Ellis Island
By John F. Di Leo -
Reflections on the cross-section of crime, war, and public policy…
Loudly, clearly, proudly, the Obama administration has declared its solidarity with the immigrant wave from the middle east.
Throughout Barack Obama’s two terms – while the United States were at war, trying to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, even while he himself started a war against Libya and approved military actions in other countries in the region – the Obama administration has continuously facilitated the immigration of “refugees” from that dangerous, alien territory.
We have watched the waves lap up onto our shores, depositing middle easterners in ever greater numbers – just a few by ship as in the old days… more by foot or wheel, over the Mexican or Canadian borders… and most by plane, either directly or indirectly.
The United States have had waves of immigrants before, of course: English, then Scots, Welsh and Dutch… Germans… Irish… Chinese… Italians…Pols and Russians and Mexicans… Any group of people naturally includes good people and bad, ambitious and lazy, honest and dishonest, in varying proportions. But something is different about this one: Never before has the United States accepted immigrants in quantity from a country or region with which we were at war at the time. This fact might change the expected distribution of desirable and otherwise among its migrants, mightn’t it?
For 3200 years, all governments have remembered the ancient experience of the City of Troy, and have wisely closed their doors to their enemies’ population in wartime, just to be safe. But the Obama administration thinks itself “above” the lessons of history.
The Cost
A fascinating report, released in the spring of 2016 by Negative Population Growth Inc., gathered data from the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, and determined that the United States, through the Departments of State and Health and Human Services, spend about $20,000 per UN-approved refugee, whether they land in the USA or elsewhere. (We Americans are even more generous than we thought)…
We – the taxpayers of the United States – fund the United Nations’ High Commissioner of Refugees’ budget, to the tune of $1.28 billion per year… and in addition to paying much more than our share, we also accept much more than our share; some 67% of the UNHCR’s refugees wind up here in the United States.
Once they arrive, these refugees are eligible for all sorts of federal and state aid that would be banned from many regular immigrants, but such bans are waived for refugees.
- So, 56% of them are on Medicaid.
- 74% of them receive food stamps.
- 22% of them have housing assistance…
- And 47% of them receive some cash assistance from government as well.
So here we are, welcoming in tens of thousands of refugees per year, with no end in sight. There are over a billion muslims in the world, and the place where they came from doesn’t have much to recommend it, so they’re moving here, as fast as they possibly can.
The Competition
As we’ve seen, all refugees receive at least a one-time outlay of taxpayer funds, to get them situated, and then at least half wind up receiving considerable state and/or federal welfare.
But what of the ones who don’t end up on the dole? Shouldn’t we be happy that they’re not helping themselves to our generous entitlement cornucopia?
Well, that’s the odd thing. Even the ones who DO go to work and start the march toward a real American career still present a cost to the American economy. With few exceptions, they are – as the cliché goes – taking jobs that Americans would have liked to take.
There is a distinct difference between importing willing workers to staff a growth economy, as we did in the 19th century, and importing workers to compete with our own jobless in a stagnant-or-worse economy.
We have 95 million people outside the workforce in America today – 95 million who would like to go to a real job every morning, get to work on climbing the ladder of a career, and provide for their families without needing to reach out a hand for government assistance.
But in an economy this rough, in which so many are chronically unemployed already, intentionally importing more competition for our own jobless isn’t just unwise, it is outright cruel.
The People
We have learned so much, in recent months, about who we are importing. Consider:
Through America’s generous “citizenship for spouses of citizens” deal, we imported American-born radical Syed Farooq’s Pakistani jihadist wife, Tashfeen Malik. Together, these jihadists shot up their coworkers’ Christmas party in December 2015, killing half of the 30-plus victims.
Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were Chechen/Avar immigrants, born in Russia, who came to the United States in 2004. They soon were radicalized by watching Anwar al-Awlaki’s internet lectures, honed their craft on a visit back to Russia in 2012, then set the vicious bombs in April, 2013 now known as the Boston Marathon Massacre, which killed three but injured or maimed 264 others.
Muhammed Yussef Abdulazeez was born in Kuwait to Jordanian parents, who brought him to the USA as a little boy in 1996. He was on his way to the American dream, earning an electrical engineering degree and getting an internship at the Tennessee Valley Authority, and then a job with the Perry Nuclear Generating Station… which he promptly lost by failing a drug test. But he had a job with Superior Essex, an electrical cable manufacturer, when he set off on his shooting rampage outside the Chattanooga recruiting stations, where he killed five servicemen and injured two others.
But that’s just a sample of what we’ve already seen on these shores. Recent events in 2016 have given us a foreshadowing of what’s coming down the turnpike:
A Deadly Week in Western Europe
On July 14, in the French city of Nice, the whole town was in the streets, celebrating with a Bastille Day parade… until the celebration turned to bloodshed as a truck plowed down the street, running down hundreds of people. 84 were killed as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel screamed Allahu Akbar and kept on killing. He had at least five accomplices, fellow jihadist Tunisians and Albanians.
On July 18, the world news was aflame with the story of the 17 year old Afghan refugee, armed with knife and ax, who had arrived in Germany to take advantage of Angela Merkel’s generous welcome wagon… and then showed his appreciation by going on a rampage on a passenger train near Wuerzburg, leaving three people in critical condition and another nineteen victims with lesser injuries. Lest his motive be unclear, he did shout Allahu Akbar as he slashed his innocent victims.
