The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: We Need to Stop Letting In Ungrateful Immigrants

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

Most Americans used to be supportive of legal immigration because most immigrants loved the country that welcomed them in. Today’s immigrants, such as Hasan Piker and Ilhan Omar, are somehow ungrateful yet refuse to return to their home country.  “You set one foot in here or your parents set one foot in here, and immediately you lodge complaints against the gracious host that welcomed you in and welcomed you in with security, prosperity, and freedom that you did not have.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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All Americans support legal immigration, especially legal immigration that is diverse, measured, in numbers that can be assimilated and acculturated and integrated, meritocratic. So we get people who come here with skills that ensure that we, the people of the United States, will not have to support them. But from time to time, that hasn't happened. And when you have that combined with illegal immigration, you have a pool of 30 million illegal and legal immigrants and 53 million people who were not born in the United States.

People lose their support for immigration. Hello, this is Victor Davis-Hanson for the Daily Signal. All Americans support legal immigration, especially legal immigration, is diverse, as I said, measured in numbers that can be assimilated and acculturated and integrated, meritocratic. So we get people who come here with skills that ensure that we, the people of the United States, will not have to support them.

And they have some knowledge of the traditions and customs and protocol of the United States, as well as English fluency. But from time to time, that hasn't happened. And when you have that combined with illegal immigration, as we did under the Biden administration, when 12 million people came in, sometimes it rates 10,000 a day, plus over a million and a half legal immigrants, then you have a pool of 30 million illegal and legal immigrants and 53 million people who were not born in the United States. So then people lose their support for immigration. It happened in the early 20th century, say from about 1900 to 1910,

about 1.5% of the population, 1 million people, half a million some years, but some years a whole million, came into the United States from southern and eastern Europe. And they had very different ideas about politics. Many of them were anarchists. They joined unions, an anarchist. remember had killed William McKinley. He was an American-born anarchist, but there was a lot of worry that immigration at that level of one and a half percent of the population every year from people who were not integrating but had radical ideas about changing America

was dangerous, and it lost public support for years. The same thing is happening, as I said now, because of the numbers, but also because we're seeing a new type of immigrant. Usually we say the immigrant is good for America because he's eager to get here. He's eager to work hard. He loves the United States. He's studied the United States.

He wants to leave his homeland and start anew. And then he makes us say, wow, look at that energized immigrant that loves this country. We've got to snap out of it and compete. That was the idea of immigration, one of the ideas. Not now. We're getting a lot of immigrants that are coming from failed states, mostly as a result of communism and socialism. Some of them come legally, some come illegally, and they're coming in numbers that we can't fully assimilate. But there's a new type of legal immigrant, and these are immigrants from the first generation or their children in the second generation from failed states.

And so let me ask you a question. What do Rashida Talib, a Democrat of Michigan, or Ilyan Omar, a Democratic representative from Minnesota, whose family came from Somalia, Rashida Talib was from the West Bank, or AOC, whose father came from Puerto Rico, who was also a Democratic congresswoman, or the podcaster Hassan Piker, who's from a multimillion-dollar family in Turkey and was born here. and then returned to Turkey. Our New York Mayor Zoran Mondami, who came here from Uganda, or a Democratic senator candidate, Senate candidate Abdul El-Said, who came from Egypt, his family did. Or Melot Kuros, his family and she came from Ethiopia. Or Representative Ro Khanna, a representative congressman from California,

whose family and his wife's family came from India, second generation, or Gustavo Gordillo, who is a first-generation immigrant from Peru. And I could go on, but that should be enough. What do they all have in common? Let's count them. Number one, most of them are pretty wealthy. Well, Kana's family is probably worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Hassan Piker drives a poor.

She has a multimillion-dollar home. His family is worth millions. Ilan Omar, whether truthfully or untruthy, filed a financial report that said she was worth $30 million. We can talk about Mr. Saeed, he filed a tax return for over $600,000. But besides that they are mostly wealthy, they're also, with exception of AOC Muslims, which is fine, except they accentuate their Islamic identity, to the extent that Mr. Saeed has even said in an unguarded moment that he didn't want to mention anything about the killing of the Supreme Leader, theocratic enemy of the United States in Iran, because that might upset his constituents.

But in addition to being quite wealthy and Islamic and from failed states, many of them, as soon as they arrived here, or their parents equated their own race or their religion or their antithesis to what they called the oppressor or victimizer class, the white male heterosexual Christian, we all know who's supposed to be responsible for all the sins of the world, as somehow exploiting them. In other words, think of the argument. You come from a failed socialist state in Somalia or Uganda or Egypt. you set one foot in here or your parents set one foot in here, and immediately you lodge complaints against the gracious host that welcomed you in, and welcomed you in with security, prosperity, and freedom that you did not have under the system that you left, but which you seem to be now champion in a very chauvinistic way.

And no sooner than you come without any knowledge of the United States' nature or history or protocol, you're so bold that you start to demand socialist changes. You want to abolish the Senate. You want reparations. You want to reopen the border. You want to get rid of the filibusers. You want to get rid of the electoral college. You want to pack the court.

You want to change the capitalist system. You want to tax billionaires, not on what they make, but on their worth. You want to go after people who have two homes. All of these are radical things that are outside the American. tradition. And what people are just stunned by is they thought that under the old immigrant paradigm that you come from your home country and you vote with your feet. In other words, you're saying, I want to be a new American. I want to take advantage of this system that attracted me there and gave me a home where I had no home. But not now. Now is I'm very wealthy

and I'd like to come to America, and I'd like to experiment on Americans and impose a foreign socialist system that they have never wanted. And I want to run for office, I want to be a podcast influencer, I want to use my wealth and influence to change the country that I fled to and kind of emulate the system that I fled from. Why are people doing this? why we have to ask ourselves, why would you leave the country that has failed you and go to a country that welcomed you and then be so ungracious? I think the primary reason is immigrants from these areas put their finger in the air and they say,

where do the winds of advantages blow? Not with the right and conservativeness says, we welcome you, but we're an entrepreneurial capitalist system, and we want you to take care of yourself, so go to it, and we'll give you the advice and the infrastructure so you can be successful. Versus you are a victim, you're a non-white victim, you've been oppressed. There are affirmative action opportunities for you,

both in college admissions and scholarships, race-based scholarships, there is preference in hiring. You can lodge complaints and complain that if you're not doing well, The entire system is against you and innately prejudiced. We have a whole array. We on the Democratic left side of subsidies for housing, food, legal advice, education, and all we ask of you is to retain your own ethnic, religious, foreign identities, or at least make them as important or more important than your American identity, which is going to be incidental. and therefore show us fealty and loyalty at the polls.

Do that, and we will take care of you. And unfortunately, what is the most ironic of all is a lot of these new immigrants who are very affluent are imposing a socialist system they think on Americans as if we're the lap rats and they are the experimenters. And that's not a very successful way to win the American people over to the cherished idea, in the past of legal immigration.

Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis-Hansson for the Daily Signal. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansan.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.