Hypocrisy over ‘Replacement’ Rhetoric in the Immigration Debate
By Ian Smith on September 11, 2025
Much spittle and ink has been spilled over the use of the phrase “Great Replacement” to describe America’s post-1965 immigration wave and its numerical effects on old-stock citizens (and not just the white ones). But replacement can and does happen; it’s really just a question of numbers. And when it suits them, the Left actually agrees.
While there are plenty of examples of the Left using replacement rhetoric (urban gentrification or Chinese migration in Tibet come to mind), Palestine-sympathizers, in particular, have been deploying it for decades, specifically to decry the Israeli government’s “use” of diaspora Jewish immigrants and, post-October 7th, foreign guest-workers, to “replace” Palestinians.
Immigration and demography in Israel in general should be a fascinating topic for CIS supporters. Amazingly, for instance, in just one year following the fall of the Soviet Union, the tiny sliver that is Israel took in a whopping 400,000 Jews from the former empire. Combined with some early Soviet immigrants in the 1970s, like dissident Natan Sharansky, this wave equated to 21 percent of all Israeli Jews at the time, surely making it one of the biggest voluntary population transfers in modern times – today, Soviet-era Jews are 1.1 million of the country’s 9 million population, which has doubled since 1990.
Conservative Israeli politicians, at the time, were excited at the arrival of potentially anti-communist and right-wing voters from the Soviet Union who, they assumed, would be less open to an Arab settlement (yes, immigration can affect electoral outcomes), while economists fretted over the population surge’s effects on workers’ wages (yes, it can affect wages too). Apparently neither really happened, as Soviet-era Jews proved to be more concerned with building new lives and, due to their superior science and technology educations, wages among vulnerable Israeli workers did not change much.
https://cis.org/Smith/Hypocrisy-over-Replacement-Rhetoric-Immigration-Debate
