Our Best Stuff on Immigration—and Naturalization

Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening. Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. You’re reading The Weekly, a Saturday morning recap of the best Dispatch content of the week, with some additional commentary from Managing Editor Rachael Larimore. Hello and happy Saturday. Last weekend was a rough one here in the Ohio bureau. Sure, the Bengals won their season opener Sunday and the new defense is already clicking, but that was a small comfort after my beloved Ohio State Buckeyes blew a huge second-half lead the night before and lost to the Texas Longhorns 24-23. To make matters worse, and for reasons having nothing to do with sports, photos of Texas fans celebrating filled my newsfeeds all week—one photo in particular. Now, were I not a Buckeyes fan licking my wounds, I might have better appreciated the photo that Bo French, a Republican running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, shared on social media of happy students whooping it up after the big win. But French didn’t share it in celebration—rather he did so because it depicted what he deemed too many students of South Asian descent. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” he posted. Assuming the young people in the photo—some wearing cowboy hats, all of them enjoying the quintessential American experience of a big-time college football game—are students, they are likely here legally (or may have been born here). But French is not content to reduce or eliminate illegal immigration—he thinks we have too many legal immigrants too, as Michael Warren pointed out in his Next Right newsletter this week. Mike wasn’t surprised when he saw French’s tweet, because he’d heard French speak at a panel discussion put on by the Mass Deportation Campaign in Dallas last week. He observed that the backlash to French’s post came quickly, and not just from Democrats—indeed Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who is not on the ballot this fall after losing his primary, posted: “This is how great political parties self-destruct. Sad.” Mike writes: Sad, but for whom, exactly? Cornyn was turned out by his party’s voters in his own bid for reelection, losing his Republican primary runoff election to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton the same day that French defeated incumbent commissioner James Wright. French has a better-than-good shot at being in office this time next year, and Cornyn will be in his forced retirement. French’s approach to politics, more blatantly postliberal, populist, and overtly racist than the MAGA movement from which it sprung, looks to be on the rise in the Texas and national GOP, while the more respectable conservatism of Cornyn et al. is on the outs. In Boiling Frogs, Nick Catoggio says French’s tweet is typical of postliberal attitudes about immigration. He writes: The point of postliberalism isn’t to make sure that immigrants and their descendants adopt the civic and cultural preferences that Americans have traditionally held. How could it be when postliberals themselves don’t share many of those preferences: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, democracy rather than right-wing autocracy, and so on? The point of postliberalism is to secure the political and cultural dominance of one’s racial/religious tribe. The problem with nonwhite kids at UT isn’t that they’re failing to assimilate or are unassimilable. The problem is that they’re nonwhite, and therefore their personal and professional success threatens the long-term dominance of white Christians. The gang discussed French on the Dispatch Podcast, with Jonah Goldberg arguing that French’s attitude is damaging for the future of the Republican Party: “There's still a lot of Republicans left over who just don't wanna be part of a racist party. It just makes them crazy uncomfortable, maybe even not for, like, the most high-minded reasons. They just don't, they just don't like the drama of it. And as the Trump coalition fractures and they start throwing behind Vance and jockeying for a post-Trump universe, they're saying stuff that is just really, really bad for attracting normie Republicans and normie right-leaning independents.” If you could use a little palate cleanser, one reason I wanted to discuss the Bo French tweet is that we had a lovely piece this week from contributing writer Mindy Belz revealing that, despite all the turmoil we’ve seen around immigration during Donald Trump’s second term, and despite the sometimes frightening rhetoric, some immigrants want nothing more than to become American citizens. She reported from a naturalization ceremony at Monticello, home of President Thomas Jefferson, on July 4: The Mutombos arrived from Africa as refugees invited by the U.S. government seven years ago. Before that, they spent 15 years living in a camp in Zambia, having crossed the border from