Tucker Carlson wants to convert empathy for migrants into hatred of Democrats
Washington Post
A look at his dishonest, dangerous rhetoric
Misael, a 4-year-old from Guatemala, sleeps on the ground by his mother, Anna, as they wait to be transported by U.S. Border Patrol after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into La Joya, Tex., earlier this month. (Go Nakamura/Reuters)
To a large extent, the debate over immigration to the United States comes down to how one views the country's legacy of serving as an inspiration to the rest of the world. The idea that America would welcome the world's huddled masses that yearn to breathe free may have been an appendix to the Statue of Liberty, but it still captures a sentiment that motivates many people: America should be a place to which the rest of the world aspires.
The question, then, is the extent to which they are still welcome. Some, like former president Donald Trump, are much more willing to embrace theoretical immigrants from places like Norway than to accept migration from places like Central America, where rampant violence and other factors are pushing people north. Many people, apparently including Trump, seem to think that migration into the United States mirrors the imagery that was common in the political conversation 15 years ago: single adults (whom Trump even now argues are largely criminals) sneaking over the border to work.
But that’s not what migration usually looks like. Last month, more than 45,000 children were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border, part of a one-month surge in migration that exceeded any month since the administration of George W. Bush. The majority of those children arrived with a parent. Nearly half, though, arrived by themselves — sometimes because their parents believed the children would have a better chance of being able to remain in the United States with relatives who are already here. It’s now common for people arriving at the border to turn themselves into law enforcement to make a claim of asylum.
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Since the beginning of fiscal 2017, more than 209,000 asylum claims have been granted. That includes 15,000 asylees from China, which serves as a reminder of another way in which our understanding of migration is often outdated. From 2010 to 2017, more immigrants came to the United States from Asia than from Latin America, usually flying into the country rather than crossing over the southern border. In fiscal 2019, 39 percent of the 844,000 people who were naturalized as new citizens came from Asia. Five percent came from Central America; 15 percent came from Mexico.
All of this context is important because of how perceptions skew the immigration debate. It is important, too, because it helps reveal how hollow and misleading Tucker Carlson's presentation of immigration on Fox News actually is.
Last week, you may recall, Carlson successfully managed to draw attention to himself by embracing the idea that immigration to the United States would functionally “replace” Americans who already live here. He presented this as simply an observation about voting patterns, but even he recognized that his rhetoric overlapped with views held by white nationalists.
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“Oh, the, you know, White replacement theor — no, no, no,” Carlson said, referring to White replacement theory, before catching himself. “This is a voting rights question. I have less political power because they’re importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that?”
That caveat that he wasn't explicitly talking about the racist doctrine that a group on the political left aims to replace White Americans with non-Whites (even as he explicitly argued that this was what was happening) gave Carlson the cover he needed with Fox News's higher-ups.
“A full review of the guest interview indicates that Mr. Carlson decried and rejected replacement theory,” a letter from Fox chief executive Lachlan Murdoch to the Anti-Defamation League read. “As Mr. Carlson himself stated during the guest interview: 'White replacement theory? No, no, this is a voting rights question.'"
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The famous “I'm not espousing white nationalist rhetoric, but” loophole.
Murdoch’s statement seems to have given Carlson all the cover he needed to double down on his claims about “voting rights” on Monday night. This time, he went into elaborate detail on the ways in which he purports that migration reshapes the country.
“Demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party's political ambitions,” he said, introducing the segment. “In order to win and maintain power, Democrats plan to change the population of the country. They're no longer trying to win you over with their program. They're obviously not trying to improve your life. They don't even really care about your vote anymore. Their goal is to make you irrelevant.”
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This is the linchpin of his argument — Democrats need new migrants because otherwise they lose. And this alone is obviously and immediately false.
Gallup’s most recent data show that, in the first quarter of 2021, Americans were more likely to identify as Democrats or Democrat-leaning independents than as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents by a nine-point margin, the largest gap since 2012. Just last year, the Democratic candidate for president received 10 percent more votes than did the Republican in the highest-turnout election in American history. What’s more, the long-term trend in voting seems to favor the Democrats, with younger voters being consistently far more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans. If anything, the data suggests that it is Republicans who are in need of an injection of new support to hold power — were it not for the advantages that the party enjoys from the uneven distribution of Senate seats and electoral votes relative to population.
