“Your countries are going to hell,” President Donald Trump told the leaders of Europe this week in New York. “In America, we’ve taken bold action to swiftly shut down uncontrolled migration. Once we started detaining and deporting everyone who crossed the border, and removing illegal aliens from the United States, they simply stopped coming. They’re not coming anymore.”
Trump is not wrong, factually or morally. Europe is going to hell and immigration is quite plainly one of the primary reasons. What’s more, they know it. In the UK, business secretary Peter Kyle recently said the country is “straining at the bit to get a grip on the migration crisis,” yet increasingly it seems the rider has let the reins slip loose. The UK’s former socialist Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, who ironically resigned this month over tax evasion, concluded in her yearlong study of this year’s riots that the cause of social erosion in the country has been poverty, social media, and immigration. Even leftist Prime Minister Kier Starmer has finally acknowledged that border security must become a top priority. Reality is hitting them like a brick wall, but it’s too little too late. In the UK, there were 44,125 irregular arrivals in the year ending in March, up 14% from the previous year. In 2024, there were 108,100 people applying for asylum, the highest annual number ever recorded in the UK, but already this year asylum applications rose 17 %. Meanwhile, over the past six years, only about 3% of those who arrived by small boats were returned home. This directly impacts social erosion because certain migrants populations, under certain conditions, commit more crimes. And the UK has been importing those populations under those conditions for decades. Nor is the UK alone. In the EU overall, theft, robberies, burglaries, and rapes are increasing. Over the past decade, rape is up almost 80% across the EU. Did Europeans suddenly become more thieving and raping, or did they admit unprecedented numbers of people from places in Africa and the Middle East with higher rates of those exact behaviors?
In economics and criminology, this is phenomenon is known as a compositional effect, which occurs when a population’s overall rate of some outcome changes not because individuals already within the group alter their behavior, but because the mix of people in the population changes. If Pakistan has a higher baseline rate of rape, and you admit more Pakistanis into the UK, the overall rate of rape in the UK will rise closer to the Pakistan level the more Pakistanis you allow in. This is common sense, and it should be utterly uncontroversial to observe. A 2020 study found immigrants in Denmark committed more crimes, a 2023 study found crime in Germany rose as the number of immigrants rose, and a 2024 study found the same thing. This isn’t hard.
Nor does this mean one should adopt an anti-immigration position. Europe has seen three basic waves of immigration over the past 20 years. First was Eastern European immigration, which came after the expansion of the EU in 2004, and again in 2007, admitting new countries from Eastern Europe, after which millions of Central and Eastern Europeans moved westward for work, especially to the UK, Ireland, and Germany. But crime rates in these countries continued to decline even as the proportion of foreign Eastern Europeans increased. Second was African and Middle Eastern immigration, between 2011 and 2014, when the Arab Spring and conflicts in Libya, Egypt, and Syria led to spikes in arrivals across the Mediterranean. In 2015, Europe saw the highest rate of immigration since World War II, with around 1.3 million asylum seekers arriving mainly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But unlike the wave of Eastern European immigration that came before, these waves were incredibly destabilizing, fueling right-wing populism, straining asylum systems, leading to staggering crime spikes, and in some cases, triggering a loss of free speech in order to prevent local citizens from speaking up about these very issues. This wave continued from 2017 to 2021, as sub-Saharan Africans of Nigeria, Eritrea, and Sudan came via Libya and Morocco to Italy and Spain. Third came Ukrainian refugees, who assimilated well but, as I have reported, arrived in such large numbers that they strained the infrastructure of neighboring countries, especially Poland.
Eastern Europeans, including Ukrainians, have had a much better go at assimilating, being that they are already European themselves and so there is not as much cultural conflict, not the same linguistic or religious barriers, and so forth. But also, being European, they are more accustomed to a rules-bases society and therefore less prone to commit certain crimes. Put another way, they come from countries where crimes such as murder, rape, and theft occur at far lower rates, and therefore the average citizen from those countries is less likely to commit such crimes than people coming from countries where those crime rates are significantly higher. That said, there are other conditions that contribute to immigrants causing crime spikes, regardless of their home country. Namely, when the influx of immigrants is very sudden or large, when the immigrants face significant barriers to success such as unemployment or racism, when their new home already has significant socioeconomic challenges (Somalian or Middle Eastern migrants are better off moving to affordable Yerevan than costly London), and when studies that look at immigrant-crime causality fail to fully control for confounders such as selection bias, measurement, or differences in policing across countries.
