Proverbs 23
10 Do not remove an ancient landmark
or encroach on the fields of orphans,
11 for their redeemer is strong;
he will plead their cause against you.
President Trump's New York - Outspoken with Dr Naomi Wolf
Postcards from a City That Rejected "Mr Global"
“…By transplanting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, from nations that are themselves broken in many ways, to the heart of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the Biden administration created an atmosphere of chaos, incomprehension and fear.
What were we importing in such vast, unassimilable numbers? Attitudes and cultures alien to our own.
In many Central American countries, there really is no rule of law; cartels run society. Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras (the latter two nations being part of the UN’s staging area for the “invasion” of America) are overrun by criminal drug-running syndicates. There is barely a rule of law apart from the cartels – in parts of those nations, the rule of the cartels is the law.
Haiti is a failed state. According to international think tanks, there is a nearly complete collapse of civil society and national governance in Haiti. Informally, when you talk to Haitian legal immigrants to this country, they describe the way in which crime, plunder and corruption have made what was once a beautiful, safe country, now unlivable; everyone who can leave, they say, has fled.
China is also a source of the “Biden invasion” numbers. This is frankly weird. People in Communist China cannot just up and leave. They need permission from the Chinese Communist Party:
“Article 5. Chinese citizens who desire to leave the country for private purposes shall apply to the public security organs of the city or county in which their residence is registered. Approval shall be granted except in cases prescribed in Article 8 of this Law. The public security organs shall decide, within a specified time, whether to approve or disapprove the citizens’ applications for leaving the country for private purposes, and shall notify the applicants accordingly.”
The above is from China’s legal codes. So that means that the thousands and thousands of Chinese nationals who simply appeared in the United States from 2022-2024, were sent on their way by our existential adversaries — people who want to destroy the United States as a superpower!
Then there are the illegal immigrants from nations such as Afghanistan, Yemen, and other MENA — (“Middle Eastern and North African”) — Muslim countries. The immigration-friendly Migration Policy Institute estimates that there are between 50,000 and 200,000 illegal immigrants to the United States from MENA nations alone! While these are not failed states, they are nations that are often theocracies with values very different from our own. Today in Afghanistan, women have been virtually erased from public life by the Taliban, and are forbidden even from singing. In Yemen, according to the advocacy organization Human Rights Watch, though women have legal rights on paper, “[t]he authorities across Yemen are increasingly restricting women’s freedom of movement […] The restrictions have harmed women’s ability to access work, education, and health care, and are a form of discrimination.” In Algeria, 14% of women participate in the labor force, versus 67 per cent of men, and they are subject to Sharia law, which treats them unequally to men: “Algerian women are subject to the family code (Sharia law), a retrograde and patriarchal interpretation of Islamic law passed in 1984 by the Popular National Assembly, under the pressure of religious and conservative representatives. On the whole, laws under the family code serve to reinforce the domination of men over women, contradicting Article 29 of the Algerian constitution […]”
I could go on and on. The bottom line is that it is not racist or even ethnocentric, to object passionately to the “invasion” of the United States, or any Western country (or any country), by illegal immigrants. When you import people in large groups, you also import their cultures. We need to face the fact that the freedom, rule of law, relative peaceableness, and high level of civil society functioning, of Western nations, is an incredible achievement and an incredible gift. When you import millions of people who are not acculturated to these norms and rules, you also will import the reflexes and expectations of those who live in failed states, or under corrupt rulers, tyrannical or unequal laws, and oppressive theocracies. You simply cannot sustain the high level of functioning civil society, the peaceableness, rule of law, legal equality, etc, that characterize the West, under these conditions. And we need to stop being shy about saying so aloud.
You saw this in New York and Brooklyn by the end of 2024. Central American women and even small children, as I have described elsewhere, were being freely trafficked in the city’s subway system; women who spoke no English were forced, it appeared, to sell candy and beg for money all day long in subways, with unconscious or drugged babies strapped to their backs. Teenagers, working during school hours, had to man carts selling fruit and ices —- carts that appeared illegally in the bowels of subway stations, in a city that used to guard every legal pushcart permit, jealously and with abundant documentation.
