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GONZALES, Calif. It looks like a century-old picture of farming in California: a few dozen Mexican men on their knees, plucking radishes from the ground, tying them into bundles. But the crews on Sabor Farms radish patch, about a mile south of the Salinas River, represent the cutting edge of change, a revolution in how America pulls food from the land.

For starters, the young men on their knees are working alongside technology unseen even 10 years ago. Crouched behind what looks like a tractor retrofitted with a packing plant, they place bunches of radishes on a conveyor belt within arms reach, which carries them through a cold wash and delivers them to be packed into crates and delivered for distribution in a refrigerated truck.

The other change is more subtle, but no less revolutionary. None of the workers are in the United States illegally.

Both of these transformations are driven by the same dynamic: the decline in the supply of young illegal immigrants from Mexico, the backbone of the work force picking Californias crops since the 1960s.

The new demographic reality has sent farmers scrambling to bring in more highly paid foreign workers on temporary guest-worker visas, experiment with automation wherever they can and even replace crops with less labor-intensive alternatives.

Back in the day, you had people galore, said Vanessa Quinlan, director of human resources at Sabor Farms. These days, not so much: Some 90 percent of Sabors harvest workers come from Mexico on temporary visas, said Jess Quinlan, the farms president and Ms. Quinlans husband. We needed to make sure we had bodies available when the crop is ready, he said.

For all the anxiety over the latest surge in immigration, Mexicans who constitute most of the unauthorized immigrants in the United States and most of the farmworkers in California are not coming in the numbers they once did.

There are a variety of reasons: The aging of Mexicos population slimmed the cohort of potential migrants. Mexicos relative stability after the financial crises of the 1980s and 1990s reduced the pressures for them to leave, while the collapse of the housing bubble in the United States slashed demand for their work north of the border. Stricter border enforcement by the United States, notably during the Trump administration, has further dented the flow.

The Mexican migration wave to the United States has now crested, the economists Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh wrote.

As a consequence, the total population of unauthorized immigrants in the United States peaked in 2007 and has declined slightly since then. California felt it first. From 2010 to 2018, the unauthorized immigrant population in the state declined by some 10 percent, to 2.6 million. And the dwindling flow sharply reduced the supply of young workers to till fields and harvest crops on the cheap.

The state reports that from 2010 to 2020, the average number of workers on California farms declined to 150,000 from 170,000. The number of undocumented immigrant workers declined even faster. The Labor Departments most recent National Agricultural Workers Survey reports that in 2017 and 2018, unauthorized immigrants accounted for only 36 percent of crop workers hired by California farms. That was down from 66 percent, according to the surveys performed 10 years earlier.

The immigrant work force has also aged. In 2017 and 2018, the average crop worker hired locally on a California farm was 43, according to the survey, eight years older than in the surveys performed from 2007 to 2009. The share of workers under the age of 25 dropped to 7 percent from a quarter.

Desperate to find an alternative, farms turned to a tool they had largely shunned for years: the H-2A visa, which allows them to import workers for a few months of the year.

The visa was created during the immigration reform of 1986 as a concession to farmers who complained that the legalization of millions of unauthorized immigrants would deprive them of their labor force, as newly legalized workers would seek better jobs outside agriculture.

But farmers found the H-2A process too expensive. Under the rules, they had to provide H-2A workers with housing, transportation to the fields and even meals. And they had to pay them the so-called adverse effect wage rate, calculated by the Agriculture Department to ensure they didnt undercut the wages of domestic workers.

May 27, 2022, 3:14 p.m. ET

It remained cheaper and easier for farmers to hire the younger immigrants who kept on coming illegally across the border. (Employers must demand documents proving workers eligibility to work, but these are fairly easy to fake.)

That is no longer the case. There are some 35,000 workers on H-2A visas across California, 14 times as many as in 2007. During the harvest they crowd the low-end motels dotting Californias farm towns. A 1,200-bed housing facility exclusive to H-2A workers just opened in Salinas. In King City, some 50 miles south, a former tomato processing shed was retrofitted to house them.

In the United States we have an aging and settled illegal work force, said Philip Martin, an expert on farm labor and migration at the University of California, Davis. The fresh blood are the H-2As.

