Please Don’t Spread Bizarre Conspiracies About Undocumented Immigrants

This is a difficult enough issue without rumormongering nonsense

Back in 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones quote-retweeted a Twitter thread suggesting that “government agents” were setting off fireworks in Brooklyn and Queens “to disorient and destabilize the #BlackLivesMatter movement.” She added two words: “Read this.”

Many people, myself included, found this to be a wildly irresponsible thing for Hannah-Jones to do. Racial tensions were white-hot, there’s nothing remotely surprising about fireworks being set off in certain neighborhoods of certain cities in the summer, and it was simply a deranged conspiracy theory. Hannah-Jones was (and is) a respected figure with a huge platform, and she was contributing to a climate of fear and paranoia. The most likely victims would be addled, credulous types.

Hannah-Jones, to her credit, apologized. She straightforwardly told the National Review that it had been “irresponsible” for her to publish the quote retweet.

 Imagine if, instead of apologizing and taking down the tweet, Hannah-Jones published an article in The New York Times Magazine that asked in its headline, “Are Government Agents Psychologically Assaulting Black and Brown Americans with Fireworks?” Imagine further — and I know this is all far-fetched, but I’ll get to the point soon, I promise — that Hannah-Jones spent most of the article pointing out that 1) lots of people are saying that this theory is true, and 2) it’s easy to find people on the streets of Brooklyn and Queens who not only insist that it’s true but who have seen, firsthand, very suspicious behavior from individuals who appear to be government agents. Finally, imagine that in this scenario Hannah-Jones doesn’t entirely disregard the “other side” of the debate (i.e., the 99.999999% likelihood truth, which is that there is no fireworks conspiracy), but instead buries a few quotes from authoritative figures about how unlikely this is in the closing grafs, and tucks away countervailing evidence in a couple of parentheticals.

This would be a deeply irresponsible article, because it would further fan the flames of conspiracy theorists without providing any substantive evidence justifying the further dissemination of the claims in question in a major outlet.

I thought of the Hannah-Jones incident when I read an article in The Free Press by Peter Savodnik earlier this week: “Is There Really a Plot to Use Migrants to Turn America Blue?”

Savodnik is referring to an unfortunately viral conspiracy theory, sometimes known as The Great Replacement, which holds that elites are conspiring to flood the “the West” with illegal immigrants, usually (in the modern context) Muslim ones. There are European versions of this theory, including some originally spread by the Nazis themselves (it’s often the Jews who are pulling the strings behind the scenes to invade white societies with the swarthy hordes). 

The most popular American version claims that it’s the Dems who are to blame, and that their goal is to flood the country with illegal Democratic voters, conferring a permanent electoral majority. To be clear, not every person who believes in The Great Replacement is a Nazi or a white nationalist, but many Nazis and white nationalists believe in this theory. In many ways, it’s a pillar of their worldviews, because it provides the flattening and simplification demanded by hardcore ideologues everywhere: Immigration is no longer a complicated, trade-off-ridden policy question, but rather a plot foisted upon helpless everyday people by distant, sinister elites. You can see how someone who is frustrated by their economic prospects or by the direction of the country, and who believes immigration is the problem, might come to believe there is a sinister actor behind the curtain.

This conspiracy theory has been orders of magnitude more consequential than anything involving fireworks in New York City, especially given the United States’ migration crisis. Elon Musk (as Savodnik points out) is a true believer, so much so that he believes — or claims to believe — that if Harris wins, this will be the last free and fair election in American history, because of all those ’legals. (Musk himself at one point worked illegally in the U.S.) 

I like The Free Press, have written for it and appeared on its podcast, and hope to continue to contribute to it. But I thought Savodnik’s treatment of this conspiracy theory was not nearly careful enough, given the incendiary nature of the subject matter.

The problem can be summed up by the subheadline: “A top GOP talking point of this election is that Democrats are rigging the vote through illegal immigration. Is there any truth to it? Peter Savodnik investigates.”

He doesn’t, really.

Here’s how the article starts:

Almost everyone in Lockland, Ohio, agrees on this: In the past year and a half, 3,000-plus immigrants from Mauritania, in West Africa, have streamed into the 1.2-square-mile town, taking over apartment buildings, straining police and fire services, and flooding the sewer system. “They don’t have furniture, so it’s probably just two queen-size mattresses on the floor,” Doug Wehmeyer, Lockland’s fire chief, told me. The newcomers, who have led to a doubling of Lockland’s population of 3,500, are mostly living in a handful of four-story apartment buildings, with ten to fifteen people squeezed into a four-person unit, Wehmeyer said. The buildings have become cluttered with trash and filled with the fumes of kitchen fires caused by too much cooking grease, Mark Mason, Lockland’s mayor, told me. If the Mauritanians ever leave, the mayor said, the buildings will have to be razed.

