Opinion: Tucker Carlson joked about deporting me on air for ‘good TV.’ That’s the kind of host he was

When I learned on Monday that Tucker Carlson and Fox News had “agreed to part ways,” I gasped. The most anti-immigrant broadcaster on television had just been taken off the air. For someone like me, who came to this country as a child, unwittingly undocumented, and who, like millions of others, has been waiting decades for a path to citizenship, Carlson represents the scariest of boogeymen. He hates me and other human beings he calls “illegal.”

Or does he?

I’ve been a guest on various Fox News shows over the years, and appeared on Carlson’s show three times. I did it to demonstrate to Fox viewers that the immigrants that Carlson constructed nightly — the rapists, the thugs, the freeloaders — were just convenient figments of his imagination. “Here I am,” I hoped to convey to people watching, “I’m just a person, like you, paying my taxes (did you even know that undocumented workers pay taxes and contribute to Social Security?), living my life, calling this country my home.”

But to Carlson, it was all a performance.

Just before we went live for what would be my final appearance on his show, he said to me: “We should have just called ICE on you.”

At that moment, I understood that my life, my undocumented status, the fact that I haven’t been able to hug my mother since I left the Philippines at age 12 — these were not things that he could perceive with any sort of humanity. They were mere props to be used in his daredevil ideological stunts. “That would have been good TV,” he noted about calling ICE on me.

We have seen his kind before. He’s Elmer Gantry, Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, Willie Stark, Charles Coughlin, Logan Roy. Real or created, there’s nothing new about these greedy showmen. They want the usual things: money, power, adulation. Carlson has sickened a vast swath of Americans with his poisonous words.

For the past five years, Carlson has been airing segments on the racist conspiracy theory known as “great replacement” — the idea that an elite cabal (often Jewish) is pushing to increase immigration from nonwhite countries, which will ultimately result in a civilizational shift in once-majority-white nations like the United States. In one monologue from April 2021, Carlson mentioned the idea by name: “I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate — the voters now casting ballots — with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually. Let’s just say it. That’s true.”

Carlson repeatedly warned viewers that Democrats were “importing” new citizens “to replace the disobedient ones.” In 2021, Carlson likened the Biden administration’s immigration policy to “eugenics” against white people.

In more than 400 episodes, Carlson has amplified the idea that Democratic politicians and others want to force demographic change through immigration, totaling more than 50 hours of talking since November 2016, according to The New York Times’ analysis of 1,150 episodes.

This theory may sound fringe, but more than 50% of Republicans believe that in the future, white Americans will have fewer rights than people of color. The scale of the impact of “great replacement” theory is clearly attributable to its widespread presence online, where the theory has been repackaged and spread through viral videos, news stories and memes. Fox News is just the loudest megaphone among many.

Last year, Define American, the organization that I founded after I revealed my undocumented status in 2011, studied the most viral anti-immigration videos of the previous 15 years on YouTube. We found that the “great replacement” was a foundational narrative across most of the videos, which time and again painted a vision of America under an attack from inferior foreign cultural influences.

We discovered a collection of thousands of channels and videos that villainized undocumented immigrants and legal immigrants that we call the “Great Replacement Network.” And Fox News’ YouTube channel has the highest audience overlap with other YouTube channels that promote “great replacement” theory.

This is troubling because about 26% of all U.S. adults say they get news on YouTube, and 73% of them trust it, never mind that 77% of teens say they use YouTube daily. We found that YouTube viewership around immigration in particular leads to real-world action. We polled likely voters in swing states, and found that 21 percent said YouTube content had changed their vote for a representative. For better or worse, though?

And that is why it is hard to feel any sort of satisfaction in his departure, as op-ed columnist LZ Granderson wrote on Monday in the L.A. Times: “I don’t get my hopes up about whom Fox News will anoint as the next Tucker Carlson. Fear-mongering and appealing to our lower selves are still profitable.”

“How do you feel?” A friend texted me.

I laughed to myself. Tucker Carlson and I finally have something in common.

“I don’t feel anything at all,” I responded.

Jose Antonio Vargas, the founder of the organization Define American, is the author of “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen.”