The Center for American Progress (CAP), a far-left think tank founded by current Biden climate envoy John Podesta, published a policy blueprint in 2013 laying out how the Democratic Party should capitalize on the 11 million “undocumented immigrants” in the United States.
The CAP’s policy analysis argued that giving illegal immigrants a “pathway to citizenship” was the only way for the Democratic Party to “maintain electoral strength in the future.”
“Getting right on immigration and getting behind real and enduring immigration reform that contains a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in our country is the only way to maintain electoral strength in the future,” the policy analysts Philip E. Wolgin and Ann Garcia argued.
Arguing that “demographics is destiny,” the authors explain how the Democratic Party can take over red states one at a time. Their state-by-state analysis is modeled on the immigration wave that helped the Democratic Party take over California and turn it into a one-party state.
“As we move into the congressional debate on immigration reform, we should remember that the political shifts that have opened a space for reform—grounded in demographic changes—were not a phenomenon that debuted in 2012,” the CAP argues. “These changes began in the mid-1990s, when anti-immigrant politics in California helped turn the state reliably blue.”
“And as our nation moves toward a point where by 2043 we will have no clear racial or ethnic majority, 11 other states such as Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, and even Georgia are also reaching demographic tipping points,” the policy paper continues. “Whether or not these states turn blue in the future has a lot to do with how politicians in both parties act and what they talk about on the subject of immigration reform.”
The CAP’s funders read like a who’s who of power players: Bloomberg Philanthropies, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, Arnold Ventures, Ford Foundation, Microsoft Corporation, Bank of America, Mastercard Worldwide, Verizon, Wells Fargo & Co, and many more.
The Biden administration has since raided the Center for American Progress for top policy analysts, as explained in a 2022 Fox News report.
“The Center for American Progress, a leading progressive think tank, has a large influence on federal policymaking with many of its former employees flocking to high-level administration roles,” the report states.
“The think tank’s extensive influence in the Biden administration was on particular display in an April 2021 email exchange between Christy Goldfuss, CAP’s senior vice president for energy and environment policy, and Jesse Young, a senior State Department adviser,” the report continues.
“You all keep taking our good people … so it’s safe to say that I’m a little behind,” Goldfuss told Young in the email.
President Biden hired CAP founder and chairman John Podesta as a senior White House clean energy czar in 2022, where he was tasked with managing roughly $370 billion in climate spending appropriated by the Inflation Reduction Act.
Podesta was hired in late January as the Biden administration’s top climate envoy, replacing outgoing climate envoy John Kerry. Neither John Kerry nor John Podesta are climate scientists, but lifelong political operatives.
“Mr. Podesta, 75, will take on that international role in addition to his current White House job overseeing $370 billion in spending on clean energy projects under the landmark 2022 Inflation Reduction Act,” the New York Times reported.
The Biden administration is strewn with former Center for American Progress staff.
“The White House also hired Neera Tanden, who served as CAP’s president between 2011-2021, as a senior adviser and staff secretary last year,” the Fox News report notes. “Biden initially nominated her to lead the powerful Office of Management and Budget, but she withdrew her nomination after facing heavy criticism and scrutiny into her previous statements.”
“In addition to Podesta and Tanden, dozens of current administration officials, including White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, top White House economic adviser Brian Deese, senior White House economic adviser Gene Sperling, Veteran Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough and Department of Defense Chief of Staff Kelly Magsamen, have all previously held positions at CAP, according to employment records and government watchdog Open Secrets,” the report added.
Top Republicans recently blasted the Biden administration for promoting CAP founder John Podesta.
“For over two years, the Biden Administration resisted and obstructed the Committee on Oversight and Accountability’s efforts to bring transparency to Climate Envoy John Kerry’s office,” House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) said. “Kerry repeatedly skirted Congressional authority as he ignored questions about his deals with foreign governments, unchecked collusion with leftist environmental groups, and negotiations with the Chinese Communist Party.”
“John Kerry’s recently announced successor John Podesta has made public comments that give us reason to remain concerned about the nature of the Biden Administration’s Climate Envoy’s negotiations with the CCP,” he added. “We will continue to call on the Biden Administration to be transparent about their activities with both the Committee and the American people and expect they cooperate as we do so.”
Podesta’s ties with a high-ranking Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official are a major cause for concern, according to top Republicans. In 2013, Podesta collaborated with his CCP “friend” to write a policy white paper on U.S.-China relations.
The Center for American Progress in 2014 published a paper called “U.S.-China Relations: Toward a New Model of Major Power Relationship,” which was the culmination of a Beijing conference in September 10-11, 2013 attended by delegations from the United States and China.
