Research: The Political-Economy of Immigration Rage

Companion dossier to the six-dossier workstream documenting the underlying mechanism: H-1B / L-1 Labor Arbitrage — Diaspora-as-Labor-Cost-Suppression, Diaspora PACs as Remittance-Economy Political-Influence Mechanisms, Intelligence Services and Diaspora Networks — Postwar Template and Worldwide Adoption, Historical Precedents — When Polities Confronted Foreign-State or Foreign-Commercial Displacement, European Diaspora-Influence + Labor-Arbitrage — the EU/UK Ratchet Analog, and Canada and Australia — Diaspora-Influence and Labor-Arbitrage Pattern. Those dossiers document what the mechanism is. This one documents who profits from the citizen reaction to the mechanism being misdirected.

Positions and documented financial outcomes only. No motive imputation. Where a figure is an outside estimate (Sacra, WSJ source reporting, Statista derivation) it is labeled as such; where it is from an SEC filing, IRS Form 990, FEC report, or audited financial statement it is labeled accordingly.

1. Thesis

The immigration / labor-arbitrage discourse generates more sustained citizen rage than nearly any other US policy domain. The dossiers listed above document why the rage is epistemically rational: the host-country regulatory apparatus has documented, in court findings and federal filings, that the H-1B/L-1/F-1-STEM-OPT pipeline operates as wage suppression at scale, and that diaspora political-action vehicles function as remittance-economy soft-power channels. These are facts on the regulatory record.

The structural finding this dossier supports is narrower and more disturbing: every major institution covered below has a documented revenue, audience, or electoral payoff from keeping that rage hot and keeping it directed away from the mechanism. Rage at the immigrant worker, the diaspora community, or the corporate lobbyist is monetizable. Rage at the host-country institutional apparatus that designed the system and chose not to enforce against the abuse is not. The targeting is engineered, even when no individual actor is acting in bad faith — the incentive gradients of cable news, of 501(c)(3) donor concentration, of FEC-reportable small-dollar fundraising, and of platform engagement metrics all point the same way.

This dossier maps the rent collectors. The book argues the mechanism’s documented existence; this dossier documents who profits from the citizen reaction being misdirected away from it.

2. Method and sourcing discipline

• Revenue / audience / compensation figures: SEC 10-K and 8-K filings (SEC EDGAR), IRS Form 990 filings retrieved via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, FEC filings retrieved via OpenSecrets, and audited financial statements published by the entities themselves.
• Where primary filings are not available (private companies, closely held media properties, podcast subscription counts), the figure is anchored to two independent estimates — typically a major-outlet investigation citing internal sources plus a research-firm derivation (Sacra, Statista, Nieman Lab) — and labeled “estimated.”
• No motive imputation. The dossier reports positions, revenue flows, and audience reach. It does not claim that any individual outlet, organization, or politician intends the structural effect the aggregate produces.
• Adjectival characterizations forbidden in the dossier voice. Where a primary source uses a characterization (“misleading,” “controversial”), it is quoted with attribution and not adopted into the dossier’s own voice.
• All revenue figures are presented in USD nominal dollars for the fiscal year noted. Where a fiscal year does not align with calendar year (Fox Corp FY ends June 30; many nonprofits use July–June or other windows), the fiscal-year convention is noted.

Part A: News outlets that sell immigration conflict, by revenue model

This part groups the news outlets by how they are paid, not by which policy their audiences favor. The dossier’s test for each is where its immigration coverage points the rage: at immigrants and political opponents, or at the enforcement and visa mechanism the companion dossiers document. An entry records that only where the file holds a sourced basis for it. Where it holds none, the entry says nothing and assigns no position.

A.1 Cable carriage, advertising and ad-supported digital

A.1.1 Fox Corporation / Fox News

• Parent entity: Fox Corporation (NASDAQ: FOXA, FOX), SEC registrant, ticker FOX (Fox Corp SEC filings, EDGAR).
• FY2024 (ended 30 June 2024) total revenue: ~$13.98 billion consolidated; Fox Corp 8-K quarterly reports filed via SEC (Fox Corp 10-K, EDGAR).
• Cable Network Programming segment FY2024: the segment that contains Fox News Channel reported full-fiscal-year segment revenue in the ~$6 billion range (Cable Network Programming, per Fox Corp 10-K Item 7); Fox News Channel is the dominant driver but is not broken out as a standalone reporting unit in SEC filings.
• Primetime lineup, immigration-relevant: Hannity, Jesse Watters Primetime, Gutfeld!, The Ingraham Angle; Tucker Carlson Tonight aired 2016–April 2023.
• Audience scale: Fox News Channel is the highest-rated US cable news network in 2024, with average primetime viewership in the 2.5 million range per Nielsen (cited in adweek, NewscastStudio, and Fox Corp investor presentations).
• Documented position: Fox News primetime programming makes border / immigration enforcement a recurring lead segment. Fox Corp’s investor materials cite “live news, live sports” engagement as the driver of its affiliate-fee and advertising revenue (Fox Corporation, Form 10-K FY2025: “Maintain leading positions in live news, live sports and quality entertainment”; about 47% of fiscal 2025 revenue came from affiliate fees).
• Financial outcome attributable to immigration content (estimate only): not separately disclosed by Fox Corp. The dossier does not attribute revenue to a specific topic without a primary disclosure.

A.1.2 Newsmax + OAN

• Newsmax Inc. (NYSE: NMAX): IPO completed 31 March 2025 (Newsmax SEC filings, EDGAR).
• Q1 2025 revenue (per Newsmax 8-K, SEC filing): $45.3 million, +11.6% YoY (Newsmax Q1 2025 earnings release, SEC; Newsmax IR).
• Q2 2025 revenue: $46.4 million, +18.4% YoY; broadcast revenue $38.0 million, +28.5% YoY.
• Q3 2025 revenue: $45.3 million, +4.0% YoY; broadcast revenue $36.6 million.
• Q1 2025 cash position: $126.7 million (+426.8% from December 2024), reflecting IPO proceeds.
• Audience reach Q1 2025: ~33 million quarterly viewers per Newsmax-cited Nielsen panel; ranked 4th-highest US cable news channel.
• One America News Network (OAN): privately held, owned by Herring Networks Inc. No SEC filings. Dropped by DirecTV (April 2022; announced Jan 2022 — NPR), Verizon Fios (July 2022 — Daily Beast), and Frontier (November 2022 — Daily Beast); Charter Spectrum never carried it (StreamTV Insider). Carriage losses removed an estimated several million paying-subscriber households.

