James Fishback: America Is Full
James Fishback: America Is Full
The Florida gubernatorial candidate sat down with The American Conservative to discuss immigration, assimilation, and why Israel considers him a big problem.
James Fishback is a candidate for the GOP nomination in the race to become the next governor of Florida. In an interview with The American Conservative, Fishback, a self-described “America First” candidate, clarified his immigration policy, outlined a plan to revoke pro-Israel censorship laws in Florida, and responded to criticism directed toward his campaign.
I want to start with the issue of immigration. Trump campaigned on deporting people who are here in the United States illegally, prioritizing people who commit crimes. But since taking office, the Trump administration has gone beyond what was promised. They’ve deported various people who are residing in the United States lawfully, who committed no crime other than using their free speech to express certain ideas that the federal government disagrees with. There are also many people who were deported to a prison in El Salvador, rather than to their home countries. As a governor, would your approach to immigration be more similar to what was planned during the Trump campaign, or would it be closer to the sorts of deportations that we’re seeing now?
On November 5th, 2024, the public sent a very strong mandate to Washington, DC that we wanted mass deportations. My approach as governor would be very similar to the public mandate that was handed down then, and I think will be handed down once again in my election. I think we have to recognize that an immigration system that allows people to come here, even on legal means, is still effectively unlawful because it violates the legal social contract between the government and her people.
Look, let’s not forget that the only thing the fake news media got right about Springfield in 2024 was that the Haitians who were living there were here legally, they had temporary protected status. The same thing is true for the thousands of Afghan refugees who came here after 2021. They were here legally, including and especially the sick animal who shot two national guardsmen the night before Thanksgiving this past year.
And so I think we have to be very honest that’s an invasion of our country, whether it is illegal in the literal sense or whether it was illegal in the contractual sense between a government and her people, which is to say importing the Third World, giving them welfare, giving them benefits, allowing them to have work authorization to quite literally replace Americans in their own country. That is an issue.
Now, your particular point about protected speech, I would not use protected speech as a reason to remove people who otherwise have lawful status. I believe that our country was quite literally founded on free speech and open debate. And so I’ve always been a big believer that when conservatives want to censor groups like Students for Palestine, they’re losing the plot. I welcome all students, all Americans from all political persuasions to hash out their differences in the public square, never to resort to violence, never resort to intimidation.
But we as conservatives especially cannot play the same identitarian left-wing censorship practices. And when you have someone like our own lieutenant governor here in Florida who said, “You don’t have a right to harm people with your words,” that is essentially policing the speech of Americans.
We as a state have a state statute 10105 that codifies the IHRA definition of antisemitism into state law. I think all conservatives rightly recognize that we must unequivocally stand up against all forms of religious hate. But criticizing the Israeli government, or any government, is fully protected by the First Amendment. And doing so should never be the basis for immigration enforcement or for losing your job, or being expelled from school, or in any way harassed or intimidated by the government.
Would these deportations prioritize people who are here illegally and criminals, or would some of these deportations also include the many people here in Florida who are here on visas, lawfully?
Well, I think there are two elements to it. The first is that we need to do more as a state, and we have done more than any other state under Governor DeSantis’s leadership, to pursue the closest thing to state-based deportations. But we cannot deport people who are here on an H-1B. As state governor, I can’t do that. What I can do though, is create an active deterrent, an active disincentive that deters those workers from working in our state and employers from employing them.
And so, as Florida governor, I would let every single company who has a contract with the state government know on my first day in office that if they have H-1Bs on the payroll, they are not eligible for any state taxpayer dollar government contracts. If you want to go hire thousands of H-1Bs across our state, do whatever you want, but you’re not going to get a penny of taxpayer funding.
Israel Hayom, an Israeli newspaper that is owned by the Adelson family, recently published an article with the headline, “Netanyahu’s Real Republican Problem Isn’t Trump,” and they pointed to you as Israel’s “real Republican problem” instead. I’m wondering what it is about the state of Florida and its ties to the foreign government of Israel that are so important, and why does Miriam Adelson’s newspaper think that you pose a threat to them?
Our campaign poses a threat for the very simple reason that we are not going to be obsequious to any foreign country, least of all Israel. My job is not to be ambassador to Israel. That’s why I’m the only candidate in my race who has said I will refuse any dollar from AIPAC. I will not go to the country of Israel under any circumstances because my job is here at home.
What triggered that story and all of this backlash calling me and my supporters antisemites is I announced that I would fully divest $385 million of foreign government bond purchases that Florida pension funds had pursued. Florida has a specific policy. You’re not allowed to use taxpayer funds to buy foreign government bonds, with one exception: Israel. And so my premise is, first principles, we should not be lending taxpayer pensioner money to any foreign government.
And it’s precisely because Israel is the only foreign government that receives this money from our state that I would end it on day one. And I announced that we would launch a $385 million statewide down payment assistance program to let young married couples get $10,000 so they can buy their first home.