Immigrant guest workers are unlikely to fill the labor hole on Americas farms, though. For starters, they are costlier than the largely unauthorized workers they are replacing. The adverse effect wage rate in California this year is $17.51, well above the $15 minimum wage that farmers must pay workers hired locally.

So farmers are also looking elsewhere. We are living on borrowed time, said Dave Puglia, president and chief executive of Western Growers, the lobby group for farmers in the West. I want half the produce harvest mechanized in 10 years. Theres no other solution.

Produce that is hardy or doesnt need to look pretty is largely harvested mechanically already, from processed tomatoes and wine grapes to mixed salad greens and tree nuts. Sabor Farms has been using machines to harvest salad mix for decades.

Processed food is mostly automated, said Walt Duflock, who runs Western Growers Center for Innovation and Technology in Salinas, a point for tech entrepreneurs to meet farmers. Now the effort is on the fresh side.

Apples are being grown on trellises for easy harvesting. Scientists have developed genetically modified high rise broccoli with long stems to be harvested mechanically. Pruning and trimming of trees and vines is increasingly automated. Lasers have been brought into fields for weeding. Biodegradable plant tape packed with seeds and nutrients can now be germinated in nurseries and transplanted with enormous machines that just unspool the tape into the field.

A few rows down from the crew harvesting radish bunches at Sabor Farms patch, the Quinlans are running a fancy automatic radish harvester they bought from the Netherlands. Operated by three workers, it plucks individual radishes from the ground and spews them into crates in a truck driving by its side.

And yet automation has limits. Harvesting produce that cant be bruised or butchered by a robot remains a challenge. A survey by the Western Growers Center for Innovation and Technology found that about two-thirds of growers of specialty crops like fresh fruits, vegetables and nuts have invested in automation over the last three years. Still, they expect that only about 20 percent of the lettuce, apple and broccoli harvest and none of the strawberry harvest will be automated by 2025.

Some crops are unlikely to survive. Acreage devoted to crops like bell peppers, broccoli and fresh tomatoes is declining. And foreign suppliers are picking up much of the slack. Fresh and frozen fruit and vegetable imports almost doubled over the last five years, to $31 billion in 2021.

Consider asparagus, a particularly labor-intensive crop. Only 4,000 acres of it were harvested across the state in 2020, down from 37,000 two decades earlier. The state minimum wage of $15, added to the new requirement to pay overtime after 40 hours a week, is squeezing it further after growers in the Mexican state of Sinaloa where workers make some $330 a month increased the asparagus acreage almost threefold over 15 years, to 47,000 acres in 2020.

H-2A workers wont help fend off the cheaper Mexican asparagus. They are even more expensive than local workers, about half of whom are immigrants from earlier waves that gained legal status; about a third are undocumented. And capital is not rushing in to automate the crop.

There are no unicorns there, said Neill Callis, who manages the asparagus packing shed at the Turlock Fruit Company, which grows some 300 acres of asparagus in the San Joaquin Valley east of Salinas. You cant seduce a V.C. with the opportunity to solve a $2-per-carton problem for 50 million cartons, he said.

While Turlock has automated where it can, introducing a German machine to sort, trim and bunch spears in the packing shed, the harvest is still done by hand hunched workers walk up the rows stabbing at the spears with an 18-inch-long knife.

These days, Mr. Callis said, Turlock is hanging on to the asparagus crop mainly to ensure its labor supply. Providing jobs during the asparagus harvest from February to May helps the farm hang on to its regular workers 240 in the field and about 180 in the shed it co-owns with another farm for the critical summer harvest of 3,500 acres of melons.

Losing its source of cheap illegal immigrant workers will change California. Other employers heavily reliant on cheap labor like builders, landscapers, restaurants and hotels will have to adjust.

Paradoxically, the changes raking across Californias fields seem to threaten the undocumented local work force farmers once relied on. Ancelmo Zamudio from Chilapa, in Mexicos state of Guerrero, and Jos Luis Hernndez from Ejutla in Oaxaca crossed into the United States when they were barely in their teens, over 15 years ago. Now they live in Stockton, working mostly on the vineyards in Lodi and Napa.

They were building a life in the United States. They brought their wives with them; had children; hoped that they might be able to legalize their status somehow, perhaps through another shot at immigration reform like the one of 1986.

