A review of what Elon Musk’s hyperventilating immigration post got wrong

Elon Musk’s politics are not subtle. Since buying Twitter and reshaping it in his image, he has regularly posted or reposted commentary critical of immigration to the United States. Particularly since transitioning his tacit support for Donald Trump’s reelection into explicit support earlier this year, Musk’s riffs on immigration have leaned toward the apocalyptic.

Over the weekend, for example, Musk posted a lengthy explanation of why, in his view, Trump’s failure to win in November would mean that 2024 would “be the last election” in the United States. In short, because of immigrants — and because of a narrative he presented that relied on a battery of misinformation and false claims.

It’s useful to walk through Musk’s assertions to demonstrate what he gets wrong.

He begins by rationalizing his claim that American democracy itself was at risk.

The source of his “1 in 20” claim appears to be the post included in his own message, asserting that 9 million immigrants are eligible for naturalization as citizens. It’s not clear where that number comes from; U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) estimates that a bit over 10 million lawful permanent residents — green-card holders — are eligible to become citizens.

Musk could also be referring to the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants estimates provided by other sources, like Pew Research Center. Musk’s “2 million new legal voters in 4 years” could come from either estimate.

But undocumented immigrants do not have a trivial path to citizenship. The USCIS figure looks at legal immigrants, not those who are living in the country without authorization. Immigrants who are in the United States without documentation can obtain citizenship through some existing channels, none trivial, including marrying a citizen, obtaining asylum or successfully appealing a deportation order.

Naturalizing half a million people sounds like a lot but by recent standards it isn’t. In fiscal year 2023, the government naturalized about 879,000 people. More than four times as many babies were born that calendar year.

All of that aside, note how Musk’s assertion is immediately contradictory: If these immigrants become citizens they are legally allowed to vote. That’s not a threat to democracy. It’s just democracy involving voters that Musk finds unacceptable.

Why? Well, that’s what comes next.

Musk is amplifying the idea that immigrant voters are necessarily Democratic ones. Never mind that Musk is himself an immigrant and very obviously not a Democrat. Never mind that one of the states like Florida and Texas have large immigrant populations but also vote heavily Republican. Never mind that Hispanic voters, a large segment of the immigrant population, have been trending more Republican. He simply asserts that they will be Democratic votes for the simple reason that it’s the only non-humanitarian reason he or others on the right can imagine for Democrats to welcome immigrants from other countries.

The superficiality of Musk’s understanding of politics goes slightly further here, too. Swing states change all the time in response to candidates and issue saliency. In 2016, no one thought Michigan was a swing state, but then it swung. We used to talk about Iowa and Missouri as swing states; they no longer are. These things shift; overtly dumping 200,000 Democrats into Pennsylvania wouldn’t mean that no other state became close in future elections.

He continues in this vein:

Immigrants seeking asylum are allowed to remain in the U.S. while their claims are being adjudicated. It is, in fact, one way that someone who entered the U.S. without authorization can become a citizen. But it isn’t a “fast track”; most such claims are denied. And that’s often only after years of waiting for hearings. (One central immigration reform that has been sought is adding more judges to adjudicate these claims, which would allow ineligible applicants to be removed from the U.S. more rapidly.)

The “flying people in” claim, meanwhile, is a common bit of right-wing misrepresentation. Some immigrants from eligible countries can apply to be allowed to join sponsors in the U.S., paying for their own flights. It’s not the case that President Joe Biden is simply flying immigrants to Wisconsin — much less in order to make them citizens, keeping his fingers crossed that they vote for his party.

Musk then described what lay at the bottom of the slippery slope he had outlined.

Let’s say that everything Musk had delineated was true, that there would be millions of new voters, all formerly undocumented and all voting Democratic. All of them in current swing states, with no new swing states emerging. Even if all that unfolded — which it won’t because he doesn’t know what he is talking about — the fate above still wouldn’t be the necessary result.

Why? Because the Republican Party has agency! It could (and would!) moderate its positions to accommodate the electorate. In the same way that the party slowly moved away from overt hostility to same-sex marriage in the face of public support for the practice — and in the same way that the traditional party was sidelined by Trump’s populism — the GOP reoriented to appeal to the ways in which the electorate had shifted.

California has dominant Democratic leadership because the state Republican Party can’t and won’t pivot in ways that make it more viable there. It’s not that the state’s immigrant-heavy electorate locked out the GOP. It’s much more that the national GOP’s politics disadvantages it and its candidates in California.

Musk’s purchase of Twitter has had a lot of negative effects, including that it actively allows right-wing misinformation and abuse to spread under the guise of “free speech.” But it has been useful for revealing the extent to which people like Musk, once widely regarded as quiet geniuses, can expose themselves as very much the opposite on both points.