, China, and the Muslim Brotherhood use mass migration to undermine American sovereignty, influence U.S. politics, and reshape the country from within.
Shapiro notes that in America, “We think of ourselves as the shining city on the hill, as the country of the Statue of Liberty. ‘Bring us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.’ And people take advantage of that. So, can you explain exactly how that’s happening?”
“I’m the son of immigrants, so I think immigration is great,” Schweizer said. “The problem is, it’s not the immigration of 100 years ago or even 50 years ago. It’s been weaponized by foreign governments.”
Mexico is the first example discussed. “I quote extensively in the book from Mexican leaders, including President Sheinbaum, who view mass migration to the United States as a reconquista, which sounds like a crazy theory, but they talk about it repeatedly,” Schweizer said. “And they back it up. They have created an infrastructure in the United States that allows them to activate Mexicans and Mexican Americans, for their political benefit.”
He notes that other countries routinely have a few consulates scattered around the US to aid their visiting citizens, such as China (6) and the UK (7). “Mexico has 53. And, as I lay out in the book, consular officials — these are Mexican diplomats in the United States – are engaged in not only organizing violent anti-ICE protests, and other protest activity, but are also actively trying to elect Democrats and defeat Republicans,” Schweizer reveals. “You have Mexican diplomats involved in political activity inside the United States. That’s a clear example.”
“One of Sheinbaum’s top aides in December of 2024 said, and I quote, ‘There are 39.9 million Mexicans in the United States. We are quietly reconquering the territory that was taken from us.’ Now, does that mean they think California and Texas are actually going to become Mexican states? Maybe. But I think what they really mean, and what there’s plenty of evidence for, is they are exerting sovereign control on territories inside the United States,” Schweizer said.
China, about which Schweizer has written two previous books, does things differently – by encouraging Chinese government encourages its elites to give birth in the US. “China is using birthright citizenship at industrial scale, creating large numbers of U.S.-born citizens who are then raised and educated in China but can later gain voting rights and access to U.S. institutions,” he told Shapiro.
Shapiro asks, “You’ve written extensively about the threat that China represents in your past books. China is utilizing immigration against the United States as well. What is their goal? What mechanisms are they mostly utilizing?”
“They see mass migration as subversion,” Schweizer said. “They have created an industrial scale use of birthright citizenship. So, birthright citizenship is obviously being heard by the Supreme Court, but it’s the idea that if you happen to be in the United States and a foreign national and your child is born here, that child automatically is granted US citizenship.”
“Our government has no idea no idea how many people are born this way. Because when you get a birth certificate, it doesn’t list the nationality of the parents…The Chinese government has done assessments, and their determination is mind boggling. The Chinese government believes that, over the last 13 years, roughly 100,000 Chinese nationals have done this in the United States per year. This means we’re looking at roughly 1 million ‘US citizens.’ But they’re to Chinese parents and they’re mostly part of the Chinese elite,” Schweizer said. “They go back to China and are raised in China. And they are US citizens when they turn 18, so they’re going to be able to vote in elections, make political campaign donations, be able to get US government jobs.”
“But they’ve never lived here. They’ve never been educated here. They’ve had very little exposure to the United States,” Schweizer explained. “And that wave is going to start to crest in the late 2020s, because this started in 2011 and 2012. That is a massive threat.”
The Muslim Brotherhood, meanwhile, views this as a civilizational warfare, and consider immigration a key component of that. “They look back at the experience of Mohamed and how he preached the use of migration as a form of colonization and taking over territories,” Schweizer said.
“They speak openly about the fact they don’t need to reach sort of critical mass in certain numbers. They’re quite confident that by controlling certain areas — even if they are a minority — because they are politically active and they intimidate people around them, they can gain relative political power,” Schweizer said.
“One of the examples I cite in the book is Zohran Mamdani in New York, Hezbollah newspapers in Lebanon were cheering him on. The overseas networks involving the Muslim Brotherhood and their ancillary groups in the United States were funding his campaign. The Iranian government even ran an article speculating that Mamdani has a political future. He’s not American born, so he can’t be president but, the article speculated, he might become the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.”
“Now, why would they want that?” Schweizer asked. “I think we know the obvious answer.”
“The other thing I think we have to recognize, Ben, is that a lot of the fraud that we’re seeing in Minnesota and elsewhere involving the Somali community, for example, is not just, in my mind, random fraud. There are actually a lot of Islamist leaders that preach how this kind of fraud on public assistance is good and righteous, because it’s effectively a tax on non-Muslims that is paid to Muslims,” Schweizer said. In Arabic, this is called a jizya. “So they’re actually encouraging Muslims in the United States to engage in this kind of behavior.”
“We have to understand what our adversaries are saying and what they believe,” Schweizer concluded.
