Is There Really a Plot to Use Migrants to Turn America Blue?

Almost everyone in Lockland, Ohio, agrees on this: In the past year and a half, 3,000-plus immigrants from Mauritania, in West Africa, have streamed into the 1.2-square-mile town, taking over apartment buildings, straining police and fire services, and flooding the sewer system. 

“They don’t have furniture, so it’s probably just two queen-size mattresses on the floor,” Doug Wehmeyer, Lockland’s fire chief, told me. 

The newcomers, who have led to a doubling of Lockland’s population of 3,500, are mostly living in a handful of four-story apartment buildings, with ten to fifteen people squeezed into a four-person unit, Wehmeyer said. The buildings have become cluttered with trash and filled with the fumes of kitchen fires caused by too much cooking grease, Mark Mason, Lockland’s mayor, told me.

If the Mauritanians ever leave, the mayor said, the buildings will have to be razed. 

“I don’t know how Lockland survives,” Wehmeyer added. 

But this is what people inside—and outside—of Lockland don’t agree on: who brought these newcomers here and why, and what it all portends for America. 

Is it simply another wave of immigration that will benefit from and strengthen our melting-pot nation? Or is it, as some Republicans and Elon Musk, one of Donald Trump’s chief backers, claim: a nefarious Democratic plot to bring illegal immigrants to swing states, and even red states, and eventually turn them blue? 

If you’ve heard, over the past few weeks, Musk and others suggest that a Kamala Harris victory means this will be the last election—this is what they are referring to. Not the idea that Democrats will cancel elections—which is what Democrats say Trump will do if he prevails—but that a demographic shift means Team Blue will always win every election.

Lockland, after all, is one of many towns—like Springfield, Ohio; Charleroi, Pennsylvania; and Aurora, Colorado—that have seen a huge influx of Mauritanians, Haitians, Venezuelans, Colombians, and others in recent years. To conservatives like Mike Howell of the conservative Heritage Foundation, the only reason for this is a scheme to gerrymander the vote and “usher in a Marxist revolution.” 

“That is the plan, to have an openly international election,” Howell, who monitors progressive immigration policy for the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., told me. “Get a ton of people into the country, and then also simultaneously, aggressively fight against measures of election integrity to prevent them from voting.” 

Doug Wehmeyer, the fire chief in Lockland, Ohio, said he has “no idea” whether immigrants are being sent to Lockland to help reelect Democratic senator Sherrod Brown and give Harris Ohio’s seventeen Electoral College votes.

But according to Donald Trump, the plan in Ohio—and everywhere else new migrants now live—is obvious. “Our elections are bad,” Trump declared in his September 10 debate with Kamala Harris, in Philadelphia. Referring to Democrats, he said, “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote, they can’t even speak English, they don’t even know what country they’re in practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote, and that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.” 

The former president added: “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats.”

Earlier this month, while campaigning for Trump in Pennsylvania, Musk declared that after four more years of the Harris “puppet regime, they’re actually gonna legalize so many illegals in the swing states that there won’t be swing states anymore.” 

He noted that California Democrats, who control the governorship and state legislature, recently passed a law barring municipalities from requiring voter identification. “If the Dems win, they’ll ban voter ID nationwide,” Musk said. “That’s why I think, if Trump doesn’t win, this is the last election.” (Musk did not mention that the GOP will likely hold on to the Senate in 2024, which would make it impossible for a future President Harris to pass sweeping legislation.)

Democrats have so far sidestepped Trump’s and Musk’s charges. When Fox News’ Bret Baier asked Harris about the White House border policy in his interview with her on October 16, Harris responded—accurately—that Republicans tanked a border-security bill late last year after Trump came out against it. (Baier did not mention any talk of Democrats manipulating border policy to win elections.) Senator Sherrod Brown, despite the stiff reelection challenge he faces in Ohio, has struck a more conciliatory tone. “Presidents of both parties have failed on the border—including the Biden administration,” he said in a statement in May.

Nonetheless, this fear that the White House has opened the floodgates to the unwashed masses illegally crossing the southern border—there have been roughly 8 million encounters with immigrants crossing the southern border since Biden took office, versus 2.4 million under Trump—and steered them toward politically competitive states in order to transform the electoral chessboard has hardened into dogma among many Trump supporters. It has also provided them with a kind of license to protest any election result they don’t like.

“Of course we win—unless the election is rigged” was a common refrain at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July. Viewed through this lens, one doesn’t have to buy the conspiracy theory that Dominion’s voting machines were rigged to ensure Joe Biden won the 2020 election. The rigging, as it were, is happening organically at the border in plain sight.

Earlier this month, a video surfaced showing how fears over a plot to steal the election are percolating in Lockland. Posted on the town’s Facebook page by someone named Chickie Chickie, a man in a Trump T-shirt says of Democratic hopes for the Mauritanians: “They don’t want them to stay in the blue states. They want to get them into the red states to turn us blue.”

“This isn’t just a couple of cities,” adds the narrator of the video, produced by right-wing production outfit Real America’s Voice. “This is everywhere.”