their war-wrecked home in Lubumbashi, the Congo’s second-largest city. Nineteen-year-old Omar Basel Bouz Alassal, standing in his gray suit and tie, fled Syria with his family at age 4, all “looking for safety and a better future,” he said. Debee Arvind Bouch came from India’s Tamil Nadu state as a teenager with her family for religious reasons, her father sponsored by a church in nearby Charlottesville. She married an American who runs a local locksmith business and works in the ticket office at Monticello. Her name drew boisterous applause when she received her citizenship certificate. Bouch—like Pei-Che from Taiwan and Frank from Switzerland, whose American spouses were also in attendance—shows that many roads to citizenship begin with love. Down below, check out Jonah’s G-File on how the attention economy has left us all exhausted, Kevin Williamson’s rant against influencer culture, and Jack Kubinec’s profile of a January 6 protester who has turned her attention to fighting AI. Thank you for reading and have a great weekend. We increasingly live in an attention economy—and paying attention to things can be exhausting. So can having your attention to one thing constantly disturbed by other things demanding your attention. Big chunks of our days are like playing that old game “Operation,” trying to use tweezers to remove a liver or spleen without lighting up the patient’s nose, while people are saying, “Did you hear what Trump said?” “Look at this video of a puppy sleeping with a monkey!” “Here’s how you can use Claude to organize your closet!” The news—and media outfits pretending to be in the news business—is full of stuff demanding you not only pay attention to it, but worry about it. Once Claude organizes your closet, it will destroy humanity. Ticks are not only coming back, they’ll make you allergic to cheeseburgers. In the old days, if I wanted a distraction, I’d pick up a magazine and thumb through it. Now, if I want to do the digital equivalent, there’s a good chance I’ll have to re-sign into the website, but I won’t remember my password, so I’ll have to create a new one and have a temporary password emailed to me, at which point I will have to answer the Sphinx’s three questions. Or if I’m lucky enough to avoid that, I’ll get hit with a video I don’t want to watch and have to figure out how to turn off. Or if I get halfway through an article, I might need to click on the “click here to read more” button, which I only realized I scrolled past when I started reading an advertorial about managing, of all things, my cortisol levels. There are many things I do not keep up with all that closely. E.g., at the gym (stop laughing) the other day, I noticed a television advertisement for Jack Daniel’s. Jack Daniel’s is, not to my credit, something to which I have paid excessive attention over the years, but what I thought was: When did they start allowing hard liquor advertising on television? I had thought of whiskey and cigarettes as two of the things that our weird moralistic sensibilities simply would not allow on television, where they would morally cheapen the wall-to-wall sports-gambling and erectile-dysfunction advertising. Many of you are perplexed right now, wondering why I have imagined there is some kind of ban on liquor advertising. There was, for many years, but the industry’s voluntary forbearance was lifted way back in 1996, and liquor ads returned to television no later than 2001, with a Smirnoff spot on Saturday Night Live. I somehow missed that. Or, if I knew that the prohibition had been lifted, I forgot that I ever knew it. Another related thought I had during the same visit to the gym: Who is this schmuck with the camera on the tripod? When Amy Kremer joins a political movement, a bus tour is likely to follow. In 2009, as the fiscal conservatism-centered Tea Party was remaking the GOP, Kremer took several bus trips around the U.S. on the so-called Tea Party Express. In 2020, when Donald Trump claimed without evidence that the presidential election had been stolen, Kremer embarked on two separate “March for Trump” bus tours that culminated in the January 6, 2021, rally and Capitol riots in Washington, D.C. Now, Kremer is kicking off a new bus tour, with a new focus: data centers. … A Tea Party organizer-turned-J6er leading a so-called Data Center Revolt underscores just how politically salient the ongoing data center buildout, largely being undertaken at the behest of AI companies, has become. But it also forces Kremer and a growing portion of the MAGA right into the uncomfortable position of opposing President Trump, who has remained unflinching in his support for AI infrastructure development. Best of the Rest Rachael Larimore is a managing editor of The Dispatch and is based in the Cincinnati area. Prior to joining the company in 2019, she served in similar roles at Slate, The Weekly Standard, and The Bulwark. She and her husband have three sons.