That spells disaster for Europe, but Trump is also correct to have made this his crusade as president. From 2012 to 2024, the number of Americans who consider immigration the top issue facing the country has grown from about 2% to almost 15%, with 68% of Republicans favoring border enforcement as a solution and 60% of Democrats preferring pathways to citizenship. Immigration was the No. 1 reason people voted for Trump, followed by the economy. When Trump began aggressively deporting people, a Pew Research poll found 59% of Americans approved. At the moment, approval is more mixed than supportive, but addressing immigration is, arguably more than anything else, Trump’s presidential mandate. It is also undeniably a catastrophic problem, as well as one that the left knowingly allowed to fester to the point that Trump can now come in with a sledgehammer where the Democrats refused to use a scalpel. Or, as
recently wrote, “Trump always has the wrong solutions but often identifies real problems.”
And Trump has been swinging his sledgehammer with surprising energy. His second administration began with a sweeping executive order on immigration, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” revoking several Biden-era executive orders on border processing, asylum, and family reunification, and instructing Homeland Security to set interior enforcement priorities, speed up removals, expand detention and deportation, and ensure enforcement of the Alien Registration Act, which makes failure to register a civil or criminal offense. His executive order “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” signed the same day, attempts to reinterpret the Fourteenth Amendment to deny automatic birthright citizenship to children born in the U.S. to noncitizen parents. Finally, there’s the presidential proclamation “Restricting the Entry of Foreign Nationals to Protect the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats,” which suspends or limits the entry of nationals from certain countries such as Afghanistan, Chad, and Eritrea, citing deficiencies in vetting, high rates of visa overstays, and security vulnerabilities. This month, Trump issued the proclamation “Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers,” aimed at H-1B visa entrants, making it so that employers filing new H-1B petitions for aliens outside the U.S. must include a supplemental payment of $100,000. Many of Trump’s orders and proclamations face or already face litigation, not to mention longstanding concerns about due process, especially in cases of expanded and expedited removal of asylum seekers. But also, he does appear to have addressed the immigration crisis to some degree. At least, U.S. Customs and Border Protection offers this data:
Trump’s address to the UN General Assembly this week reflects a consistent throughline in his political project. Namely, suspicion of multilateral institutions and a preference for nationalist sovereignty. In his very first address to the UN General Assembly in September 2017, Trump declared, “We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy. America is governed by Americans. We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism.” The UN has long been a bipartisan whipping boy in U.S. politics, but Trump’s rhetoric this week went beyond casting the body as merely hamstrung by bureaucratic bloat or political bias, and hinted that the UN is killing Europe.
The media response was predictable. To take but one example, The Guardian reported Trump accused the UN of leading a “globalist migration agenda,” a clipped quote that was selectively edited to suggest something specific about Trump. Namely, that he’s a bigot. “Globalist migration agenda” is meant to be read as something akin to Jewish brown invasion, and we are to believe that Trump is a fascist for ranting on about such things. But even if you happen to think Trump is a fascist, that shouldn’t sway you here. A globalist is, first and foremost, one who accepts democratic peace theory and wants more national interdependence through trade networks and security alliances. It also refers to people who support general globalization, from Desi hop hop being 30% of all top 50 tracks in India in 2023 to things such as the record-breaking success of KPop Demon Hunters. Additionally, Alex Jones and his fans apply the term to deep-state actors. And, of course, a small subsection of far-right scumbags use the term to refer to Jews. But in article after article, The Guardian pushes the notion that “globalist” only means something antisemitic, when this is arguably its least common usage — but notably, the one most likely to generate outrage. But look at Trump’s full remark and tell me if the words they quoted capture the actual point of what Trump said, or if instead they were calculated to present an otherwise fairly reasonable statement as vaguely antisemitic, possibly racist, and probably conspiratorial:
Joe Biden’s policies empowered murderous gangs, human smugglers, child traffickers, drug cartels, and prisoners. Prisoners from all over the world. The previous administration also lost nearly 300,000 children. Think of that. They lost more than 300,000 children, little children who were trafficked into the United States on the Biden watch, many of whom have been raped, exploited, and abused and sold. Sold. Nobody talks about that. The fake news doesn’t write about it with many others, young children who are missing or dead. And we found a lot of these children. And we’ve been sending them back to their parents. They said nobody knows who they are. They said, “Where do you come from?” And they’ll give us a country and we’ll find out. And we’ll figure it out. Or we’ll bring them back to their homes. And the mother and father rushed to the door, tears in their eyes. They can’t believe that they’re seeing, their son or daughter, their little son or daughter again. We’ve done almost 30,000 of them so far. Any system that results in the mass trafficking of children is inherently evil. Yet that is exactly what the globalist migration agenda has done. In America, those days, as you know, are over. The Trump administration is working, and we are continuing to work, to track down the villains that are causing this problem.
