Journalist Christopher Rufo spoke on mass immigration at Hillsdale on Tuesday Oct 8. Courtesy | Fox News

Investigative journalist Christopher Rufo, a former Pulliam fellow and current lecturer at Hillsdale, spoke Tuesday about his reporting on mass immigration in the United States.

 

“Remarkably little reporting has been done about the mechanics of this great migration, predominantly coming from the South,” Rufo said. “What I’ve been engaged in in recent months, along with my research team, is to actually tease out the mechanics of how this happens.”

 

Rufo is a distinguished fellow at the college and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. 

 

Rufo said his research focused primarily on three small communities that have been affected by immigration: Springfield, Ohio; Aurora, Colorado; and Charleroi, Pennsylvania. 

 

“In recent years they’ve seen their demographics, politics, and compositions of their towns shift dramatically,” Rufo said.

 

Rufo’s investigative work focused on the connection between the federal government, non-governmental organizations, and private corporations in facilitating mass immigration.

 

“Under the previous president, you had a low and stable rate of in-migration,” Rufo said. “And all of the sudden, starting in 2021, it explodes. You also have the ad-hoc construction of temporary protective status or refugee programs.”

 

Rufo said the Biden-Harris administration has brought 500,000 Haitians — or about 5 percent of the population of Haiti — into the United States through refugee programs.

 

Rufo said left-wing NGOs play a major role in mass immigration due to the high levels of funding they receive from the federal government. This funding allows NGOs to facilitate the flow of migrants through housing, healthcare, and employment services without being accountable to the public, according to Rufo.

 

“They can create almost a shadow government — a shadow manager — of this migration that is beyond the scope of public scrutiny,” Rufo said.

 

Rufo also discussed the role of private corporations in mass immigration.

 

According to Rufo, the investigative work he and his team had done in Charleroi showed that private corporations had also participated in the flow of migrants into small American towns. 

 

Alumnus Logan Washburn ’24, who used to work for Rufo, said he liked Rufo’s focus on the mechanics that facilitate immigration.

 

“Rufo has investigated these issues and I think he has a good grasp of the mechanics actually at play of all the entities that are actually coordinating this,” Washburn said.

 

Ph.D. student Joshua Waechter said the talk made him think about why former President Donald Trump has been able to garner so many supporters.

 

“It’s the issue of mass immigration — a manifestation of the state’s hatred for its citizenry -– that resulted in the election of Donald Trump,” Waechter said. “It’s the reason Donald Trump is the most popular president in modern American history.”

 

Rufo ended his speech by talking about the importance of assimilation.

 

“You have to have a cultural commitment to assimilation,” Rufo said. “You have to have a rigorous process of selection so that you’re selecting, for example, Venezuelan physicists instead of Venezuelan gang members. Then you have to have a culture that demands a process of integration into the fabric of the country and into the fabric of these towns.”