Weaponized immigration began in 1979 with the Mariel Boatlift organized by Fidel Castro of Cuba. Hostile foreign powers took notice and have since perfected the strategy.
That’s the conclusion of five-time #1 New York Times bestselling author Peter Schweizer in his latest book, The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon. Schweizer joined the Josh Hammer Show to discuss how immigration has been turned into a clash of civilizations in the US.
“The Mariel boatlift from Cuba to the United States is a classic example of this. Fidel Castro seeded fleeing migrants with criminals, intelligence officers, criminal gangs, and psychopaths,” he tells Hammer. “As I recount in the book, Jimmy Carter said ‘we’re going to welcome them with open arms.’ That is weaponized immigration.”
“A US government study concluded that the three most successful attacks against the United States in our history were 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the Mariel boatlift. After the 9/11 attack, we destroyed al-Qaeda. After Pearl Harbor, we destroyed the Japanese empire,” he said.
“But after the Mariel boatlift… nothing. Because… what do you do? There’s nobody to go after militarily. That is what inspired the use of immigration as a weapon. Islamists have talked about it, but Mexico and China and other radicals have adopted that strategy as well,” he says.
Mexico, Schweizer’s book documents, is encouraging illegal immigration from Central and South America, propagandizing those who come with “Migrant TV,” and using its large number (53) of consulates within the US to encourage protests against the Trump administration’s efforts to remove illegal immigrants from the US.
China, the book shows, has been abusing “birthright citizenship” on an industrial scale. In the last 13 years, possibly a million US-born Chinese children who have been raised and indoctrinated fully in China are nevertheless birthright US citizens. A large number of children have also been born to American women who were paid large sums of money to be surrogates by members of China’s elite.
“The immigration that we experienced 50 or even 100 years ago is very different than the immigration now. Americans tend to have this view that it’s sort of organic that it is people that are coming here to adopt American values. That’s not really the case anymore,” Schweizer said.
“And it’s because of the involvement of these foreign actors. So, in the case of China or Mexico, or Islamist groups, they want people to come here, but they don’t want them to assimilate,” Schweizer said. “I quote a senior Mexican official who says that Mexicans that come to the United States and adopt American values are ‘traitors to Mexico’.”
Hammer recalls that in the 1990s and even into the administration of Barack Obama, the Democrats were against illegal immigration to the US, even as they excuse and encourage it today. He asked Schweizer, “What should legal immigration policy should look like?”
“I think we need to deal with this weaponized immigration first, and we need to have a sealed border. I’m a believer in immigration. I think it’s an important component of the United States,” Schweizer responded. “But the key word is vetting. You’ve got to vet the people coming into the country. I don’t mean racially. I don’t mean in any way other than their character qualities, their allegiances, their alliances.”
Schweizer and Hammer agree that the Democratic Party has become opposed to such screening and even ignore laws that require it.
“You can enact a law that says we’re going to have vigorous screening and vetting of legal immigrants, but if you have a president who says, no, for political reasons we want to open the floodgates, it doesn’t matter what the laws on the books say,” Schweizer said.
“That’s how bad it’s become. I don’t know what the immediate solution is,” Schweizer adds. “But we do not have in the Democratic Party people who actually want to abide by the law when it comes to immigration.”
This is especially true when it comes to voting ID. Despite vast majorities of the public that are in favor of requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote and actually voting, the Democratic Party fights every attempt to codify that. “Is it literally just as simple as a partisan attempt to get more voters to Democratic Party?” Hammer asked.
“I think there’s no question about it,” Schweizer agreed. One of the reasons Democrats strip and eliminate requirements for new citizenship – like criminal background checks, et cetera – is because newly minted American citizens vote about 85 percent for Democrats,” he said. “The longer immigrants stay here, that evens out. But it takes 20 years to get anything approaching 50-50 in terms of party identification. And the Democrats know this.”
“The biggest years for minting new voters through naturalization, by eliminating these requirements, were 1996, 2012 and 2024 – all reelection years for Democratic presidents.”
He goes further. “They are desperate to prevent deportations because our Census is calculated not by counting citizens but by counting people. And if you look at California, the estimates are based on the illegal population in California. That state has between 4 and 7 more congressional seats than they would otherwise,” he noted.
