“Weaponized Migration” — One of the Most ‘Sophisticated Invasions’ In History

Summary

Morning Wire: “Weaponized Migration”—One of the Most ‘Sophisticated Invasions’ In History

Podcast: Morning Wire
Hosts: John Bickley, Georgia Howe
Guest: Peter Schweitzer, President of the Government Accountability Institute
Episode Date: February 1, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth interview with investigative journalist Peter Schweitzer about his new book, The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon. The conversation centers on the concept of “weaponized migration”—the deliberate use of major U.S. immigration programs and border security gaps by foreign governments and cartels to exert influence, compromise national security, and shape American politics. Schweitzer reveals the sophisticated networks and strategies behind these efforts, discussing specific examples involving Latin American cartels, Chinese state actors, and the Mexican government.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Cartel and Progressive Political Alliances

[02:31]

• Schweitzer explains the evolving relationship between Latin American drug cartels and North American progressives, highlighting the role of the group “Progressive International,” founded by Bernie Sanders and involving several U.S. members of Congress.
• The cartel interest revolves around two key aims:
  • Open borders: Enables more lucrative human smuggling operations than drug trafficking.
  • Ending military campaigns against cartels: Reduces pressure from both U.S. and Latin American authorities.
• Notable Quote [03:20]: “The drug cartels actually make more money off of human smuggling when the borders are open than they do from drugs.” — Peter Schweitzer

2. U.S. Visa Programs Exploited for Influence

[05:23]

• Focus on the EB5 visa program: Meant to spur U.S. investment by granting residency to those who invest significantly in the U.S. (whether they actually reside in the U.S. or not).
• Schweitzer highlights the program’s founding was pushed by an individual later identified as a Chinese spy.
• Permanent residents can legally donate to U.S. political campaigns, allowing substantial (and potentially foreign-aligned) funds to enter U.S. politics.
• Notable Example [06:25]: “Chinese billionaires have obtained permanent resident status…and brag how they don’t actually live in the United States…And you can donate, in some instances, tens of millions of dollars flowing into political campaigns…from individuals that remain in China.” — Peter Schweitzer
• The loophole may persist due to Supreme Court precedent, though Schweitzer calls for greater transparency on campaign donations.
• Notable Quote [07:23]: “There’s no way of knowing whether this is foreign money or US money that’s going into campaigns.” — Peter Schweitzer

3. Weaponized Migration and Foreign State Manipulation

[08:02]

• Schweitzer asserts that immigration is not merely organic movement, but is being “weaponized” by foreign governments as a tool for influence and destabilization.
• He underscores the Mexican government’s efforts to activate migrants in the U.S. as a political force, including state-sponsored news and propaganda services like “Magrante TV.”
• Notable Quote [08:43]: “They are trying to radicalize and motivate migrants inside the country and turn them into a political force.” — Peter Schweitzer

4. The Reach of the Cartels and Mexican Government

[09:49]

• Discusses the intertwining of the Mexican government and cartels, especially under the Sheinbaum administration, and the use of consulates for direct influence and agitation within the U.S.

5. National Security Implications: China’s Exploitation of Birthright Citizenship

[10:22]

• China’s strategic use of U.S. birthright citizenship (“instant citizens”) is highlighted as a large-scale, coordinated effort.
• Schweitzer provides estimates that over 100,000 Chinese children are born in the U.S. each year, hold American citizenship, and are raised in China within CCP institutions. He warns these individuals will eventually gain the right to vote, donate to campaigns, and hold government positions.
• Notable Quote [11:17]: “You’re looking at more than a million US citizens that right now are being raised in China. And when they turn 18 they’re going to be able to vote in our elections, donate to our political campaigns, take government jobs.” — Peter Schweitzer

6. Surrogacy and Birth Tourism as Subversion Tactics

[11:54]

• Beyond travel-based birth tourism, the Chinese government and elites have begun using American surrogate mothers for “instant citizen” births, complicating detection and oversight.
• Schweitzer cites research that in Southern California alone, there are over 100 Chinese-owned surrogacy companies focused on this purpose.
• Notable Data [12:51]: “One Chinese billionaire close to the CCP has over 100 children born in the United States, US citizens, using this technique.” — Peter Schweitzer

7. The Scale and Complexity: Diplomatic Networks and U.S. Politics

[13:29]