A.1.3 MSNBC

• Parent entity: renamed MS NOW, the network is now part of Versant, the cable-network company Comcast announced in November 2024 and spun off from NBCUniversal; the split took effect on January 2, 2026 and Versant trades on Nasdaq as VSNT (Mediaite).
• 2024 average primetime viewership: 1.34 million pre-election per Nielsen (NewscastStudio, December 2024). Primetime ratings fell ~57% between Election Day 2024 and December 31, 2024.
• Primetime lineup, immigration-relevant: The Rachel Maddow Show (Mondays), All In with Chris Hayes, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell; The ReidOut with Joy Reid until its cancellation in February 2025 (NewscastStudio).
• Documented position: TheWrap (December 2024) reported that viewers and pundits said MSNBC failed to spotlight Latino-voter immigration frustration during 2024 cycle (TheWrap).

A.1.4 Vox Media

• Parent: Vox Media LLC (private). Merged with Group Nine Media February 2022. No SEC filings.
• Reported financial scale: ~$700 million projected combined revenue for 2022, announced at the December 2021 deal — an estimate, not a filing (AdExchanger).
• Immigration-relevant programming: Vox.com explainer desk; Today, Explained podcast.

A.1.5 Steve Bannon War Room / Real America’s Voice

• Distribution: Bannon’s War Room podcast (since 2019), 4 hours/day Mon–Fri plus 10:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. ET slots on weekends. Video version distributed by Real America’s Voice (Real America’s Voice).
• Real America’s Voice: privately held cable/streaming network. Reported owner: Robert J. Sigg (Washington Post, 24 Jan 2022). No SEC filings; financials not public.
• Audience reach: regularly ranked among the top 10 US political podcasts per Podchaser/Podcharts; top 10 news podcasts on Apple Podcasts, and 44th among all US podcasts in July 2022, per Chartable (Newsweek, 20 Jul 2022).
• Bannon personal status: served federal prison sentence July 2024–October 2024 for contempt of Congress; podcast continued during incarceration via guest hosts (CBS News; OPB/AP, 29 Oct 2024).

A.2 Subscription, membership and commerce

A.2.1 Tucker Carlson post-Fox

• Tucker Carlson Network: subscription-streaming product launched December 2023. Headquartered Reno, NV. Reported paid subscribers: ~400,000 as of September 2024 (NY Times opinion piece on Vance interview, cited in Threads/Simon Owens). At the company’s reported subscription price point this implies subscription revenue on the order of $20–28 million annually — estimate, not a filed number. Tucker Carlson Network is private; no SEC filings.
• YouTube channel (TCNetwork): ~1.87 million subscribers per vidIQ (May 2025 snapshot). Tucker Carlson Network (@TCNetwork, created November 2023) had 2.04 million subscribers and 648 million lifetime views on 2026-09-28 (Social Blade; channel page). His own @TuckerCarlson channel had 5.76 million (channel page). Estimated YouTube ad revenue, $25k–$80k a month, is a HypeAuditor / vidIQ estimate, not audited. Social Blade’s own estimate for @TCNetwork on 2026-10-04: “$6.5K - $104K Monthly Estimated Earnings” (Social Blade).
• Tucker on X (post-Fox 2023–2024 era): launched as the Tucker on Twitter show, reported per-episode view counts in the tens to hundreds of millions on X’s own metric (which counts impressions, not viewers). The peak was the Trump interview posted during the 23 Aug 2023 GOP debate, whose post “displayed a count of 254.6 million views”, against “only … 14.8 million video views” by Mashable’s count (Salon, 25 Aug 2023).
• Documented immigration content: ongoing on Tucker Carlson Network; the dossier does not enumerate episodes here.

A.2.2 The Daily Wire

• Parent: The Daily Wire LLC (private). Co-founded 2015 by Ben Shapiro, Jeremy Boreing, Caleb Robinson.
• 2023 revenue: >$200 million top line per Axios (28 May 2024), sourced to internal company disclosures. Of this, $22 million (~10%) attributable to commerce (Jeremy’s Razors, merchandise); $19 million attributable to Jeremy’s Razors alone (up from $10M in 2022) (Axios, 28 May 2024).
• 2024 revenue: on track to exceed $200 million per Axios follow-on reporting (December 2024). No SEC filings; figures are company-reported via Axios (Axios, 10 Dec 2024).
• Capital raise: undisclosed round closed 2023 at “valuation well north of $1 billion” per Axios.
• Immigration-relevant programming: The Ben Shapiro Show, The Matt Walsh Show, The Michael Knowles Show, Morning Wire.
• 501(c)(3) partner: Daily Wire is for-profit; its content partners and sister organizations file 990s. Not all are consolidated under Daily Wire.

A.2.3 The Atlantic

• Owner: Emerson Collective (Laurene Powell Jobs majority). Private. No SEC filings.
• 2023 revenue: ~$100 million, +10% YoY (Press Gazette, October 2024; Nieman Lab, March 2024).
• Paid subscriptions: surpassed 1 million in March 2024 (Nieman Lab). 56% digital-only, 44% print/digital bundle.
• Profitability: announced profitable in early 2024 after losses reported at $20M (2020) and $10M (2021).
• Documented immigration position: extensive 2017–2024 coverage of Trump-era enforcement actions; The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson said a Trump-presidency issue “drove a lot of subscriptions” but expected Trump-coverage traffic spikes to be “less likely to come” (Press Gazette).

A.3 Donor-, foundation- and publicly funded newsrooms

A.3.1 NPR / PBS NewsHour

• NPR: 501(c)(3). FY2023 revenues, gains and other support ~$319 million per audited consolidated financials (NPR FY2023 statements); federal funding through CPB is a single-digit percentage of NPR’s own budget but is a structural component for many member stations.
• PBS NewsHour: produced by WETA Washington (501(c)(3)).
• CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting): federally appropriated; FY2024 appropriation $525 million, advance-appropriated in 2022 (P.L. 117-103).
• Documented immigration position: NPR and PBS NewsHour run immigration-policy desks; both publish 990s and audited financials.

