The Woke Democrat Left defines America as incurably racist – So why are millions fleeing their home countries to seek out one of toxic “white privilege”?
By Victor Davis Hanson
There have been more than 8 million illegal entries into the United States since Joe Biden was elected president. He appointed Alejandro Mayorkas as Secretary of Homeland Security, whose apparent prime directive was to destroy the southern border. That task is precisely what Mayorkas has now accomplished.
The result is that the border is neither “porous” nor “problematic,” but nonexistent, kaput, vanished — and by design.In one of the most surreal experiences in the history of the United States, each night Americans see video clips of thousands of foreign nationals crossing the border en masse with complete impunity — as if the entire corpus of federal immigration law has been dynamited.
As millions of citizens watch this travesty, they hear only from Mayorkas, Biden, and his Pravda megaphone, Karin Jean-Pierre, that the border is “secure” — a Baghdad Bob narrative that they know that we know is an utter lie.
Surely, this deliberate effort to destroy an entire border, to invite in millions of unchecked illegal aliens, and to violate oaths to execute faithfully the laws of the land are impeachable offenses for both Biden and Mayorkas. If not, what are?
Stranger still, Americans have no real idea why these revolutionaries are destroying our border.
Are they 19th-Century anarchists who want to undermine the United States itself?
Are they cynical “Demography is Destiny” and “The New Democratic Majority” leftists who need new dependent Democrat constituents to find votes for agendas that most Americans reject?
Do they want to create billions of dollars in new entitlements and subsidies to grow government, hike taxes, and make the upper middle class pay, as Biden puts it, “their fair share?”
Are they cynical “Demography is Destiny” and “The New Democratic Majority” leftists who need new dependent Democrat constituents to find votes for agendas that most Americans reject?
Do they want to create billions of dollars in new entitlements and subsidies to grow government, hike taxes, and make the upper middle class pay, as Biden puts it, “their fair share?”
Whatever the cause of this nihilism, there are at least 10 ways their open border is insidiously destroying the United States. (EDITOR's NOTE: Today's Part II article lists the 2nd Half of Mr. Hanson's the insidious ways; Here's a look at the first half.)
Cui Bono? (Or, probable responsibility for an act or event usually lies with one having something to gain.)
We suspect the Left and employers welcome illegal immigrants; the more en masse and without audit, the better. But:
- How do millions simply leave their homes, cross international borders, and get waved on to El Norte?
- What is the mentality of Mexico that facilitates this mass exodus northward from its neighbors,and from itself?
- Is Mexico a frenemy?
Do we even care that some $60 billion leaves the U.S. as remittances into Mexico, mostly by illegal residents here who are on state and local subsidies to free up their billions of dollars to support people inside Mexico that Mexico City has no intention of helping?- Is such a gargantuan cash outflow, then, Mexican socialist President Obrador’s cynical idea of payback for supposed historical Yanqui sins? Does he think a new, huge expatriate community will continue to lobby for Mexico to do what it pleases on our side of the border?
The Cartels
Does anyone worry that among the millions moving northward are hundreds of Mexican cartel functionaries loaded with tens of thousands of pounds of dangerous drugs, fentanyl most prominently?
- Do we even care that the U.S. is enriching the cartels through its tolerance of drug importation and alien smuggling?
- With open borders, are we not abetting the annual 100,000 or so deaths of Americans through overdoses, often by the counterfeiting of fentanyl to resemble less toxic illicit drugs and prescription tranquilizers, sedatives, and painkillers?
Trashing Citizens
Illegal immigration is insidiously diminishing citizenship by equating illegal aliens with – if not making them preferable to – American citizens. Is there anything an illegal alien cannot do in Biden’s America – work in a campaign, vote in some elections, serve in the military, receive government subsidies? Crisscross international borders without a passport?
To put it another way:
Why did we expel 8,400 already serving U.S. Military Personnel for the “crime” of passing on the required but experimental mRNA vaccinations (most of the discharged had natural immunity from prior COVID infections), while we let in millions of foreigners without worrying whether any have been vaccinated for anything, much less have had COVID tests?
Why are we forcing every American to recalibrate, at great expense, their identification to a “Real ID” to ensure security within our airline industry while putting tens of thousands of illegal aliens, without any documents, on flights throughout the country?