• Mexico’s vast consular network (53 consulates, compared to 6-7 for the UK or China) is used to organize protests, meddle in politics, and coordinate with U.S. political organizations.
• Schweitzer recounts a 2024 Oklahoma City meeting where Mexican diplomats and Democratic Party activists discussed turning swing states blue using migrant activation strategies.
• Notable Quote [14:40]: “You’re not supposed to, as a diplomat of a foreign government, [be] involved in political campaigns. And that is exactly what they’re doing.” — Peter Schweitzer

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Cartel-Progressive Alliances:
  • “The drug cartels actually make more money off of human smuggling when the borders are open than they do from drugs.” — Peter Schweitzer [03:20]
• On Political Donations via Visas:
  • “You can donate…tens of millions of dollars flowing into political campaigns…from individuals that remain in China.” — Peter Schweitzer [06:25]
  • “There’s no way of knowing whether this is foreign money or US money that’s going into campaigns.” — Peter Schweitzer [07:23]
• On Weaponized Migration:
  • “They are trying to radicalize and motivate migrants inside the country and turn them into a political force.” — Peter Schweitzer [08:43]
• On Birthright Citizenship Threats:
  • “Let’s remember the 2016 presidential election was settled by 80,000 votes. So we can see the potential, the ability here for China to manipulate our politics is enormous.” — Peter Schweitzer [11:34]
• On Foreign Consular Meddling:
  • “You’re not supposed to, as a diplomat of a foreign government, [be] involved in political campaigns. And that is exactly what they’re doing.” — Peter Schweitzer [14:40]

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Timestamps for Critical Segments

• [02:31] — Cartels’ collaboration with North American progressives
• [05:23] — Visa programs exploited by foreign governments
• [08:02] — Weaponized migration and Mexico’s influence operations
• [10:22] — National security implications of birthright citizenship (China’s exploitation)
• [11:54] — Surrogacy and advanced subversion tactics
• [13:29] — Mexico’s diplomatic network and direct U.S. political engagement

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Tone and Takeaways

The episode maintains a grave and urgent tone, typical of investigative journalism on national security. Schweitzer’s revelations are presented as shocking and concerning, with a call for greater disclosure, legal scrutiny, and public awareness about how U.S. immigration systems can be—and are being—exploited. The discussion is grounded in extensive research, insider accounts, and detailed example-driven analysis.

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Conclusion

If you’re concerned about the intersection of U.S. immigration policy, national security, and foreign influence, this episode offers a rich, detailed look at the risks posed by “weaponized migration.” Schweitzer’s testimony underscores the sophistication and scale of current threats, calling on policymakers and citizens alike to recognize and address these challenges before they escalate further.

Transcript

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[Peter Schweitzer]

This book is about the weaponization of migration and how foreign governments and adversaries have weaponized our immigration system. But when they turn 18, they're going to be able to vote, they're going to be able to donate to political campaigns, they're going to be able to get government jobs. It's a massive, massive national security problem.

[Commercial Narrator]

That was Peter Schweitzer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, discussing the explosive findings of his new investigative book, the Invisible.

[Peter Schweitzer]

Coup How American Elites and Foreign Powers.

[Sponsor Representative]

Use Immigration as a Weapon.

[John Bickley]

In this episode, we sit down with Schweitzer to discuss what his investigative team has uncovered about these foreign influence campaigns. I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. This is a weekend edition of MORNING wire.

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[John Bickley]

Netsuite.Com MorningWire Investigative journalist Peter Schweitzer joins us now to talk about his new book, the Invisible How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon. Great to have you back on.

[Peter Schweitzer]

Great to be with you, John. Thanks for having me.

[John Bickley]

So look, there's a lot in this book that we can't hope to fully cover here, of course, but I wanted to ask you about a few things that will be of particular interest to our audience. Let's start with the cartels. They're a major target for the Trump administration. Obviously, you track the cartels, particularly partnering with progressives to influence Washington. Can you unpack that for us?

[Peter Schweitzer]

Yeah. So the drug cartels, of course, have been politically active south of the border for decades. That's no big surprise. But what's happening is there's been this movement to bring. Bring progressives from Latin America together with those from North America. One of the groups doing this is a group called Progressive International. It was founded by Bernie Sanders. It's run by his former foreign policy advisor. His chief of staff participates with the organization, as do a bunch of Democrats in Congress, people like AOC, Greg, Cesar, etc. Well, this organization has set up a leadership structure that is populated with individuals from Latin America who are linked to the drug cartels. And what they've done is they push for two very important things that the drug cartels want. Number one is open borders. The drug cartels actually make more money off of human smuggling when the borders are open than they do from drugs. The second thing they're pushing for is ending the military war against the drug cartels in Latin America. So we're seeing a leakage of drug cartel influence moving into North America and affecting our politics.