Things to them look decidedly cloudier. We used to prune the leaves on the vine with our hands, but they brought in the robots last year, Mr. Zamudio complained. They said it was because there were no people.

Mr. Hernndez grumbles about H-2A workers, who earn more even if they have less experience, and dont have to pay rent or support a family. He worries about rising rents pushed higher by new arrivals from the Bay Area. The rule compelling farmers to pay overtime after 40 hours of work per week is costing him money, he complains, because farmers slashed overtime and cut his workweek from six days to five.

He worries about the future. It scares me that they are coming with H-2As and also with robots, he said. Thats going to take us down.

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Illegal Immigration Is Down, Changing the Face of California Farms - The New York Times

Farmworkers near Fresno, Calif., pick paper trays of dried raisins off the ground and heap them onto a trailer in the final step of raisin harvest on Sept. 24, 2013. Gosia Wozniacka/AP hide caption

Farmworkers near Fresno, Calif., pick paper trays of dried raisins off the ground and heap them onto a trailer in the final step of raisin harvest on Sept. 24, 2013.

Federal reforms for farmworkers are in the works following a blockbuster human trafficking case out of Georgia late last year. That case highlighted loopholes for abuse in the federal visa program that provides workers to farms and meat processing plants.

In a letter sent to Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the department is preparing to take the first step toward creating a rule reforming the H-2A and H-2B nonimmigrant worker visas.

The letter comes alongside others sent to Ossoff throughout May from the Labor and State Departments in response to his questions about steps the federal government is taking to protect farm and food system workers.

Ossoff wrote to the agencies in March following the indictment of two dozen defendants in a multi-year human trafficking case in Georgia that found the defendants allegedly defrauded the government of over 70,000 H-2A visas forcing hundreds of workers to illegally work on Georgia onion farms. The case reignited advocates' push for increased labor protections among America's essential farmworkers.

In the Georgia case, dubbed Operation Blooming Onion, the working conditions were described as "modern day slavery" as workers faced wage theft and physical abuse and were illegally transported; two died due to heat exposure. According to an indictment, 24 farm labor contractors and recruiters allegedly demanded workers pay illegal fees, held their identification documents hostage, required physically demanding work for little or no pay and housed workers "in crowded, unsanitary, and degrading living conditions." According to the indictment, workers were threatened with deportation and violence while the defendants profited $200 million.

"The commitment that I have received to engage in new rulemaking suggests that in response to my inquiry they are planning to undertake reforms to protect the human rights of migrant farmworkers in the United States," Ossoff told NPR in an interview, adding he still wants to see what specific rulemaking the agency plans to make.

Currently, farmers and ranchers are able to resource the H-2A visa program if they need workers to perform seasonal or temporary agricultural labor so long as they can prove that they were not able to hire a domestic worker, among other requirements. While H-2B visas are considered "nonagricultural," nurseries, meatpacking and seafood processing plants use them across the country.

The demand for agricultural workforce visas has been steadily on the rise as producers face continued labor shortages, even before the pandemic. Most recently, the Labor Department noted the number of H-2A visas has more than tripled since 2012.

Employees with these kinds of agriculture labor visas make up a small portion of the overall agriculture labor force, nearly half which is estimated to be made up of undocumented workers, according to the Labor Department. But abuses still occur even through the legal federal program aimed at providing labor.

Over 70 percent of DOL investigations find workplace violations, with 30 percent of investigations finding employers have committed five or more violations, according to a report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, which analyzed DOL data.

Though the case in Georgia is among the most extreme, since the start of the Biden administration, the DOL's Wage and Hour Division, one of the branches that investigates workplace abuses, has concluded 573 H-2A investigations, resulting in over $9 million in back wages for more than 10,000 workers. Additionally, the agency has assessed over $8.8 million in civil money penalties for H-2A violations, according to the DOL letter written to Ossoff by WHD Acting Administrator Jessica Looman.

According to Mayorkas in the letter, the proposed rulemaking process, which could still take years, would address some of the biggest issues brought to light in Operation Blooming Onion, such as workers being overcharged and issued illegal fees for visas and facing salary shortages.