A.3.2 The Nation / Mother Jones / In These Times

• The Nation: published by The Nation Company L.P. / The Nation Institute (501(c)(3)), now Type Media Center, whose 990s report revenue of $2,375,591 (2023) and $3,411,279 (2024) (Type Media Center, IRS 990 via ProPublica); The Nation Company’s own (for-profit) figures are not public.
• Mother Jones: published by Foundation for National Progress (501(c)(3)). Revenue per 990 ~$16.2 million (FY ending June 2023), ~$21.8 million (FY ending June 2024) (IRS 990 via ProPublica).
• In These Times: published by Institute for Public Affairs (501(c)(3)). 990 ~$2 million annual scale (Institute for Public Affairs, IRS 990 via ProPublica: $2,424,946 (2022), $898,922 (2023), $2,465,877 (2024)).

A.3.3 ProPublica

• EIN: 14-2007220.
• Reported 2023 revenue: per its 2023 Form 990, ~$58.0 million (ProPublica, IRS 990 via Nonprofit Explorer).
• Donor concentration: Sandler Foundation has been a structural founder-funder since 2008; Sandler Family Supporting Foundation Schedule I grants are visible on ProPublica’s own Nonprofit Explorer. Other large recurring donors include MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Knight Foundation.
• Immigration desk: dedicated reporting team active 2017–present; multiple federal-policy stories.

Part B: The commentary economy: think-tank fellows, newsletters and podcasts

Commentators and independent publications, grouped by who pays them: a think tank’s budget, a newsletter’s subscribers, or a platform’s licensing deal. The positions they take on immigration are recorded entry by entry, in their own words where the file has them.

B.1 Think-tank salaries and budgets

B.1.1 Heather Mac Donald / Manhattan Institute

• Heather Mac Donald: Manhattan Institute fellow; City Journal columnist. Manhattan Institute 2023 revenue ~$27 million per its 990. Mac Donald’s compensation reported in 990 Schedule J (Manhattan Institute, IRS 990 via ProPublica).

B.1.2 Heritage Foundation

• Heritage Foundation: 2023 revenue ~$101 million per IRS Form 990. Immigration content via The Daily Signal (Heritage Foundation, IRS 990 via ProPublica).

B.2 Newsletter subscriptions and independent publications

B.2.1 Bari Weiss / The Free Press

• The Free Press / FP Media LLC (private until October 2025).
• September 2024 valuation: $100 million (Series A, $15 million raised). Source: Nieman Lab.
• September 2025 annualized revenue: ~$20 million estimated (Sacra, +48% YoY from $13.8 million September 2024).
• Paid subscribers: ~170,000 of ~1.5 million total readers as of October 2025 (Press Gazette).
• October 2025: acquired by Paramount Skydance for reported $150 million.
• Documented immigration position: multiple long-form pieces on H-1B reform and asylum-system stress (2023–2025), and a staged debate on immigration.
• Where the coverage points, on this file’s record: the H-1B long-read (The $100,000 Question: What’s Going On with H-1B Visas?) takes the visa program’s rules as its subject. The file holds no measure of the publication’s immigration coverage as a whole.

B.2.2 Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich, Mehdi Hasan

• Heather Cox Richardson (Letters from an American): per Nieman Lab and Readless / industry estimates, estimated $12M+ annual revenue at >2.6 million total subscribers (mid-2025 data, paid-subscriber share not publicly disclosed by Substack). Among the highest-earning known Substack publications (Nieman Lab, highest-earning Substacks estimate). Substack’s own page for the publication lists “Hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers” and over 3 million subscribers in all (Substack, read 2026-09-28). Press Gazette estimated her revenue at “at least £4m ($5m)” a year from that tier and the $50 annual price (Press Gazette, 23 Jan 2025). In August 2026 she “declined to provide revenue figures, but hinted that estimates of $5 million in annual Substack income may be low”, and the Boston Globe ranked her third among political Substacks by revenue, behind The Free Press and The Bulwark (Boston Globe Magazine, 11 Aug 2026). Growth In Reverse’s estimate works from 200,000 paid subscribers at the $5 monthly price (Growth In Reverse).
• Robert Reich: Substack publication active; figures not separately disclosed.
• Mehdi Hasan: founded Zeteo (subscription publication) after leaving MSNBC. Subscriber count cited in Press Gazette but not audited.

B.2.3 Glenn Greenwald

• Substack (later Locals/Rumble): monthly revenue estimated $80,000–$160,000 per Fox Business reporting (2021).
• Rumble contract: mid-six-figure annual contract reported for System Update daily program (December 2022 onward — Rumble via GlobeNewswire).
• Documented immigration position: critical of both parties’ enforcement and rhetoric.

B.2.4 Matt Taibbi / Racket News

• Racket News on Substack: >500,000 total subscribers per Salon reporting and The New Republic (April 2025); revenue not disclosed (The New Republic).
• Twitter Files reporter (December 2022–March 2023), with Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, et al. Topic intersected with immigration content moderation (DHS DGB / GEC adjacency).

B.2.5 Yascha Mounk / Persuasion

• Persuasion: Substack publication, network-bundle model. Subscriber count “Over 130,000” (Persuasion); “a project of Persuasion Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in the United States” (Persuasion, About); positioned as a defense of pluralism. Immigration coverage modest.

B.2.6 Andrew Sullivan, Caitlin Flanagan, John McWhorter

• Andrew Sullivan: The Weekly Dish on Substack. Subscriber and revenue figures not publicly disclosed. Sullivan writes for bringing immigration under control: “What Americans want is a sense that immigration is under control” (What Biden Doesn’t Get On Immigration).
• Flanagan, Sullivan and McWhorter all publish primarily through legacy outlets and Substack; financial scale individually small relative to Free Press and Greenwald.

