What Should Be Done About Schizophrenic and Ungrateful Immigrants?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns immigrants to our nation, particularly the schizophrenic and ungrateful immigrant who hates America but refuses to leave. Legal immigration is good for our country.

Most of the people who are legal immigrants come to America because they recognize the virtues of our nation, such as democracy, constitutional law, free enterprise, liberty, freedom, etc. They respect the laws of the United States and are willing to abide by them. On the other hand, many illegal immigrants curse those same laws, virtues, and qualities while enjoying the benefits of living in America.

In an article published at The Daily Signal, Victor Davis Hanson discussed the ungrateful immigrant. 

I’d like to talk about a very controversial topic. I call it the ungrateful immigrant. You know, it used to be in the United States that immigrants were our great strength….

That was sort of the general perception that we had of immigrants. Think of Silicon Valley. I mean, Tesla, SpaceX, eBay, Strip, Sun Microsystems, I could go down the list. They’re all created by these wonderful legal immigrants.

But that’s changing. And I’m not talking about the 500,000 illegal immigrants who were known to have come across with criminal records. I’m not talking about the truck drivers….

I’m not talking about the Somali fraud…. I’m not talking about Rep. Ilhan Omar and antisemitic remark, “It’s the Benjamin’s baby,” or labeling and vilifying the United States as trash. That’s all self-evident.

What’s new are legal immigrants and naturalized citizens. As if they become almost … They have a schizophrenic idea. They hate the country, but under no circumstances do they want to leave it.

Hanson proceeded to name a few of the “schizophrenic” and “ungrateful” people who are in the United States legally, but do not love and appreciate America and American values:

Just in an eight-day period: A week ago, we had in Austin, Texas, a Senegal naturalized citizen who went into a beer garden and opened fire. Killed three and wounded a lot…

At Old Dominion University in Virginia, a naturalized immigrant from Sierra Leone came in, and he shot the ROTC instructor and yelled, “Allahu Akbar.”

… Out in front of the New York mayor’s mansion, there was a protest against Islam and a counterprotest supporting Mamdani and two naturalized citizens, one an Afghan, one parents from Turkey, they brought two IEDs and tried to, they said, surpass the Boston Marathon bomber of 2013.

Remember them? The Tsarnaev brothers? They were Chechens from Russia. And we were very magnanimous in allowing them to come in. And how did they repay us? By trying to slaughter people. They injured dozens. Dozens. More than dozens in Boston.

And then, of course, we had the synagogue attempt by a Lebanese naturalized citizen. And he had ties to Hezbollah. His family were Hezbollah members. He tries to drive his car into a synagogue in Michigan and kill people. And the question is, why do they do that?

Maybe a better rephrasing it would be why don’t they do it?

We have no civic education. We ask very little of the immigrant when they come to the United States. We don’t ask them to have a high school diploma all the time. We don’t ask them to be fluent in English. We don’t ask them to study the Constitution. We don’t ask them to profess their greater loyalty and love to the United States.

Instead, we have open borders. Or we bring in thousands of students from the Middle East.

And what do they do? They protest, and they push Jews around, and they celebrate at a time when we’re at war. As we saw in New York City recently, they celebrate our enemies: Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran. They’re on their side.

This is a far different phenomenon from the past when we had wonderful immigrants from Japan who were treated pretty badly, that many of them, most of them, went to internment camps, and yet they joined the 442 [C]ombat [B]rigade in Italy. And they took horrendous casualties fighting for whom? The United States.

So, something’s wrong, and what I’m getting at is this: These immigrants, whether they’re temporary immigrants, they’re illegal immigrants, they’re legal immigrants, or they’re naturalized citizens, or they’re on student visa, they sense something.

They look at the Tsarnaev brothers, and they say, “Well, yes, they were Islamicists and yes, they killed a lot of Americans, but Rolling Stone put one of the brothers in a very photogenic pose on their cover as if he was a romantic type of person. Oh, I remember Fort Hood.” That was Major Nidal Hasan. He shot 13 of his fellow soldiers and wounded over 30 of them.

And the Pentagon said, we’re not going to attribute this to what? Terrorism. Even though he yelled, “Allahu Akbar.” … then-Chief of Staff of the Army George Casey … said one of the greatest tragedies of this shooting might be the injury to our diversity program.

No, no. It was not the injury to the diversity. It was the paradigm that was established that you can go in and kill people and not suffer public opprobrium and condemnation. It’s almost as if anytime someone yells “Allahu Akbar” – citizen, illegal citizen, anybody – and you scream and yell, and you do something terribl[e], the first thing we say is, “Well, we don’t want to condemn it. That would be Islamophobic.”

But again, that sends a message. And all of these people, all 50 million people, who have come to the United States, many of them, some of our best citizens, but all of them have to be reminded and are reminded, if we’re doing our duty, that they chose to come here, and they need to become Americanized.

And a lot of them are not….

Hanson shared an example: Illegal immigrants from Mexico rioting in Los Angeles and waving the Mexican flag – a country that they do not want to return to – while burning the American flag – a country that they do not want to leave. Then Hanson questioned where people got such an idea:

Was it from the universities? Was it from the K-12 curriculum where we teach people that the story of the United States is sexism and racism and homophobia? Or is it when they look on TV and we see ICE people trying to enforce the law, and predominantly looking at the 500,000 criminals that came in.

And what happens to them? They’re demonized by us as Gestapo, as Nazis.

Hanson called the situation a “Frankensteinian monster of immigration” and said that we created the problem. Immigration “used to be our great strength,” but the American people have become Dr. Frankenstein. We have turned immigration into a monster that threatens the American way of life.