After her fact-free segment on “gun reform,” MSNBC’s Joy Reid pivoted on Tuesday’s ReidOut to immigration with a segment that could have easily been penned by the White House. In said block, Reid repeatedly said there isn’t a “crisis” at the southern border and said “caterwauling” from “the Grand Q Party” doesn’t care about the children there because they’re too busy perpetuating a “brown scare.”
And with help from the University of Texas at Austin’s Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, they compared concerns about the border to 20th century eugenicists and even implied they don’t view Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) as a real Hispanic.
Reid began with clips of Republicans calling the overwhelmed border a “crisis,” but she quickly mocked the “Grand Q Party” as grasping at straws and “desperate” to convince “the media” to adopt their verbiage even though “migration at the southern border is a genuine political challenge, an ongoing one that spans several previous administrations.”
She added that the situation at the border is merely “a predictable pattern of seasonal changes” due in part to “a backlog of demand because of 2020's coronavirus border closure” and other, more frequent factors such as “natural disasters,” “poverty, gang, and cartel violence,” and even America’s “drug demand.”
After gently calling for more press access to migrant “facilities,” Reid gaslit viewers into further hating their right-leaning family members and neighbors as having hearts so cold that children lack value:
[F]or Republicans, their caterwauling is not about concern for those children. Let’s just be clear. Those children are just a prop for fear-mongering and doing the old brown scare as evidenced by what you heard from Lindsey Graham earlier.
Speaking of gaslighting, Reid then butchered and further misled by saying FNC’s Justice host Jeanine Pirro used “nativist” and “racist” language.
What Pirro actually said was that cartels trafficking children to the U.S. was a form of “slavery” and would endow these children to them in a way that would render them “a lower level of human being who will be controlled from other countries.”
Reid wasn’t concerned about facts and neither was DeFrancesco Soto, who replied that Piro’s rhetoric was just like “words that were used with European immigrants, with southern and eastern European immigrants, really there is where the eugenics movement started in Ellis Island where they would take immigrants who were coming over and figuring out that they were lower level and not letting them come in.”
Having constructed that strawman, they turned to whether the border is “a crisis” with DeFrancesco Soto stating that it’s a decade-long crisis and Reid going utterly ballistic and almost shouting about how “no, it’s not a crisis” because it was supposedly worse under President George W. Bush. DeFrancesco Soto didn’t push back and instead chalked up climate change as a primary push factor (click “expand”):
DEFRANCESCO SOTO: Is there a crisis at the border? Look, we had got a crisis when it comes to the border and the immigration system for going on a decade. We’re well overdue for a comprehensive immigration reform. So yes, it is a crisis.
REID: Yes.
DEFRANCESCO SOTO: But it's a crisis that we've been living in close to a decade, Joy Ann.
REID: More than a decade. I mean, you can go all the way back. You know, there's a great piece in The Week where they put a chart up that I just want to put up on the screen. Okay, if you — if you call the crisis the number of apprehensions, if you want to go by that, because they're making it sound like a million people are at the border. Look at the side of the chart that is on my left, stage right. The year 2000 — we're talking — in 2001, you had more than 200,000 a month — that was during the George W. Bush era. Okay, keeping going. You can go all the way through. It goes up, it does down. It's seasonal. Up, it goes down. Up, it goes down. Up, it goes down. Look where we are in 2021, we are not anywhere near — we are less than happen of the level of people coming in — in 2000. So, no, it's not a crisis. We need immigration reform. Can — talk a little bit about the logistics here. We talk about this on the show as sort of — there's a challenge at the start of it, right? The triangle countries who, by the way, some of it is our doing that has put them in this horrible situation. We aren't giving enough aid. They have issues with COVID, all sorts of issues are happening there, then the problem of the choke point. When you get to the border, what the hell do you do to people who are stuck and backing up because of the last four years of terrible policy, and now they know their kids won't be taken, so, like, okay, maybe I can try. And then were do you put people? Because you can’t just take a kid and send them off on their own. You have to process kids and have them go somewhere safe. Sorry, I just talked myself out. Tell me what you think we could by doing differently.
DEFRANCESCO SOTO: What you just laid out is the multilayered nature of the problem. When we’re talking about immigration, it’s about the push and pull factors. And there is no one push factor of folks coming from Central America. It's instability when it comes to their economy, to the gang violence, to the economic instability that's triggered by climate change. We have seen, since 2014 —
REID: Yes.
DEFRANCESCO SOTO: — El Nino and La Nina being much more severe. It's causing more droughts in the highlands of Guatemala. Your subsistence farms no longer have anything to subsist on, so they’re coming over. With the hurricanes, we saw the sharecroppers, who lived off the land, their crops were wiped out. And do the calculus. If you're a rational actor, human beings make the cost/benefit analysis. If I stay here, I’m going to starve. If I don't stay here, I might have a chance of making it and surviving and thriving. Any Republican would do the same thing for their family. And this is what this nation was built on — immigrants coming for a better life.
“The Irish did it in the 1840s, the Germans did it in the 1870s. That’s how Donald Trump’s family got here. They didn’t just come over here for kicks,” Reid exclaimed.
The pair ended with the attack on Cruz, which followed an indignant Reid reacting to Governor Greg Abbott (R-TX) saying the flood of illegal immigrants was further spreading the coronavirus in Texas: “[I]t is gross for me for Greg Abbott to basically portray people as disease carriers because they come from Central America.”
So, talking about life disparities between Central America and the U.S. is fine, but it’s racist to raise basic health concerns (and in context of the spotty nature of coronavirus testing by the Biden administration)? Got it.
At any rate, Reid then invited DeFrancesco Soto to do the work for her on questioning Cruz’s ethnicity (click “expand,” emphasis mine):
REID: [B]ut I just have to get your thoughts on Ted — Rafael Cruz, who himself is a person of color, participate in that? Your thoughts.
DEFRANCESCO SOTO: He is, Joy Ann, but he has never embraced that identity. In fact, I would — I would argue that he is pushed back against his Latino identity. And I think the trickier part is that, in framing his dad’s immigration to the United States from Cuba, he always is very clear to point out he was a political refugee, that he came here fighting communism. He didn't want to be in that communist bastion that was Cuba. He came to the U.S., so he uses a very different frame to separate himself from immigrants who are coming as a result of economic reasons or the plight that we're seeing in Central America. So, it's been always interesting to see how Ted Cruz has separated himself from his immigrant experience and when pushed, you know, puts the difference of his dad and other immigrants.
REID: Yeah, but he also did defend his dad when Donald Trump said his dad was part of killing JFK. He didn’t even defend the man. He basically was like yes, Donald Trump, yes, Donald Trump, yes, sir, more, sir. Victor — that was me, not Victoria — DeFrancesco Soto is lovely and not shady like me.
Seeing as how MSNBC has given their tacit approval through their silence to Reid’s anti-Semitism, homophobia, and racism from her so-called “hacked” blog, it’s doubtful she’ll ever face disciplinary repercussions for such divisive nonsense. How refreshing.
Reid’s inflammatory rhetoric and segment that called into question Cruz’s commitment to his ethnicity as made possible thanks to supportive advertisers such as ADT, LoanDepot, Sketchers, and Uber Eats. Follow the links to see their contact information at the MRC’s Conservatives Fight Back page.