B.3 Platform licensing deals

B.3.1 Joe Rogan / The Joe Rogan Experience

• 2020 Spotify deal: reported >$200 million over 3.5 years (New York Times, February 2022; the Wall Street Journal’s May 2020 figure was $100 million; Spotify declined to comment — The Verge).
• February 2024 renewal: reported up to $250 million over multiyear term, non-exclusive (Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2024; Variety; Fortune). Structure: upfront minimum guarantee plus revenue share on ad sales. Distribution by Spotify; podcast also available on YouTube and Apple Podcasts.
• Documented immigration content: regular guest list includes immigration-policy voices on multiple sides (e.g., Vivek Ramaswamy, Bernie Sanders, Bret Weinstein, Mike Benz, Tucker Carlson, Coleman Hughes, et al.). Per-episode reach in the millions.

Part C: Advocacy nonprofits on opposite sides of immigration bills

The organizations in C.1 and C.2 do oppose each other: they take opposite positions on the same bills, and the Center for Immigration Studies’ 2011 count of lobbying on immigration bills sets the pro-enforcement groups against the rest (Part E). They are kept apart here and named by what they advocate.

C.1 Organizations advocating lower immigration and stricter enforcement

The “restrictionist tripod” — three organizations founded by or associated with John Tanton — files annual 990s.

Compensation, top officers (2024 990 filings):

• FAIR: Daniel A. Stein (President) $368,324; Julie Kirchner (Executive Director) $351,164; Jennifer Harris (CFO) $210,302.
• CIS: Steven Camarota (Director of Research) $306,533; Mark Krikorian (Executive Director) $281,958; Andrew Arthur (Resident Fellow) $262,945.

Aggregate, three orgs, three-year revenue (FY2022–FY2024): approximately $45 million, audited via 990 filings. This is the documented financial footprint of the restrictionist think-tank / advocacy tripod.

US Tech Workers / IT-PRO USA: small-scale operations focused on H-1B labor-market opposition. U.S. Tech Workers files under the Institute for Sound Public Policy (formerly Progressives for Immigration Reform), EIN 26-1634671: revenue $759,560 (2022), $107,604 (2023), $493,480 (2024) per its 990s (IRS 990 via ProPublica; ISPP, Our Team). No filing entity named IT-PRO USA appears on ProPublica.

C.2 Immigrant legal-services, legalization-advocacy and policy-research organizations

Compensation, top officers:

• UnidosUS: Janet Murguia (President & CEO) — $676,570 (FY2024), $649,453 (FY2023), $615,995 (FY2022), $593,464 (FY2021), $555,628 (FY2020). Compensation has grown ~22% in five years per Schedule J.
• RAICES: Dolores K. Schroeder (CEO/President) $432,185 (FY2024); Kim Mattheson (CHRO) $333,337; Anna L. Flores (CFO/COO) $293,726.
• Migration Policy Institute: Andrew Selee (President) $269,512 (FY2024), $263,091 (FY2023).

Aggregate, five orgs, FY2023 + FY2024 revenue: approximately $267 million. Roughly 9.5× the scale of the restrictionist tripod over the same window (UnidosUS $130.9M + NILC $29.8M + AILA $18.5M + RAICES $71.8M + MPI $15.6M = $266.5M, against the tripod’s FY2023 + FY2024 $28.0M, from the 990s linked in the table above and in C.1). AILA is a 501(c)(6) trade association, not a 501(c)(3). This is a documented financial-flow asymmetry, not a judgment about either side.

C.3 What both groups share

Opposed on the bills, the two groups share one interest, stated in Part G: FAIR’s $7M-a-year budget line and UnidosUS’s $76M-a-year budget line both depend, structurally, on the issue remaining unresolved. Both lines come from the 990s in C.1 and C.2.

Part D: Platform incentive structures

D.1 YouTube algorithm

• Mozilla Foundation RegretsReporter (crowdsourced 2020–2021): 37,380 volunteers installed the extension; 3,362 regret reports came from 1,662 volunteers across 91 countries. 71% of all Regret reports were of videos recommended by YouTube’s automatic recommendation system. Recommended videos were 40% more likely to be reported than searched videos. Per Mozilla published report (2021) (Mozilla Foundation, “YouTube Regrets” findings; full report PDF).
• Guillaume Chaslot: former YouTube engineer (algorithm team), Mozilla Fellow (July 2019). Documented in Columbia Journalism Review and CJR-cited interviews that YouTube’s recommendation objective during his tenure was time on the platform: “Total watch time was what we went for—there was very little effort put into quality” (CJR).
• Immigration-relevant content: YouTube has not separately disclosed immigration-topic engagement metrics.

D.2 X / Twitter

• 2024 ad revenue: ~$1.7 billion (68% of total) (Business of Apps, citing X’s own disclosures and Investing.com aggregation; X is private, so these are third-party estimates).
• Total 2024 revenue: ~$2.5 billion across all sources per same aggregations.
• Creator monetization: in seven months of Ads Rev Share, X paid

  $45 million to >150,000 creators per Elon Musk public posts (and X’s own statement, March 2024 — Nairametrics). Structure shifted to engagement-based payouts from X Premium users (TechCrunch, 9 Oct 2024).

• Community Notes: launched at scale 2022.
• Recommendation audits: Republican content on the platform has documented increases in reach following Musk’s October 2022 acquisition (multiple platform-disclosed metrics and independent analyses). Two independent 2024 audits found X’s recommendations favoring Republican content: “a possible recommendation bias favouring Republican content in terms of visibility”, dated to July 2024 (Graham & Andrejevic, QUT), and “a right-leaning bias in exposure” for new accounts (Ye, Luceri & Ferrara, arXiv 2411.01852).

D.3 Facebook / Meta

• Frances Haugen disclosures (3 October 2021): internal documents including 8 SEC complaints. Documented that the 2018 algorithm change boosting “Meaningful Social Interactions” (MSI) rewarded outrage and incentivized sensationalism per Facebook’s own internal memos.
• 2024 ad revenue: Meta total advertising revenue $160.6 billion per 10-K (Meta Platforms SEC filings, EDGAR). Immigration-content share not separately disclosed.
• Documented immigration content amplification: Haugen testimony to Senate Commerce subcommittee, October 5, 2021 (written testimony, U.S. Senate Commerce Committee); WSJ Facebook Files series.

