Kari Lake’s immigration remark plays into racist 'Great Replacement Theory,' scholar says

It started when Elon Musk weighed in on Arizona election issues.

“Arizona clearly states that no proof of citizenship is required for federal elections,” wrote Musk, who owns the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

The claim was misleading. States aren’t allowed to set those kinds of rules for federal elections, and, as Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer pointed out in response, Arizona is the only state with any proof of citizenship requirement for state-level elections.

Still, Kari Lake, the former gubernatorial candidate now running for U.S. Senate, took Musk’s comment in stride.

“This is why they had to stop me. My plan to shut down the human smuggling and their open borders policies would thwart their agenda to register illegal voters,” said Lake, who continues to insist without evidence that she was the rightful winner of Arizona’s 2022 governor’s race.

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“They need the human smuggling to fill the voter rolls with new Democrat voters.”

Lake frequently has promoted, without evidence, conspiracy theories related to elections and immigration. Her Tuesday remark was perhaps Lake’s most explicit venture into the influential and sprawling idea known as the "Great Replacement Theory," which holds that elites, often left-leaning or Jewish, are deliberately engineering a replacement of the native-born population with immigrants.

That view has become a major feature of politics in Europe, where right-wing leaders argue that non-white migrants, largely from Asia and Africa, are replacing white Europeans.

Once a fringe idea in American politics, the racist theory is now widespread among Republicans. Last year, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., was accused of using white nationalist rhetoric linked to the replacement theory.

“Until fairly recently, this was a theory that you would only encounter in far-right propaganda and message boards, but it’s been gradually mainstreamed through social media and, more recently, in the right-wing ecosphere,” said Yale University sociology professor Philip Gorski, an expert on white Christian nationalism.

Propelled by an endorsement by former President Donald Trump, Lake is widely presumed to win Arizona's Aug. 6 Republican Senate primary. She likely will face Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., in the Nov. 5 general election. Incumbent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., has not formally announced a Senate re-election campaign.

Immigration has helped Democrats, but no evidence of 'systematic conspiracy'

Garrett Ventry, a spokesperson for Lake’s campaign, disputed the idea that Lake’s tweet was racist and said Democrats also have pushed the idea.

Ventry pointed to a remark by Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., who said “I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes” in response to Republican-led arguments that New York cannot handle an influx of migrants.

He also highlighted a 2013 paper by the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, which said that creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants “is the only way to maintain electoral strength in the future,” both because it will bring in new voters and because those policies will appeal to Latino voting blocs.

And Ventry cited past Politico reporting that a bipartisan immigration reform bill from 2013, which passed the Senate but did not become law, would have virtually guaranteed millions of new Democratic voters by creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented migrants. Then-Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., were among the eight senators who negotiated that legislation.

Indeed, immigration-caused demographic changes have often helped the Democratic Party at the ballot box. Arizona’s burgeoning Latino population, for example, is thought to have helped swing recent statewide elections toward Democratic candidates.

Still, dozens of failed legal challenges have not surfaced evidence to back up the claims of widespread fraud in U.S. elections, including the claim that undocumented immigrants are voting in elections in large numbers.

Those conspiracies, Gorski said, are "propaganda 101."

"The most effective propaganda conceals lies inside of truths, and thereby convinces people that the lies are also true,” Gorski said. "Is it true that historically, non-whites have tended to lean Democratic over the last couple of decades? Sure. … The lie is that this is a systematic conspiracy that is somehow being orchestrated from on top.”

Gorski argued that taking out a reference to race gives the theory “plausible deniability,” but that the argument has clear racial undertones. "They know perfectly well what they’re doing with that political messaging," he said.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s hold on immigrant voters appears to be slipping. Polling suggests that President Joe Biden's support among Hispanic voters has fallen since he took office, and evidence suggests that many immigrant neighborhoods swung to the right during the 2020 election.

Laura Gersony is a national politics reporter for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Contact her at 480-372-0389, or by email at lgersony@gannett.com. Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, at@lauragersony.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake plays into racist conspiracy theory, professor says