'Legal' Immigration Doesn't Make it 'Good'
We cannot continue to prioritize 'diversity' over a unified American identity
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America is increasingly under siege, and the weapon being used against her was forged by her own immigration system.
In the span of just weeks, a mass shooting at an Austin bar, a murder on a Virginia college campus, a truck attack at a Michigan synagogue, and a bomb plot outside a New York City mayor's residence have confronted Americans with an uncomfortable reality: one common denominator links them all.
All four attacks were apparently committed by those who were either “integrated” into the fabric of American society through America’s naturalization process, or, perhaps more ominously, the children of naturalized citizens.
The conclusion is inescapable: contrary to the assertion of pro-immigration Republican politicians such as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who believe that so long as immigration is “legal,” it is by nature “good,” America’s “legal” immigration system has failed.
Mistaken Idea of a Melting Pot
At the root of this crisis is not only the failure of assimilation, but the very myth of assimilation itself — especially in the modern age. This has brought tens of millions of people from incompatible cultures into America, such as from Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Turkey, Senegal, and Lebanon.
Americans have been taught from a young age that their country is a melting pot, a sort of universalist stew where, regardless of where the ingredients originated from, the resulting dish will only get better.
Under this belief, America has ceased to be a particular people in a particular place. Instead, it has become a global welcome mat where people from every corner of the world can come, wipe their feet of all that came before, and “assimilate” into an overarching and unified “American” family.
What’s more, it is said that the children of newly minted Americans are instantly “just as American” as anyone else. In this view, these birthright Americans retain none of their parents’ cultural or ideological priors, quickly becoming indistinguishable from those Americans with generational ties to the land.
This is, of course, nonsense.
New York City Case
New York’s “ISIS-inspired attack,” allegedly attempted by two well-off children of naturalized U.S. citizens outside the home of New York’s first Muslim mayor, Mamdani, should immediately put such myths to rest.
By all accounts, Emir Balat, 18, and Ibrahim Kayumi, 19, the two men caught on camera attempting this alleged homemade bomb attack against “far right” protestors, were living the “American Dream.” Their parents, naturalized citizens, were the beneficiaries of “legal” immigration — the “good kind,” according to Cruz.
Yet, despite growing up in an affluent Pennsylvania county, Balat and Kayumi allegedly chose to pledge their allegiance not to the American Republic, but to the Islamic State, and launch a potentially deadly attack against innocent people in the name of their militant Islamic ideology, as the Justice Department documents.
Virginia’s Case
Then we have the shooter at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, identified as Mohamed Jalloh, a naturalized citizen from Sierra Leone and former Army National Guardsman who was arrested in 2016 for attempting to provide material support to ISIS.
Though he was sentenced to 11 years in prison, he was released two-and-a-half years early and was free to kill an ROTC instructor and wound two more before being killed himself.
These two examples expose the central lie of our era: that assimilation from culturally divergent societies into a dominant American fabric is viable at scale, and that multiculturalism leads to societal harmony.
By prioritizing “diversity” over a dominant American culture, our institutions have traded social cohesion for a volatile state of permanent friction, where the “welcomed” are increasingly at war with the “welcomer.”
Era of Mass Migration
The post-1965 Hart-Celler era of mass immigration has not produced a unified populace but rather a fractured landscape of competing interests. The myth of the melting pot, once touted as America’s strength, has completely shattered, leaving behind a collection of disconnected people and cultures that share geography but little else in common.
Nothing illustrates the sheer scale of this cultural displacement better than the 90-foot bronze Hanuman deity at the Sri Ashtalakshmi Hindu Temple in Sugar Land, Texas. This statue is a literal monument to America’s new cultural reality, where elements of a foreign culture now tower over America’s traditional landscape.
But proof is not just found within American communities, but perhaps more consequentially, in the halls of American power.
Mayor Mamdani recently transformed City Hall into a prayer hall, hosting a formal Iftar on the building’s historic floor — a symbolic centering of a specific religious identity within a supposedly secular civic space.
This ideological and cultural shift is mirrored and amplified in the halls of Congress, where foreign-born representatives like Shri Thanedar, Salud Carbajal, and Ilhan Omar routinely demonize the very agencies charged with protecting our borders and enforcing immigration laws within our cities. Omar has even gone as far as openly boasting of her intent to use her American office to advance the interests of her birth nation, Somalia.
American Leaders Once Understood This Threat
In 1915, former President Theodore Roosevelt vociferously championed what he called Americanism in an effort to unify the United States in the face of cultural friction and fragmentation. Roosevelt lambasted the concept of “hyphenated Americans,” which he labeled those who elevated their ethnic or ancestral backgrounds and allegiances above that of their American nationality, going so far as to say that “a hyphenated American is not an American at all.”
Later, in 1923, President Calvin Coolidge recognized the danger posed by immigration in his first annual message to the nation. In his address, Coolidge correctly stated that “American Institutions rest solely on good citizenship,” and that they were created by people who already “had a background of self-government.” For this American trait to be retained, he believed that “new arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship.”
Coolidge stated clearly that “America must be kept American,” and so he believed it was necessary to continue with policies that restricted immigration.
With this goal in mind, Coolidge later signed the Immigration Act of 1924, which drastically reduced immigration by setting strict quotas based on the 1890 census. It aimed to preserve American, Northern, and Western European homogeneity and allowed for a form of ethnogenesis to occur, which lasted until 1965, when the passage of the Hart-Celler Act ultimately began America’s cultural unraveling.
Cultural Suicide
Today, this form of Americanism, as championed by Roosevelt and Coolidge, is, effectively, dead — as evidenced by the recent terrorist attacks by “American” citizens, as well as the words and actions of naturalized elected leaders in Congress. This is the logical conclusion of a decades-long experiment akin to committing cultural suicide.
If we continue to prioritize a project of culturally incompatible “diversity” over a robust, dominant form of Americanism, we will continue to see foreign ethnic conflicts play out on the streets of America’s communities. We must recognize that our capacity to absorb newcomers is not infinite, and that our primary duty is to the welcomer, not the welcomed.
We must end the myth that America’s magical soil transforms foreigners into patriotic Americans and re-establish a standard of citizenship that demands more than a passing test score and a signature on a form.
But most importantly, American leaders must pass new immigration legislation that will either curtail or outright end the scourge of mass immigration into the United States.
One such bill is the PAUSE Act which would effectively freeze most immigration into the United States until certain security conditions are met.
Another is the recently introduced ASSIMILATION Act, whose stated goal is to “end replacement migration and ensure American cultural cohesion.” According to Rep. Andy Ogles, if this bill were to pass, net migration would immediately decrease by 85%.
Bills like these would allow the time and space for cultural cohesion to form, much like it did during the decades of immigration restrictions stemming from the 1924 Immigration Act that reduced the percentage of America’s foreign-born population from around 13 percent to under 5 percent.
If bills like these are not passed into law, the “homefront” will inevitably cease to be a home at all, becoming instead a permanent cultural battlefield where the American people become strangers in their own land.
As Coolidge warned a century ago, “America must be kept American.”
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