Opinion Mike Johnson’s conspiracy theories about ‘illegals’ mark a new GOP low
“This is the plan of our friends on this side — to turn all the illegals into voters,” Johnson said at a congressional hearing in May 2022, gesturing at Democrats. “That’s why the border’s open.”
The “open borders” trope is a lie, and while a few municipalities allow voting for noncitizens in local elections, in no sense do national Democrats have any such “plan” for “all the illegals.” As far as I can determine, no House speaker in recent memory has been quite as reckless and incendiary with this kind of language.
Johnson employs it regularly. He reiterated the claim in an interview this year with the right-wing outlet Newsmax, accusing President Biden of “intentionally” encouraging undocumented migration to “turn all these illegals into voters for their side.” On numerous other occasions, he has made similar charges, even declaring that Democrats’ express goal is the “destruction of our country at the expense of our own people.”
On immigration, as well as on abortion and gay rights, Johnson’s elevation is a triumph for the far right. It has been widely noted that Johnson doesn’t come across as a MAGA bomb-thrower, despite his extreme views. That’s true on immigration, too: He voices high-minded platitudes about how providing asylum to the persecuted is a noble ideal, but he’s a big booster of the wildly radical House GOP border bill that would functionally gut asylum entirely.
The pro-immigrant group America’s Voice, which tracks lawmakers’ positions on the issue, has not documented any comparable rhetoric in Johnson’s predecessor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy. “Johnson has gone farther than most of his Republican colleagues in elevating alarmist and dangerous rhetoric,” says Vanessa Cardenas, the group’s executive director.
Other predecessors, such as John A. Boehner and Paul D. Ryan, were supporters — nominally, at least — of reforms that would legalize large numbers of undocumented immigrants, though they ultimately failed to deliver. Not even Newt Gingrich, the most extreme House speaker of the modern era, went as far as Johnson, says Nicole Hemmer, author of a history of conservatism in the 1990s.
“Even at his most anti-immigrant, he spoke largely in fiscal and law-and-order terms,” Hemmer told me, while eschewing the “eliminationist rhetoric” at the core of great replacement theory.
Yet little by little, those more extreme ideas have penetrated GOP leadership circles. In 2021, Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), a top House Republican, charged Democrats with scheming to replace conservative voters with Democratic-leaning immigrants.
Stefanik, like Johnson and other Republicans who make such claims, did not explicitly allege a plot to replace Whites with non-Whites. But those playing this game know exactly what they’re implying. Indeed, former president Donald Trump recently made the racist implications behind the great replacement theory explicit by claiming that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
All this echoes the 1920s, when prominent lawmakers depicted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe as a threat to “our genius” and to “the foundations of society,” says historian Joshua Zeitz. “White nationalists have been reintroducing these ideas gradually over the past several decades, and they are now thoroughly ingrained in the Republican establishment,” he told me.
That someone with these views now controls the House’s agenda bodes badly. Johnson has already declared that a top priority is fixing our “broken” border. Julián Castro, a former member of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, anticipates Republican efforts to shut down the government to force Democrats to “remake the asylum system in the MAGA cult’s image.”
Congressional Republicans have long been split between establishment figures who favor compromise reforms (legalization of many undocumented immigrants in exchange for border security) and those who see migration as a wholly destructive force, an invasion to be rebuffed via mass deportations, an effective end to asylum and maximal border militarization. As Johnson’s new — and very powerful — leadership position reveals, the latter forces have decisively won.
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