Coverage of the situation by a Cincinnati radio station, later picked up by the New York Post, explains that “Many of the Mauritanian people in Lockland were able to enter the U.S. under current federal migration policies. Though their entrance into the country triggered the start of a work permit application process, approvals can take between a year and 18 months.”

Even the most bleeding-heart advocate for immigrants can see why it is a bad idea to double the population of a tiny town with recently arrived migrants. That’s just too big an influx, over too short a time, in too small a place. And maybe they’re there because of a sinister Dem plot! After all, Savodnik notes that “what people inside—and outside—of Lockland don’t agree on” is “who brought these newcomers here and why, and what it all portends for America.”

This is a strange thing for Savodnik to write, because there’s actually not much mystery here. Mauritania is experiencing a lot of strife, ethnic cleansing, and slavery at the moment, and there’s been a yearslong push to make it easier for Mauritanian migrants to settle here.

I’m not going to get into the bureaucratic specifics here because they don’t really matter for our purposes, but if you Google around you’ll see there there’s been a lot of advocacy geared at providing Mauritanians Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or Deferred Enforced Departure (DED). In at least one notable instance, this advocacy was bipartisan: In a January 2023 letter to President Biden and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) and Rep. Mike Carey (R) “request[ed] an 18-month designation of either Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) for Mauritania, given extraordinary conditions including systemic and ongoing slavery and entrenched ethnic and racial exclusion in the country.”

They continued:

Black Mauritanians began to flee their country in the late 1980s due to a wave of violent repression and forced expulsions, with a small number heading toward the United States. Currently, there are an estimated 8,000 foreign-born Mauritanians residing in the United States. More than 3,000 foreign-born Mauritanians live in Ohio, with the largest diaspora settling in Cincinnati and central Ohio.

As far as I can tell from checking the appropriate government websites, Mauritanians never gained any sort of special protected status, which might explain why the ACLU complained, six months after the Brown and Carey letter, that over a hundred of them were being held on $5,000 bond.

The ACLU paints a dire picture of the Mauritanians’ situation:

The vast majority of the detained asylum seekers are Black Mauritanians who primarily speak Pulaar Mauritanian, Soninke, or Hassānīya. Because of racial persecution in Mauritania, many do not read or write in any language, as the above languages are forcibly prevented from being taught in schools in the country and most are not given the opportunity to attend school. These individuals were placed in removal proceedings without being provided credible fear interviews accompanied by adequate interpretation. Furthermore, due to lack of interpretation in their native languages, many individuals’ hearings have already been delayed. The government's treatment of these Mauritanians highlights systemic flaws in immigration detention and courts, which especially disadvantage Black migrants, non-English speakers, and asylum seekers with limited resources.

My point is not to assume that every word of everything the ACLU says is true — it’s an advocacy organization. My point is simply that there’s no mystery as to why some Mauritanians are arriving here, and even if they don’t qualify for TPS or DED, they can still seek asylum. Many of them are likely to be strong candidates given the situation back home. (Also, if their arrival is some part of a plot, why are some of them being detained for $5,000? For that matter, is the assumption here that the ICE employees helping to carry out this plot by eventually waving them through are all bleeding heart libs and none of them will blow the whistle? Hmmm. . . )

So there: I’ve solved Part 1 of The Mystery of the Mauritanians. Part 2 is “Why did so many of them end up in the same place?” I don’t need to do any further research to solve this one, if I’m being honest: When migrants arrive someplace, they tend to seek out their countrymen.

There are probably enhanced pressures for Mauritanians to do so. If you arrive in the States from El Salvador, yes, you’d probably prefer to find and hang out with other Salvadorans, but the fact is you speak a language that is understood by tens of millions of Americans, and the dialects are mutually intelligible. You have options, is what I’m saying.

I’m sure some of the Mauritanians fleeing their country have picked up another language or two, but for the most part their mother tongues aren’t really spoken by anyone in the U.S., unless there are large pockets of “Pulaar Mauritanian, Soninke, or Hassānīya” speakers in the U.S. I’m unaware of (Hassānīya is a tiny dialect of Arabic, but even the major Arabic dialects often aren’t fully mutually intelligible).

