A very well written and imminently reasonable article. The one quibble I have is the belief that we can import people who believe our country is “the great Satan” without issue. While it is true that some Christians also hold that view (hell, some non religious people hold that view for political reasons alone), once someone is a citizen there’s almost nothing that can be done. We have the ability to control who comes to this country, and barring individuals who hate our values is not some moral evil. I would prefer to have more people in the country who love America than hate her, call me crazy.
Quite a bit of subversion of expectations here, as the Haitian introduction led me to expect nothing but defense of Somalia. Three more points:
1. Talk of a high percentage of Somalis in the US being US citizens really doesn't impact criticism. We understand that entry into America and even citizenship have been doled out irresponsibly by past regimes, and legal approval has not solved the inherent problems.
2. Sympathy for Somalis doesn't mean that they are remotely close to being able to exist in our society, which is designed for far higher social trust than they have back home. They're generations deep in an "abuse or be abused" culture.
3. Any left-wing whining about how cultural criticism is "racist" should be silenced with a single word: REDNECKS. Rednecks are clearly meant to refer only to a certain ethnicity, and there is no limit to the over-the-top negative portrayals of rednecks that left-wing media gorges itself upon. They don't believe that stigmatizing an ethnic culture is wrong; they just hate "whiteness".
1. True, but it does complicate proposals to remove them. It would make more sense to revise policy moving forward than to start going after legal residents.
2. I agree, but empirical research shows that environment largely determines behavior, migrants tend to internalize the values of their host culture, and exposure to high-trust societies reduces corruption behaviors. This applies to some societies more than others. Also, these effects are mitigated if you let too many people in because then they bring their culture with them, recreate it within yours, live in enclaves, and what you end up with—as Jimmy Carr said in the clip I shared at the end—is balkanization. The solution seems to be to limit how many people you bring in over how much time.
Import one and only one member of even the worst culture into some Mormon community in Utah and he'll become a lot more compatible with America, yes. Volume certainly decreases assimilation odds, but it is also the case that some foreign cultures are further from ours and harder to assimilate from.
The Somali situation is the worst of both worlds.
Moreover, we should recognize that creating a culture-preserving enclave within the US was the explicit goal of the people who brought them here. They said that it would be BAD if they assimilated, because "diversity is our strength".
Your answer to (2) is whaat keeps me from going 100% “deport them all!” All four grandparents of mine came directly or indirectly from Sicily, which was a tribal, low trust society (and maybe still is in some ways). That all of my aunts and uncles assimilated very successfully leaves me wondering how and why? I’ve discussed multiculturalism with you, David, some months ago and I believe you gave me some thoughts I promised to think about, but in all honesty I still feel that multiculturalism has eroded the need for assimilation.
Sicily isn't, and never was Somalia. Neither are Sicilians Muslims. Like you, all of my antecedents came from Sicily and built America without accepting a penny in welfare. Absolutely no comparison with the savages we are now importing.
One of my grandfather’s father was a foreman in a sulphur mine. He apparently was smart and responsible but he was raising his kids alone as his wife had died. As the story goes the village priest suggested he marry this young woman who was pregnant out of wedlock. It solved his care problem and her out of wedlock problem. The storyteller, one among many, always suggests the priest was the father but that along with much else is truly lost to time. Soon after they all got off the boat at Ellis Island.
As Nicholas Wade wrote in “A Troublesome Inheritance,” it only takes less than 10% of a population to possess the pattern of single nucleotide polymorphisms that result in aggression and lack of guardrails in social behavior. I read another book “The Middle East” by Bernard Lewis, a Middle Eastern scholar. In it, he draws attention to social behaviors of Muslims who controlled their conquered domains and he believes were adopted by Spanish and Sicilian populations. He was referring to the caudillo in Spain, which we see write large in Mexico and elsewhere in the south: the drug cartels. They both prey on the locals by recruiting their children and build loyalty in the population by re-distributing a portion of the cartel’s wealth. And the Sicilian and Southern Italy’s Mafia use the same model.
I’m not trying to change your mind and doubt that I could, but it was my fault when I painted with too much of a broad brush when writing my first comment. I apologize.
Comparing Somalis to Italians, Irish, Jews, Hatians, and Cubans is a gross exaggeration and unjust to immigrant groups. My grandfather arrived at Ellis Island in 1890. He was seven years old and ALONE. A street kid who drifted West to build the railroads in Colorado and Texas. Volunteered for WWII but was rejected for age although his three sons were combat veterans. My father's story (MIA 1945) is similar. We built this country, defended it, and never accepted a penny in welfare. We also don't abuse our wives and daughters. The entire Somali community needs to take ownership of what is shaping up as the biggest fraud in American history, and the consequences need to match the audacity of the offence. Islam, with its FGM and other barbarisms deserves no place in democratic America. Take in the tired and poor like my grandfather. Shut the door on the Ilhan Omars. It's not rocket science, just common sense.
