America’s Dumbest Smart Guy Is Still Spreading Debunked Garbage

Elon Musk is completely obsessed with illegal immigration—something that’s not exactly a surprise, given the fact that he’s both a Republican and one of the wealthiest people in the country. But you’d think he could stop spreading debunked conspiracy theories about President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, if only so that he didn’t look like a complete idiot.

“Bet you didn’t know that this administration is flying hundreds of thousands of illegals into America using your tax dollars…” Musk tweeted in the early morning hours of Friday.

Musk was quote-tweeting America First Legal, Stephen Miller’s extremist anti-immigration group, which wrote, “On January 5, 2023, President Biden and DHS Secretary Antonio [sic] Mayorkas announced the creation of the unprecedented new program to allow 30,000 aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to fly into the country EVERY MONTH.”

The problem with Musk’s tweet is that it’s wrong in just about every respect. Yes, the U.S. government instituted a program that allows people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter the country. But it’s far from unprecedented. The program is modeled after the exact same thing that allowed Ukrainian refugees to come to the U.S. after the country was first invaded by Russia in early 2022. But that’s far from the biggest lie in Musk’s tweet.

As PBS recently explained:

Musk’s characterization of these people as “illegals” is just factually incorrect on its face. There’s nothing illegal about what’s happening. These migrants are being admitted at the explicit direction of the U.S. government, making them very much legal refugees, in contrast to whatever immigration visa shenanigans Musk was engaging in during the 1990s. They’re being admitted on a two-year “parole” program, wording that sometimes confuses people because Americans associate parole with prison release programs. These people don’t have a path to citizenship under the parole program, as the Associated Press explained in a recent fact-check of the viral claims being made.

But perhaps the most egregious lie in Musk’s tweet is that these people are flying in on the American taxpayers’ dime. It’s simply not true, as several news articles have pointed out in the past month. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told Voice of America recently that everyone in the program, “must buy a plane ticket to fly into the United States on a commercial airline,” adding that they’re all given background check screenings before they arrive and are inspected when they land in the U.S.

Again, this has been documented in countless articles at this point, from CNN to PBS to U.S. News and World Report.

As the AP put it last month, emphasis ours:

Even a researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies, the anti-immigration think tank that first took major issue with the program, doesn’t believe the Biden administration’s efforts count as secretive, instead telling the AP last month it was “enigmatic” and didn’t have enough transparency.

It’s possible to have an intellectually honest debate about U.S. immigration policy, but Musk clearly has no interest in that kind of conversation. The Biden administration started this program for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela because it wanted to provide a more orderly way for people to come into the country, given the influx of crossings at the border in the past year.

Again, reasonable people can disagree about the ins and outs of U.S. immigration policy. But if guys like Musk are going to continue spreading debunked nonsense, we can’t have an honest conversation about the issue, whatever your politics. It seems pretty clear at this point that an honest conversation isn’t in the cards when Musk is talking about immigration.

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