Immigration as a weapon of subversive unconventional war
Originally published in InFocus Quarterly, Spring 2026
Weaponization of immigration ranks among humanity’s most ancient armaments. As a modern tool of unrestricted warfare against free societies, weaponization of immigration is an invasion that most can see but few truly recognize because of its gradual nature.
When citizens and officials of the targeted countries facilitate the invasion, all defenses are down.
Mass deportations, forced migration, terror-driven displacement, ethnic cleansing – these violent, militarized forms of weaponized migration date more than 30 centuries ago to the Neo-Assyrian Empire against the Israelites, spanning various Persian, Greek, and Roman empires to the Byzantines, Vikings, West Europeans, and Chinese, up to the Communists and Nazis of the 20th century.
What has escaped the public eye is the subversive dimension of weaponized migration: The purposeful mass movement of people to penetrate, disrupt, divide, burden, and destroy the target destination of settlement.
Small regimes weaponize migration to cleanse their dominions of dissidents, criminals, parasites, and the ill, aged, or otherwise non-productive. The weaponization part is not the purgative effects, but a focused projection of economic and social burdens upon a target.
Governments and tribes of some of the most primitive countries weaponize emigration to prosperous lands with intent to milk the host country’s generosity through demands, extortion, and criminal enterprises to send cash back home.
More efficient weaponization exploits or even orchestrates migration to infiltrate intelligence operatives, political agitators, street gangs, terrorists, and saboteurs into the target’s body politic for the purpose of destroying from within.
Fifth column migration
This weaponization is Fifth Column migration. Its intent is inherently subversive.
The terminology is borrowed from a Spanish Civil War reference to a military operation that employs secret sympathizers and subversive agents behind enemy lines who clandestinely undermine the government to aid the invading force.
Fifth column migration is a long-term strategy to populate a target country, or establish colonies within, for the purposes of undermining, subverting, or overthrowing the target government, economic system, social system, culture, or all of the above.
This type of migration, as Nathan D. Steger wrote in a 2016 Naval Postgraduate School study, “can range from overt and hostile in support of military operations to more clandestine or passive undertakings, such as espionage” or influencing political and social demographics. “Due to lengthy timeframes required to plan and execute fifth column operations, people often dismiss evidence as imaginings of the conspiracy-minded who are quick to voice suspicions on politically sensitive and polarizing topics such as racism or immigration.”
Vanguard colonialism
Fifth column immigrants thus settle abroad to subvert the societies that welcome them, in support of a larger military or terrorist strategy. Their dual purposes are to feed off their hosts in their new countries while acting as ideological, political, and cultural vanguards for a foreign actor. Those vanguard forces enforce discipline to dominate the immigrant community. They operate within the system to establish colonies and build the material, political, and legal support structures for their foreign subversive strategy.
The Communists in Bolshevik and Stalinist times called their migrating operatives a “vanguard of the proletariat.” They would dispatch a “detachment of the vanguard” abroad to organize workers’ movements nationally, as part of an international “struggle.”
These vanguard forces were known variously as “cadres posted abroad” or “internationalists.” They were not immigrants to other countries but migrants in the real, migratory sense of the word. These cadres did not move about to settle. Their purpose was to agitate and organize the locals for a global revolution. Communist doctrine imagined the workers of the world as rising up organically after cadres raised their “class consciousness,” so there was no need of ideological colonization.
The Frankfurt School, critical theory, and avenging those oppressed by the Dead White Men
Lenin and his comrades realized that the Bolshevik Revolution could not be repeated in the industrialized West. In 1922, as the revolution was still consolidating, the Soviets held a meeting of European Communist Party leaders at Moscow’s Marx-Engels Institute to devise new ways of revolution.
From that meeting, a group of mostly German or German-speaking party leaders and academics reverted to Marx’s pre-Communist Manifesto ravings about waging class warfare not against the wealthy, but against Western culture. Civilization, not the bourgeoisie, was the oppressor. This concept refined itself over the decades after the Comintern and Soviet intelligence services set up what became the Frankfurt School of cultural warfare – the critical theory that is sometimes called cultural Marxism.
Critical theory became a fashionable and sophisticated way for intellectuals and other privileged elites, who had become disillusioned with Stalin, to remain true to Marx and Bolshevism.
Culture replaced economics as the dialectical battlespace. The rich were no longer the oppressor – the oppressor was Judeo-Christian values and traditions.
Part of that cultural destruction to right the terrible wrongs of the Dead White Men who built the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian foundations of what became Western Civilization, meant importing large numbers of civilizational rejectionists into Europe, Canada, and the United States.
After migrating to Columbia University in New York, the Frankfurt School refined the idea to devise intellectual discipline: Critical legal theory to weaponize the law, critical race theory to weaponize issues of race and ethnicity, and all the other critical theories to destroy civilization and all its oppressiveness.
Self-hating Europeans and North Americans, in the thrall of their unrelenting self-criticism of their oppressive being, would support and ultimately demand unrestricted migration – not the best people from around the world who would make the host countries greater, but the worst parasites from the worst countries to feed off the hosts and bring them down.
And among these hordes would come the agents, organizers, agitators, propagandists, subversives, terrorists, and others as the weapons.
Cultural Marxism meets Civilization Jihad
The Muslim Brotherhood neatly sums up this concept as “civilization jihad.” It laid out a plan in 1991, the “Explanatory Memorandum of the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” The FBI found the plan in the false basement of a Muslim Brotherhood suspect’s house in Virginia, among the Holy Land Foundation documents exhibited in the famous material support for terrorism trials in 2007-2008. These documents provided the best evidence yet of the Muslim Brotherhood’s organizational agenda and blueprint for the U.S. and Canada.
