Weaponized compassion

Peter Schweizer believes the United States is more vulnerable than we admit—but not by the usual measures. A conservative investigative author whose books have appeared eight times on The New York Times bestseller list, Schweizer argues that America’s “greatest vulnerability is not economic or military, but moral.” Americans, he told me in an email interview, have lost the ability to defend borders without believing themselves unjust. That hesitation, he says, has become an exploitable weakness—and hostile actors have.

In The Invisible Coup, Schweizer makes the case that mass immigration is no longer best explained as humanitarian overflow or policy failure. It is, increasingly, something “organized and leveraged as a political strategy.” Asked what convinces him this is intentional, Schweizer pointed not to one smoking gun but to accumulation: “the volume of evidence in the book that outside forces (and their inside partners) are intentionally fomenting chaos.”

China looms largest.

Schweizer is scheduled to testify before a Senate committee on March 10 about China’s manipulation of American birthright citizenship, with a related Supreme Court case to be argued April 1. The issue is simple. The United States grants citizenship to anyone born on its soil, even if the parents are temporary visitors with no lasting ties to the country. That rule, Schweizer argues, has created a profound national-security vulnerability.

In the book, he documents how Chinese nationals exploit visa-free or loosely regulated entry points—such as Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands—to give birth in U.S. territory. “More than 70 percent of the newborns in Saipan are PRC birth tourist parents who utilize the territory’s 45-day visa-free visitation rules and the Covenant of the Northern Mariana Islands to guarantee that their children will have American citizenship,” Schweizer writes.

The federal government does not systematically track birth tourism. “It is a guessing game in Washington,” Schweizer notes in the book. The long-term consequence, he argues, is a coming wave: U.S. citizens raised, educated, and politically formed in Communist China, legally entitled to vote in American elections and relocate here at any time.

“If senators take away just one key point from my testimony, it’s this: China is not our friend.” Schweizer continued, “We would love to get along with all nations, but many of them don’t live by the same ethic. And since they are unable to oppose us directly, they do so in secret, smiling to our face while insidiously introducing poisons heretofore unknown to us. Weaponized migration is one of them.”

Birth tourism is not the only channel he describes. Schweizer also reports on the use of American surrogacy arrangements by senior Chinese Communist Party figures. In one case, authorities discovered more than a dozen children living in a California mansion tied to a CCP-linked businessman, with surrogacy contracts spanning multiple states. Schweizer calls this “another even more Byzantine and suspicious form of birthright citizenship”—one even less regulated and less understood.

Progressives, Schweizer argues, have “hijacked biblical terms like love, compassion, and mercy to guilt Americans into believing that their treatment of immigration is the most humane.” He is explicit that this does not diminish the dignity of migrants, who are “made in the image of God and are due dignity, respect, and fair treatment.” What he rejects is the claim that dignity requires open borders or resisting immigration officials.

“Instead,” Schweizer told me, “it would be better to take into account the victims of criminal aliens, the victims of the chaos created by resisting law enforcement, and the far-­reaching consequences of admitting people whose worldviews are opposed to what our founders imagined.”

That last point can be the hardest for Christians. Schweizer told me that media and activist rhetoric collapse disagreement into accusations of hate. In The Invisible Coup, he documents how foreign governments, NGOs, and political organizers work to discourage assimilation, shaping migrant populations into pawns of political power.

Many Christians feel trapped between a law enforcement branded as heartless and a leniency that invites collapse. Our inability to live with policy trade-offs, he argues, produces greater harm. If we cannot sustain borders and citizenship without moral self-loathing, then our most dangerous enemies need only wait us out, as Americans destroy the foundations of our own generosity.