Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
It is hard now even for Democrats to defend illegal immigration, given that the Biden administration allowed in more than 10 million entrants. Among them were an estimated 500,000 criminals. No one believes that was wise or should ever be repeated.
Worse, the message went out that there would be few, if any, deportations and no real ICE kinetic activity beyond the border.
The world’s poor, sick, both law-abiding and criminal, young and old, understood that anyone could now enter the U.S. at will. Deterrence and legality were lost.
In its place, the message went out that if it was permissible to cross the border unlawfully, then, by extension, it would be seen as equally fine to reside illegally as well—and perhaps further to ignore laws, on the theory that the host had sanctioned all such exemptions.
During the lockdown hysteria, some 8,000-8,500 U.S. soldiers were expelled from the military for refusing the experimental mRNA vaccine. State employees nationwide were being fired for refusing the government vaccines. Nevertheless, illegal aliens would have no such mandates or worries. They simply walked in without worries over vaccinations and current COVID status and surmised correctly that illegal aliens were part of a Biden-administration-protected and privileged category.
Indeed, between 2021 and 2025, in one of the most bizarre episodes in U.S. immigration history, the border simply disappeared. There were to be no background checks, no health audits, and no identification of the greatest influx in any four-year period in U.S. history.
No one knew why. All had their explanations.
Was the Biden handlers’ plan for more poor to grow the welfare state and expand liberal government?
Was it misplaced idealism to welcome in millions of the world’s poorest, who would soon make it even more difficult for the nation’s citizen poor to find affordable housing and health care?
Was the agenda to create future dependencies and constituencies for an otherwise ossified Democratic Party?
Or was it an effort to ensure, in DEI terms, that the oppressed and victimized would outgrow the inert white oppressors and victimizers?
Oddest of all has been the attitude of the left toward the past destruction of the border. They went mum about the rampant illegality as the border disappeared and as millions filtered throughout the nation. Americans had no idea who the newcomers were, or even where or why they were here.
Given that it is much easier to destroy the border and allow millions to enter than to restore it and find the millions who entered illegally, the Democrats’ response has been Orwellian. After assuming the law did not apply to illegal alien entrants, they now insist its full force must apply to each of 10 million aliens before they can be sent home.
There were no protests when an errant Biden ICE became dysfunctional due to massive illegality. But there is now outrage when it attempts to restore legality and follow the law.
The result, however, of such a massive nullification of immigration laws has been that the nation’s outrage over illegal immigration has now extended to legal immigration as well. At the current level of frustration, all legal immigration will likely soon be put on hold.
Why?
One, we are currently in a great experiment: never has the U.S. foreign-born resident population approached 50-55 million or 16 percent of the population.
Two, never has the once-time-tried melting-pot creed of assimilation, integration, and acculturation been under greater assault and ridicule—just when it is most needed.
The canon of DEI—the nation is divided between a mostly white oppressor class and the non-white oppressed—has served to amplify the effects of giving up on civic education and melting-pot assimilation.
Somehow, the left advanced the absurd notion that the salad bowl of immigrants, chiefly and permanently identified by tribal ethnicities, races, religions, and nationalities, and only secondly as new Americans, would radically change America for the better. And so ended the ancient notion of assimilation, now to be known as “cultural appropriation.”
Three, if millions of legal immigrants are not asked to assume fully American identities, and further, if they feel that there are exemptions and largesse to be had by emphasizing their tribal and victimized status, then will they also feel they are not subject to any American customs and laws?
Instead, immigrants under these new protocols will seek to carve out their own tribal communities, based both on ethnic chauvinism and a sense of exemption from accountability. And if they insist on identifying as collectives rather than unique individuals, they will become increasingly unpopular not just as ingrates, but as hypocrites whose greater affinity with the nation they abandoned does not extend to returning to it.
Indeed, they will appear to have arrived in America only to craft a cocoon of security, freedom, and prosperity lacking in their homeland, but otherwise not to become fully American or see their former homeland as incidental, not essential, to their new identities.
The logical result of such tribal immigration is now upon us. Somali immigrants, both legal and illegal, have pulled off a likely multi-billion-dollar welfare fraud in Minnesota—perhaps the greatest single heist of welfare funds in the nation’s history. They were empowered by the usual DEI boilerplate rhetoric from their Minnesota champions, Rep. Ilhan Omar (who claimed the U.S. was now “one of the worst countries in the world”), Governor Tim Walz, and Attorney General Keith Ellison.
The more criminality, theft, and fraud were uncovered, the more the Somali leadership screamed “racism,” with the Democrat apparat blaming everyone but the perpetrators themselves.
Meanwhile, California has issued at least 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses to illegal alien truck drivers, the majority of them non-residents with little if any prior trucking expertise or English facility. The result is a sort of road-warrior new atmosphere on the nation’s freeways, as a new generation of truckers ignores the norms of the past and rightly concludes that if they were given exemption to enter the U.S. illegally and further to drive without proper audits, then naturally no authorities would mind if they also violated American traffic laws.
There are roughly one million foreign students in the U.S., the majority from China, India, and the Middle East. After October 7, protests, often violent and in violation of campus rules, spread nationwide.
There was never much pushback from either campus official or law enforcement. Within a few months, our liberal bastions of higher education had become saturated with anti-Semitic rhetoric, protests, and occasional violence against Jews.
Middle-East guest students often openly cheered on Hamas, called for the destruction of Israel, and, despite being non-citizens, often declared campus areas as no-go zones for American Jews. They did so because they could and had fully absorbed the DEI mantras of exemption.
So often they screamed “Islamophobia” when called out on their anti-Semitism, damning their critics with slurs of “nativism,” “racism,” and “xenophobia.” Thousands of foreign students felt contempt for their hosts and rhetorically attacked the U.S. as much as they fought in reality to remain in America.
As for the millions who crossed the southern border, almost daily, a national news story relates that a DUI driver has killed an American family, or a U.S. citizen has been murdered or raped, by an “undocumented immigrant,” usually with a criminal record, several deportations, and revolving-door arrests.
In Los Angeles, we were treated to street scenes of immigrants, apparently both legal and illegal, waving the Mexican flag while occasionally burning the American flag, sending the message that they would resist returning to the country whose flag they chauvinistically waved but demanded permanent residence in the nation whose flag they trashed and burned.
The net result was that our recent generations of immigrants have done the impossible: turned the most generous nation in the world from the most welcoming to increasingly resistant to mass immigration of any sort.
Again, why the change? They have read the news of one too many horrendous semi-truck accidents, one too many horrific murders, one too many anti-Semitic screams, and one too many massive abuses of a generous welfare state.
In sum, Americans now believe that the current generation of immigrants interprets their magnanimity and generosity as weakness and stupidity to be manipulated and scorned, and rarely as generosity to be appreciated and reciprocated in kind.