It’s like they couldn’t even make it any more obvious for us.
In an election where razor-thin margins could decide who controls the White House, the Senate and the House, the Los Angeles Times reported that “a wave of new U.S. citizens” is “being sworn in across the country as immigration authorities approve citizenship applications at the fastest speed in a decade.”
That might seem like a curious coincidence, as indeed the L.A. Times insisted it was: “The Biden administration says the uptick in new citizens is due to efforts to reduce a backlog of applications that began during the Trump administration and exploded amid the COVID-19 pandemic,” the paper reported Thursday from a naturalization ceremony in Riverside, California.
It added: “Immigration officials said the timing is not driven by the election or any political agenda.”
However, even the Times had to note that “American flags lined the stage as messages conveying the immigrants’ new power played on a large screen.”
“Today, I am an American. Today, I am a citizen of the country I serve. Today, I can register to vote,” the message read.
Just coincidental. Move along, folks. Seriously, move along or else this becomes disinformation, as the Times made clear:
“Former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have long repeated baseless claims that Democrats are admitting immigrants into the U.S. for political gain and allowing them to vote unlawfully,” the Times said in the piece.
“The issue even made its way into the government spending bill this month when House Speaker Mike Johnson tried unsuccessfully to insert a GOP proposal to require states to obtain proof of U.S. citizenship when people register to vote.”
Are the Democrats trying to rig the 2024 election?
“This is not part of some master conspiracy to flood the country with new Democratic voters. There’s a lot of statistics that show many immigrants share more in common with Republican values,” said Xiao Wang, the co-founder of a company that helps immigrants navigate the system.
This may be true, but with 4 million immigrants gaining citizenship since the 2020 election and citizenship applications being processed at what counts as a blinding pace given government bureaucracy, those quoted by the Times also couldn’t help but notice how these immigrants — especially in border states — might tip election scales, even if California isn’t up for grabs.
“In Arizona, we keep talking about how there’s a 10,000-vote margin of victory,” said Nicole Melaku, the executive director of the National Partnership for New Americans.
A few paragraphs down: “New citizens broadly skew Democratic, though the National Partnership’s poll showed a range of political leanings. About 54% of respondents said they’d vote for Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, while 38% said they’d vote for Trump.”
Furthermore: “The average processing time for a citizenship application was cut in half from a record high of 11.5 months in 2021 to 4.9 months this fiscal year, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data through July 31. A decade ago in 2014, it also took 4.9 months on average to process a citizenship application … The speedier processing is the result of an effort by the Biden administration to cut through the backlog.”
So, frontloading the story was talk of “no political agenda” and “baseless claims” by the GOP about demographics being destiny for the Democrats. Wade down a few paragraphs, and you get the “yes, but…”
And it’s not like people didn’t notice — including Elon Musk, head of Tesla, SpaceX, and X/Twitter:
They are importing voters. It is obvious. pic.twitter.com/R9eSY3qH9u
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 26, 2024
Right, but you can’t say it’s obvious. Unless, of course, you’re well-established enough that you can bear the brunt of the consequences and are beyond caring what people think. (See: Musk, Elon.)
It isn’t conspiratorial to notice that the attention and the resources of the federal government, such as they may be, seem to be going certain places. Speaking of “baseless claims,” let’s revisit the situation in Springfield, Ohio — where a town overwhelmed by Haitian migrants who received Temporary Protected Status mostly under Joe Biden’s administration have overwhelmed both city and state services and the governor was left pleading for the Biden administration to help.
In 2021, Harris bragged about fast-tracking TPS for Haitian migrants, presumably speaking on behalf of the Biden administration. Three years later, we have the governor of Ohio begging D.C. for money to deal with the crisis and weird, probably untrue stories spreading around regarding the effect on house pets — and, on the other side of the country, a feel-good story about how the feds have somehow managed to find the resources to fast-track citizenship for a group which just so happens to vote heavily Democratic.
These aren’t “baseless claims.” It’s noticing what gets attention and making bedrock assumptions about why it gets attention. Perhaps it’s overt, perhaps it’s just a matter of subliminal preferences. Fast-tracking citizenship while ignoring Springfield or the border crisis or ballooning crime rates or anything like that involves making a choice of what to focus on.
Assumptions based on a government’s priorities don’t involve the invocation “baseless claims.” It’s merely noticing the inconvenient.
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