So it’s not about contempt for any foreign country. It is about looking out for American citizens that reside in my state. I don’t care if it had gone to Israel or Qatar or any other foreign country. We’re bringing back all $385 million.
Well, that makes total sense why they’re freaked out about it, just based on the policy that you’ve outlined of divesting these hundreds of millions of dollars of Israeli bonds that the taxpayers of Florida are, for whatever reason, paying to finance that foreign government’s wars.
Let me ask you another question about this Israel exception to free speech and all other principles in the state of Florida. Florida has some of the strictest anti-BDS laws on the books. Which means that if you contract with the state of Florida, which many people do, you can criticize the government of Ireland, you can criticize the government of Russia, you can criticize even a different state in the United States like Georgia. But what you cannot do—and you’ll lose all of your state contracts for doing this, potentially your job too—is criticize the foreign government of Israel. Will you revoke those laws? Or do you plan to keep them in place?
I will revoke them completely unapologetically and proudly. This goes back to first principles, Harry. You can either criticize all foreign governments or you can criticize no foreign governments. But this game of selective application of the law has to end. And that’s not antisemitic. That is just the American pro-free speech thing to do. What’s fascinating about that particular framework is that that’s the exact framework we’re going to use to prevent companies from using their state contracts to hire H1B workers at the expense of qualified Floridians all over our state.
I’ve seen a criticism going around about your free speech principles. You did spend a long time leading a debate organization that was founded against censorious behavior, the kind of excesses of the woke movement that really became dominant in our culture after the summer of 2020.
But one of the criticisms that I’ve seen, often in comment sections, is that you’ve been flexible on this really core principle, it seems to you, which is free speech. These critics will point to certain comments you’ve made in support of Bari Weiss or Bill Ackman during the first year of the Gaza genocide. Perhaps more than anyone else at the time, those two people were working to censor and suppress Americans who use their free speech to criticize their favorite foreign government. Could you explain how your views have evolved on those issues over time?
I have never worked for or gotten a penny from Bari Weiss personally or Bill Ackman personally. The comments that I’ve made publicly were, in the case of Bill Ackman, about the Federal Reserve. It wasn’t about Israel or about what was happening in Gaza.
And then, my high school debate piece for The Free Press, which is how we got connected back in 2023, was, you’re right, about a very simple idea that in high school, debate students who go up there and criticize any foreign government, including our own, should not be pulled aside by anyone and told that they’re going to lose the round or be disqualified. I reached out to Bari in a cold email and said, “I know The Free Press has been covering the attack on free speech. Would you be open to publishing this?” And she did. And we added thousands of students after that article went live.
But I want to say very clearly that my views have changed. After October 7th, which was a tragedy, what I saw was very angry militant people storming into college classrooms disrupting a math class or an English lecture, shouting “free Palestine,” the same people who just a few months earlier had been shouting the liberal catechism of the day. And I guess I made the mistake of assuming that all of that was motivated by antisemitism. It wasn’t. It was just the garden variety leftist using the latest news cycle.
And so I had put out some complimentary words about Bari Weiss’s book in view of what I saw as college campuses being hijacked by left-wing protesters. You can have a disagreement about what is going on in Israel or Gaza without resorting to running into a classroom and shouting with a megaphone. So, I had fallen for the fake news media hoax that those protesters were being motivated by antisemitism as opposed to anti-Americanism.
And I think about my own journey about the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza. I didn’t really wake up to that until, as a Catholic, I saw the Holy Family Catholic Church get bombed in Gaza City. I had heard a lot about what was going on, but I truly didn’t wake up and pay attention to what clearly was famine, starvation, and humanitarian crimes against Palestinians until my own faith was attacked, and that was a real blind spot on my part.
The other day you were at some sort of town hall giving comments about Vivek Ramaswamy and you did a small standup routine, very similar I would say to stuff that President Donald Trump has done in the past. It was offensive, certainly if you were an Indian-American, or at least to some Indian Americans. I’m wondering how do you balance or reconcile trying to build this broad coalition on very popular ideas but also making those controversial stand-up jokes like that one that may potentially alienate, in that specific case, Indian-Americans in Florida, who may otherwise agree with all of your policies.
Well, for full context, the joke was that I was saying that there is a fork in the road right now for the future of the Republican Party, and that I told that to Vivek and he said, “What’s a fork?” And so that is the joke. And I think the bigger point here is that of assimilation.
To tell you the truth, Harry, I don’t want to build a big tent of anybody of any background if they refuse to assimilate into our country. The immigration moratorium that I support at the federal level and will push for at the state level by using powerful economic deterrence is that, at this point, we are full. We’re full of New Yorkers who came here after COVID and we’re full of Third World immigrants who not only don’t want to assimilate, but don’t want to speak our language, don’t want to contribute, and are actually taking jobs that otherwise Floridians would be able to be gainfully employed by.
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