Donald Trump’s director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services promoted white supremacist propaganda during an interview with the far-right outlet Breitbart, alleging that the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda comes in response to liberals’ attempts to nefariously alter the demographic makeup of the country for political gain.
USCIS Director Joseph Edlow’s comments to Breitbart, an outlet with a history of promoting racist propaganda, advanced the central tenet of the so-called great replacement theory, in which white supremacists allege that liberals — in many cases, Jewish liberals — are attempting to bring nonwhite immigrants into majority-white countries en masse, to try to change a nation’s demographic makeup and help liberals win elections.
This is a baseless and racist conspiracy theory that has been espoused by mass murderers and also echoed by the president of the United States. But the man tasked with overseeing America’s citizenship protocol and various programs for immigrants seems to think it may have some validity.
Per Breitbart, he said:
Anything the Biden administration could do to get a bigger foothold from an illegal population in this country, they were going to do. I mean, their long-term plan, I think we have to assume, was to grant some sort of mass amnesty, make them all citizens, and then spread them out to try to change demographics elsewhere throughout the country.
Again, this is nothing more than bigoted, conspiratorial schlock. But the upper echelons of Trump’s administration are filled with figures known to have peddled white supremacist talking points, from White House policy director Stephen Miller to State Department official Darren Beattie and a host of others. And it certainly seems we can add Joseph Edlow to that group.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