In addition, Mayorkas said the department is looking for ways to improve oversight of the H-2A program and improve workers' participation in investigations. The move is also in line with President Joe Biden's campaign promises to strengthen protections for farmworkers, while waiting on Congress to move forward with immigration reform.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Continue reading here:
DHS tells Sen. Jon Ossoff it will reform the agricultural visa program. - NPR

After each of the repeated mass shootings that now provide a tragic backbeat to American life, the same doomed dance of legislation quickly begins. As the outraged demands for action are inevitably derailed in Congress, disappointed gun-control advocates, and perplexed ordinary citizens, point their fingers at the influence of the National Rifle Association or the intransigent opposition of congressional Republicans. Those are both legitimate factors, but the stalemate over gun-control legislation since Bill Clintons first presidential term ultimately rests on a much deeper problem: the growing crisis of majority rule in American politics.

Polls are clear that while Americans dont believe gun control would solve all of the problems associated with gun violence, a commanding majority supports the central priorities of gun-control advocates, including universal background checks and an assault-weapons ban. Yet despite this overwhelming consensus, its highly unlikely that the massacre of at least 19 schoolchildren and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, yesterday, or President Joe Bidens emotional plea for action last night, will result in legislative action.

Thats because gun control is one of many issues in which majority opinion in the nation runs into the brick wall of a Senate rulethe filibusterthat provides a veto over national policy to a minority of the states, most of them small, largely rural, preponderantly white, and dominated by Republicans.

David Frum: Americas hands are full of blood

The disproportionate influence of small states has come to shape the competition for national power in America. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, something no party had done since the formation of the modern party system in 1828. Yet Republicans have controlled the White House after three of those elections instead of one, twice winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. The Senate imbalance has been even more striking. According to calculations by Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political-reform program at New America, a center-left think tank, Senate Republicans have represented a majority of the U.S. population for only two years since 1980, if you assign half of each states population to each of its senators. But largely because of its commanding hold on smaller states, the GOP has controlled the Senate majority for 22 of those 42 years.

The practical implications of these imbalances were dramatized by the last full-scale Senate debate over gun control. After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, the Senate in 2013 voted on a measure backed by President Barack Obama to impose background checks on all gun sales. Again assigning half of each states population to each of its senators, the 54 senators who supported the bill (plus thenSenate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who opposed it only for procedural reasons) represented 194 million Americans. The remaining senators who opposed the bill represented 118 million people. But because of the Senates filibuster rule, which requires the backing of 60 senators to move legislation to a vote, the 118 million prevailed.

The outcome likely would not differ today. Last year, the House passed legislation to expand and strengthen background checks. But it, too, has been blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

That impassable opposition reflects the GOPs reliance on the places and voters most deeply devoted to gun culture. Polling last year by the Pew Research Center found that the share of Republicans who live in a household with a gun (54 percent) far exceeds the share of Democrats who do (31 percent). (In all, Pew found that four in 10 adults live in a house with a gun and only three in 10 own one.) A 2020 Rand Corporation study found that the 20 states with the highest rates of gun ownership had elected almost two-thirds of the Senates Republican lawmakers (32 of 50) and comprised about two-thirds of the states that President Donald Trump carried in the 2020 election (17 of 25). In an almost mirror image, the 20 states with the lowest rates of gun ownership had elected almost two-thirds of the Senates Democratic lawmakers (also 32 of 50) and comprised about two-thirds of the states Biden won (16 of 25). The 20 states with the lowest rates of gun ownership have more than two and half times as many residents (about 192 million) as the states with the highest gun-ownership rates (about 69 million). But in the Senate, these two sets of states carry equal weight.

In their opposition to gun control, Republicans in Congress clearly are prioritizing the sentiments of gun owners in their party over any other perspective, even that of other Republican voters. The Pew polling found that significant majorities of Americans support background checks (81 percent), an assault-weapons ban (63 percent), and a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines (64 percent); a majority also opposes concealed carry of weapons without a permit. Majorities of Republicans who dont own guns shared those opinions, as did Democratic gun owners, by even more lopsided margins. Even most Republicans who do own guns said in the polling that they support background checks and oppose permitless concealed carry (which more red states, including Texas, are authorizing). Despite all of this, Republican elected officials, in their near-lockstep opposition to gun control, have bent to groups like the NRA in equating almost any restrictions as a sign of disrespect to the values of red America.

