by Victor Davis Hanson
A border abandoned and laws ignored have turned public frustration into a sweeping backlash that now threatens even legal immigration.
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 Davis Hanson
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/12/08/immigration-gone-wild/
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