D.4 TikTok

• ByteDance Ltd. (private; Cayman-incorporated). 2024 revenue ~$155 billion global per Reuters reporting and The Information and Bloomberg (April 2025), citing internal sources; international (non-China) revenue $39 billion, mostly TikTok US (Tubefilter). US TikTok revenue estimated at $20+ billion Sacra, “ByteDance vs TikTok” (Jan-Erik Asplund, January 2025): “In 2024, TikTok generated $27B in revenue from the United States” (Sacra estimate); the reported 2023 US figure is about $16 billion (Reuters via DealStreetAsia, 15 Mar 2024).
• Political content policy: TikTok announced restrictions on political advertising and political-content monetization (multiple policy updates 2020–2024; the political-ads ban dates to TikTok, 3 Oct 2019 (archived); TikTok, 21 Sep 2022 (archived)); enforcement contested (NBC News, 23 Sep 2024).
• PAFACA: Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act signed into law April 2024; divestment deadline reached January 2025; subsequent extensions issued under executive order.

D.5 Substack

• Gross writer revenue: $300 million (2023), $370 million (2024), $450 million (2025) per Substack disclosures (Sacra; Substack’s own March 2025 post gives 5 million paid subscriptions — Substack).
• Heather Cox Richardson: estimated $12M+ annual revenue per 2025 industry estimates (up from the 2023 Nieman Lab figure of ≥$5M; among the largest known publications); third among political Substacks by revenue, behind The Free Press and The Bulwark (Boston Globe Magazine, 11 Aug 2026). See B.2.2.
• Top earners are concentrated in five categories: Finance, Business, US Politics, Technology, Health Politics (per Substack data summarized by Nieman Lab).
• Top earners by genre: of the 52 Substack accounts Press Gazette could confirm at $500,000+ a year, US politics was “by far the top-performing genre”, with 46% of the group’s combined minimum earnings ($18.4M) (Press Gazette, 23 Jan 2025).
• Documented finding: subscription revenue concentrated in political commentary; immigration is a recurring theme on Richardson’s newsletter and on The Free Press, Greenwald and Taibbi.

D.6 Reddit

• Reddit Inc. (NYSE: RDDT): IPO March 2024.
• FY2024 revenue: $1.30 billion per Reddit 10-K (Reddit, Inc. Form 10-K FY2024, SEC).
• r/politics: ~8.5 million subscribers (Reddit-reported, late 2024).
• Immigration-specific subreddits: r/immigration (~400k); r/h1b (~140k); both report subscriber counts on subreddit pages.

Part E: The think-tank / advocacy-org revenue race (consolidated)

Five-year revenue trajectories for the orgs whose work product most directly drives elite-discourse framing on immigration. All from IRS Form 990 filings retrieved via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer unless noted — per-org 990 pages: FAIR, CIS, NumbersUSA E&R, UnidosUS, RAICES, NILC, AILA, Migration Policy Institute.

Organizations advocating lower immigration and stricter enforcement

Immigrant legal-services, legalization-advocacy and policy-research organizations

Documented finding: the pro-immigration advocacy side, by 501(c)(3) revenue alone, runs roughly 9.1× the financial scale of the restrictionist tripod over the FY2020–FY2024 window. This is a fact on the 990 record. It does not, by itself, support any claim about which side is correct on policy. It does confirm the restrictionists’ own long-standing complaint that they are outspent. The Center for Immigration Studies made that case on lobbying money in 2011, finding that less than a third of one percent of the lobbying spent on the immigration bills it tracked came from pro-enforcement groups. The 990 record shows the same asymmetry on the charity side. Sources: $702.4M / $76.9M = 9.1×, from the two tables above and their ProPublica filings; CIS, Jon Feere, “Report: Open-Borders Groups Spend Millions Lobbying”, 2011: “less than 1/3 of 1 percent of lobbying money spent on these immigration bills was by pro-enforcement-oriented groups.” Lobbying spend and 501(c)(3) revenue are different ledgers; the two agree in direction, not in ratio.

The record also undercuts a pro-immigration framing: the claim that “restrictionist policy is purely organic citizen sentiment with no institutional infrastructure” is also not supported by the record. The restrictionist tripod operates at the ~$15M/year scale — small relative to the pro-immigration side, but not zero, and concentrated on three orgs that have provided the bulk of the data citations for restrictionist arguments in Congressional record, court filings, and media coverage since the 1980s.

Adjacent: Cato Institute

• EIN: 23-7432162 (Cato Institute, IRS 990 via ProPublica).

• FY2023 revenue: $71,927,807.

• FY2023 expenses: $41,834,120.

• FY2023 total assets: $172,218,520.

• Fiscal year: all three figures are from the return for the fiscal year ending March 2024 (tax year 2023); the return for the year ending March 2023 shows $57,666,559 revenue.

• Documented immigration position: pro-immigration on net, consistent with libertarian frame. Cato’s white paper “Immigrants' Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994–2023” (February 2026 — Cato) is among the most-cited counter-restrictionist fiscal studies.

• Funding: Koch network exposure documented historically (Donors Capital Fund, Charles G. Koch Foundation, Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, others per InfluenceWatch and Cato 990 Schedule B for years where Schedule B is public).

Niskanen Center

• FY2023 revenue: the main 501(c)(3), The Niskanen Center, EIN 45-5308952, reported $11,280,437 (2023) and $9,958,495 (2024), comparable to MPI and CIS; the small 501(c)(4), Niskanen Center for Public Policy, EIN 47-4946572, reported $605,000 (2023). Historical immigration funding: $75,000 each in 2020 and 2021 from Open Society Foundations (its 2017 $500,000 grant was for defense policy); $125,000 from FWD.us (2021). OSF’s own record lists the 2017 grant “to support advocacy on defense policy inter alia” and $75,000 each in 2020 and 2021 for refugee resettlement and protection (OSF grants); FWD.us: 2021, DACA (Niskanen funding disclosure).

Part F: Politicians who specialize in the rage

For each politician, this section reports (a) immigration-issue position, (b) FEC-reportable campaign-finance footprint (2019–2024 cycle aggregate per OpenSecrets, unless noted), and (c) specific documented financial / electoral outcome. Top-donor breakdowns are available at the OpenSecrets URLs cited; the dossier does not enumerate per-donor detail here.