On July 22, 18 year old Syrian refugee Ali Sonboly shot up a mall in Munich, starting at the McDonald’s. Nine innocents were killed, and another sixteen were wounded before the cretin finally put himself out of society’s misery.
On July 24, a 21 year old Syrian man – in Germany enjoying political asylum from his nation’s civil war – used a machete to kill a pregnant woman and injure two others.
That’s what’s in Europe now. Parades, malls, McDonalds’s, even commuter trains, are no longer safe, as the Islamic culture of violence moves to infiltrate and replace the peace of Western Civilization.
The Belly of the Beast
And what is life like in the Middle East itself? How do they comport themselves before they migrate to these new lands in Western Europe and the New World?
Not much differently, it seems.
On July 15, a world-famous Pakistani model, Qandeel Baloch, at home in Pakistan, was strangled to death by her own brother; the family had decided it was time for her punishment in compliance with Sharia law. She was insufficiently observant, you see.
On July 23, a suicide bomber blew up his explosive vest while standing amid a crowd of demonstrators in the Afghan capital of Kabul. This one left 61 dead, and produced another 207 wounded.
On July 3, ISIS managed a car bombing in Karradah, Iraq. This one killed 292 people in a single burst.
Need we go on? In the Middle East, where the islamists are at their greatest concentration, and have the most freedom to live under the barbaric punishments of Sharia law, the attacks and mob justice are at their most horrific and their most plentiful.
Every day, they behead a man in front of his family, or toss a homosexual off a rooftop to his death… or take hostages and kill half of them. Al Qaeda flies planes into buildings; Hamas blows up tourist buses and coffee shops; ISIS dunks cages full of victims into a lake until they drown.
The methods and weapons vary – from guns and bombs to knives and rooftops.
What they have in common is evil. Sheer evil, and the love of inflicting pain on the innocent.
…And they want to bring that evil here; they’re already doing it. Our job is to find a way to fight back. If they don’t want to – or cannot – assimilate with the American Way, they have no business being allowed in here at all.
When you import people, you import their culture. Regardless of how generous, kind, and caring a country’s population may be, its government’s first duty is to protect its citizens, so it must guard its borders, in both wartime and peacetime, against any infection that would put its people at risk.
The United States rightly welcomed massive immigration at the time of our greatest expansion. In the 19th century, the United States had land to make productive, factories to staff, a growth economy in need of employees, entrepreneurs, visionaries. And in those days, the United States had strict rules about the health of immigrants – turning away those who would bring tuberculosis, trachoma, small pox, cholera, yellow fever, and other such diseases.
Now that we can cure so many physical illnesses, we have a different concern when reviewing immigrants: can we tell if any are at special risk of being security threats? Just as we spend centuries controlling for health threats, we must take this threat seriously as well, and do everything we can to keep our citizens safe.
The Voting Booth
Knowing what we know now about the modern threat of the jihadist philosophy – that its doctrine is growing within islam by leaps and bound, that it removes the revulsion at the thought of injuring the innocent that should be innate to all people – we must recognize that this threat is even greater among an immigrant population as the health threats that we have always taken seriously.
For once an immigrant is allowed in, he can apply for citizenship, and in a matter of years, he can be voting to elect our representatives in government.
This in fact is what has been happening; immigrants arrive, often start voting (illegally) before they are even citizens, and start changing the nature of our government.
One votes – normally – for what one knows.
If you are raised the child of working parents who mow their lawns and work hard in their careers and send you to school and value a rounded Western education and take you to church or synagogue, you will try, at least, to vote for candidates who honor that culture.
But if you are raised the child of unworking parents in the subculture of public housing, food stamps and welfare checks, attending schools that function more as gang recruiting centers than as places of learning, then you will vote for what you know, the steady stream of checks from Washington DC, because you don’t have a frame of reference for anything else.
And what if you enter the country, not only without a frame of reference to the Enlightenment values that informed our Founding Fathers, and serve as the core of our system of government, but in addition, you were raised in an environment of hatred and violence? What if you were raised in a culture in which your “clerics” shout “Death to Israel” as they do across the Middle East? What if you were raised in a country with a “Death to America Day” as celebrated in Iran? What if you were raised in a culture that praised the murder of your own neighbor, coworker, or family member? What if you were even raised in a culture that encouraged you to be the one to commit that murder?
Can a free nation afford to invite such a cancer into its society, its neighborhoods, and its voting booths?
People are people… and there are good people in every country and every ethnic group. But the proportion of good to bad varies, and so does the ability of different groups to assimilate. Like a single sponge floating in a bucket of water, the United States has long since passed the saturation point where this issue is concerned.
This great nation – this City on a Hill – has an obligation to again be a role model for the world. And that requires a clear eye and a firm stance on our border.
The reckless, unchecked immigration of people who are raised with an absolute hostility to our way of life must be stopped… and those who continue to advocate that open door, despite mounting evidence in our daily headlines that it is a suicidal policy, must be recognized as the destructive elements in our polity that they are.
Copyright 2016 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicago based international trade compliance trainer, actor, and writer. His columns are regularly found in Illinois Review.
Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the byline and IR URL are included.
