Former Kansas Secretary of State and immigration hardliner Kris Kobach, who is running for the U.S. Senate this year, argued Friday that being American requires assimilation into the country’s culture.
Kobach appeared on SiriusXM Patriot’s “Breitbart News Daily” with Breitbart News editor-in-chief Alex Marlow Friday to share his criticisms of the New Way Forward Act proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives, which has been blasted by prominent anti-immigrant voices and organizations like Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the Center for Immigration Studies. Pro-immigration advocates claim the bill will lessen legal injustices for undocumented immigrants and break the prison-to-deportation pipeline. Marlow called the bill one of “the most insane” pieces of legislation he had ever heard about and proof that the Democratic Party “hates the country” and wants to “undo America.”
Agreeing with Marlow, Kobach criticized pro-immigrant Democrats like former Vice President Joe Biden, who took heat from conservatives earlier this year after he said that most undocumented immigrants protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program are “more American than most Americans.” Kobach said that Democrats believe “America is just a place on a map” and that people become Americans by simply coming to the United States.
“That undoes the entire notion of what it is to be an American,” Kobach said. “Being an American means being assimilated and adopting what the scholar Samuel Huntington called the ‘American creed.’ It was a series of values that you are assimilated into, you adopt it, things like the rule of law, constitutionalism, individualism.”
Anti-immigrant activists such as Kobach often argue that the United States should restrict immigration because immigrants fail to fully assimilate—a process that is hindered by denying immigrants legal status.
Anti-immigrant and white nationalist activists have supported Kobach, who they see giving voice to their extreme agenda.