F.1 Enforcement spending and migrant transport

• Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX, since Jan 2015):

  • Operation Lone Star: launched March 2021. Texas state spending through Jan 2025: >$11.1 billion per Abbott’s own request for federal reimbursement (Texas Tribune, 23 Jan 2025; CBS Texas). Components: $4.75B border barriers, local border-security grants, criminal-trespass processing and migrant relocation (the letter’s line: “Border wall and other border barrier funding, local border security grants to counties and cities, processing criminal trespass arrests, and the relocation of migrants”; of which ~$2.95B border wall); $3.62B Texas National Guard personnel; $2.25B Texas DPS personnel (Abbott letter, 23 Jan 2025); $495.3M budget transfer approved April 2022 (Abbott press release).
  • Documented position: border enforcement as a sustained Texas state-government cost line; bussing-of-migrants program to NYC, Chicago, DC, Philadelphia, Denver, LA documented in state procurement records and the governor’s own releases (Office of the Texas Governor, 15 Mar 2024; ABC13, on TDEM transaction data: “the state paid Wynne Transportation $75,561,032.72 from Aug. 19, 2022, through Aug. 23, 2023, to bus migrants out of state”).

• Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL, since Jan 2019):

  • September 2022 Martha’s Vineyard flights: two charter flights from San Antonio TX to MV; ~50 migrants. Class action lawsuit filed against DeSantis and Florida Sec. of Transportation; settlement / status varies by claim.
  • SB 1718 (2023): $12 million appropriation to Florida Division of Emergency Management’s Unauthorized Alien Transport Program.
  • 2024 presidential campaign: ended January 2024; campaign spending heavily anchored on immigration content per ad-tracking analyses. Before he announced, AdImpact found that the digital ads of his affiliated PAC, Friends of Ron DeSantis ($187K on Google and Facebook by April 2023), focused “on national issues, highlighting immigration” (AdImpact, 6 Apr 2023).

F.2 Bills on legal-immigration levels, H-1B rules and enforcement

• Sen. JD Vance (R-OH, since Jan 2023; VP-elect Jan 2025; VP Jan 2025—):

  • OpenSecrets candidate ID: N00048832; FEC ID S2OH00436 (OpenSecrets — JD Vance).
  • 2022 Senate cycle total raised: ~$16 million across his Senate committee (FEC candidate S2OH00436: $15,994,977 receipts, 2021–22) (his outside spending was vastly larger, with Protect Ohio Values PAC and Peter Thiel-funded entities at ~$15M additional; Thiel gave $15,000,000 to Protect Ohio Values PAC, which spent $15,985,860 independently in 2022 — FEC C00770495).
  • Documented immigration position: H-1B-skeptical; co-sponsored border/immigration-enforcement bills (e.g. S. 505, S. 2824), no H-1B bill in his congress.gov record; floor speeches on visa-fraud enforcement. Position aligns with the Grassley/Durbin/Sessions/Cotton lineage documented in the H-1B/Embassy dossiers.

• Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR, since Jan 2015):

  • OpenSecrets candidate ID: N00033363 (OpenSecrets — Tom Cotton).
  • 2014–2020 cycle aggregate: ~$27M total raised (FEC candidate S4AR00103: $13,911,690 (2014) + $12,990,412 (2020)).
  • Documented immigration position: lead Senate Republican on legal-immigration reduction (RAISE Act, 2017, with Sen. Perdue). Co-sponsor on multiple H-1B reform bills. His cosponsored record includes the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act (S. 281, 2018; S. 386, 2019), which lifts per-country caps on employment-based green cards; sponsor of the Visa Cap Enforcement Act and OPT Fair Tax Act (2025).

• Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL, since Jan 1997): long-running co-author of bipartisan H-1B reform bills with Grassley (2007 onward). Documented in Embassy and H-1B-labor-arbitrage dossiers.

• Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT): historically restrictionist on labor-market grounds (notably 2007 floor remarks on H-1B as wage-suppression), position shifted toward open-borders critique by 2016 primary and after.

F.3 Comprehensive-reform and border-deal bills

• Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL, Senate 2011–Jan 2025; Sec. of State Jan 2025—): 2013 Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform co-sponsor; subsequent position shifts.

• Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY, Senate Majority Leader 2021–Jan 2025): 2013 Gang of Eight co-sponsor; comprehensive-reform anchor on Senate Democratic side.

• Sen. James Lankford (R-OK):

  • Lankford–Murphy–Sinema border deal (introduced February 2024; failed). Text released by the Senate Appropriations Committee (4 Feb 2024 — Senate Appropriations). Bipartisan negotiation; Republican leadership declined to advance.

F.4 Campaign platforms, fundraising and issue content

• Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX, since Jan 2013): long-running campaign presence on border / immigration enforcement. 2024 reelection raised ~$74M (FEC candidate S2TX00312: $74,050,031 receipts in 2023–24).

• Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL, resigned Nov 2024): high-volume immigration content on social media; both reported small-donor fundraising aggregates in the tens of millions per FEC filings.

• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY): 2019 detention-facility visits; high-volume immigration content on social platforms. 2024 cycle fundraising aggregate ~$15M (FEC H8NY15148: $15,299,236 receipts in 2023–24).

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA): 2020 presidential platform included broad legalization, decriminalization of unauthorized entry.

F.5 Campaign ad spending and fundraising appeals: Trump campaign apparatus / RNC

• Trump 2024 official campaign committee + affiliated PACs: ~$217M direct spending through March 2024 per OpenSecrets; broader Republican-side spend ~$1.8B for the cycle. Over the full cycle the principal campaign committee raised $463,662,725 and spent $448,966,052; with outside groups, $1,452,617,443 raised and $1,470,544,050 spent (OpenSecrets — Donald Trump, candidate N00023864).
• Immigration ad spending, H1 2024: >$247 million spent on TV, streaming, and digital ads mentioning immigration — $40M more than the next-largest issue category. Over 90% supported Republican candidates; >80% of the spending went to ads that never ran in states on the Mexico border. Ohio, Indiana and Montana drew the most (Washington Post, 18 Aug 2024, AdImpact data covering 745 ads aired January through June 2024; archived copy (archived)).
• Fundraising email subject lines: extensive primary record of immigration-coded subject lines; Newsweek, NBC News, CNN, and Globe and Mail catalogued patterns including misleading “fwd:” framing, post-conviction “I was just convicted in a rigged trial” blast.