There are also very few Mauritanians here — as per the Brown/Carey letter, only about eight thousand in the entire country. This makes it even more likely they’re going to go wherever more Mauritanians are, and because fate is a cruel mistress, it turns out there’s a Mauritanian community in small-town Ohio, and the situation has snowballed. 

Savodnik provides none of this context — not even the basic story of why Mauritanians are ending up in the U.S. Instead, he uses it as a case study of how weird this all is, and then large chunks of his article are given over to repeating, over and over and over, that a bunch of conservatives, from Trump and Musk on down to right-wing think tankers and random YouTube wackos, are super suspicious and super convinced something is up. In fact, he never explains what drives the immigration of certain groups here. At one point, he explains that there has been a “huge influx of Mauritanians, Haitians, Venezuelans, Colombians, and others in recent years,” and that this is spurring conspiracy theories. But there are very straightforward reasons for all these waves of migration! Venezuela is run by a now-dictator who has decimated the economy, Haiti is one of the worst places on Earth and is currently run by gangs rather than a government, and Colombia (far and away the most stable of the three) is dealing with economic and violent strife of its own. Laying these facts out immediately grounds this dispute in reality and in policy: Okay, these folks are trying to come here. What should we do? That’s a reasonable discussion, of course.

It’s not that Savodnik completely eschews the reality that there’s no evidence for a vast plot to turn undocumented immigrants into Democratic voters. Tucked into the story here and there are facts like “a 1996 federal law prevents noncitizens from voting in national elections” and “The number of noncitizens voting illegally is vanishing low” — facts that highlight just how impractical it would be to do anything like what the Democrats are accused of here. (Or if they are doing it, they’re doing a piss-poor job.)

Those well-established facts are tucked away in parentheticals, while all sorts of wild bullshit is given much more room to breathe:

Earlier this month, a video surfaced showing how fears over a plot to steal the election are percolating in Lockland. Posted on the town’s Facebook page by someone named Chickie Chickie, a man in a Trump T-shirt says of Democratic hopes for the Mauritanians: “They don’t want them to stay in the blue states. They want to get them into the red states to turn us blue.” 

“This isn’t just a couple of cities,” adds the narrator of the video, produced by right-wing production outfit Real America’s Voice. “This is everywhere.

Cool, cool. I hadn’t heard of “Real America’s Voice” but it’s a far-right conspiracy website that used to regularly post QAnon content (that link is to Media Matters, and no, I do not automatically take that site’s claims at face value, but in this case they have the receipts). Thank you, The Free Press, for informing me that a pro-QAnon outlet believes something’s up with ’mmigration. 

What is the point of this?

Elsewhere, Savodnik writes that Joshua Treviño, a conservative think-tank staffer,

said Sister Norma Pimentel, executive director of the Rio Grande Valley branch of the progressive group Catholic Charities USA, has played a key role in moving immigrants across the border and resettling them in the United States. “I’ve heard her described as a ‘plaza boss,’ ” he said—a term for “the cartel man in charge of an area.” (Among others, Pope Francis has praised Pimentel for helping immigrants “fleeing from true social hells.”)

Pimentel did not reply to a Free Press request for comment. 

So Pimentel said he heard someone else describe her as a “plaza boss.” What is the evidence she has done anything illegal, let alone participated in a staggering conspiracy theory to hacer que Estados Unidos sea azul? What should we make of her lack of response to a journalist reaching out to say, “Hey, this guy says you’re basically in some sort of Latino mafia — care to comment?” In the absence of any evidence, this is nonsensical rumormongering — why is The Free Press printing this?

Savodnik also takes some truly dumb claims at face value. For example:

Nate Hochman, the right-wing filmmaker who produced [a short documentary called] Erasing Charleroi, insisted there was nothing veiled or surprising about progressives colluding with business to bring in more immigrants. 

“They’ve been boasting about how immigration is going to create bulletproof majorities for a generation—that is how they see immigration,” Hochman told me, referring to Democrats. He cited a 2019 piece by Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton entitled “California’s Changing Demographics Will Further Doom Republicans,” and a 2018 piece from New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg called “We Can Replace Them,” as evidence.

Hochman, you may recall, was fired from Ron DeSantis’s campaign for making a video “that featured the candidate at the center of a Sonnenrad, an ancient symbol appropriated by the Nazis and still used by some white supremacists,” despite being “ethnically Jewish” himself (Hochman was fired a little more than a year after the 2022 Buffalo mass shooting, which was perpetrated by a white supremacist wearing a Sonnenrad). Now he’s back, touting a film that sounds like it should have the term Rassenhygiene somewhere in it. It will shock you not one whit that neither link points to a column that comes anywhere close to supporting the idea that Democrats are engaged in a plot to import their next voting base. The biggest howler here is the Goldberg column headline, which was a response to Great Replacement nonsense and which was focused on the majority-minority demographics of Georgia immediately prior to the 2018 midterms. It’s much, much more about the diverse citizenry of Georgia than it is about immigration.

