Our new Americans killing Americans
Yet the immigration disaster transcends student visas and illegal aliens, since it extends to many naturalized citizens as well.
Consider the terrorist acts that have transpired in just the last several days.
On March 1, Ndiaga Diagne, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Senegal, shot up a beer garden in Austin, Texas. He murdered three people and wounded 14 others. Diagne wore a “Property of Allah” sweatshirt, along with an Iranian flag T-shirt.
On March 7, Emir Balat, the son of a naturalized citizen from Turkey, and Ibrahim Kayumi, the son of naturalized Afghan refugees, threw IEDs toward a conservative protest outside Gracie Mansion, the New York mayor’s residence.
The media sought to cover up their Islamist motives but could not, given that the two terrorists openly boasted of their aims. Indeed, the two bragged that they wanted to achieve something “bigger than the Boston Marathon bombing.”
That was a reference to Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the murderous Chechen-immigrant brothers. In 2013, they murdered three and injured hundreds at the Boston Marathon. Their aim too was apparently to further the so-called global “Islamic cause.”
This same week, on March 12, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, another naturalized U.S. citizen, this time from Sierra Leone, went into an ROTC meeting at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. Once there, he murdered the instructor, Lieutenant Colonel Brandon Shah, a decorated combat veteran. Jalloh shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he fired. Jalloh had previously been convicted for attempting to support ISIS but was released before serving his full sentence.
That same March day, Ayman Muhammed Ghazali, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Lebanon, whose family in the Middle East currently has strong Hezbollah terrorist ties, drove his car rigged with explosive fireworks into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
Ghazali was killed by security guards before he could carry out his homicidal plan. Hezbollah, remember, in the past, butchered hundreds of Americans in Lebanon.
There is an endless list of illegal aliens and naturalized citizens who have killed hundreds of Americans, both as common criminals and as would-be jihadists.
And not all the killing is intentional. Thousands of driver’s licenses have been issued to both illegal aliens and legal residents from all over the world, including those who do not understand English, cannot pass a commercial driver’s test, and are utterly unqualified to drive. Is it any surprise that we have recently witnessed serial horrific crashes, where incompetent drivers rammed their 80,000-pound semi-trucks into unsuspecting drivers?
What happened to immigration?
So what made the U.S. adopt such a suicidal immigration and visitation policy — one that welcomes in millions illegally, hundreds of thousands who are known criminals, tens of thousands of students who despise the U.S., and thousands of terrorists themselves and their sympathizers?
In the mid-1960s, amid the Great Society’s dreams of transforming America, new immigration laws were passed that ended the older quota process. That traditional system tended to favor better-off immigrants from Europe and the former British Empire to reflect somewhat the founding demographics of the republic.
But the new law junked the prior merit-based system and instead admitted immigrants chiefly on the basis of family ties and the purported need of the host country for inexpensive labor–with most now arriving from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Suddenly, far less important for entry were critical skill sets, English mastery, high school diplomas, proof of self-support, and knowledge of, or familiarity with, the American system.
But in the subsequent 60 years, Democrats went even further beyond the 1965 Hart-Celler Act efforts to change the demography of the U.S. They began welcoming in anyone, legal or not, who simply crashed the border or claimed they wanted to study in the U.S. The old melting pot was banished, replaced by the “salad bowl.”
Immigration was seen by the Left as the answer to why they had never been able to complete their socialist agendas amid a skeptical American public. Supposedly, by welcoming in a “diverse” demographic, poor and without English fluency, they would grow the welfare state, creating a new dependent constituency.
The new immigrants and visitors were envisioned as left-wing voters-to-be who would look to the Democratic Party as their guarantors of open borders, a new entitlement society, and a criminal justice system that saw the perpetrator as a victim — and the real criminal as a racist America itself.
Diversity, the immigration force multiplier
The new “diversity” ideology peaked under Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The subtext of their open-borders nihilism was a new oppressor/oppressed binary.
It dictated that traditional America was still too white, too traditionalist, too Christian, too unfairly successful–and too hostile to the Democratic-socialist agenda of a mandated equality of result achieved through massive coercive government redistributive efforts.
Under this warped view, the criminally minded Abrego Garcia became a victim of supposed “Gestapo” ICE “goons” (ironic, when patriotic and skilled Mexican American officers disproportionately staff ICE ranks).
The Tsarnaev Boston Marathon killers became “hot” underdog freedom fighters. So the supposedly sexy, photogenic young murderer Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was highlighted on the cover of Rolling Stone.
The more Mahmoud Khalil took on the mantle of an anti-American, pro-Hamas activist, the more the Left rallied to his cause.
When Major Nidal Hasan, the son of naturalized Palestinian immigrants, slaughtered 13 and wounded 32 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, the Pentagon resisted efforts to tie him to the Islamic terrorist cause. That was hard to do, since he screamed “Allahu Akbar!” as he mowed down his fellow soldiers.
Then Army Chief of Staff George Casey responded to the mass murder with his lamentation on CNN that, “As great a tragedy as this was, it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.” He sought to quash any speculation about Hasan’s Islamic motives, in fear that the ensuing truth might endanger the Army’s diversity efforts.
Then we come to the case of Eileen Gu, the recent American Winter Olympic multi-medalist skier.
She was born in San Francisco to a Chinese immigrant mother and an American father and lived her entire life in the U.S. But Gu chose to compete in the games for communist China, despite its efforts to isolate, dehumanize, and eventually vastly “reduce” its Uyghur minority population.
Dr. Frankenstein and his monster
The final irony: Why do so many criminals believe they can enter the U.S. illegally and get away with murder?
Is it because they feel contempt for any nation that opens its borders, requires no background checks, destroys its own immigration laws, and weaponizes its criminal justice system to make the criminal the victim and the state his victimizer?
Why do so many burn the U.S. flag while waving the flag of Mexico, a country they have no intention of returning to?
Is it because they sense they might be praised for “celebrating diversity,” as the popular culture would term such abject cultural schizophrenia?
Why would the Tsarnaev brothers repay the country that took them in by killing innocent Americans?
Would it be because, in their formative years in American schools, their teachers and texts emphasized what was wrong with a supposedly exploitative U.S.?
Why, in the middle of a near-existential war with Iran to stop its efforts to obtain nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles pointed at the U.S. and its allies, would naturalized citizens feel so free to slaughter Americans for the cause of Islam?
Would it be because they sense from left-wing universities and popular culture that it is a virtual open season on Jews?
Or that any time an Islamic terrorist commits an act, a Democratic operative will warn America of “Islamophobia” — as if, say, mowing down soldiers at Fort Hood is the lesser crime?
Why would a rich, privileged Eileen Gu feel no discomfort competing for a murderous regime whose agenda is to displace her country from its global preeminence in favor of a communist dictatorship?
Is it because in our relativist modern America, Gu’s “truth” is just as meaningful as any other? And who, after all, is qualified to judge anything or anyone?
Who created our current Frankensteinian monstrosities?
We did.
We are the Dr. Frankensteins who asked nothing of immigrants, in a complete break from our nation’s past.
And we got our wish for a new, quite different class of immigrants, who treated the U.S. the very way they were taught to do by the Left: as an evil entity that deserved what it got.
And we sure have gotten it.
– Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing
authorvdh@gmail.com.