Civilization jihad is the systematic colonization of target countries with Sunni Muslim immigrants who are led, organized, or docile to the Brotherhood. The Explanatory Memorandum calls civilization jihad a “process of settlement” of North America, a “Civilization-Jihadist Process with all the word means.” The continental Muslim Brotherhood operation is a “kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers.”
The document implies, correctly, that that sabotage, that fifth column activity, would be done by the Americans themselves (“their hands”) with the Muslim Brotherhood cadres (“the hands of the believers”).
The Explanatory Memorandum lays out classic subversion methodology in any civilizational context. The strategy shows how the Brotherhood created its own institutions, including approved mosques, charities, schools, training centers, student groups, NGOs, and pressure groups to police Muslim communities and American society at large.
The Muslim Brotherhood took the horizontally networked Sunni sect of Islam and mobilized a vanguard under a vertical, hierarchical political structure, much as the Comintern turned scattered leftists into a global network of national Communist parties.
As the Communist parties did in each country, the Brotherhood’s national chapters determine a “party line” to portray themselves and their front organizations as the true, legitimate leaders of all Muslims in each country; to indoctrinate, radicalize, credential, and elevate their own people to become community and national Muslim leaders as a political and cultural force; and thus to dominate the colonization of the host communities, states, and countries. Like any loyal Communist had been, this is a lifetime duty for Brotherhood followers to remake civilization, a civilization jihad.
Having been established for decades, the Muslim Brotherhood infrastructure came to welcome, absorb, protect, and dominate the sudden massive influx of largely Sunni Muslims from all corners of the world and incorporate them into the civilization jihad.
Because this colonization is generally not violent until an appropriate future time, it falls under the radar of those conditioned to view threats in terms of “violent extremism.”
The founder of modern fifth column migration
Modern fifth column migration pre-dated the Muslim Brotherhood’s scale by decades. From this period emerges what Asra Nomani calls the “woke army” or “red-green alliance” – the alliance of Marxists and radical Muslims – comes into play.
Cuba’s Fidel Castro pioneered illegal mass migration into the United States with his Mariel Boatlift of 1980. Not only did he allow hundreds of thousands of opponents of his regime to seek freedom in America, but he emptied his prisons and insane asylums to inflict his social problems as a weapon against the United States.
Castro’s protégé, Nicolás Maduro, conducted a far more ambitious repeat more than 40 years later when he, too, emptied Venezuela’s prisons to join millions of legitimate refugees, deploying violent street gangs like Tren de Aragua to prey on local communities and add a bloodier dimension to the criminal underworld in the United States.
Sanctuary for foreign insurgent networks
The Mariel Boatlift took place in the context of Cuba’s more systematic and disciplined support, with strong Soviet backing, for Marxist-Leninist revolutions in the Americas. The Sandinista revolution of 1979 begat unification of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) insurgency in El Salvador, under Castro’s supervision, within months of the invasion from Mariel. The FMLN waged a vicious guerrilla war across what President Ronald Reagan considered the red line against Communist expansion in the hemisphere.
Reagan’s support for El Salvador’s fight to crush the FMLN caused the guerrillas to evacuate their family members to safe haven – deep inside the United States. Front organizations and allied churches smuggled FMLN civilian loyalists by the thousands into the U.S. in direct support of the insurgency. They moved human FMLN assets through Mexico to “sanctuaries” from California to Massachusetts, first under the protective auspices of churches, and then under the legal protection of cities and later states to provide “sanctuary” from federal immigration officials.
This sanctuary movement, begun in the mid-1980s, endures to the present day. The movement became far more broad among people indoctrinated in the worldview of critical theory that their own country and culture were oppressors to be resisted.
This mass psychosis helps explain the widespread support for unchecked mass migration among American-born citizens.
Through exploiting that psychosis and fueling it, other foreign actors, as Castro did nearly a half-century ago, dispatch their own fifth column immigrants into America. Meanwhile, mayors and governors refuse to cooperate with federal authorities to remove the illegal aliens, be they rapists, child molesters, or agitators for Hamas.
With uncommon awareness, former Trump National Security Council staffer Joshua Steinman posts regularly on X with questions about “foreign sabotage teams,” including Iranian, inside the United States.
One awaits news of the deportation of any of the estimated 60,000 disciplined, physically fit, military-age men from the People’s Republic of China who crossed in from Mexico during the Biden years. Sixty thousand men. The equivalent of six U.S. Army divisions.
The cause that became a business and then a racket
A careful study of the sanctuary movement will show how a fringe effort in support of a foreign, state-sponsored communist insurgency became intertwined with the Muslim Brotherhood’s civilization jihad, and that the cooperation of the two, with their overlapping constellations of organizations, emerged among the engines of weaponized illegal migration into the United States.
Such a study will also show that it was Christian churches and culturally Jewish philanthropies, often more than the Brotherhood, that pressured for, and sponsored, mass migration of the world’s Islamic dregs from places like Somalia to colonize parts of this country. They demanded and received billions in charitable, state, and federal tax dollars for NGOs and contractors to finance the influx.
Just how the federal government, under President Joseph Biden with a homeland security secretary born in Cuba, created policies and provided funding to import millions of unvetted illegal immigrants by land, air, and sea, is a matter to be investigated. What to foreign regimes, insurgents, and jihadists weaponized into a cause for well-meaning dupes soon morphed into an American immigration-industrial complex.
To its American facilitators and many of its racketeers, weaponized immigration illustrates the late social philosopher Eric Hoffer’s observation that “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually designates into a racket.”
More importantly, it illustrates how foreign regimes, revolutionaries, and terrorists have turned immigration into a weapon against the United States and its allies, with irreversible damage.
J. Michael Waller is Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC. He can be found on X @JMichaelWaller.