[John Bickley]

Well, and have you seen any sort of reverse reversal of this with Trump coming in power in the last years? Is there a real effect in Washington?

[Peter Schweitzer]

I think it's going to create a sense of urgency, John, because what, what they're hoping to do is avoid US Involvement in the events of Latin America, the drug cartel activity, political influence, et cetera. So it's probably going to add urgency to it in the short term out of a desire to prevent Trump from taking some of the actions he's taken in Venezuela and elsewhere.

[John Bickley]

Are there legal implications for these ties, anybody tied to these cartels now, the stakes higher now for them?

[Peter Schweitzer]

They are. And look, it could be. I'm not a lawyer, but there are laws and statutes that apply to individuals that are involved with activities with either terrorist designated organizations or drug cartels designated by the federal government. So there is possible implication here. Legally, I'm not an attorney, but it's an enormous problem. And I think we make a big mistake when we look at immigration and assume that it's just a function of economics. And if we think that the drug cartel problem is a problem south of the border, it's not just something that bubbles up occasionally here in Terms of violence. It's actually something that is walking around in our halls of Congress, which should concern us deeply.

[John Bickley]

I think you also hit something that we've been covering on and off here on this show for a few years, and that's the US Visa program. You say it's being exploited by actual spies. What evidence did you find of this?

[Peter Schweitzer]

Yeah, so there's a EB5 program. It's a visa program that was started in 1991 by Congress designed to spur investment in the United States. If you invest a million dollars in the United States and create a certain number of jobs, you can get permanent resident status in the United States. Turns out that law was passed by Congress. One of the most important lobbyists. The person that really pushed that legislation over the finish line was a lady named Maria Sai, who it turns out was in fact a Chinese spy. Or at least a Senate committee declared that about eight years after the bill was passed. And the problem is, the CB5 program is a very clever way to inj foreign money legally into our elections. So let me explain. You get permanent resident status if you come through this program doesn't mean you actually have to live here. In fact, there are a lot of Chinese billionaires who have obtained permanent resident status through this program that brag how they don't actually live in the United States. They remain in China. But if you get permanent resident status in the United States, John, you are allowed to legally donate to political campaigns. And you can donate, you know, in. In some instances, we found tens of millions of dollars FL flowing into political campaigns in the United States from individuals that remain in China. So this is kind of a covert way of manipulating our immigration system to curry influence and expand their power within the United States government.

[John Bickley]

Are there any efforts to close this kind of loophole? It's more than a loophole. But this loophole that allows this kind of thing.

[Peter Schweitzer]

Yeah, it's challenging. So the EB5 program is set to sunset in 2026. Some people are trying to resurrect the program. The problem with permanent resident status is the Supreme Court determined in the Citizens United case that making political donations is a First Amendment right from being in the United States. So it would be hard for me to believe that the courts would allow a law that says permanent resident status means you can't donate to campaigns because you're effectively saying people don't have First Amendment rights even though they live here or supposed to live here permanently. I do think, though, that what we should do is have disclosure. They should be required campaign should be required. Required to say we received this large check from a non citizen who is donating to our campaign. So at least there is some transparency. Because right now you go through the FEC records, there's no way of knowing whether this is foreign money or US Money that's going into campaigns.

[John Bickley]

One of the points you make that's really interesting is we all talk about what happens to people when they arrive in the US you say we should back up and really start the conversation way before that. Some of this, some of what you've already touched on actually addresses some of these things. But what do you mean by this?

[Peter Schweitzer]

Well, what I mean is that, you know, we've been having a national conversation about immigration in the United States, about its effect on wages, safety on our streets, how it might influence our culture. Very, very, very important debate and discussion. And I think President Trump deserves a lot of credit for sealing the border. But we have to step back and realize that we're not just dealing with immigration that is sort of random and organic. We're dealing with weaponized migration. What do I mean that foreign actors, foreign governments see it as a weapon to deploy against us. So they are encouraging it, they are pushing it. And once immigrants come into the United States, they bring with them not only themselves, their families and their culture, they bring with them oftentimes political networks. So we see governments like Mexico, for example, working to exert sovereignty within the United States by activating migrants and turning them into, into a political force. The Mexican government, for example, has something called Migrant tv. Magrante tv. This is a news service. I'll put that in air quotes by the Mexican government specifically for migrants in the country. But it's highly, you know, laced with propaganda. Anti Trump ICE agents are Nazis. They are trying to radicalize and motivate migrants inside the country and turn them into a political force. There's evidence that people connected to the Mexican consulates are doing the same thing. And I name some of those individuals in the book.