Here's the problem: there's no demand that they even speak English. How is the civic compliance "interrogation" supposed to go? Or can it happen before they set foot here? I don't see there's any point in getting acceptable admissions from them. They are who they are and we don't command their minds. They'll say anything.
We have no choice but stop importing them. Surely not to give them citizenship or welfare. And we have a right to deport them. Look at what other democracies have done. Those who acted seriously and clearly are not in the morass the US , the UK and Germany are. Countries like Spain and Sweden lost it quite a while ago. Spain has Moorish DNA and Jew-hating genes. France is poisoned since Algiers. But Sweden was a do-it-yourself contemporary catastrophe. And other countries have exhibited similar suicidal choices. European minds in fact have been defeated.
We already restrict entry for people from North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. Adding Somalia to the list is a fair proposal. My argument is not against that notion, but against demonizing Somalis or whitewashing their culture.
This is a great article. But letting people into my country who hate the country will usually lead to acting upon the hatred towards the most vulnerable. Girls. This has led to industrial levels of targeted rapes of white British girls over the last 20 or so years, has led to the rise of the Albanian mafia, has led to me not being able to safely walk home at night anymore, has led to the Manchester Arena bombing targeting little girls and teen girls, the stabbings of little girls at a Taylor Swift dance class = it is not OK to let people in who hate the country because what is hating a country if not hating its inhabitants and values we used to hold, but which have been destroyed by the importation of politicians of a low trust culture. Low trust culture isn't just a result of immigration policy, it was already being fostered by the broken social contract between state and society. But now, it had filtered down into the lives of women and girls and our every day considerations, I no longer move freely in society. Women and girls are terrorised here by the dumping of masses of men who appear to hate us, this is what has happened as a result of letting people in who hate this country.
"But I don’t want people to have to take a loyalty test to step inside. That flies in the face of exactly what makes this country great. "
But you do have to take one to become a citizen.
"I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God."
Teddy Roosevelt is worth revisiting when it comes to the obligations of the host country to immigrants and the reciprocal obligations of immigrants to the host country:
“Our principle in this matter should be absolutely simple.
In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here does in good faith become an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin.
But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American. If he tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin and separated from the rest of America, then he isn’t doing his part as an American.
There can be no divided allegiance here.
Any man who says he is an American but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile.
We have room for but one language here and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house; and we have room for but one soul loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
One thing that I’ve been looking into that really gives me the creeps is how refugees are settled. It’s really a big bunch of nonprofits that make the decisions of how many refugees are placed in a location once the government says these people are coming into the country, then these organizations are contacted and then they say oh yeah, we can take all those people here or we can take all those people there but the actual people that live there - the citizens - don’t get any say at all. apparently it’s based on “resources”. Whose resources? American citizens’ resources. Many of them have been settled in Minneapolis and Seattle, it just feels completely wrong to me if we’re addressing what you talked about- if we’re trying to cause balkanization that makes sense but if we’re trying to prevent it, it makes no sense at all, I have a gut feeling and a lot of weird vibes associated with some of the organizations that place those refugees. after looking into it, I just feel like we need reform. i’m completely disgusted at the way we’ve been doing it and now that it’s these groups of people that are hostile to our culture, that refugee placement reform couldn’t come soon enough.
Great piece. The lack of intellectual honesty on the left, and its preference for perceived virtue over actual morality will ultimately be its undoing.
Ilhan Omar represents Minnesota's 5th Congressional District in Congress. While she may be an unfortunate choice, her presence in Congress is certainly not as unfortunate for the US as Trump's presidency.
She appears to be deeply flawed and possibly a criminal, but while she has been rumored to have married her brother in order to help in immigrate to the US, it seems that no actual evidence exists to substantiate that rumor.
First, let's get the facts straight. Minnesota does not have the best healthcare system in the U.S., it isn't even in the top ten. Massachusetts is number one.
There's a reason why Haiti, Somalia, and Latin America are not like Switzerland. The cause could be cultural, it could be related to the average IQ of 85 in those regions, or it could be societal.
A very well written and imminently reasonable article. The one quibble I have is the belief that we can import people who believe our country is “the great Satan” without issue. While it is true that some Christians also hold that view (hell, some non religious people hold that view for political reasons alone), once someone is a citizen there’s almost nothing that can be done. We have the ability to control who comes to this country, and barring individuals who hate our values is not some moral evil. I would prefer to have more people in the country who love America than hate her, call me crazy.
