Former MSNBC employee Pat Buchanan used an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press to frame immigration as a “massive invasion” and “conquest of the West” by “third-world ... border jumpers.” During the appearance, host Chuck Todd did not mention Buchanan's past history of racist comments, or that NBC's cable channel MSNBC parted ways with Buchanan in 2012.

After Meet the Press announced that Buchanan would be a guest on Sunday's show, Todd told Media Matters that Buchanan was invited on to compare Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's campaign to his own 1990s-era presidential runs.

On the July 26 edition of the show, Todd introduced Buchanan only as a former Republican presidential candidate. On-air text also mentioned Buchanan's former work as communications director at the White House during the Reagan administration.

After Todd asked whether Trump is conducting a campaign similar to Buchanan's past runs for the presidency, Buchanan said that there was a “similarity” in how Trump discusses immigration, and went on to describe “what people feel” is a “massive invasion” of “refugees, and border jumpers” (emphasis added):

TODD: Pat, when you see Trump, and what he's doing to the field, regardless of your views personally about him, and I know the two of you have had your own encounters in the past -- similar to what you rode in '92?

BUCHANAN: There is great similarity in the sense -- Trump's strength is the precise opposite of the distance of the Republican base from the Republican leadership in the country. He's exposing that and he's hitting two of the really strong populist issues. One of them, there's overlap with Bernie Sanders, and that's the trade issue, the export of American jobs and factories, and what's happening to the American middle class.

But the other one Trump is hitting, which is one of the hottest issues in the whole West, as well as the United States, is the massive invasion, if you will, of what people feel is the conquest of the West by massive third-world immigrations, coming from refugees, and border jumpers, and all the rest of them. He's wired into both of these and they're enormously popular issues.

These comments echoed ones Buchanan has made before. In his 2006 book State of Emergency, for example, he wrote of immigration: “This is an invasion, the greatest invasion in history,” and “We are witnessing how nations perish.”

Buchanan's anti-immigration rhetoric contributed to his early 2012 departure from MSNBC. Buchanan was suspended and then dropped from the channel specifically because of his book Suicide of a Superpower, which claimed to document how diversity and immigration are ruining the country, and featured chapters titles such as “The End Of White America.”

But Todd passed on the opportunity to explain to viewers Buchanan's past with the network and his lengthy history of bigoted comments about immigrants.