What is clearly a plea against the horrors of child trafficking as a result of immigration was twisted into an antisemitic, racist conspiracy theory. The question is, when Trump talks about globalists, is he talking about trade networks and security alliances, or is he actually talking about Jews? We don’t know what is in the man’s heart, but in terms of trade networks, he pulled out of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership on his third day in office in 2017, arguing that multilateral trade deals disadvantage American workers. He called NAFTA “the worst trade deal ever made” and pushed Mexico and Canada into renegotiations, resulting in the USMCA. And, of course, he imposed tariffs on steel, aluminum, and a wide range of Chinese goods, framing these moves as protecting U.S. industry. In terms of security alliances, he has repeatedly criticized NATO allies for not meeting defense spending commitments. At one point, he suggested the U.S. might not honor Article 5, the collective defense clause, if allies failed to “pay their bills.” He has specifically questioned the value of U.S. troop commitments in South Korea, Japan, and Germany. His 2017 National Security Strategy explicitly embraced an ideology of “America First,” emphasizing national sovereignty over multilateralism. He has often said the U.S. should “stop being the world’s policeman.” He withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord. He pulled funding from the World Health Organization. He prefers one-on-one negotiations where the U.S. holds leverage, rather than rules-based multilateral agreements.
Listen, there are a lot of areas where Trump can and should be criticized, but his record as an anti-globalist in the political-science sense of the word speaks for itself, and as for the argument that he’s an antisemite, okay maybe, but Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, has publicly denounced antisemitism, issued an executive order to combat antisemitism, celebrated the history and culture of Jewish Americans, and his son-in-law is Jewish. I may find some of his comments insensitive, ignorant, or even repugnant, but let’s just say this is not the kind of antisemite I spend my days worrying about. Yet what bothers me is not the media bias, nor Trump’s alleged antisemitism, but the fact that Trump delivered a truly needed message that went directly to spam. Consider, if you will, his lead-up to the remark that European countries are going to hell:
Proud nations must be allowed to protect their communities and prevent their societies from being overwhelmed by people they have never seen before with different customs, religions, with different everything. Where migrants have violated laws, lodged false asylum claims, or claimed refugee status for illegitimate reasons, they should, in many cases, be immediately sent home. And while we will always have a big heart for places and people that are struggling and truly compassionate, answers will be given. We have to solve the problem and we have to solve it in their countries, not create new problems in our countries. And we are very helpful to a lot of countries that are just not able to send their people anymore. They used to send them to us in caravans of 25-30,000 people each, these massive caravans of people pouring into our country, totally unchecked and unvetted, but not anymore. According to the Council of Europe, in 2024, almost 50% of inmates in German prisons were foreign nationals or migrants. In Austria, the number was 53% of the people in prisons were from places that weren’t from where they are now. In Greece, the number was 54%. And in Switzerland, beautiful Switzerland, 72% of the people in prisons are from outside of Switzerland. When your prisons are filled with so-called asylum seekers who repaid kindness, and that’s what they did, they repaid kindness with crime, it’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now. I see it, I can tell you. I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.
This is being scoffed at and dismissed as racist fear-mongering in the European media and by the European leftist public. Even in the wake of Baroness Casey’s report on the British culture that condoned Pakistani rape gangs and allowed them to thrive, people have their heads in the sand. Sweden used to have an incredibly low rape rate and now it has the highest rape rate in Europe, and 63% of cases involve immigrant rapists. It’s a major problem now in Germany too. And according to a 2025 EU report, rape rates are also spiking dramatically in France, Denmark, Czechia, Spain, Latvia, and Finland. Not coincidentally, all these countries have recently taken in large numbers of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and in Latvia’s case, many Russian speakers. Simply put, Europe is accepting culture-changing numbers of men and women from parts of the world where, if you lived there, you might actually want to throw a burqa on your daughter for her own sake. You might find yourself supporting house confinement for your female loved ones, and the sexistly draconian practice of having a male minder to accompany your female loved ones outside the house might suddenly begin to make ominously cold sense. When you live in an actual rape culture, as opposed to the one that exists in the figments of Western fifth-wave feminists’ imaginations, the burqa becomes an instrument of feminist protection, because that’s how bad it is for women in those countries. And we used to know this.
