The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns legal and wise immigration. According to his paper posted at The Daily Signal, Victor Davis Hanson believes that legal immigration should be diverse and in numbers that “can be assimilated and acculturated and integrated, meritocratic.” He added that we want immigrants “with skills that ensure that we, the people of the United States, will not have to support them” and “some knowledge of the traditions and customs and protocol of the United States, as well as English fluency.”
This
did not happen under the Biden administration. We had “12 million people [come]
in, sometimes at rates of 10,000 a day, plus over a million and a half legal
immigrants, then you have a pool of 30 million illegal and legal immigrants and
53 million people who were not born in the United States.”
This
sort of experience causes people to stop supporting immigration, and the Biden years
were not the only times when such things happened.
It
happened in the early 20th century, say from 1900 to 1910. About
1.5% of the population, 1 million people, half a million some years, but some
years a whole million, came into the United States from Southern and Eastern
Europe. And they had very different ideas about politics.
Many
of them were anarchists. They joined unions, and an anarchist, we remember, had
killed William McKinley. He was an American-born anarchist, but there was a lot
of worry that immigration at that level of 1.5% of the population every year
from people who were not integrating but had radical ideas about changing America
was dangerous, and it lost public support for years.
The
same thing is happening, as I said now, because of the numbers, but also
because we’re seeing a new type of immigrant.
Usually,
we say the immigrant is good for America because he’s eager to get here. He’s
eager to work hard. He loves the United States. He’s studied the United States.
He wants to leave his homeland and start anew, and then he makes us say, “Wow,
look at that energized immigrant that loves this country. We’ve got to snap out
of it and compete.”
That
was the idea of immigration, one of the ideas.
Not
now.
We’re
getting a lot of immigrants that are coming from failed states, mostly as a
result of communism and socialism. Some of them come legally, some come
illegally, and they’re coming in numbers that we can’t fully assimilate.
But
there’s a new type of legal immigrant, and these are immigrants from the first
generation or their children in a second generation from failed states.
And
so, let me ask you a question. What do Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat of Michigan,
or Ilhan Omar, a Democratic representative from Minnesota whose family came
from Somalia, Rashida Tlaib was from the West Bank, or [Alexander
Ocasio-Cortez], whose father came from Puerto Rico, who was also a Democratic
congresswoman, or the podcaster Hasan Piker, who’s from a multimillion-dollar
family in Turkey and was born here and then returned to Turkey, or New York
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who came here from Uganda, or Democratic Senate candidate
Abdul El-Sayed, who came from /Egypt, his family did, or Melat Kiros, whose
family and she came from Ethiopia, or Rep. Ro Khanna, a representative
congressman from California whose family and his wife’s family came from India,
second generation, or Gustavo Gordillo, who is a first-generation immigrant
from Peru – and I could go on, but that should be enough.
What
do they all have in common? Let’s count them.
No.
1, most of them are pretty wealthy. Ro Khanna’s family is probably worth a quarter
of a billion dollars. Hasas Piker drives a Porsche. He has a multimillion-dollar
home. His family is worth millions. Ilhan Omar, whether truthfully or
untruthfully, filed a financial report that said she was worth $30 million. We
can talk about Mr. El-Sayed. He filed a tax return for over $600,000.
But
besides that, they are mostly wealthy, they’re also, with exception of AOC,
Muslims, which is fine, except they accentuate their Islamic identity to the
extent that Mr. El-Sayed has even said in an unguarded moment that he didn’t
want to mention anything about the killing of the Supreme Leader, the
theocratic enemy of the United States in Iran, because that might upset his
constituents.
But
in addition to being quite wealthy and Islamic and from failed states, many of
them, as soon as they arrived here or their parents, equated their own race or
their religion or their antithesis to what they call the oppressor or
victimizer class, the white male heterosexual Christian we all know who’s
supposed to be responsible for all the sins of the world, as somehow exploiting
them.
In
other words, think of the argument. You come from a failed socialist state in
Somalia or Uganda or Egypt. You set one foot in here or your parents set one
foot in here, and immediately you lodge complaints against the gracious host
that welcomed you in and welcomed you in with security, prosperity, and freedom
that you did not have under the system that you left, but which you seem to now
champion in a very chauvinistic way.
And
no sooner than you come without any knowledge of the United States’ nature or
history or protocols, you’re so bold that you start to demand socialist
changes.
You
want to abolish the Senate. You want reparations. You want to reopen the
border. You want to get rid of the filibuster. You want to get rid of the Electoral
College. You want to pack the court. You want to change the capitalist system.
You want to tax billionaires not on what they make, but on their worth. You
want to go after people who have two homes.
All
these are radical things that are outside the American tradition….
And
unfortunately, what is the most ironic of all is a lot of these new immigrants
who are very affluent are imposing a socialist system, they think, on Americans
as if we’re the lab rats and they are the experimenters, and that’s not a very
successful way to win the American people over to the cherished idea in the
past of legal immigration.