The Daily Signal - America’s ‘Frankenstein’ Out of Control Immigration System | Victor Davis Hanson
Episode Date: March 17, 2026Immigration used to be the U.S.’ great strength but now that’s changing. What’s new is illegal immigrants and naturalized citizens, who hate America but don’t want to leave, are going aroun...d and violently killing Americans, explains Victor Davis Hanson on today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.” “But how did we create it where we're getting people killing us and yelling Islamic sloganeering and championing Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran at the same time we're at war with them?… The answer is: Dr. Frankenstein created the Frankensteinian monster.” (00:00) Immigrants as Strength (00:39) The Ungrateful Immigrant (02:34) Recent Attacks and Radicalism (04:23) Why Assimilation Fails (08:06) Frankenstein of Immigration 👉 The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: http://dailysignal.com/donate 👉Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest short videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1 Also on Spotify: https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9753340027 👉Want more VDH? Watch Victor’s weekly, hour-long podcast, “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” now! Subscribe to his YouTube channel, and enable notifications: https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273?sub_confirmation=1👉More exclusive content is available on Victor’s website: https://victorhanson.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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It used to be in the United States that immigrants were our great strength.
Think of Silicon Valley, I mean, Tesla, SpaceX, eBay.
I could go down the list.
They're all created by these wonderful legal immigrants, but that's changing.
We had this synagogue attempt by a Lebanese naturalized citizen,
and he had ties with Hezbollah.
He tries to drive his car into a synagogue in Michigan and kill people.
And the question is, why do they do that?
Maybe better to rephrasing it would be, why don't they do it?
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for The Daily Signal.
I'd like to talk about a very controversial topic.
I call it the ungrateful immigrant.
You know, it used to be in the United States that immigrants were our great strength.
We all saw maybe Eliya Kazan's America, America, the story of his uncle's struggles to get to the U.S.
and how much he worshipped the country when he arrived here.
I just interviewed Max Nikias.
He is the former president of USC.
He came with nothing from Cyprus,
and he has a new memoir out, American Trojan,
about how lucky he was to get here
and how he worshiped the United States.
That was sort of the general perception
that we had of immigrants.
Think of Silicon Valley.
I mean, Tesla, SpaceX, eBay, Stripe, Sun Microsystem.
I could go down the list.
They're all created by these wonderful legal immigrants, but that's changing.
And I'm not talking about the 500,000 illegal immigrants who were known to have come across with criminal records.
I'm not talking about the truck drivers, thousands of them, that were given licenses, even though they did not qualify for a driving competency test, even though they didn't know English, even though they had been involved in a number of lethal accident.
I'm not talking about the Somali fraud.
That's self-evident.
Thousands of Somalis were involved as payback to arriving in America and to us, their magnanimous hosts.
They paid us back by what?
Embezzling up to $9 billion.
I'm not talking about Ilyan Omar and her anti-Semitic remark.
It's the Benjamin's baby or labeling and vilifying the United States as trash.
that's all self-evident.
What's new are legal immigrants and naturalized citizens,
as if they become almost, they have a schizophrenic idea,
they hate the country, but under no circumstances do they want to leave it?
Just in an eight-day period a week ago,
we had in Austin, Texas, a Senegal naturalized citizens,
went into a beer garden and opened fired,
killed three and wounded a lot of them.
At Old Dominion University in Virginia,
A naturalized immigrant from Sierra Leone came in, and he shot the ROTC instructor and yelled Allah Akbar.
All of these were Islamists, although you won't find that very readily in the mainstream media.
Out in front of the New York mayor's mansion, there was a protest against Islam and a counter-protest supporting Mondami, and two naturalized citizens.
One, an Afghan, one parents from Turkey.
They brought two IEDs and tried to, they said, surpass the Boston Marathon Bomber of 2013.
Remember them, the Sarnet brothers?
They were Chechnans from Russia, and we were very magnanimous in allowing them to come in.
And how did they repay us by trying to slaughter people?
They injured dozens, dozens, more than dozens in Boston.
And then, of course, we had the synagogue.
attempt by a Lebanese naturalized citizen. And he had ties with Hezbollah. His family were Hezbollah members.
He tries to drive his car into a synagogue in Michigan and kill people. And the question is,
why do they do that? Maybe a better rephrasing it would be, why don't they do it? We have no civic
education. We ask very little of the immigrant when they come to the United States. We don't ask them to
have a high school diploma all the time. We don't ask them to be fluent in English. We don't ask them
to study the Constitution. We don't ask them to profess their greater loyalty and love to United
States. Instead, we have open borders. Or we bring in thousands of students from the Middle East,
and what do they do? They protest, and they push Jews around, and they celebrate at a time when
we're at war, as we saw in New York City recently, they celebrate our enemies. Have you
Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran. They're on their side. This is a far different phenomenon on the past
when we had wonderful immigrants from Japan who were treated pretty badly. There were many of them,
most of them went to internment camps, and yet they joined the 442nd Combat Brigade in Italy,
and they took horrendous casualties fighting for whom, the United States. So something's wrong,
And what I'm getting at is this.
These immigrants, whether they're temporary immigrants, they're illegal immigrants, they're legal immigrants, or they're naturalized citizens, or they're on student visa, they sense something.
They look at the Sarnab brothers and they say, well, yes, they were Islamists and yes, they killed a lot of Americans.
But Rolling Stone put one of the brothers in a very photogenic pose on their cover as if he was a romantic type of person.
Oh, I remember Fort Hood.
that was Major Hassan.
He shot 13 of his fellow soldiers and wounded over 30 of them.
And the Pentagon said, we're not going to attribute this to what, terrorism, even though he yelled Allah Akbar.
You know, I had nothing against then chief of staff of the army, George Casey.
But you remember what he said?
He said one of the greatest tragedies of this shooting might be the injury to our diversity program.
No, no, it was not the injury to the diversity.
It was the paradigm that was established that you can go in and kill people
and not suffer public opprobrium and condemnation.
It's almost as if any time someone yells Allah Akbar,
citizen, illegal, citizen, anybody.
And you scream and yell and you do something terribly.
The first thing we say is, well, we don't want to condemn it.
That would be Islamophobic.
But again, that sends us.
a message. And all of these people, all 50 million people who have come to the United States,
many of them, some of our best citizens, but all of them have to be reminded and are reminded,
if we're doing our duty, that they chose to come here, and they need to become Americanized.
And a lot of them are not. And you saw that in the ICE riots in Los Angeles. What in the world
were people doing who were here illegally from Mexico, and they were waving the flag of the country
under no circumstances they wish to return to,
while they are burning the flag under no circumstances
of the country under no circumstances they wish to leave.
Where did they get that idea?
Was it from the universities?
Was it from the K through 12 curriculum
where we teach people that the story of the United States
is sexism and racism and homophobia?
Or is it when they look on TV and we see ICE people
trying to enforce the law
and predominantly looking at the 500,000
criminals that came in. And what happens to them? They're demonized by us as Gestapo, as Nazis.
How did we create this Frankensteinian monster of immigration that used to be our great strength
and is still in some cases, many cases? But how did we create it? Where we're getting people
killing us and yelling Islamic sloganeering and champion Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran at the
time we're at war with him. Where did this come from? And the answer is, Dr. Frankenstein created
the Frankenstein monster. We're the Dr. Frankenstein's. We created this, and these people are taking advantage of our messaging.
And their messaging says, basically, you get what you deserve. And boy, have we got it lately.
Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis-Hanson for the Daily Signal.
Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal.
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