So yes, the conversation needs to be had, as desperately as Europe needs to have a conversation about free speech, which is why Vice President JD Vance’s comments on free speech at the Munich Security Conference in February were so bittersweet. Sweet because it was such a desperately needed, perfectly timed, and well-delivered message. I loved it in that sense. I was inspired listening to it. Bitter because no one in that audience gave a shit what Vance had to say about free speech when the United States was throwing students in jail for writing op-eds. Bitter because Europe needs to wake up to the threat of immigration, but no one in that audience gives a shit what Trump has to say about it when we’re threatening broadcast networks to fire comedians we don’t like or deporting 317 Korean workers, some of whom were here lawfully. You may think our hypocrisy doesn’t undermine our message, but it does. In strict logical terms, it shouldn’t, but humans are not logic machines.
In Rhetoric, Aristotle’s great work on arguing and persuasion, the old philosopher lays out three modes of persuasion: ethos, logos, and pathos. Ethos is the speaker’s credibility. Do they have a good reputation? Do they have an impressive CV? But Aristotle emphasizes that ethos is also interactive, fluid, and conveyed not just through reputation or by holding a position of power, but through one’s speech itself. In other words, you can alter it in the moment, for even a pauper can speak with a booming voice. Then there’s pathos, which is usually translated as emotional appeal, but that frames it as coming from the speaker, and it’s really more the emotional state of the audience, which the speaker can sometimes influence, if the audience is small enough. The current pathos of the American nation is not something any one person can usually nudge, but like ethos, there’s an interactive in-the-moment aspect to it that makes it more a relationship that a status. Finally, there’s logos, or demonstration through logic. Again, this is something that you can deploy in the discussion, demonstrating for the person in real time that your point makes sense, or that your argument holds up. Now, it’s important to know that in Aristotle’s view, one of these three stood above the rest:
The speaker persuades by speaking in a way that makes us think him credible … character can almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.
This is because if the audience doesn’t trust the speaker, they’ll discount both the reasoning of logos and the emotional appeals of pathos. Consider how logical arguments about biological sex fall flat when debating trans issues with a leftist. Consider how emotional appeals about intergenerational trauma fall flat when debating black crime rates with a conservative. Now imagine how the dynamic shifts, not if you sharpen your logic or present more emotional appeals, but if you position yourself as an insider. If, for example, you were a black trans woman. Imagine how much more respect you’d automatically command in conversation with a leftist crowd, regardless of the content of your speech. Or, when speaking to a conservative, imagine how much more headway you might make if you happen to be wearing a MAGA hat instead of a BLM shirt. Even before you open your mouth, the listener’s brain has assessed the reliability of your words based on a hundred different unspoken cues. Simply put, ethos builds the ground on which logos and pathos can actually work. It’s the same in politics as it is in even the most intimate layers of our emotional life — your father’s advice hits hard because of all those years of ethos he built up with you.
This gets to the execution gap in American diplomacy. We have a great product, but our ability to sell that product to the consumer — be it free speech or sensible immigration policy — is sharply undercut by our lack of ethos because we have recklessly spent our political capital. Just as our greatest military weapon is not the 7th Fleet nor the U.S. Air Force, but our network of allies, so too is our ethos and the credibility of our leaders more than just a matter of reputation. It is diplomacy. It is soft power. It is quite literally how we get things done when we aren’t waging war to do it. What I am trying to say is that it truly, deeply matters for our own future security in this world that Europe does not fall prey to poor decisions when it comes to certain liberties, freedom of expression chief among them, or when it comes to preserving its own culture through sensible immigration, which will, in turn, help maintain those liberties, and in turn, our own security in the world a a part of that ally network. Therefore, it really matters that they listen to us when we have to tell them something important, and that they respect us when we say it. It matters that we are recklessly behaving in ways that turn otherwise towering speeches into worthless rants, or preaching to the choir. I don’t mean this to sound condescending to Europe, but the execution gap in American diplomacy under the Trump administration is in failing to realize one simple truth — that a wise father builds trust with their child so that, if and when danger comes and the father must call, the child will run.