Quite a bit of subversion of expectations here, as the Haitian introduction led me to expect nothing but defense of Somalia. Three more points:
1. Talk of a high percentage of Somalis in the US being US citizens really doesn't impact criticism. We understand that entry into America and even citizenship have been doled out irresponsibly by past regimes, and legal approval has not solved the inherent problems.
2. Sympathy for Somalis doesn't mean that they are remotely close to being able to exist in our society, which is designed for far higher social trust than they have back home. They're generations deep in an "abuse or be abused" culture.
3. Any left-wing whining about how cultural criticism is "racist" should be silenced with a single word: REDNECKS. Rednecks are clearly meant to refer only to a certain ethnicity, and there is no limit to the over-the-top negative portrayals of rednecks that left-wing media gorges itself upon. They don't believe that stigmatizing an ethnic culture is wrong; they just hate "whiteness".
1. True, but it does complicate proposals to remove them. It would make more sense to revise policy moving forward than to start going after legal residents.
2. I agree, but empirical research shows that environment largely determines behavior, migrants tend to internalize the values of their host culture, and exposure to high-trust societies reduces corruption behaviors. This applies to some societies more than others. Also, these effects are mitigated if you let too many people in because then they bring their culture with them, recreate it within yours, live in enclaves, and what you end up with—as Jimmy Carr said in the clip I shared at the end—is balkanization. The solution seems to be to limit how many people you bring in over how much time.
Import one and only one member of even the worst culture into some Mormon community in Utah and he'll become a lot more compatible with America, yes. Volume certainly decreases assimilation odds, but it is also the case that some foreign cultures are further from ours and harder to assimilate from.
The Somali situation is the worst of both worlds.
Moreover, we should recognize that creating a culture-preserving enclave within the US was the explicit goal of the people who brought them here. They said that it would be BAD if they assimilated, because "diversity is our strength".
https://freevoices.substack.com/p/diversity-is-our-weakness
Your answer to (2) is whaat keeps me from going 100% “deport them all!” All four grandparents of mine came directly or indirectly from Sicily, which was a tribal, low trust society (and maybe still is in some ways). That all of my aunts and uncles assimilated very successfully leaves me wondering how and why? I’ve discussed multiculturalism with you, David, some months ago and I believe you gave me some thoughts I promised to think about, but in all honesty I still feel that multiculturalism has eroded the need for assimilation.
Sicily isn't, and never was Somalia. Neither are Sicilians Muslims. Like you, all of my antecedents came from Sicily and built America without accepting a penny in welfare. Absolutely no comparison with the savages we are now importing.
One of my grandfather’s father was a foreman in a sulphur mine. He apparently was smart and responsible but he was raising his kids alone as his wife had died. As the story goes the village priest suggested he marry this young woman who was pregnant out of wedlock. It solved his care problem and her out of wedlock problem. The storyteller, one among many, always suggests the priest was the father but that along with much else is truly lost to time. Soon after they all got off the boat at Ellis Island.
As Nicholas Wade wrote in “A Troublesome Inheritance,” it only takes less than 10% of a population to possess the pattern of single nucleotide polymorphisms that result in aggression and lack of guardrails in social behavior. I read another book “The Middle East” by Bernard Lewis, a Middle Eastern scholar. In it, he draws attention to social behaviors of Muslims who controlled their conquered domains and he believes were adopted by Spanish and Sicilian populations. He was referring to the caudillo in Spain, which we see write large in Mexico and elsewhere in the south: the drug cartels. They both prey on the locals by recruiting their children and build loyalty in the population by re-distributing a portion of the cartel’s wealth. And the Sicilian and Southern Italy’s Mafia use the same model.
I’m not trying to change your mind and doubt that I could, but it was my fault when I painted with too much of a broad brush when writing my first comment. I apologize.
It seems we have a lot in common. Would be interesting to compare notes. “In bocca al lupo…”
Excellent piece. Two things can be true at the same time. This is an excellent analysis that shows how.
Comparing Somalis to Italians, Irish, Jews, Hatians, and Cubans is a gross exaggeration and unjust to immigrant groups. My grandfather arrived at Ellis Island in 1890. He was seven years old and ALONE. A street kid who drifted West to build the railroads in Colorado and Texas. Volunteered for WWII but was rejected for age although his three sons were combat veterans. My father's story (MIA 1945) is similar. We built this country, defended it, and never accepted a penny in welfare. We also don't abuse our wives and daughters. The entire Somali community needs to take ownership of what is shaping up as the biggest fraud in American history, and the consequences need to match the audacity of the offence. Islam, with its FGM and other barbarisms deserves no place in democratic America. Take in the tired and poor like my grandfather. Shut the door on the Ilhan Omars. It's not rocket science, just common sense.