Even though the NRA has weakened institutionally, its influence inside the GOP has been magnified by the reconfiguration of American politics along geographic lines. When Congress, during Clintons first term, created the national background-check system through the Brady Bill and later approved a ban on assault weapons (which has since expired), significant numbers of congressional Democrats representing rural constituencies opposed the legislation, while significant numbers of Republicans with big suburban constituencies supported it. But three decades of electoral re-sorting has significantly shrunk both of those groups. As a result, when the House passed its universal-background-check bill in 2021, only eight Republicans voted for it, while just a single Democrat voted against it.

Clint Smith: No parent should have to live like this

The Senates small-state bias is impeding legislative action on other issues on which Americans broadly agree, including climate change, abortion, and immigration. As with gun control, polls consistently show that a majority of Americans support acting on climate change, oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, and back comprehensive immigration reform, including offering legal status to undocumented immigrants (especially young people brought into the country by their parents). The House has passed legislation reflecting each of those perspectives. The Senates inaction on these issues again reflects the outsize influence of those states with the highest gun-ownership rateswhich also tend to be those enmeshed in the fossil-fuel economy, with high shares of culturally conservative white Christians and low shares of immigrants.

If there is any hope for congressional action on gun control in the aftermath of the Uvalde tragedyor another mass shooting in the futureit almost certainly will require reform or elimination of the filibuster. Otherwise, the basic rules of American politics will continue to allow Republicans to impose their priorities even when a clear majority of Americans disagree. The hard truth is that theres no way to confront Americas accelerating epidemic of gun violence without first addressing its systemic erosion of majority rule.

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The Real Reason America Doesn't Have Gun Control - The Atlantic

Our fact-check on President Joe Bidens claim about mass shooting deaths rising after the assault weapon ban expired in 2004 sparked a generally well-informed debate from a variety of viewpoints, particularly on reddit.

After a draft Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade leaked, our explanation of the legislative options drew a couple of comments about the power of the Supreme Court.

We also heard from you about the Republican charge that Democrats seek an open border with Mexico. And, we read some broader reflections about the number of outlandish Facebook claims that we take the time to check.

On that last point, well just note that we check claims that are getting a fair bit of traffic. So, maybe some people skip right over these posts, but other people are definitely reading them.

Biden on the assault weapon ban of 1994

The claim: "When we passed the assault weapons ban, mass shootings went down. When the law expired, mass shootings tripled." Mostly True

One person wrote, "If theres no strong evidence that a ban made a change in numbers of mass shootings, then whats the point? Correlation means nothing without strong evidence, so this entire article is just misleading. Im all for making new policies to prevent deaths and other mass shootings, but Id rather those policies be based on facts and empirical data and not unsubstantiated and misleading data."

Another added, "This is frustrating because 'Mostly True is about the fact stated by the quote, but most people are interpreting it as transitive to the implication of the quote. To wit, it is mostly true that expiration of the ban caused the rise in shootings. (And so we should bring back the ban to cause shootings to declinewhich also plays to our intuition: fewer guns = fewer mass shootings, right?) But even the fact check article clearly states that no studies have found a causal link between the ban and the fall in shootings. Theyve only found a correlation."

And a third person wrote, "I'm really curious what different metrics people are using for mass shooting events. Because this often sourced website says there were 4,600 mass shootings since 2013, while this report is only counting 500 events for the entire period from 1994-2013. That's a massive disparity, and I think any report should have these qualifications described front and center anytime we're comparing one report to another, since it could make a massive difference at how the data appears."

The leaked Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling

We published many stories and fact-checks about abortion and Roe v. Wade. A reader told us, "In your assessment of the proposed Supreme Court ruling, you neglected to point out that Congress is the law-creating body in this country, with the confirmation of the sitting president. It was never the purpose of the Supreme Court to create laws, therefore making Roe v. Wade not law at all. I would guess that 90% of the citizens are not aware of this important fact."

Another person wrote that our article, "Why Democrats control of the White House and Congress isn't enough to pass law protecting abortion," neglects another obstacle in codifying Roe: "Codified laws are subject to review by the Supreme Court, just as they review precedent. Democrats may pass a law that may be challenged, and the Supreme Court could rule it unconstitutional and strike it. The Supreme Court deserves its name."

