Musk Has A Point

The goal of the Biden administration was to strategically place illegals in swing states and make their status legal, thereby turning swing states Democrat.

The net result would have been permanent one-party rule of the USA, just like what they did in California. https://t.co/n9iOL6QP7P

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 22, 2025

Whatever Elon Musk may be, one thing he certainly isn't is a Biblical scholar. But there's scriptural support for his position in the post above, and it's something the USCCB, among whom there must certainly be some Biblical scholars, omit in their web page outlining the Church's teaching on migration:

Both the Old and New Testaments tell compelling stories of refugees forced to flee because of oppression. Exodus tells the story of the Chosen People, Israel, who were victims of bitter slavery in Egypt. They were utterly helpless by themselves, but with God's powerful intervention they were able to escape and take refuge in the desert. For forty years they lived as wanderers with no homeland of their own. Finally, God fulfilled his ancient promise and settled them on the land that they could finally call home.

The Israelites' experience of living as homeless aliens was so painful and frightening that God ordered his people for all time to have special care for the alien: "You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; have the same love for him as for yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt" (Lv 19:33-34).

But another major theme in the Old Testament echoed in the New (cf the Woman at the Well, John 4:4–42) is the dilution of the faith among the northern tribes of Israel. Although this certainly had its start with King Solomon himself and his foreign wives and concubines, the Assyrians were able to exploit this opening, as outlined in 2 Kings 17:

24 The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and settled them in the cities of Samaria in place of the Israelites. They took possession of Samaria and dwelt in its cities.

. . . 33 They were both venerating the LORD and serving their own gods. They followed the custom of the nations from among whom they had been deported.

34 To this very day they continue to act according to their former customs, not venerating the LORD nor observing the statutes and regulations, the law and commandment, that the LORD enjoined on the descendants of Jacob, whom he had named Israel.

This strategy was found convenient through the 20th century; Stalin found mass deportations useful for various purposes:

From 1930 to 1952, the government of the Soviet Union, on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and under the direction of the NKVD official Lavrentiy Beria, forcibly transferred populations of various groups. These actions may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population (often classified as "enemies of the people"), deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill ethnically cleansed territories.

In other words, mass transfers of population for political ends is something as old as empires. There's an ongoing debate as to whether this practice constitutes "genocide". At the link:

Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent who initiated the Genocide Convention and coined the term genocide himself, assumed that genocide was perpetrated in the context of the mass deportation of the Chechens, Ingush, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks and Karachay. Professor Lyman H. Legters argued that the Soviet penal system, combined with its resettlement policies, should count as genocidal since the sentences were borne most heavily specifically on certain ethnic groups, and that a relocation of these ethnic groups, whose survival depended on ties to their particular homeland, "had a genocidal effect remediable only by restoration of the group to its homeland".

What Musk is suggesting in his post, or at least what we might infer from it, is that the Biden administration strategy of mass population transfer from particular areas amounted to a form of deportation for political ends. Musk links a tweet that includes this chart in his own post that reinforces this (click on the image for a more readable view):

Estimates of how many people from the designated countries, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, vary, as do the particular features of the program. As of 2023, the Biden administration itself said,

On January 5, 2023, the Biden administration announced its intent to provide “safe and orderly pathways to the United States” for up to 30,000 nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela [per month]. The new program, formally known as the Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), allows certain people from these four countries who have a sponsor in the U.S. and who pass a background check to come to the U.S. for a period of two years to live and work lawfully, using a legal mechanism known as “humanitarian parole.”

On one hand, the actual numbers admitted, according to the chart above, are far greater, and few actually received background checks:

The Trump administration is revoking the legal status of more than 500,000 migrants who entered the United States through a Biden administration parole program.

CBS News reported that 532,000 migrants from countries such as Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, who entered the country through a program called CHNV, will have their “work permits and deportation protections” terminated in April.

. . . In August 2024, Fox News reported that DHS under the Biden administration had decided to halt the “issuing of advance travel authorization” for the CHNV Parole Program, “out of an abundance of caution.”

The freeze of the program at the time came “after an internal report” found there were “large amounts of fraud in applications for” people wanting to sponsor migrants in the program, according to the outlet.

This raises the question of who the "sponsors" of these people were. Immigratiomn documents suggest that they provide transportation to the US and "initial" housing:

Maintain flexibility in your welcoming plans. Once your I-134A application is approved, your beneficiary will have 90 days to travel to the U.S., during which you can focus on travel arrangements or securing initial housing.

Again, it appears that the "sponsors" are often the same organizations that provide a "package" of sweatshop employment, slumlord housing, transportation -- which may even include purchasing cars for the migrants, but not assisting them in getting driver education, licenses, or insurance -- and other highly specilized services in places like Springfield, OH and Charleroi, PA. This raises for me the question of whether Catholic Charities is, or was, involved in this "sponsorship" racket.

So I'm left with some lingering questions. The Catholic bishops compare the "migrant" wave to the Hebrews fleeing Egypt, but in subsequent centuries, the Hebrews themselves were subject to forced deportation and repopulation programs that were specifically meant to weaken their faith and cohesiveness. The bishops don't mention this scriptural parallel, but the numbers involved in the current migrant wave of the past few decades are at the same order of magnitude as the Stalinist repopulations of the 1930s and 1940s, and appear to be implemented for the same reasons of centralized social engineering.

But eved more disturbing is the sense I get that in particular via Catholic Charities, the bishops are financially enabling government policies that arguably verge on genocide. At minimum, these aren't random, or even organized, works of corporal mercy -- they amount to mass deportations on an Assyrian or Stalinist scale that are meant to achieve political ends. And are the migrants "voluntary"? Not if they're being offered plane tickets, jobs, housing, and stay-out-of-jail cards. Who would turn that down?