Transcript of 'Weaponized Migration' — One of the Most ‘Sophisticated Invasions’ In History

This book is about the weaponization of migration and how foreign governments and adversaries have weaponized our immigration system. But when they turn 18, they're going to be able to vote. They're going to be able to donate to political campaigns. They're going to be able to get government jobs. It's a massive, massive national security problem. That was Peter Schweitzer, President of the Government Accountability Institute discussing the explosive findings of his new investigative book, The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Power Use Immigration as a Weapon.

In this episode, we sit down with Schweitzer to discuss what his investigative team has uncovered about these foreign influence campaigns. I'm Daily Wire executive editor, John Bickley with Georgia How. This is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

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Investigative journalist Peter Schweitzer joins us now to talk about his new book, The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign powers use immigration as a weapon. Great to have you back on.

Great to be with you, John. Thanks for having me.

Look, there's a lot in this book that we can't hope to fully cover here, of course, but I wanted to ask you about a few things that will be of particular interest to our audience. Let's We'll start with the cartels. They're a major target for the Trump administration, obviously. You track the cartels, particularly partnering with progressives to influence Washington. Can you unpack that for us?

Yeah. The drug cartels, of course, have been politically active south of the border for decades. That's no big surprise. But what's happening is there's been this movement to bring progressives from Latin America together with those from North America. One of the groups doing this is a group called Progressive International. It was founded by Bernie Sanders. It's run by his former foreign policy advisor. His chief of staff participates with the organization, as do a bunch of Democrats in Congress, people like AOC, Greg César, etc. Well, this organization has set up a leadership structure that is populated with individuals from Latin America who are linked to the drug cartels. What they've done is they push for two very important things that the drug cartels want. Number one is open borders. The drug cartels actually make more money off of human smuggling when the border are open than they do from drugs. The second thing they're pushing for is ending the military war against the drug cartels in Latin America. So we're seeing a leakage of drug cartel influence moving into North America and affecting our politics.

Well, and have you seen any reversal of this with Trump coming in power in the last year? Is there a real effect in Washington?

I think it's going to create a sense of urgency, John, because what they're hoping to do is avoid US involvement in the events of Latin America, the drug cartel activity, political influence, et cetera. So it's probably going to add urgency to it in the short term out of a desire to prevent Trump from taking some of the actions he's taken in Venezuela and elsewhere.

Are there legal implications for these ties? Anybody tied to these cartels now? Are the stakes higher now them?

They are. And look, it could be. I'm not a lawyer, but there are laws and statuts that apply to individuals that are involved with activities with either terrorist-designated organizations or drug cartels. Designated by the federal government. There is possible implication here illegally. I'm not an attorney, but it's an enormous problem. I think we make a big mistake when we look at immigration and assume that it's just a function of economics. If we I think that the drug cartel problem is a problem south of the border, it's not just something that bubbles up occasionally here in terms of violence. It's actually something that is walking around in our Halls of Congress, which should concern us deeply, I think.

You also It hits something that we've been covering on and off here on this show for a few years, and that's the US Visa program. You say it's being exploited by actual spies. What evidence did you find of this?

Yeah, so there's an EB-5 program. It's a visa program that was started in 1991 by Congress, designed to spur investment in the United States. If you invest a million dollars in the United States and create a certain number of jobs, you can get permanent resident status in the United States. Turns out that law was passed by Congress. One of the most important lobbyists, the person that really pushed that legislation over the finish line, was a lady named Maria Tsai, who it turns out was, in fact, a Chinese spy, or at least a Senate committee declared that about eight years after the bill was passed. The problem is the CB5 program is a very clever way to inject foreign money legally into our elections. Let me explain. You get permanent residence status if you come through this program. It doesn't mean you actually have to live here. In fact, there are a lot of Chinese billionaires who have obtained permanent residence status through this program that brag how they don't actually live in the United States, they remain in China. But if you get permanent residence status in the United States, John, you are allowed to legally donate to political campaigns.

You can donate. In some instances, we found tens of millions of dollars flowing into political campaigns in the United States from individuals that remain in China. This is a covert way of manipulating our immigration system to curry influence and expand their power within the United States government.

Are there any efforts to close this loophole? It's more than a loophole, but this loophole that allows this thing.

Yeah, it's challenging. The EB5 program is set to sunset in 2026. Some people are trying to resurrect the program. The problem with permanent resident status is that the Supreme Court determined in the Citizens United case that making political donations is a First Amendment right from being in the United States. It would be hard for me to believe that the courts would allow a law that says permanent resident status means you can't donate to campaigns because you're effectively saying people don't have first amendment rights, even though they live here, are supposed to live here permanently. I do think, though, that what we should do is have disclosure. They should be required. Campaign should be required to say, We received this large check from a non-citizen who is donating to our campaign. So at least there is some transparency. Because right now, you go through the FEC records, there's no way of knowing whether this is foreign money or US money that's going into campaigns.

One of the points you make that's really interesting is we all talk about what happens to people when they arrive in the US. You say we should back up and really start the conversation way before that. Some of this, some of what you've already touched on actually addresses some of these things. But what do you mean by this?

