Almost since the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, critics of American immigration policy have been suspicious of the political advantage the Democratic Party was taking of this crucial piece of legislation.  Though Congress’s motive in passing the bill was, in political terms, more symbolic than partisan and tactical, the replacement of more or less well-off European immigrants with poor ones from non-Western societies in practice held obvious electoral benefits for the self-proclaimed friends of the poor, the huddled, etc., to the detriment of the well-off, established, comfortable, and native (etc., etc.), prompting restrictionists to recall Bertolt Brecht’s line about a government electing its own people.  This charge was met by countercharges of racism and demagoguery, as the Democrats continued to make political hay from the arrival of scores of millions of Third World immigrants while attempting to keep an innocent face in the matter.

Now that mask has slipped—or rather, it has been boldly removed by the Obama administration in one of its most recent acts of late-term political defiance.

An article posted in late March on The Daily Caller asserts that the White House is directing federal funds toward a number of nonprofit groups working together to encourage holders of green cards to apply for U.S. citizenship in time to vote in the national elections this fall.  The stated aim is the political destruction of the “hateful” Donald Trump, but this is mainly a p.c. dodge.  The ultimate purpose, as Raul Hernandez, the director of Catholic Legal Services in Miami, has expressed it, is far more comprehensive.  It is meant, says Fernandez, as “a game changer”: “It’s going to be a totally different political situation—folks with a very different view of what a citizen is, raising their voice, saying, ‘I’m here and I want to have a say in the future of the nation.’”

As Chuck Ross reports for The Daily Caller, the White House initiative, Networks for Integrating New Americans, dates from 2014 and works with the National Partnership for New Americans, which cooperated in the effort to disrupt Trump’s planned rally in Chicago in March.  The administration has also funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars through the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to anti-Trump groups pressing for new citizens, despite (as Ross notes) the obvious objection that the use of federal funds to oppose particular candidates is of dubious legality.

Ross indicates that the administration and the various domestic activist groups are being substantially aided in their efforts by foreign agencies, including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Mexican government, which is working through its consulates in American cities to create new citizens from among Mexicans legally present in the United States and urge them to register as voters before the fall.  What restrictionists have always suspected to be a domestic plot to import and create voters from abroad therefore turns out to be a foreign one as well.