F.6 Latino-vote-specific operations

• Catalist LLC: Democratic voter-data firm; founded 2006. Private.
• Equis Research / Equis Labs: Latino-voter polling and analysis firm; founded 2019 by Stephanie Valencia, Carlos Odio. Documented 2020/2022/2024-cycle work on Latino-voter immigration sentiment. No SEC filings; nonprofit and corporate structure (Equis, About).

Part G: The structural finding

The aggregate financial footprint documented in Parts A–F runs to the multiple billions of dollars per year. To anchor scale:

• Cable carriage, advertising and ad-supported digital (A.1): Fox Corp Cable segment ~$6B (FY2024, SEC); Newsmax $180M+ annualized (SEC, 2025); MSNBC / NBCUniversal Cable segment in the multi-billion range (Comcast 10-K, not isolated for MSNBC); Vox Media $600–650M (2022, The Information via Nieman Lab); Real America’s Voice (private, not disclosed).

• Subscription, membership and commerce (A.2): Daily Wire $200M+ (Axios-cited, 2023); Tucker Carlson Network $20–28M (estimated, 2024); The Atlantic $100M (Press Gazette, 2023).

• Donor-, foundation- and publicly funded newsrooms (A.3): ProPublica ~$58M (2023 Form 990).

• Aggregate: Fox, Newsmax, the Daily Wire and TCN together run at roughly $6.5B/year minimum, before counting the Sinclair / Salem / iHeart talk-radio adjacencies. The minimum rests on Fox’s SEC-filed segment; the Daily Wire and TCN figures are company claims or estimates. The outlets in A.1–A.3 together run at the multi-billion scale.

• Restrictionist 501(c)(3) advocacy: $77M five-year total (FAIR + CIS + NumbersUSA ER, 990 audited).

• Pro-immigration 501(c)(3) advocacy: $700M+ five-year total (UnidosUS + RAICES + NILC + AILA + MPI, 990 audited).

• Substack political commentary: $450M gross writer revenue (2025, third-party estimate), with Heather Cox Richardson estimated at $12M annual revenue and third among political Substacks by revenue, behind The Free Press and The Bulwark (Boston Globe Magazine, Aug 2026). The Free Press, Greenwald, Taibbi and the other commentary publications in Part B compose a substantial share (see D.5 and B.2.2).

• Political campaign spend on immigration ads, H1 2024: $247M in six months (Washington Post, 18 Aug 2024).

• State enforcement spend, Texas alone, 2021–2024: $11.1B (Operation Lone Star, Abbott reimbursement request — Texas Tribune).

The book’s diagnostic frame, restated through the financial record:

The dossiers in this workstream document a mechanism — a labor-arbitrage / diaspora-influence channel that the host-country regulatory apparatus has documented and chosen not to enforce against at any scale that would alter it. Citizen rage at the documented existence of that mechanism is, on the face of it, epistemically rational.

What this dossier documents is that the rage gets harvested. It is harvested by Fox Corp’s cable segment and MSNBC’s primetime block. It is harvested by The Daily Wire’s $200M revenue line and ProPublica’s $58M revenue line and The Atlantic’s 1-million subscription count. It is harvested by FAIR’s $7M-a-year budget line and UnidosUS’s $76M-a-year budget line — both of which depend, structurally, on the issue remaining unresolved. It is harvested by Greg Abbott’s $11.1B Texas state expenditure line and by Joe Rogan’s $250M Spotify contract and by Heather Cox Richardson’s $12M Substack and by the $247M of Q1-Q2 2024 immigration ads. It is amplified by YouTube’s documented 71%-of-regrets-from-recommendations rate and Facebook’s documented MSI-rewards-outrage internal finding.

Almost none of these institutions has a positive financial-statement outcome from the underlying mechanism being resolved. Each has a positive financial-statement outcome from the rage at the mechanism remaining hot.

That is the structural finding. It is not a motive imputation against any individual journalist, advocate, politician, or platform executive. It is the aggregate equilibrium that the financial filings document. The rage is real and the citizens experiencing it are not wrong about the existence of the mechanism. The targeting of the rage — at the immigrant, at the diaspora, at the corporate lobbyist, at the political opponent — is selected for by the incentive structures of every layer of the discourse that surrounds the mechanism.

This is the same architectural pattern The Ratchet documents in other domains. The safety infrastructure that becomes the control grid; the trust-and-safety apparatus that becomes the censorship apparatus; the regulatory body that becomes the captured agent of the regulated. The pattern in immigration is: the citizen-discourse apparatus that becomes the rage-monetization apparatus. The rage at the wrong target obscures the rage at the actual mechanism. And every institution covered in Parts A–F has a documented dollar-line exposure to that obscuration continuing.

Appendix: Adversarial-review pass

Where a hostile reviewer would attack this dossier, and how the record holds up.

AR-1: “You’re equating left and right financially, which is false-equivalence.”

The objection assumes the dossier sorts its subjects into left and right. It does not, so there is nothing to equate. The series places actors by documented action, never by self-label or by the side they are said to be on (see the three-axis model), and this dossier uses one action test: where an institution’s output points the rage, and whether the institution earns more when the rage stays hot. The parts are grouped by how each institution is paid (Parts A and B), by what it advocates on bills (Part C), and by what each politician did on the issue (Part F).

Where the filings show a scale difference, the dossier reports it as a difference between named institutions: over FY2020–FY2024 the five organizations in C.2 took in 9.1× the revenue of the three in C.1 (Part E). That figure says nothing about which policy is right, and the dossier draws no conclusion about “sides” from it. The dossier also documents that Fox News’ cable-segment revenue exceeds MSNBC’s by a meaningful margin (Fox Corp 10-K vs. Comcast NBCUniversal segment disclosures; Kagan/S&P Global via Pew Research Center, cable news fact sheet: Fox News “$3.3 billion in 2022”, MSNBC $903 million). The finding is the same for every institution covered, whatever policy it favors: each has a documented revenue exposure to the rage staying hot and aimed away from the mechanism, and almost none has a documented financial upside from the mechanism being fixed. That claim is on the record, institution by institution.