Here's the problem: there's no demand that they even speak English. How is the civic compliance "interrogation" supposed to go? Or can it happen before they set foot here? I don't see there's any point in getting acceptable admissions from them. They are who they are and we don't command their minds. They'll say anything.
We have no choice but stop importing them. Surely not to give them citizenship or welfare. And we have a right to deport them. Look at what other democracies have done. Those who acted seriously and clearly are not in the morass the US , the UK and Germany are. Countries like Spain and Sweden lost it quite a while ago. Spain has Moorish DNA and Jew-hating genes. France is poisoned since Algiers. But Sweden was a do-it-yourself contemporary catastrophe. And other countries have exhibited similar suicidal choices. European minds in fact have been defeated.
We already restrict entry for people from North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. Adding Somalia to the list is a fair proposal. My argument is not against that notion, but against demonizing Somalis or whitewashing their culture.
Multiculturalism does not demand that those imported under its auspices believe in it. At all. Or that they have any other principles.
If zombies existed, multiculturalists would be demanding their import, screaming "diversity is our strength".
Diversity is an aesthetic preference. Unity is what we should emphasize.
This is a great article. But letting people into my country who hate the country will usually lead to acting upon the hatred towards the most vulnerable. Girls. This has led to industrial levels of targeted rapes of white British girls over the last 20 or so years, has led to the rise of the Albanian mafia, has led to me not being able to safely walk home at night anymore, has led to the Manchester Arena bombing targeting little girls and teen girls, the stabbings of little girls at a Taylor Swift dance class = it is not OK to let people in who hate the country because what is hating a country if not hating its inhabitants and values we used to hold, but which have been destroyed by the importation of politicians of a low trust culture. Low trust culture isn't just a result of immigration policy, it was already being fostered by the broken social contract between state and society. But now, it had filtered down into the lives of women and girls and our every day considerations, I no longer move freely in society. Women and girls are terrorised here by the dumping of masses of men who appear to hate us, this is what has happened as a result of letting people in who hate this country.
"Yes, criminal gangs run Port-au-Prince, but this doesn’t mean Haitians are not a law-abiding people." Seriously?
1 in 1,000.
"But I don’t want people to have to take a loyalty test to step inside. That flies in the face of exactly what makes this country great. "
But you do have to take one to become a citizen.
"I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God."
https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship/learn-about-citizenship/the-naturalization-interview-and-test/naturalization-oath-of-allegiance-to-the-united-states-of-america
Teddy Roosevelt is worth revisiting when it comes to the obligations of the host country to immigrants and the reciprocal obligations of immigrants to the host country:
“Our principle in this matter should be absolutely simple.
In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here does in good faith become an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin.
But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American. If he tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin and separated from the rest of America, then he isn’t doing his part as an American.
There can be no divided allegiance here.
Any man who says he is an American but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile.
We have room for but one language here and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house; and we have room for but one soul loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/digital-library/o265602/
Part of the problem is that elements of the left now view assimilation itself as racist. The whole salad bowl vs melting pot argument.
One thing that I’ve been looking into that really gives me the creeps is how refugees are settled. It’s really a big bunch of nonprofits that make the decisions of how many refugees are placed in a location once the government says these people are coming into the country, then these organizations are contacted and then they say oh yeah, we can take all those people here or we can take all those people there but the actual people that live there - the citizens - don’t get any say at all. apparently it’s based on “resources”. Whose resources? American citizens’ resources. Many of them have been settled in Minneapolis and Seattle, it just feels completely wrong to me if we’re addressing what you talked about- if we’re trying to cause balkanization that makes sense but if we’re trying to prevent it, it makes no sense at all, I have a gut feeling and a lot of weird vibes associated with some of the organizations that place those refugees. after looking into it, I just feel like we need reform. i’m completely disgusted at the way we’ve been doing it and now that it’s these groups of people that are hostile to our culture, that refugee placement reform couldn’t come soon enough.
Great piece. The lack of intellectual honesty on the left, and its preference for perceived virtue over actual morality will ultimately be its undoing.
Ilhan Omar represents Minnesota's 5th Congressional District in Congress. While she may be an unfortunate choice, her presence in Congress is certainly not as unfortunate for the US as Trump's presidency.
She appears to be deeply flawed and possibly a criminal, but while she has been rumored to have married her brother in order to help in immigrate to the US, it seems that no actual evidence exists to substantiate that rumor.
First, let's get the facts straight. Minnesota does not have the best healthcare system in the U.S., it isn't even in the top ten. Massachusetts is number one.
There's a reason why Haiti, Somalia, and Latin America are not like Switzerland. The cause could be cultural, it could be related to the average IQ of 85 in those regions, or it could be societal.
20K Haitians in a city of 60K is a huge problem. Perhaps Trump was clueless in his way,but you are clueless in yours.