Show Notes
Two connected news stories from the past week show how illegal immigration into the United States is changing the country, and that the Biden administration seems to want it that way.
Mexico’s National Institute of Migration reported this week that between January and May of this year, nearly 1.4 million undocumented immigrants from a staggering 177 countries traveled through Mexico to the United States.
At the same time, the Biden administration announced a new policy that will grant legal protections to about 500,000 illegal immigrants already in the United States against deportation, if they are spouses of citizens.
Taken together, those two stories show that Biden’s open border policy is drawing people from around the world to come to the US illegally, and that it is willing to let those people cut the line ahead of immigrants who have come in legally.
In another related story, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted this week that “Voter fraud is real. Especially in Houston,” after a judge in that city ordered a new election after finding that more than 1,430 votes cast were illegal.
“This is a dangerous, toxic combination for our democracy,” says Eric Eggers, host of the Drill Down podcast as he reviews these stories with Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach on the most recent episode.
As Kansas attorney general, Kobach has been active in challenging what he sees as Biden administration overreach. He promises that if Biden proceeds with this new policy, “Kansas will sue along with other states” to stop it.
But he and Eggers note this is part of a plan not just to encourage illegal immigrants to flood into the US as they are clearly doing, but to then leverage that influx of illegal migrants as an electoral force by giving them government benefits normally reserved for citizens. They note that there are now 15 cities in the US where non-citizens are permitted to vote in civic elections. This policy was pushed very effectively in Maryland by a political activist named Tom Perez. Perez was at the time head of an immigrants advocacy group called CASA Maryland. Today, he is “Senior Advisor, Assistant to the President, and Director of Intergovernmental Affairs,” to Joe Biden.
Eggers sees the strategy behind this in stark terms. “It’s as if they’re trying to change the country not by persuading Americans to support their policies, but by bringing in people to override Americans.”
Kobach agrees that the trend is to reduce the legal defenses against allowing aliens to vote. He also points out that the COVID pandemic allowed Democratic run states to implement “temporary” changes to voting laws that they have not repealed since the pandemic. These rules concern absentee and mail balloting and rules around proving one’s identity as a citizen entitled to vote. “Some of the states with these rule changes did not have a legislature that would correct those changes.”
Georgia, he noted, was a counter-example, where the state has tightened its eligibility laws considerably since the pandemic ended. And in his home state of Kansas, over the veto of a Democratic governor, that state’s legislature did as well.
Kobach has watched election integrity issues for years and was appointed to a short-lived presidential commission on election integrity by President Trump in 2017. The committee tried – and failed – to get voter roll information from each of the fifty states in order to determine whether and where voter fraud might have been an issue in elections. A raft of lawsuits was launched against the committee’s efforts by Democratic operatives that was so exhaustive that Trump finally pulled the plug on the project in 2018.
“The lawfare began even before our first meeting,” Kobach recalled.
Eggers, author of the 2018 book FRAUD: How the Left Plans to Steal the Next Election,” summarizes that the issue means a lot to the political left, and they are willing to go to court to advance it.
