It is never surprising to see George Soros backing the leftist cause du jour, and in recent years, it has become typical for Soros-backed organizations to launch fake “conservative” groups and propaganda campaigns to push for such causes.
Breitbart reports a new instance of this practice: an online ad campaign proclaiming “America is Better as a Nation of Immigrants.” The ad campaign’s focus is on admission of the Syrian refugees, whom the U.S. House of Representatives wants more thorough vetting of — especially since the director of the FBI briefed Congress that there’s no way to fully screen all of the refugee applicants.
The Americaisbetter.org website traces, through its own links, to the Soros-funded National Immigration Forum (about which more below). The website admonishes readers as follows:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Our security concerns are real, but a response based on fear alone is not worthy of our values. Today, President Reagan’s vision of America as a “shining city on a hill” is more important than ever. Now, more than ever, politicians and civic leaders need to be their better selves and remember that with freedom, not fear, America is Better.
From a faith perspective, we must not blame victims who are fleeing the evil from which we also seek to protect ourselves. We are called to love our neighbor as ourselves, not slam the door in his face.
It goes on to cite the assessment of “security experts”:
But as security experts have pointed out, “Refugees are subjected to the highest and most intensive security review of any population coming to the U.S. No group goes through greater scrutiny and vetting than refugees. A litany of recurrent checks continue throughout the process, which takes 18 to 24 months to complete. None of these security steps may be waived.”
But Breitbart’s Christopher C. Hull sheds a little more light on the one security expert quoted at the link:
The quote in fact comes from John Sandweg, Former Acting Director, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a former criminal defense attorney “whose appointment to the post raised eyebrows because of his scant law enforcement experience,” and who resigned after just five months on the job.
Hull has more on Sandweg’s lack of credentials. The allusions to Reagan, meanwhile — prominent at the America is Better site — are exact parallels to the allusions made in an ad purchased by the NIF to run during the Republican debate on CNN in September. That ad’s focus was on illegal immigration. It cherry picked from Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” speech to create a contrast between a kindly, emotionally reassuring Reagan and mean-spirited GOP candidates Trump, Walker, and Cruz. (Walker has since dropped out of the race.)
That September ad’s theme: “Better.” NIF seems to have only so many themes up its sleeve.
But it has tried the fake-conservative theme-mongering before. In 2013, NIF launched fake-conservative front organizations to push for amnesty in the form of the “Gang of Eight” bill. One was called Bibles, Badges, and Business (Breitbart again):
During the battle to pass the Gang of Eight bill in the summer of 2013, Soros used Bibles, Badges, and Business as a front to create the impression that Christians, cops, and business owners supported mass amnesty and hugely increased levels of immigration. That drew harsh criticism from the Center of Immigration Studies, which called them the “false prophets of Baal.”
The other was dubbed the Evangelical Immigration Table, and purported to represent evangelical Christians. The idea was apparently to dupe evangelicals into thinking that the leaders of their faith group backed the Gang of Eight bill. A key problem, however, was that Soros and NIF couldn’t be bothered to actually incorporate an organization under the name Evangelical Immigration Table. EIT was a front for something that didn’t exist. It was the thinnest of fakeries.
Christopher Hull notes about the “America is Better” campaign that its signature image is a blond woman with an American flag, leading some vaguely ethnic-looking people depicted in soft focus behind her. His instinct probably resonates with many readers: this ad attempts to target “whites,” on a race-centric basis the ad-designers assume will appeal to them. (Which is insulting, if one wants to look for insults.)
This point, and the NIF history of mounting deceptive campaigns to appeal to conservative groups, mandate the question: why resort to so much insinuation and deception, to advocate for the left’s positions on immigration issues? Why all the coy disguises?
