Following a U.S. Senate hearing this week on birthright citizenship, U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt R-Mo and Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, joined a Heritage Foundation webinar panel Wednesday to discuss immigration issues.
“Things are different in part because of what foreign actors are doing; they are weaponizing immigration and using it as a tool to undermine American sovereignty and to advance their own political interests inside the United States,” Schweizer said. “We need to stop thinking of immigration as just an organic economic process driven by push‑and‑pull factors and recognize there are political and strategic implications behind what’s happening.”
Schmitt and Schweizer shared concerns from the Senate hearing regarding birthright citizenship and birth tourism and whether the Constitution grants babies born to noncitizens in the U.S. are guaranteed citizenship.
“It certainly didn’t mean that you could come here from communist China for a week, have a child, have that child go back to China, and then when the child is 18, come to this country, be a citizen and vote in our elections,” Schmitt said. “This issue of citizenship is front and center now.”
Both Schmitt and Schweizer criticized the Democratic party for using immigration as a tool to obtain control.
“If you look at where the Democratic Party is, they absolutely need … as many new citizens as possible every year, and the way that they achieve that is by really ignoring the requirements,” Schweizer said. “They just simply cast aside the criminal background checks because they wanted to get new voters because they calculated in the 1990s that new citizens, at least the first few years, vote 85% for Democrats.”
“They’ve lost the case with the American people, with American citizens. They’re trying to import people. They think they can hold on to power,” Schmitt said. “Democrats want to flood the ballots and have ballot harvesting reparations and drop boxes.”
Schmitt also accused the Democratic party of caring more about not deporting illegal immigrants than protecting American citizens.
“The Democrats look for every opening. It’s why they want the confrontations. It’s why they train people to get in the face and have a camera,” Schmitt said. “They try to disorient our law enforcement. They try to put them in difficult situations, so they get something they can run with to say, ‘see, this thing is – we can’t do this anymore."”
“We also have to understand and recognize the fact that these foreign adversaries have political networks that operate inside the United States, and so we need to go about dismantling those political networks as well,” Schweizer said.
In hopes of combatting some of the immigration concerns, Schmitt said he filed legislation to denaturalize and deport naturalized citizens who commit fraud and violence against American citizens.
“Because there ought to be a consequence,” Schmitt said. “This debate we’re having about immigration policy and enforcement goes to the heart of what it means to be a sovereign country.”
