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Watchdog: Salazar’s Immigration Book Relies on Nonconservative, Center-Left Sources

Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, R-Fla. (C), accompanied by Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, (C-L), speaks on March 25 on Capitol HIll. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

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Fred Lucas is chief news correspondent and manager of the Investigative Reporting Project for The Daily Signal. He is the author of “The Myth of Voter Suppression: The Left’s Assault on Clean Elections.” Send an email to Fred.

A book by Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar promoting her immigration legislation simply recycles old ideas and relies on some center-left sources, a conservative watchdog group says.

The Florida Republican member’s book, “Dignity Not Citizenship: The Truth About Immigration No One Is Telling You,” is an argument for her bill called the DIGNIDAD Act, short for Dignity for Immigrants while Guarding our Nation to Ignite and Deliver the American Dream Act. The bill—which mixes tough immigration enforcement with granting some legal status to illegal aliens—has 20 Republican and 20 Democrat cosponsors.

However, the sources used to back up Salazar’s case in the book are not conservative, according to an analysis of the text by the Oversight Project, a watchdog group.

Her book, released last November, calls out the Biden administration’s open-borders policy but also says Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids aren’t working. She opposes mass deportation, arguing it is costly and bad for the economy.

The Oversight Project analysis contends that Salazar’s book used some passages that didn’t give adequate attribution to sources such as the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Niskanen Center, and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

The Capital Research Center, a conservative investigative organization that monitors nonprofits, didn’t categorize the Peterson Institute as on the right or left, but it described the Niskanen Center as a libertarian environmental think tank and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy as left of center.

The Oversight Project analysis found that other sources for Salazar’s book were fully attributed. Yet those were not conservative sources.

One example is the Brookings Institution, which has employed members of past Democrat and Republican administrations, though many Brookings donors have been left of center, according to the Capital Research Center.

Other sources for her book include the Bipartisan Policy Center, which CRC describes as a center-left think tank, and the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is not associated with the right or left. Another source is the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is clearly conservative on numerous moral and cultural issues but has been critical of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. These organizations were cited with proper attribution, according to the Oversight Project analysis.

The analysis found a “high” concern level for only passing attribution to research by Michael Clemens of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that focuses on global trade, finance, and labor.

It also found the Salazar book mentions “Michael Clemens, writing for the Peterson Institute,” but the prose in Salazar’s book, such as “incomes dropped, land values collapsed,” was similar to wording from Clemens. Her book “mirrors the structure and content” of the Peterson article, according to the Oversight Project analysis.

Salazar argues in the book that deportations were unsuccessful during the eras of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, the presidencies of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, and under President Calvin Coolidge—information detailed by Clemens, the Oversight Project argues.

“It looks like Salazar is not thinking for herself. She certainly isn’t writing for herself,” Oversight Project President Mike Howell told The Daily Signal.

Howell said it wasn’t plagiarism but called it “sloppy regurgitation” of points made by the Washington establishment that has promoted amnesty for illegal aliens.

“These are old, tired ideas that the swamp has pushed for decades,” Howell said. “This lacks dignity. It would be more dignified if she would think of her own arguments.”

The Daily Signal emailed spokespersons for Salazar on Monday and Tuesday and left voicemails in both the Washington, D.C., office and the main district office in Miami.

The Daily Signal also contacted Skyhorse Publishing, which owns Regnery Publishing, the publisher of the book, for comment by email and phone on Tuesday.

Other examples were labeled in the analysis as moderate or low with regard to attribution.

The analysis asserted Salazar “underattributed” tax data from a 2024 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

A book passage from Chapter 5 says, “In 2022 alone, undocumented immigrants paid an estimated $96 billion in federal, state, and local taxes. That breaks down to roughly $15 billion in sales and excise taxes, $10 billion in property taxes, and $7 billion in personal income and business taxes.”

The Oversight Project says these specific breakdown figures come directly from the institute’s analysis, but the book doesn’t cite the institute study that gained news coverage when it was released.

It further says the book has “close paraphrasing” of a Niskanen Center article in Chapter 1 that describes labor shortages. The specific sequence of examples—such as pharmacies, shipping hubs, and delivery—was close to the sequence in the Niskanen report, the Oversight Project says. However, its analysis says the “Niskanen Center is named once in passing” but contends this was a “lightly reworded version of the original article’s argument structure.”

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