“We love immigrants but only if we can weaponize them against our enemies — especially Russia and China!”

I was going through some of my immigration notes when I stumbled on a tweet I saved a few years back that I think perfectly encapsulates our ruling elite’s imperialistic way of thinking about immigrants and immigration — a mindset that can be inverted from “pro-immigration” to “anti-immigration” and yet magically remain the same.

The tweet belongs to one of America’s brightest: Michael McFaul. Barack Obama appointed him as ambassador to Russia back in the day — a position in which he was a total failure. And he has since failed up to become America’s leading liberal intellectual on all things related to Democracy and the Russian Threat.

He typed the tweet out in November 2018 in response to one of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant outbursts that was roiling the news cycle at the time. As you can see, McFaul thinks he’s being progressive and tolerant and supportive of immigrants. He thinks he’s being the polar opposite of Trump — that he’s standing up to Trump’s bigotry and xenophobia. And yet he’s voicing a liberal inversion of the same kind of America First thinking.