In short:

White supremacists: Blacks and Latinos will not replace us!

Michelle Goldberg: “In a week, American voters can do to white nationalists what they fear most. Show them they’re being replaced.”

Hochman [the Sonnenrad guy]: See? She’s calling for Great Replacement Theory!

This is so stupid.

I want to grant Savodnik two things in close. First, in the broader context, there’s obviously plenty to dispute about how Biden’s White House has handled the southern border, and about how flat-footed Democrats were caught on this issue. It may well cost them the election. I can — again — understand how the average American citizen, unfamiliar with the fiendishly complex immigration and asylum systems, might not understand how a bunch of immigrants seem to just “pop up” somewhere.

But I’m being extreeeeemely charitable here, because while Savodnik’s piece mentions all this, that’s not what his piece was about. If he had written a piece about how the Biden administration screwed up its migration policy, or at least failed to anticipate and seek to soften its natural consequences, I wouldn’t have written this response! Maybe I would have tweeted out the piece with a compliment or two!

Second, and along those same lines, it’s not as though Savodnik’s piece is devoid of fair arguments or fair points. For instance, he discusses the efforts in some Democratic cities and states to give undocumented immigrants driver’s licenses and other forms of ID which, again, might strike some native Americans as unfair. In my view, this is a reasonable harm-reduction policy that takes into account that undocumented immigrants do exist, do work, and that keeping them entirely paperless is going to cause more harm than good. It is impossible to deport even a sizable fraction of them without wildly disrupting other functions of government, as a 60 Minutes interview with Trump’s former and potentially future border czar Tom Homan very quickly revealed.

***

You can certainly disagree with the United States’ border or asylum policies without being a white nationalist or Nazi, and some Democrats and progressives have repeatedly shot themselves and their coalition in the foot by adopting a stance of high moral dudgeon on these questions. But there are plenty of reasons advocates argue for liberal approaches, or for granting IDs to undocumented immigrants, support these policies that have no credible connection to Great Replacement conspiracy-theorizing (and of course having a state license or other ID granted to undocumented folks doesn’t qualify them to vote in U.S. elections, anyway!). And toward the end of the piece, Savodnik finally gets to an obvious problem with the conspiracy theory, which is that the “permanent democratic majority” thesis — that as America changed and became more diverse, Republicans would be screwed — has completely failed to materialize. It turns out race is arguably a much less important driver of partisanship than factors like socioeconomic class and education, and there are a lot of noncollege-educated, Republican-voting Latinos, and a smaller but much larger than expected anticipated group of black ones. Savodnik quotes Ruy Teixeira, who is a reasonable man, though he does so thousands of words after treating the QAnon outlet as a normal source of information.

At the end of the day, though, because Savodnik doesn’t have any evidence to support a “plot to use migrants to turn America blue” but also apparently isn’t comfortable outright debunking it (maybe because of his readers, who have been howling in the comments that his piece was too soft on immigration[!]), all his piece does is spread this horrible theory further.

I’m not a hysteric when it comes to “harmful” media. I think it’s very unlikely that someone reads Savodnik’s piece and then goes and shoots up a quinceañera or whatever. But I just think this is a matter of journalistic rigor and responsibility. If you’re writing about a hot potato of a subject, especially one that really does inspire murderous rage in a subset of lunatics, you have to do so carefully. This article fails on those grounds.

---

Questions? Comments? Theories about the Biden administration’s efforts to import tens of millions of podcasters, ruining my career? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal.

Image: Migrants walk on the US side of the border wall in Jacumba Hot Springs, California on June 5, 2024, after crossing from Mexico. Migrants from countries such as Turkey, Jordan, Guatemala, Nicaragua, China and India made their way on foot into the United States today before being met with by Customs and Border Patrol agents for processing. The United States will temporarily close its Mexico border to asylum seekers starting today, June 5, as President Joe Biden as tries to neutralize his political weakness on migration ahead of November's election battle with Donald Trump. The 81-year-old Democrat signed a long-awaited executive order taking effect at midnight to "gain control" of the southern frontier with Mexico, after record numbers of illegal border crossings sparked concerns among voters. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP) (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)