A Warning to America – Restoration, with Ayaan Hirsi Ali

After the ABC presidential debate on September 10^andDonald Trump’s opponents are still dedicated to debunking the rumor that some of the 15,000 Recent Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eat pets.

X users reacted with shock to one video – echoed by accounts such as End Wokeness – of an unknown man (prudish readers will have to forgive me) strangling a cat. Another photo of a migrant in Springfield carrying a dead goose by his neck bolstered these claims. The photo accompanied complaints to the Springfield City Committee Meeting that some Haitians were beheading ducks for food in public parks.

However, there is not enough evidence to claim that Haitians are hunting and eating Ohioans’ beloved pets en masse. It makes sense that Democrats would criticize Trump’s signature bluster: “They eat the dogs. They eat the cats. They eat the pets,” as their tried-and-true tactic of portraying him as a peddler of disinformation. They are keeping the animal debacle in people’s minds to distract from the main issue: rapid integration of migrants from developing countries remains a pipe dream.

Flooding small American towns with a diaspora of the most violent, economically disadvantaged nation in the Western Hemisphere is the Democrats’ best answer to economic stagnation in Middle America. The country is filling up with immigrants desperate enough to move to places as culturally remote as the Midwest, provided there is relative comfort and the possibility of low-skilled work. This may sound like a reasonable thing to do. If the local population doesn’t have enough children or blue-collar jobs, why not welcome people who can do the work cheaper and raise the fertility rate at the same time?

Except now the inevitable culture clashes – which Europe has experienced in abundance – have set in. When the locals of Springfield complained to the city council of lawlessness in the streets perpetrated by Haitian newcomers, they testified to a widely perceived effect of rapid immigration from countries with radically different cultural norms and sky-high crime rates. As I wrote hereMigrants whose culture includes activities that are considered criminal in Western countries do not abandon their ingrained norms. Expecting them to do so is utopian. I have discussed the causal relationship between rapid migration from developing countries and increased crime rates in European cities:

“Islamic cultures around the world actively disdain Western ‘decadence’; this attitude does not simply disappear when migrants, particularly men of fighting age, move abroad to improve their economic prospects. Islamists easily infiltrate and plot against the very countries that provide shelter and jobs to many Muslim communities – communities that Islamists successfully target. That is why, since 2020, Britain’s MI5 has more than 40,000 suspects on a terror list, the vast majority of which are related to extremist Islamist terrorism. Terrorism is not the biggest problem, however. As Eva Vlaardingerbroek points out, immigration is related to crime in general. I have discussed sexual crimes and their relationship to migration in my book Preybut also other forms of crime such as the violence described above – particularly gang-related violence such as shootings, which more than doubled in the last decade in Sweden – are also shooting up.”

As serious as Europe’s violent and sexual crime figures are, less sensational phenomena – such as petty crime and rental markets – are worth discussing because they affect the population. everyone live in urban areas. The following graph illustrates how European cities with significant migrant populations also have the highest rates of robberies. Gang-organized phone theft in London has risen by 150% in the past year. Many phones – snatched from the hands of thieves as they cycled through the crowds – end up in China where the second-hand phone market is booming. Gangs are divided along racial lines; diversity is not always the “power” from London.

In this excellent piece for The European Conservative, Connor Tomlinson describes a “conspiracy of silence” by the UK Ministry of Justice, which has refused to publish data on crimes committed on the basis of ethnicity or nationality. But in countries where such data is occasionally released, such as Sweden, the picture is inevitably clear. In 2021, a study found that 59.2% of sex offenders aged 15-60 convicted of rape between 2000 and 2015 had an immigrant background; 47.7% of them were born outside Sweden. These findings are so significant that they are even cited on Wikipedia (“Rape in Sweden”). There are in fact so many clearly unintegrated migrants in Sweden that the government has announced that it plans to individual migrants pay up to 350,000 Swedish kronor (about 34,000 USD) to return to their home countries. If this is not a decisive concession to the concerns, usually only voiced by conservatives, about the utopia of integration, I don’t know what is.