Open borders

The claim: Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters said, "Democrats want open borders so they can bring in and amnesty tens of millions of illegal aliens thats their electoral strategy." False

A reader said, "Immigration reform proposals from Democrats often are a compromise of creating a pathway to citizenship where undocumented immigrants who are already here can get citizenship, but only after a decade or more of waiting to get a green card, and then close to another decade of waiting after that. I guess you could call that amnesty in a sense. But it's not open borders, and the proposals also often pair that amnesty with much tougher enforcement of undocumented immigration and the border."

On strange claims

We check all sorts of claims, and no question, some are way out there. Like COVID-19 is a synthetic version of "snake venom." Or, evil forces are spreading through remdesivir, the COVID-19 vaccines and drinking water to "make you a hybrid of Satan." And, "Breaking: Democrats introduce bill to put Americans in quarantine camps."

We suspect that claims like these were on this readers mind when he said, "I've noticed that many, many statements you are now fact-checking are so bizarrely improbable they read more like The Onion. It is a sad state of affairs when you are having to fact-check stuff even more ridiculous than an alien weed-whacker abducted my front lawn. Are people really so credulous now?"

And more in a policy vein, this reader complained, "I supported PolitiFact for a while, during the absurd statements of the last few years. But, it appears mostly focused on fact-checking the most absurd extreme positions and statements. Most outstanding government social issues are complex and the details matter. Not just a buzzword or slogan that is right or wrong. I would be very supportive of a site that offers complex highlights of complex government or social issues."

Here is the original post:
Mailbag: The Uvalde shooting and gun control, Roe v. Wade, open borders, and more - PolitiFact

In Buffalo, New York, last week, a lone gunman brutally murdered ten people and injured three more in one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history.

The shooter appears to have put out a large manifesto as a twisted justification for the killings. His abhorrent ramblings concluded that there was a replacement of white Americans by people of color, and that it must be stopped. This racist ideology led him to choose Buffalo, a town comprised of mostly black Americans.

Some drew comparisons of his racist justification to the fear of many Americans that they will be replaced by immigrants. According to one poll, one in three Americans believes an effort is underway to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains. While there are differences between this concern and the Great Replacement theory, they do share some frightening similarities.

Although we wont dig into the politics too much, we will show why the Great Replacement theory is dangerous.

Immigrants are often morally conservative, even though they strongly tend to vote for Democrats. For instance, in 2019, 53 percent of Hispanic immigrants reported themselves as Democrats or leaning that way; 39 percent said Republican or leaning that way.

Some analysts say their Democratic leanings are because they dont feel welcomed by the Republican party. Others say its because immigrants normally come from socialist countries and Democrats will give them more government support. Still others say its because Democrats are lenient on immigration.

One of the biggest political conundrums is a chicken before the egg question. Do immigrants vote for Democrats because of their immigration policies? Or, do Democrats open up the borders because they know immigrants will vote for them?

The latter interpretation has been picked up by many controversial pundits. Some raise concerns to goad Republicans to vote to keep America from changing its demographics and giving more power to the Democrats. (Its hard to see, personally, why this strategy is favored over simply trying to win immigrants over to the conservative side.)

As far as legal immigrants, there was a ratio of 5.8 native-born babies to 1 new American from naturalization in 2020. Additionally, illegal immigrants dont illegally vote in detectable numbers.

That said, there are plenty of reasonable conservative arguments for more strictly enforcing current immigration laws and there are also arguments for and against making immigration easier. These conservative political beliefs are not necessarily the same as replacement theory.

But, there are other sinister ways this outlook on immigration can easily be twisted.

The Great Replacement theory is one put forward by a right-wing French thinker named Renaud Camus. The ideology was touted by the New Zealand gunman who killed over fifty people. On the surface, Camus rejects violence but uses strong language condemning nonwhite immigration.

The theory has been widely condemned as racist, xenophobic (bigotedly fearful of other cultures), and unfactual. I have discussed the idea that Europe is becoming more Muslim, but I pointed out that a Muslim majority is not a sure conclusion and that the vast majority of Muslims are assimilating, with entirely peaceful intentions. The philosophy of the Great Replacement is baseless and fearmongering, and most everyone (conservatives included) rejects it.

