E-Paper
MAGA's big claim against Democrats to flip swing states, 'illegal voter importation'
A month after Trump said Democrats are trying to get illegal immigrants to vote in the November elections at the Sept 10 debate, MAGA's criticism continues.
“The Dems are doing deliberate voter importation to swing states & fast-tracking them to citizenship," Elon Musk joined MAGA in levelling a heavy accusation against the Democratic Party on Thursday, October 3.
Labelling the “voter importation scam” “diabolically smart," the SpaceX boss weighed in that this supposed plan to get enough migrants to “flip all swing states” and shift the “whole country to permanent one-party rule” is the “true threat to democracy, not Trump.”
Musk’s weighty claims came in response to a study cited by MarketWatch in August 2024, which stated that while immigration continues to be a fore-running issue of contentious debates in the US, immigration-court data insisted that swing states, including Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona, have witnessed the greatest surge in “unauthorised migrants since 2021.”
Also read | Ivanka Trump goes philanthropic and joins Hurricane Helene disaster relief, makes SpaceX donations in North Carolina
What numbers are Elon Musk and MAGA referring to?
A July report from the Congressional Budget Office further foregrounded the impact of increasing immigration on state and local governments’ revenues and spending patterns. “The research literature has generally found that increases in immigration raise state and local governments’ spending—particularly on education, health care, and housing—more than their revenues,” an extract said.
“That’s why I keep saying that, unless Trump wins and reverses this scam, 2024 is the last election in America,” Musk again pushed his support for Trump into focus.
The quoted study shows the staggering growth in numbers related to illegal immigrant populations across the seven swing states since 2021: 401% in Georgia, 446% in North Carolina, 241% in Pennsylvania, 734% in Arizona, 562% in Nevada, 775% in Michigan and 467% in Wisconsin.
Republicans' criticism of Democrats over the immigration debate
These remarks come at a time when the Republicans are endlessly dropping verbal fire on the Biden-Harris administration over the immigration rhetoric and even gone as far as calling the sitting vice president a “failed border czar.”
Harris, who was tasked to root out the causes of surging illegal border crossings since 2021, has especially been under Republican fire as record-high several million migrants have been taken into custody for illegally crossing the US-Mexico border during Biden’s term, per government data as reported by Reuters.
Also read | Elon Musk bragged about ‘good friend’ Diddy and their private ‘texts’ after X investment
However, Alan Bersin, who took on the label of a special representative for border affairs under Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, previously asserted that Harris wasn’t handed the immigration portfolio. “This was not the job assigned to VP Harris,” he said as Biden tasked her with a job similar to the one he had during his former vice presidential stint. Reuters wrote that Biden asked her to lead “diplomatic efforts to reduce poverty, violence and corruption in Central America's Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as engage with Mexico on the issue.”
Trump accused Harris of the same thing during the presidential debate
Musk and Republicans’ allegations against the Democratic Party align with the “Great Replacement Theory,” which baselessly “states that welcoming immigration policies — particularly those impacting nonwhite immigrants — are part of a plot designed to undermine or “replace” the political power and culture of white people living in Western countries.”
Several US outlets also fact-check similar criticism voiced by Trump during the September 10 presidential debate as he said, “A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, [Democrats] are trying to get them to vote.”
It’s illegal for noncitizens to register or vote in all state and federal elections. However, as NBC News noted, Washington DC and some municipalities in California, Maryland and Vermont allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. Moreover, these claims also point to the False scale as there is no hard evidence of an effort plotting to register undocumented immigrants to vote illegally.