[John Bickley]

Again, as you mentioned, the cartels have so much influence in Mexico. So the cartels certainly shaping that content as well.

[Peter Schweitzer]

Yes, no question about that. And they're pushing these themes. And you see that with the Sheinbaum administration in Mexico, they don't want the Trump administration to go after the drug cartels. And as I point out in the book, Shine mom has a long history of cooperation in working with the drug cartels. She's appointed senior people to the national police that are known or have been known to have been connected to the Drug cartels.

[John Bickley]

This is a pretty large question, but what are the, the national security implications for all of this, what you've uncovered?

[Peter Schweitzer]

Well, they're enormous. I mean I'll give you one related to China. China has created an industrial sized exploitation of birthright citizenship. Supreme Court is going to be hearing this case this spring. This is the idea that if you happen to be in the United States, give birth to a child, that child becomes a US Citizen because this is where they were born. Our federal government does not keep track of how many people have done this we idea because when you're given a birth certificate it does not say the nationality of the parents. But the Chinese government has looked at this and they have come up with some astonishing numbers of how they themselves have exploited this. The Chinese government and, and some of the research firms in China estimate that over the last 13 years, 100,000 Chinese a year have been born in the United States, been granted citizenship and then are returned back to China where they are raised in CCP schools. They're often the children of the El. So if you do the math John, you're looking at more than a million US Citizens that right now are being raised in China. And when they turn 18 they're going to be able to vote in our elections, donate to our political campaigns, take government jobs. Let's remember the 2016 presidential election was settled by 80,000 votes. So we can see the potential, the ability here for China to manipulate our politics is enormous.

[John Bickley]

Yeah. Related to this, you use the term instant citizen. Can you unpack that term for us?

[Peter Schweitzer]

Yeah, this is, this is birthright citizenship and China has mastered the exploitation of this. They did this before in Hong Kong about 20 years ago. The then Hong Kong government stopped it because they realized what was going on. China sees this as a way of infiltrating the United States by creating a, a large group of super citizens as it were, that are Chinese nationals but are granted, have been granted US Citizenship by being born here. It goes even beyond the so called birth tourism when they travel here to give birth to a child. Some CCP officials in China have started hiring surrogate mothers in the United States where they donate the sperm. The, the woman who they call a carrier is paid $50,000 to carry and give birth to the child. That child will be granted U.S. citizenship because the birth mother is American and they're born on American soil. We have no idea how widespread this is, but let me just give you a couple of Street Journal had a piece a couple of weeks ago where they found one individual, one Chinese billionaire close to the CCP has over 100 children born in the United States. US citizens using this technique we found in Southern California in our research that there are in just Southern California 107 Chinese owned surrogacy companies that that specialize in doing just this thing. So this is a sophisticated war form of invas or subversion. This is not organic. And that's what I mean by weaponized immigration.

[John Bickley]

In fact, it's so broad and complex, it's something out of a movie. It's actually hard to believe. I think a lot of people probably are shocked to discover the reality of what's happening here. We usually worry about countries like Russia influencing elections. You say Mexico should be on everyone's radar more. How so?

[Peter Schweitzer]

Yeah, Mexico views migrants that are in the United States as a strategic tool school, that's the term that they use. And they want to activate that base. And they do that through a variety of mechanisms. One is the vast network of consulates that they have in the United States. These are basically many embassies and it's enormous. I was shocked by this. The United Kingdom and China have six and seven consulates in the United States, respectively. Mexico has 53. And as I point out in the book, I name them, these consular officials. They're involved in organizing violent anti ice protests and other actions on the street. But they're also meddling in our politics. We got the hold of a transcript of a 2024 meeting at the, of all places, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Consulate, where they brought together diplomats from Mexico from the consulates in Los Angeles, Orlando and everything in between. People flew in from Mexico City. And there was another group that was at this meeting and these were Democratic Party Party activists. And the discussion was about how they had turned California from blue, from red to blue. They turned Arizona from red to blue. And they wanted to do the same thing on a national scale to stop Donald Trump from winning. Whatever one's views are on Trump, you can have those views, but you're not supposed to as a diplomat of a foreign government being involved in political campaigns. And that is exactly what they're doing.

[John Bickley]

As you've detailed here, just a really remarkable sort of web of influence from foreign countries, particularly south of the border, that a lot of people have not actually paid enough attention to. Peter, thank you so much for joining us.

[Peter Schweitzer]

Always a pleasure, John. Thanks for having me.

[John Bickley]

That was Peter Schweitzer discussing his new book, the Invisible Coup. And this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

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