However, a similar conservative talking point is that the government is allowing immigrants in to replace native-born Americans for electoral gain. In America, the view that somebody is purposefully flooding the US with immigrants to take away your influence can be twisted to mean white people are being replaced by people of color. Christians must outright reject racist notions which would call anyone lesser for their skin color or ethnicity.

As Christians, we must be extremely careful that worldly philosophies like these dont creep into our thinking. Dr. Jim Denison dismantled the QAnon conspiracy theories, though they are still propagated to this day. Sadly, people prone to believing conspiracy theories are also prone to believing the Great Replacement theory.

If we say I cant believe these people from such-and-such a place are coming in! I barely even recognize this country anymore. It used to be a Christian nation, then we are dangerously close to Christian Nationalism and a whole host of other unbiblical ideas.

Indeed, if there are racial undertones in your political worries, it also becomes racial prejudice, an evil sin that God hates.

As Christians, we should be asking: Is this political idea making me less loving toward immigrants or another ethnicity? Is my political leaning making me fear immigrants first before I move to love them?

If so, we should take a long, careful look at whats really driving our thoughts, because those ideas are antithetical to Gods word.

This can be unnecessarily confusing, and at worst, intentionally misleading to conflate the conservative positions on immigration with this more sinister replacement theory. Both the left and right are guilty of confusing this phrase. Many media outlets accuse Republicans of using replacement language to talk about immigrants, while Republicans deny that its the same as the Great Replacement and that it has no racial undertones.

Even as we debate the issue of immigration, we must strive for clarity and truth. We should be wary of those who use replacement language, and we should also be wary of those who say more restrictive immigration is automatically the same as the Great Replacement theory.

Many characterize immigrants as a burden on society. In general, this could not be further from the truth. Economically, immigrants lead to billions of dollars in growth as a labor force, especially because of their unskilled labor.

Regardless of whether they are useful to our society, as Christians we should recognize immigrants (sojourners) as part of the least of these the Bible exhorts us to love (Matthew 25:40, Zechariah 7:910). If your church is close to where refugees are being resettled or immigrants are moving, we encourage you to get involved in serving them.

As Christians, we must make sure to tear down any prejudiced feelings about such people made in Gods image.

And, the good news is that around two-thirds of Americans believe that diversity makes the US stronger.

Our political allegiance on these issues should always be secondary to and informed by our primary one: loving our neighbor and caring for the immigrant.

For those on the left, take care that you are not only relying on the government to help others. The governments activity or inactivity doesnt prevent you from helping those in need. In fact, the mandate to love our immigrant neighbors applies to you as equally as it does to conservatives.

For those on the right, take care not to let inflamed rhetoric of them and they and the deplorables cloud compassion or hide an immigrants humanity. And do not let unfounded fear take hold so that youre led to prejudice.

The forty-third President of the US, George W. Bush, was a Republican and conservative. He led the country through 9/11 and the Great Recession. And, contrary to popular expectations, he tried to pass a great deal of immigration reform. These reforms were a middle ground that did not allow amnesty but also did not require mass deportations, etc. His desire was to see America stronger through a large, diverse immigrant population.

Its clear that his heart for immigrants remains. In a beautiful work that unites across the aisle, Out of Many, One: Portraits of Americas Immigrants, tells the stories of forty-three American immigrants he personally knew, loved, and respected. For each, Bush created an oil-paint portrait and includes it along with their story.

He writes, At its core, immigration is a sign of a confident and successful nation. . . . We must always be proud to welcome people as fellow Americans. Our new immigrants are just what theyve always been people willing to risk everything for the dream of freedom.

Former President George W. Bushs outspoken faith, love of immigrants, and art give a beautiful example of how American Christians can respond to immigration (even if they hold conservative beliefs).

The Great Replacement is a theory deeply rooted in fear and prejudice that has no place in Gods kingdom. And while there is room for disagreement on immigration law, Gods law on how we are to value those made in his image is beyond debate.

Lets learn to have healthy conversations about how to best love immigrants, both through politics and through our ministry.

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Why the Great Replacement theory is dangerous - Denison Forum