In his monologue, Carlson pointed out that migration patterns can change a state’s political position, which is obviously true. One reason that Texas is becoming more Democratic, for example, is that so many people have moved to the state from more liberal parts of the country. Virginia has become solidly blue because of the growth of the population in its D.C.-adjacent counties.
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In both of those cases, Carlson argued that it was new immigrants who had prompted the shift. We looked at the Virginia example in 2019, when Carlson’s colleague Laura Ingraham made a similar claim. The shifts in Virginia that year were not tied to places with the biggest increases in immigration. In fact, the states with the biggest relative increases in the foreign-born population from 2000 to 2017 all voted for Trump in 2016. What’s happened nationally is the well-documented movement of young, college-educated Americans to urban regions like D.C. or Austin.
To bolster his Texas example, Carlson quoted former San Antonio mayor Julián Castro, speaking in 2013.
“It’s going to become a purple state and then a blue state, because of the demographics, because of the population growth of folks from outside of Texas and because, unfortunately, the Republican Party has gone so far to the right that they’re losing the business community,” Castro said then. “They’re losing the middle.”
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Carlson didn’t include that bit about the GOP going too far to the right. Instead, he ended the clip after “folks from outside of Texas” — implying that the folks to whom Castro was referring were immigrants instead of the more obvious interpretation. Texas itself boasts about the number of people who move into the state from other parts of the country; it’s a point of pride. It is true that states have seen population growth as a function of immigration in recent years. At times, state populations have grown only because of immigration. But this isn’t new. Many states have a lower density of foreign-born residents than they did in 1900. Many of those immigrants and all of their children became American citizens.
That’s a key point. At its heart, Carlson’s claim that Democrats want more immigrants because they want more Democratic voters is predicated on the idea that allowing more immigrants means gaining more Democratic voters. But, of course, noncitizen immigrants can’t vote. To vote, immigrants need to gain citizenship — at which point they’re American citizens who obviously deserve to weigh in on political decisions. Carlson admitted as much, unintentionally: “If you believed in democracy, you would work to protect the potency of every citizen’s vote,” he said — clearly intending to be referring only to current citizens, very much like himself.
An extended complaint about a Reagan-era policy that granted citizenship to immigrants in the country without documentation captures part of Carlson’s grievance. Such a policy is a different issue than immigration in general, of course, and differs from President Biden’s proposal for a pathway to citizenship. It’s also the case that most immigrants in the country — three-quarters of them — are here legally.
Carlson is also clearly arguing against allowing more immigrants to the country because it means more non-White Americans in future years, voters whom he worries will lean more heavily Democratic. Data from the 2018 General Social Survey show that those whose parents were both born outside the United States are more likely to identify as Democrats or Democrat-leaning independents than Republicans. It also shows that the group is heavily young, with 7 in 10 being age 50 or younger. Those are age groups that tend to identify more heavily Democratic anyway.
Other data suggest that native-born Hispanics, in particular, are less likely to identify as Democrats than Hispanics born outside the United States.
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“Among Latino voters who are foreign born, 70% identify as Democrats or lean Democratic and 18% identify as Republican or lean toward the GOP,” the Pew Research Center reported in 2016. “By comparison, 62% of U.S.-born Latino voters identify as Democrats or lean Democratic and 26% identify as Republican or lean toward the GOP.”
The implication? If Democrats wanted to bolster their ranks through immigration, they are picking a risky way to go about it. (Particularly given the ground Trump appears to have gained among Hispanics in 2020.)
But from the outset we showed that this claim about Democratic motivation was nonsense. This argument from Carlson is not about “voting rights.” It’s about using purported voting rights and Democratic nefariousness as a rationale for opposing immigration from what Carlson, with tangible disgust, described as “the Third World.”
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“For Democrats, the point of immigration is not to show compassion to refugees, much less to improve our country,” Carlson said Monday. “... It is about power. More Democratic voters mean more power for Democratic politicians.”
Carlson knows that the reality of migration — including those tens of thousands of kids showing up and seeking amnesty — actually does often trigger a sympathetic response. So he portrays his opponents as cynical opportunists despite the evidence to the contrary.
At least one group of viewers approved: those who endorse elements of the white nationalist ideology.
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