In city parks, couples who were recent arrivals, laughed as their children did things that are considered impolite or inappropriate here, such as engaging in overt sexualized play. A lot of weird public sexuality took hold of the city, as there were no longer shared cultural mores. I witnessed at least one single man masturbating while stretched out on a park bench, looking at porn on his phone, quite oblivious to passers-by, including children. I had the misfortune of taking a cab with a recently arrived driver who was watching porn on his phone as he drove. Someone else posted a video of an immigrant couple apparently having intercourse while zipped up into a sleeping bag, in full daylight in Prospect Park. Foreign adult men stood creepily outside the skating rink in the same park, where kids skated, eyeing the young girls hungrily. People urinated on traffic medians, and defecated down alleyways, and spat in gutters.
It was just an avalanche of gross habits, which are not considered socially acceptable here, but that no social barriers now prevented; imagine them scaled by the tens of thousands.
Taking the subways had become terrifying. People shouted on subway cars, or fought with one another. A lot of men with Central American gang tattoos appeared. Aggression and violence seemed just below the surface. That wry New York City chit chat, that pleasant or whimsical interaction with the stranger, was gone, seemingly for good. We all sat, on our journeys, in tense apprehension, closed in on ourselves. No one gestured to anyone to go first; opening doors for one another was a memory of the past.
Then there was the noise. It became deafening. I have mentioned in “What is a Culture?”, the horror of being stuck on a subway car or on a train, surrounded by the deluge of people listening aloud to telenovelas or comedy shows on their phones, while using no headphones. There was no silence to be had in any public space any longer. This devolved into a genuine torment.
Then — Inauguration Day came.
On January 21, 2025, I took a flight to Toronto. On the subway that day, I noticed that things were very quiet. On my flight to Canada, almost the entire flight consisted of recent arrivals to America; they were mostly Haitian, Central American, and, for some reason, the flight included many Sikhs. These people had immense loads of luggage with them. It seemed as if they had given up and were leaving the United States. My intuition was confirmed when I saw most of them waiting to be processed at Immigration in Canada. Having fled the US, almost the entire planeload of people was intending to stay over the border, where regulations against at-will immigration, seemed almost non-existent.
The emotion on the flight, though, was not one of outrage or despair. While this is just a gut feeling, I felt that the energy among these people fleeing President Trump and ICE — for that was what was happening — was oddly calm and accepting, even resolute. It was a feeling of, “Well, we got caught. Fair enough.”
The Canadian officials processing the newcomers, looked as pained as our Border Patrol had done, back in the bad old days of the Biden administration. The officials asked the arrivals if they knew anyone in Toronto or had any means of support, and when little evidence to that effect was forthcoming, they bitterly enough had to just wave them onward to sign up for Canadian benefits and take up their residency in the country.
Please fast forward. It is now only March. There have been dramatic crackdowns against illegal immigration across the United States. President Trump has revoked legal status for 530,000 entrants into the country. Members of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang, were dramatically deported to a violent prison, the transfer of humans complete with images of chains and shaved heads. Thousands of agents have been directed to assist with this crackdown on illegal immigration — meaning, that agents are being allowed at last to do their jobs.
What is amazing is how New York City feels now. You look around and it is so much less…crowded. Many people across the country are noticing that malls during the day now are almost empty; parks and subways, are so much less full. People are vertiginously realizing how many, how very many, people in America were in fact here illegally. And Americans are processing how much money, taxpayer money, went into giving these millions of strangers, benefits that we ourselves never had.
It is hard to describe in detail, but the social contract in New York feel as if it is back. We are almost all, of whatever race, ethnicity or country of national origin, Americans again, or lawfully visiting. It feels extraordinarily peaceful; and restful. Taking subways, that arterial experience that binds all New Yorkers, is fine once again. No one is listening to a phone aloud, and if they do, other passengers gently shush them with a look.
This is our home. This is our home." .......