Ohio did what European cities have been doing for a generation: it saw a labor shortage and looked for a quick fix, ignoring all the long-term socio-cultural problems. that could follow. Consider the recent Conservative governments in the UK, which oversaw skyrocketing immigration to ensure that overall GDP growth remained above 0%, albeit by minuscule margins. While the total population grew by 685,000 net migrants in 2023, GDP grew by just 0.1%. This logic fails to take into account the fact that GDP per capita is falling: Life for the average person is economically harder (by around £1,500/year according to the cited report). With imported populations the size of entire cities entering the UK each year, people are noticing unwanted changes in their local communities rather than the supposed benefits of mass immigration implied in the meaningless invocation of “GDP growth” (by 0.1% per year!). Consequently, the Tory party has been punished by its voters, with Conservative voters flood to the new Reform Party in the July 2024 elections.

A Springfield factory owner, for whom the lower wage demands of immigrants are a blessing, praised the relative industry of its Haitian workers compared to the drug-addled locals. Immigrants act as a band-aid Democrats apply to the festering wounds of social decline: endemic drug addiction amid an opioid crisis that claims 1,500 American lives a week, declining fertility rates, and a hollowed-out ambition that has plagued America’s middle class for decades. This is without even considering the negative fiscal impact of low-wage immigrants, who often set aside money for dependents and rely more on the tax safety net than they contribute to taxeshave on developed host countries. (A new study from the UK has documented this trend.) In lower-wage sectors, migrants hired to solve labor shortages work for less than the host population would normally charge, reduction of the hourly wage for the lowest earners in the labor market over time. Vance’s populist appeals to American workers are not without merit.

It is also intuitive that sudden influxes of people put pressure on services and housing. Again, we can look to Europe for infallible evidence: A study covering 382 German administrative districts, found that an increase in the migration inflow of 1% of a district’s original population causes an increase in apartment prices of about 2.5-3%, as well as an increase in apartment rents of about 1%. Of course, social housing is often given to low-paid or unemployed migrants, with 74% of Somali homes in London social housing. It is unfortunate that so much attention is paid to Trump’s comment about pets and so little to the fact that from 2019 to 2023, homelessness in Ohio increased by 10% after a sharp rise in rents. In the UK it is even worse: where 38% of the homeless are foreigners. While immigration is rarely the only factor contributing to rental problems, it is no wonder that locals wonder about the effect of importing thousands of people into areas with scarce housing. Demonizing them as Nazis is the all-too-common response from the corporate media.

Partly due to the reluctance of governments hungry for cheap labor to be transparent about the tangible effects of immigration, and because of the general crisis in social science studies that produce findings that are often cannot be replicatedthe issue remains radioactive for many politicians. It may be true that there is a drug addiction problem plaguing white working-class areas, and that this is not the fault of honest immigrants looking for factory jobs. It is also true that the duties of politicians are primarily to serve the current citizens of their country: the people for whom this is their only home, their only resource, their only history. Those duties include getting drugs off the streets, ensuring that workers’ wages remain decent, and addressing homelessness. They also include listening to the complaints of local people when they have grievances with immigration, and not berating them for non-compliance.

Like this eloquent young womanI am baffled by the typical Democratic response to the suggestion that the benefits of immigration are debatable. Implying that not all Haitian migrants are perfectly integrated citizens earns you ridicule from Democrats, especially at election time; the conversation is not helped by hysteria about cats and dogs. It is also worth noting that in Haiti, the syncretic traditional religion of voodoo is practiced very widely alongside Catholicism and Protestantism. As the a popular saying goes: “70% Catholic, 30% Protestant, and 100% voodoo.” Voodoo involves animal sacrifice; so it can only be a ticking clock until someone is arrested for ritually slaughtering a domestic animal. If someone were focused myopically on filling gaps in the labor market, they could be forgiven for overlooking how this could be a barrier to integration. But this offers little comfort to the locals of Springfield, who now live alongside thousands of unassimilated foreigners. To de-escalate tensions, their concerns must be heard and addressed—not dismissed as racist.

Americans should beware of Europe, where knife crime, gangs made up of ethnically diverse groups, honor-based violence (HBA) against women in Islamic communitiesand general sexual violence is increasing dramatically. To deny that these phenomena are linked to ethnic divisions, caused by rapid immigration and imported cultural baggage, is to betray the duties of any political office.