Well, what I mean is that we've been having a national conversation about immigration in the United States, about its effect on wages, safety on our streets, how it might influence our culture. Very, very, very important debate and discussion. I think President Trump deserves a lot of credit for stealing the border. But we have to step back and realize that we're not just dealing with immigration that is random and organic. We're dealing with weaponized migration. What do I mean by that? Foreign actors, foreign governments see it as a weapon to deploy against us. So they are encouraging it. They are pushing it. And once immigrants come to the United States, they bring with them not only themselves, their families, and their culture. They bring with them oftentimes political networks. So we see governments like Mexico, for example, working to exert sovereignty within the United States It's by activating migrants and turning them into a political force. The Mexican government, for example, has something called Migrant TV or Migrante TV. This is a news service, I'll put that in air quotes, by the Mexican government, specifically for migrants in the country, but it's highly laced with propaganda, anti-Trump, ICE agents are Nazis.

They are trying to radicalize and motivate migrants inside country, turn them into a political force. There's evidence that people connected to the Mexican consulents are doing the same thing, and I named some of those individuals in the book.

Again, as you mentioned, the cartels have so much influence in Mexico, so the cartel is certainly shape Keeping that content as well.

Yes, no question about that. They're pushing these themes, and you see that with the Scheinbaum administration in Mexico. They don't want the Trump administration to go after the drug cartels. As I point out in the book, Scheinbaum has a long history of cooperation and working with the drug cartels. She's appointed senior people to the national police that are known or have been known to have been connected to the drug cartels.

It's a pretty large question, but what are the national security implications for all of this, what you've uncovered?

Well, they're enormous. I'll give you one related to China. China has created an industrial-sized exploitation of birthright citizenship. Supreme Court is going to be hearing this case this spring. This is the idea that if you happen to be in the United States, give birth to a child, that child becomes a US citizen because this is where they were born. Our federal government does not keep track of how many people have done this. We have no idea because when you're given a birth certificate, it does not say the nationality of the parents. But the Chinese government has looked at this, and they have come up with some astonishing numbers of how they themselves have exploited this. The Chinese government and some of the research firms in China estimate that over the last 13 In 18 years, 100,000 Chinese a year have been born in the United States, been granted citizenship, and then are returned back to China, where they are raised in CCP schools. They're often the children of the elite. If you do the math, John, you're looking at more than a million US citizens that right now are being raised in China. When they turn 18, they're going to be able to vote in our elections, donate to our political campaigns, take government jobs.

Let's remember the 2016 presidential election was settled by 80,000 votes. We can see the potential, the ability here for China to manipulate our politics is enormous.

Related to this, you use the term instant citizen. Can you unpack that term for us?

Yeah, this is birthright citizenship, and China has mastered the exploitation of this. They did this before in Hong Kong, about 20 years ago. The then-Hong Kong government stopped it because they realized what was going on. China sees this as a way of influencing infiltrating the United States by creating a large group of super citizens, as it were, that are Chinese nationals but have been granted US citizenship by being born here. It goes even beyond the so-called birth tourism when travel here to give birth to a child. Some CCP officials in China have started hiring surrogate mothers in the United States where they donate the sperm. The woman who they call a carrier is paid $50,000 to carry and give birth to the child. That child will be granted US citizenship because the birth mother is American and they're born on American soil. We have no idea how widespread this is, but let me just give you a couple of data points. Wall Street Journal had a piece a couple of weeks ago where they found one individual, one Chinese billionaire close to the CCP, has over 100 children born in the United States, US citizens using this technique.

We found in Southern California in our research that there in just Southern California, 107 Chinese-owned surrogacy companies that specialize in doing just this thing. This is a sophisticated war form of invasion or subversion. This is not organic, and that's what I mean by weaponized immigration.

In fact, it's so broad and complex. It's something out of a movie. It's actually hard to believe. I think a lot of people probably are shocked to discover the reality of what's happening here. We usually worry about countries like Russia influencing elections. You say Mexico should be on everyone's radar more. How so?

Yeah. Mexico views migrants that are in the United States as a strategic tool. That's the term that they use. They want to activate that base, and they do that through a variety of mechanisms. One is the vast network of consulats that they have in the United States. These are basically mini embassies, and it's enormous. I was shocked by this. The United Kingdom and China have six and seven consulats in the United States, respectively. Mexico has 53. As I point out in the book, I named them. These consular officials, they're involved in organizing a violent anti-ice protests and other actions on the street, but they're also meddling in our politics. We got the hold of a transcript of a 2024 meeting at the, of all places, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Consulate, where they brought together diplomats from Mexico, from the consulents in Los Angeles, Orlando, and everything in between. People flew in from Mexico City. There was another group that was at this meeting, and these were Democratic Party activists. The discussion was about how they had turned California from red to blue. They turned Arizona from red to blue, and they wanted to do the same thing on a national scale to stop Donald Trump from winning.

Whatever one's views are Trump, you can have those views, but you're not supposed to, as a diplomat of a foreign government, be involved in political campaigns. And that is exactly what they're doing.

Whereas you've detailed here, just a really remarkable web of influence from foreign countries, particularly south of the border that a lot of people have not actually paid enough attention to. Peter, thank you so much for joining us.

Always a pleasure, John. Thanks for having me.

That was Peter Schweitzer discussing his new book, The Invisible Coup. And this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

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