The report on the conference’s proceedings included a chapter provided by John Podesta and C.H. Tung, along with Samuel R. Berger, and Wang Jisi. Among the policy paper’s numerous recommendations are “strengthening” academic and military exchanges with the Communist Chinese.
“The 100,000 Strong Initiative announced by President Obama in late 2009 to send 100,000 American students to China has already helped some 68,000 Americans study in China,” the authors write. “Meanwhile, the Chinese government has also provided scholarships to some 10,000 Chinese students to purse PhD programs in the United States while inviting more than 10,000 Americans to China to visit or study.”
As an NBC News story in 2020 notes, American universities are a “soft target” for foreign espionage, according to U.S. intelligence officials. The story cites several cases of Chinese spying at universities.
“Much of this campus spying is never caught, let alone prosecuted, officials say. But in recent months”:
- A Chinese Harvard-affiliated cancer researcher was caught in December with 21 vials of cells stolen from a laboratory at a Boston hospital.
- A Chinese professor conducting sensitive research at the University of Kansas was indicted in August on charges he concealed his ties to a Chinese university.
- A Chinese scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles was convicted in June of shipping banned missile technology to his homeland.
- A Chinese student at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology was charged last year with helping to recruit spies for his country’s version of the CIA.
“No country poses a greater, more severe or long-term threat to our national security and economic prosperity than China,” said Boston’s top FBI agent, Joseph Bonavolonta. “China’s communist government’s goal, simply put, is to replace the U.S. as the world superpower, and they are breaking the law to get there.”
The Penn Biden Center has been under the microscope for large anonymous Chinese donors, as well as a scandal related to the former vice president’s illegal procurement and storage of classified documents at the center.
The Podesta-Tung, et al. paper also argued for enhancing military collaboration.
“The U.S. military and the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, should consider further exchanges of military personnel,” the paper argues. “More frequent contact will lead to more understanding and a more mature relationship. American participants suggested that these exchanges should include low-ranking officers and students so participants can build trust as they move through their careers in their respective countries.”
The Military World Games hosted in Wuhan, China is widely suspected of having been a vector for spreading Covid-19. The American Prospect investigated and found, “A strong correlation exists in COVID-19 cases reported at U.S. military facilities that are home bases of members of the U.S. team that went to Wuhan”
Regardless, the Biden administration has declined to sanction China over its cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the FBI and Department of Energy assessing the Wuhan laboratory as the likely origin of the manmade SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Multiple Biden family members have received payments from Chinese sources, including from powerful CCP-connected officials.
Furthermore, Chinese illegal immigrants are among those flooding the southern border.
“Thousands of Chinese migrants and asylum seekers have arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in recent months, and many more are heading north after passing through the treacherous Darién Gap jungle between Colombia and Panama,” Axios reported.
“So the word is out, right?,” Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Texas border Democrat, told Axios. “If you can get to our southern border, you have pretty good shot at getting in, and it has changed the demographics.”
A Yale-MIT study published in 2018 performed demographic modeling on immigration to the United States from 1990 to 2016 and found the number of “undocumented immigrants” may be twice that acknowledged in official reports.
“The paper, led by Mohammad M. Fazel-Zarandi, a researcher at Yale and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, estimates there are 22.1 million undocumented immigrants in the United States,” the Hill summarized.
The Democratic Party is not merely standing to benefit from a future possible “pathway to citizenship” for unauthorized migrants, however. It is already benefiting from the demographic shifts reported in the U.S. census.
On day one of the Biden administration, the new president issued an executive order ensuring that illegal immigrants are counted in the census.
“During the 2020 Census, the President announced a policy that broke from this long tradition,” the executive order states. “It aimed to produce a different apportionment base — one that would, to the maximum extent feasible, exclude persons who are not in a lawful immigration status. See Presidential Memorandum of July 21, 2020 (Excluding Illegal Aliens From the Apportionment Base Following the 2020 Census). This policy conflicted with the principle of equal representation enshrined in our Constitution, census statutes, and historical tradition.”
While the 2020 census saw red states gain electoral college votes, the political analysis blog FiveThirtyEight points out, “many of the fastest-growing areas of red states are increasingly Democratic, so it matters a lot how the new districts will be drawn.”
“The three most populous states to gain seats are Texas, Florida and North Carolina, and in each, Republicans will control the redistricting process,” the report adds, noting also that California, Illinois and New York each lost a seat.
The U.S. census rules and the courtroom battles over redistricting are thus two of the major frontlines in the political struggle to decide which “demographics are destiny.”
