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posted: September 23, 2026
tl;dr: The motivations are debatable but there’s no doubt that immigration has changed radically from what it once was...
Peter Schweizer, much to his credit as an investigative reporter, digs deep to surface facts and figures that one does not often find in mainstream media. In The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon he tackles the topic of immigration, a contentious topic in today’s political environment. Besides documenting the flows of immigrants and the numbers, Schweizer attempts to explain the motivations of both the foreigners and the U.S. politicians who support this flow of immigrants.
Certainly there is plenty of rhetoric, both spoken and written, from foreign politicians and radicals in the United States, which describes an intent to do some type of conquest of the United States. One such example is the concept of “reconquista”: a return of the land lost in 1848 to Mexican jurisdiction without firing a single shot. Schweizer provides plenty of quotes and sources. However, one can always find bombastic statements in fringe, radical publications with low circulation. It means more when major politicians state these views, and often they are mum or coy in their statements. Why are so many Chinese Communist Party officials and other Chinese businessmen having children in the United States, so that the children gain birthright U.S. citizenship? The motivations are debatable. What is not debatable is that it is happening. Schweizer describes the mechanisms and provides numbers.
Birthright citizenship is a prime example of a constitutional concept that made sense when the language was approved (the 14th Amendment in 1868) but which now has been eclipsed by technology. In the mid-1800s travel was difficult, and international travel was even more arduous. One of the intended beneficiaries of the 14th Amendment was the children of Chinese laborers who came to the United States and had no intentions of returning. But today, with airplane travel, the pregnant wife of a Chinese businessman can book a luxury trip to California, give birth, and return home with the child, who now has all the privileges of U.S. citizenship. Schweizer documents companies that specialize in making these arrangements. Or the Chinese official can use a birth surrogate in the United States. It’s crazy and needs to be changed; Rand Paul is one U.S. politician who is trying.
Fidel Castro’s Mariel boatlift in 1980, in which many criminals and mentally ill people were exported from Cuba to the United States, showed how U.S. immigration policy could be weaponized against the country. Schweizer argues that this provided a model which other countries and leaders are using to this day. Furthermore, it is supported by many U.S. politicians on the left, who see the immigrants as a means for gaining power and the money that goes with it. It’s not just a matter of getting these immigrants on the voting rolls. Merely having them in the country when the census is taken will increase the number of people in certain left-leaning Congressional districts, which increases representation in Congress.
It’s one thing to import immigrants who come to this country, assimilate, work hard, and contribute economically to the country. It’s something else entirely to import immigrants who don’t assimilate, draw government benefits, and become a burden on the people already here. Unfortunately, some of our politicians are openly bragging about the benefits they provide to illegal immigrants, such as California governor Gavin Newsom, who gave free healthcare to illegal immigrants in the state. As Milton Friedman has argued, you cannot have open borders in a welfare state.
It’s very different from when I was a kid. I grew up in upstate New York, and our family was close to a couple of Italian-American families. I got introduced to the local Italian-American Club, a completely voluntary organization which, among other tasks, would help Italian immigrants assimilate into the United States and provide support. The club, and its local network of Italian-American families, would find jobs for recent immigrants, perhaps washing dishes in an Italian restaurant. They’d help immigrants learn the language and the culture. Thus you’d end up with success stories like Yankee baseball great Joe DiMaggio, the son of Italian immigrants to California, who went on to marry American movie icon Marilyn Monroe. This is how immigration should work, but as Peter Schweizer documents in The Invisible Coup, this is not how it works today.