AR-2: “You’re saying ProPublica is in it for the money.”

The dossier reports ProPublica’s audited revenue, donor concentration, and the existence of an immigration desk. It does not claim ProPublica’s reporting is motivated by donor preference. It claims ProPublica has a structural funding line that depends, in part, on sustained donor interest in immigration-policy accountability reporting. That is a documentable position. The question of whether ProPublica’s specific journalism is captured by its donors is a separate, evidentiary question that the dossier does not attempt to answer.

AR-3: “You’re attacking the messengers instead of debating the

policy.”

The dossier is not a policy argument. The six companion dossiers make the policy / mechanism argument. This dossier is a political-economy supplement: who collects the rent on the citizen reaction. The two are distinguishable. The book deploys this dossier to support a different claim — that citizen-discourse infrastructure is itself a captured layer of the same control-grid pattern The Ratchet documents in other domains — not to deflect from the underlying policy debate.

AR-4: “Your estimates for Tucker Carlson Network, OAN, etc. are

not primary sources.”

Correct. Where the dossier uses non-primary estimates (Sacra, Nieman Lab, WSJ source reporting), it labels them as estimates. Where private companies decline to file SEC reports, no audited number is available. The dossier does not claim those numbers are audited; it claims they are the best available estimates from named sources. If a private company chooses to disclose, the dossier should be updated.

AR-5: “The 501(c)(3) scale comparison ignores 501(c)(4) and

527 spending.”

Acknowledged limitation. UnidosUS, FAIR, and others operate 501(c)(4) arms; full advocacy-spending comparison would require pulling those filings as well. The dossier reports what is on the public record from the (c)(3) side, which is the largest published component. A future revision should add the (c)(4) and PAC layer for both sides.

AR-6: “You haven’t sourced the Operation Lone Star $11.1B

figure to an audit.”

The figure is Abbott’s own reimbursement-request number (January 2025 letters to House and Senate leadership), reproduced in Texas Tribune, CBS Texas, and Fox 4 DFW. The Texas state-budget line items ($6.5B for the FY2026–2027 biennium proposed budget) are public. Independent audit of full program cost has not been completed; the figure is what the State of Texas asserts it has spent.

AR-7: “The structural-finding section reads as accusation.”

Reviewed and tightened. The structural-finding section makes one empirical claim: that the institutions documented in Parts A–F do not have a financial-statement upside from the mechanism being resolved, and do have an upside from the rage continuing. This is a claim about institutional incentive gradients, supported by the filings reported in the body. The claim is not that any individual actor is acting in bad faith. The dossier explicitly disclaims motive imputation. The structural-equilibrium claim stands on the financial record.

Sources

SEC filings (primary)

• Fox Corporation — 10-K (FY2024), 8-K quarterly earnings releases (Q1/Q3/Q4 FY2024)
• Newsmax Inc. — Form 1-A, 1-A/A, 1-A POS, 8-K quarterly releases (FY2025 Q1, Q2, Q3)
• Comcast Corporation — 10-K
• Reddit Inc. — 10-K (FY2024)
• Meta Platforms — 10-K (FY2024)
• Spotify Technology S.A. — Form 6-K (FY2024)

IRS Form 990 filings (primary, via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer)

• Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), EIN 52-1136126
• Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), EIN 52-1449368
• NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation, EIN 47-0865426
• UnidosUS, EIN 86-0212873
• National Immigration Law Center (NILC), EIN 95-4539765
• American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), EIN 23-7085097
• RAICES, EIN 74-2436920
• Migration Policy Institute, EIN 52-2279789
• Cato Institute, EIN 23-7432162
• Niskanen Center for Public Policy, EIN 47-4946572 / 45-5308952
• ProPublica, EIN 14-2007220
• Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, EIN 13-2912529
• The Heritage Foundation, EIN 23-7327730
• Sandler Foundation, EIN 94-3147856

FEC filings (primary, via OpenSecrets)

• Sen. JD Vance, candidate ID N00048832, FEC ID S2OH00436
• Sen. Tom Cotton, candidate ID N00033363
• Donald J. Trump for President 2024, OpenSecrets candidate page N00023864

Major-outlet reporting (anchored to primary filings or to

named-source disclosures)

• Axios: Daily Wire $200M revenue (28 May 2024); $22M commerce; growth-investment follow-on (10 Dec 2024)
• Wall Street Journal: Joe Rogan $250M Spotify renewal (3 Feb 2024); also Variety, Fortune
• Press Gazette: The Atlantic $100M revenue (October 2024); The Free Press valuation arc
• Nieman Lab: The Atlantic 1M subscriptions (March 2024); Free Press valuation (Sept 2024); Substack top-earner estimates
• Sacra: Free Press $20M ARR (September 2025)
• Washington Post: Real America’s Voice / Sigg ownership (24 Jan 2022); 2024 immigration-ad tracker
• Texas Tribune: Operation Lone Star $11.1B Abbott request (23 Jan 2025)
• Mozilla Foundation: RegretsReporter final report (2021)
• Senate Commerce Committee testimony: Frances Haugen (5 Oct 2021)
• Business of Apps: X / Twitter 2024 ad-revenue aggregation
• Wall Street Journal: Facebook Files series

Cross-companion dossiers (this workstream)

• H-1B / L-1 Labor Arbitrage — Diaspora-as-Labor-Cost-Suppression
• Diaspora PACs as Remittance-Economy Political-Influence Mechanisms
• Intelligence Services and Diaspora Networks — Postwar Template and Worldwide Adoption
• Historical Precedents — When Polities Confronted Foreign-State or Foreign-Commercial Displacement
• European Diaspora-Influence + Labor-Arbitrage — the EU/UK Ratchet Analog
• Canada and Australia — Diaspora-Influence and Labor-Arbitrage Pattern
• The Labor-Arbitrage Mythos — the frames wrapped around the mechanism
• Algorithmic Amplification — the platform substrate behind Part D

When updating this dossier, anchor every new figure to a named primary source or a two-source estimate, per the sourcing discipline above.