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.
Victor – I agree with you and while I also believe many polls are fake, the polling does not support your premise. While the left and left media basically lie about ripping babies from mother’s arms and ICE arresting citizens, a decent chunk of the US population believes the deportation efforts have gone too far. There may have been initial sentiment to deport and stop immigration, I just don’t think (unfortunately) that is any longer the case.
Thank you, Michael Campbell – “mass Stockholm Syndrome.”
There is one big difference with these immigrants. A very large segment of them are motivated by the Muslim religion and they will not come to be patriots of the US nation. The constitution will have no meaning to them and as they grow they will become a center of an alien nation within the country. We need to amend the constitution to forbid any person of Islamic beliefs from holding any position of any authority. Islam is not just a religion, it is a way of life which is contrary to the ideals of American life.
“…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.”
I am a loyal VDH reader and respect the professor’s clarity and good judgment. However, I disagree.
Decades of left-wing clobbering and propaganda has created a U.S. public that acts as if it suffers from mass Stockholm Syndrome.
The judiciary has as much blame as the Biden administration for the failure of immigrants to obey the laws of the land. Add to the fact Biden via Myorkas left the border open and restricted ICE from enforcing immigration laws; watching the leftist judiciary open jail cell doors to criminals and failures to bring charges by leftist district attorneys, is it any surprise immigrants both legal and illegal saw the US as a lawless society? Particularly those immigrants coming from nations where corruption and theft reigned supreme!
Yes on all points as usual but the elephant in this room is the Silicon Valley Immigration talent acquisition law which simply states, we need them. Effective to make ICE the villain when the law that’s been volleyed back and forth for decades, usually before elections, remains on the books. Enforce it, or change it. ICE is doing what their charter dictates.
John Glueck, what’s your point? We know everything you say. People entered our country illegally & remain here illegally. They undercut wages of American citizens, causing job loss, with the complicity of American companies seeking more profits.
Over time, these illegal aliens become more skilled, taking more jobs away from American construction workers in particular. Do those events justify people remaining here illegally while living in the shadows? Have you not heard of work visas?
As has been previously pointed out here the elite over-educated class is by-and-large shielded from the effects mentioned. If their chosen news source even bothers to report crime committed by an illegal, they dismiss it as a “one-off”. They continue to insist crime is committed at statistically lower rates by immigrants ignoring the fact that the largest harbor of illegal, California, does not allow immigration status to be mentioned in crime reports. In short, the woke elites will not change their ways.
Perhaps there is another reason for the allowed and even encouraged mass illegal migration by the left/democrats. I fear it/they want to create an environment of anarchy and strife that leads to chaos, riots, and eventually a civil war. Their ultimate goal, the destruction of the West in general and the United States specifically.
Headlines did not change my mind.
My own eyes have seen my hometown completely change. 70% of the people I encounter are from very distant and foreign countries. They fly foreign flags, speak foreign languages and even still wearing their native clothing.
It’s clear they are not here to assimilate.
Regarding Islam, if you are not Islamophobic you are not paying attention.
I feel that if one desires to immigrate to the US they should immigrate with the expressed purpose of becoming an American citizen and they should seek to assimilate into the American culture. To ensure that this is carried out, immigration laws should state that resident alien status can only be held for a limited time, such as 10 years, while American citizenship is obtained. If the immigrant doesn’t complete the full requirements for US citizenship within the allowed time; then their resident alien status is terminated and they must leave the country. This should eliminate those who come here just to live on the public dole and want to impose the culture of the country they left onto the rest of Americans. I also don’t believe the US should recognize dual citizenship…you should either be an American or a citizen of some other country but you can’t be both.
My Congressman is Andre Carson, a disciple of Louis Farrakhan. This will change if Indiana Republicans OK redistricting.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-dem-who-voted-against-resolution-condemning-hamas-has-long-history-anti-israel-activism?msockid=34effc75bf466db126f5e9d6bee16cf5
I hope you are right, Victor. I sure hope you are right. If the American people are truly fed up with all this illegal immigration nonsense, we can right our ship.
It’s up to Homan now.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction- the Democrats should not be surprised. I still haven’t heard ANY attempt at an explanation of the reason for this mess under Biden. My guess is it was a combination of of the factors Victor lists
Death by liberalism. Ultra tolerance, moral relativism, multiculturalism and wokenes
A push against illegal
immigration makes much less sense if you let their families become legal Americans. The murderer of US Army Spc Sarah Beckstrom has a spouse and five children living comfortably in Washington state.
Well, many of us who are more sensitive to the cultural/business/legal side of this debate NEVER accepted the immigration scenario that began to gather steam after the 70’s-80’s sneak-ins from Mexico and Latin America came to California and Arizona etc. Let’s look at a business example. Most of these immigrants were not criminals, but they were utilized to make money by unscrupulous businesses and start-ups. Restaurants and outdoor sweat labor jobs were first to be affected. Also, this began the process of downward pressure on wages in the residential construction industry and then skilled trades over time as the aliens learned. Standards changed, businesses pocketed the profits. Soon the commercial construction world was impacted the same.
“weakness and stupidity” or insanity?
With the reelection of Donal Trump, the US voting populace just reminded everyone that we are the most powerful group in the world. Given this, it makes sense that many different groups are trying to tear us down from the inside out. They certainly can’t do it from the outside in.
Once again Mr Hanson is spot on point it’s just too bad that he is preaching to the choir because mainstream outlets would never allow this sane and intelligent opinion get in the way of their hateful words to continue to destroy the fabric of America.
Didn’t even finish the article. Simply put, these people illegally entered the country without vetting or due process ahead of others following the law. These people remain here illegally and should be sent home. There will be exceptions when warranted.