Why are we forcing every American to recalibrate, at great expense, their identification to a “Real ID” to ensure security within our airline industry while putting tens of thousands of illegal aliens, without any documents, on flights throughout the country?
Does the Biden administration policy translate into something like, ‘We know and therefore don’t trust Americans, so we must apply airline boarding standards to them that we certainly do not need with more reliable and trustworthy illegal and unaudited aliens?’
Why, in bankrupt cities like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, where social services are overwhelmed with thousands of needy citizens, are we imploding such facilities with influxes of illegal aliens?
Do we prefer the latter to the former? Does the Biden administration’s message again read something like, ‘We care more about the health status of those south of the border than our own citizen poor in our own inner cities, so please surge on up?’Who Pays?
At $34 trillion in debt, and with budget deficits normalizing at near $2 trillion a year, where does America find the hundreds of billions, if not eventually trillions of dollars, to welcome in millions of the unaudited – all in need of immediate no-questions-asked entitlements, and for some years on end?
Is California the model – where currently an estimated half of all illegal aliens reside and 27% of the resident population was not born in the U.S.?
California, while experiencing hundreds of thousands of new illegal entries and a $70 billion annual budget deficit, just extended free health care services to non-citizens who entered unlawfully. More than half of the state’s births are already paid for through Med-Cal. One-third of Americans living on assistance live in California. A fifth of the population struggles below the poverty line while the state runs up a $70 billion annual deficit with the nation’s highest income taxes and gas taxes and among the highest sales taxes.
- No wonder over a quarter-million upper-middle-class taxpayers flee the state each year, unable to endure a 13.3% non-deductible, top state income tax rate on top of the 37% of their income that goes to the IRS.
- No wonder there is a catastrophic current 25% drop in California income tax revenues when a single 1% of households pays 50% of all state income taxes – and is stampeding out of state.
Ending Deterrence?
There are many reasons why foreign thugs are testing the United States – Putin in Ukraine, the Chinese with a spy balloon over our native soil, Hamas by murdering Israelis, Iran’s satellites by rocketing our military installations and ships abroad.
No doubt our woke, manpower-short military that fled from Kabul, leaving a multibillion-dollar trove of weapons, has lost the ability to deter opportunistic belligerents.
The Biden administration’s obsequious courting of Iran, contextualizing Chinese aggression, and announcing our reaction to a Russian invasion of Ukraine would hinge on whether it was “minor” have all eroded deterrence.
Now, in circular fashion, President Obrador no longer fears any reaction to millions from his country swarming into the United States, as he had in the past when Trump pressured him to control his side of the border.
That he helped to blow up the border with impunity also, in turn, reminds aggressors abroad that a nation too afraid to protect its own sovereignty can hardly defend that of its allies.
The DEI Narrative
We, the hosts, no longer believe in the melting pot. Instead, cultural Marxists divide America into the automatically victimized, by nature of their nonwhite status, versus the victimizers defined by whatever “white” is conveniently classified at the moment. Class, history, and individual merit matter not so much in this 24/7 effort to reduce everyone to either oppressed or oppressor.
Under this racist binary, 99% of illegal aliens – who will be instantly categorized as the so-called nonwhite – will enter the U.S. with innate claims against the majority. Thus, they will become instantly eligible for everything from affirmative action preferences in hiring and admissions (the Supreme Court ruling will be a minor inconvenience for the Left, in the manner of the easily ignored California Prop 209) to race-based targeted equity programs and subsidies.And the message we send to the illegal immigrant? Certainly not unity, integration, and assimilation. Instead, we emphasize ethnic, racial, religious, and linguistic differences and fuel such divides.
Such separatism pays cultural, social, and economic dividends in such a way that assimilation and integration earn rebuke, if not ridicule.
What Cruel Irony
The woke Left defines America as incurably racist. So how could the nonwhite in the millions possibly flee their home countries, where they compose a majority of the population, only to seek out the one country in the world where they are told toxic “white privilege” is unsurpassed?
- Did the millions swarming the Rio Grande not read the warnings of systemic this and that?
- Are they unaware of the messaging from BLM and Antifa?
If the amorality of illegal immigration were not so deleterious to Americans, its absurdity would be laughable.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished Center for American Greatness fellow. A classicist and historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, 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.
