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Journey to America: Newt Gingrich on immigration and Trump’s mass deportation plan

Newt Gingrich has been a force on the right of the Republican party for close to 50 years. Elected to Congress in Georgia in 1979, he became House speaker in 1995, then spent four years pursuing all-out war against Democrats, including the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Undeterred, he ran for the presidential nomination in 2012 and remains influential: a prolific author, forcefully pro-Trump and an adviser during the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Many historians blame Gingrich for Republicans’ lurch to extremism, for preparing the ground for Donald Trump. And yet, on the issue that continues to drive that march to the far right – immigration – Gingrich stands somewhat apart from his party.

Describing himself as a “Reaganite” in all things, inspired by the 1989 farewell address in which the 40th president expressed passionate support for immigrants, Gingrich said: “I helped pass the immigration reform bill of 1986” – the last such major federal reform.

“But if you read [Reagan’s] diary, he reluctantly signed the bill, which was supposed to give citizenship or legal access to about 300,000 [but] turned out to be 3 million. And he says he’s signing the bill because one, we have to get control of the border, and two, we have to have an effective, verifiable employment system, neither of which happened. So he was for an open legal border, not an open border.”

In Washington, immigration and borders are back to the fore. Trump, the president-elect, has promised mass deportations of undocumented migrants but possibly their documented relatives too. The fate of millions of so-called Dreamers, undocumented adults brought to the US as children, remains undecided. Trump also says he will end birthright citizenship, despite its guarantee by the 14th amendment.

At the same time, Gingrich has a film to promote: Journey to America with Newt and Callista Gingrich, a PBS documentary made with his wife, Trump’s former Vatican ambassador now nominated for such a role in Switzerland.

“We wanted to re-emphasize the importance of legal immigration as compared to illegal immigration,” Gingrich said. “And it turns out that about the same support level, 73% of Americans, are upset by illegal immigration but favor legal immigration. And given the noise level about illegality, we wanted to reinforce the history, that in fact we had gotten remarkable people who had come to America and who had dramatically contributed to the American experience at every level.”

If not strictly on thin ice with fellow Republicans – the film is solidly conservative – Gingrich may be walking a fine line. His views on immigration have earned him public batterings before. In 2012, he said immigration policy should first be “humane”. Rivals seized on such relative weakness. His presidential campaign fell short.

He continued: “I always remind people, you had Elon Musk [owning] SpaceX, Tesla, etc. He’s from South Africa. So you talk about great American entrepreneurs, and you say, ‘Elon Musk, well, fine, he’s now an American.’ Because … as long as you do it legally, you can become a really important American. And I think that’s important to remind people. Look at the heads of some of the biggest corporations in Silicon Valley. They’re very often from India, but they’re amazing people. They do great work, and they enrich all of our lives.”

Musk has certainly enriched the Republican cause, donating hundreds of millions to Trump’s 2024 campaign before ensconcing himself at the president-elect’s side, seemingly directing policy, picking fights with foreign allies … and dodging questions over his own reported spell as an undocumented migrant.

Gingrich’s documentary profiles nine migrants, some of whom came to America a very long time ago when things worked very differently. There is one Musk-ish figure: the Iranian American space entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian. Also featured are secretary of state Henry Kissinger and physicist Albert Einstein (both originally German); Catholic saint Frances Xavier Cabrini (Italian); actor and inventor Hedy Lamarr (Austrian); diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad (Afghan); Maria Daume, the first woman to pass US marines infantry school (Russian); conservative schools activist Xi Van Fleet (Chinese); and Victoria Spartz, a hard-right Indiana congresswoman born and raised in Ukraine.

Gingrich calls it “a pretty diverse group” but it’s a conservative selection that notably does not contain anyone of African or Hispanic descent. Asked why not, Gingrich said: “Well, one of the people who we actually couldn’t do, who was in the original film, is Winsome Earle-Sears, the lieutenant governor of Virginia, who is actually from Jamaica but she has an African American background. We couldn’t put her in under PBS rules because she’s running for election this year, so we didn’t want to get into an equal time provision.”

Spartz was re-elected in Indiana last year.

“I think if we were to do another round, I think we probably would do more Africans and more Latin Americans,” Gingrich said. “When Callista was ambassador to the Vatican, she had a particular involvement with the African refugees coming into Italy, visiting refugee camps, and then we’ve helped nuns who are doing both education and medical work in the Central African Republic and in South Sudan … some of their stories are astonishing.”

It will also be astonishing to Gingrich if Trump really does try to implement mass deportations, including of documented migrants. “I’d be very surprised if you see any significant effort to change the game for people who are here legally,” Gingrich said. “I just think there’s a very small faction of the party that’s rabid about this.”

How small remains open to question. After all, Trump won power on a hardline promise of mass deportations involving the armed forces and detention camps; has appointed extremists including Tom Homan and Stephen Miller; and recently told NBC: “I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.”

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That comment provoked alarm – and predictions of protest and chaos.

Gingrich may find himself less at odds with Trump over the Dreamers, who he says he supports “passionately”, given Trump’s suggestion he might accept a deal.

To Gingrich, “it’s nonsense to say somebody who came here when they were two, only speaks English, graduated as a high school valedictorian and is currently a nurse or a doctor should be deported. We’re going to deport them and they don’t speak the language of whatever country their parents came from, and they’ve earned the right to be Americans? … I think [the Trump administration has to] to realize that there are gradations here that we’re dealing with, and try to think through how do you both meet the long-term identity and national security interests of the country and meet the human concerns. And I think it’s a real challenge.”

Ever the politician, Gingrich often quotes public polling.

“I think 80% of the country opposes deporting the Dreamers,” he said. If Trump tried to depot them, “that’s crazy. Why would you do that?”

“On the other hand, over 80% of the country would deport everybody in the Venezuelan gangs. So the obvious, easy path for Trump is to focus first on people who have criminal records, and second, on people who engage in crime in the United States. And so if you are not here legally … and you commit a crime, we deport you immediately. If you … are part of a Venezuelan gang or part of MS-13 from El Salvador, we deport you immediately. You don’t have to have gangbangers wandering around your streets.”

“Gangbangers” might seem a nod to Trumpspeak – the rhetoric of the “rabid”, even. On the campaign trail, Trump pushed lurid tales of Venezuelan gang activity in Colorado and, with naked racism, the lie that Haitians in Ohio, documented migrants, were eating cats and dogs. Gingrich attributes such invective in part to Trump’s “notion that he described as ‘weaving’”, his habit of wandering all over the rhetorical map, “a little bit to the left and a little bit to the right, then back to the left”.

Either way, the weave includes promises of mass deportations.

Gingrich said: “We are a nation of law, despite some of the things that have been said. And I think that if you have legal standing in the American system, it’s very difficult to deport you. On the other hand, if you have no legal standing, it’s pretty easy to deport you, right? And I’m for doing the easy first. That’s why we should give [Dreamers] legal status, as a practical matter.”

Indefatigably, Gingrich has put out a seven-step immigration plan, perhaps for Trump to consider. Noting the presence of two immigrants among the president-elect’s three wives – Ivana Trump from the Czech Republic, Melania Trump from Slovenia – he suggested Trump would enjoy his PBS film, should he make time see it.

But Trump is a busy man, with mass deportations to plan. Gingrich offered a last warning: “Lincoln once said that with popular sentiment, anything is possible; without popular sentiment, nothing is possible. Well, you get very many human stories about mothers or babies or children being deported, then support for the deportation program will collapse.”