Immigrants Should Assimilate, Not Change the Constitution

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment of Victor Davis Hanson’s podcast. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Sami Winc: You know, since you mentioned it, let’s go, and we’re into Europe. I wanted to ask you about, they have an immigration, the EU broadly has developed an immigration policy, which they signed in 2023. And you could either pay or accept immigrants, refugees that are seeking asylum.

And the column today, and I can’t remember what publication, but they were saying that most of the countries are choosing to pay because they don’t wanna bring in any more of these asylum-seekers. So, they’re gonna have a terrible problem with immigration.

Victor Davis Hanson: I predict. The Europeans are very volatile. We forget about that. They have no history of a multiracial society like we do, and they’re not capitalist countries anymore, so they don’t have fluidity of class.

So, when you bring in people who are antithetical in terms of values, religion from a different region, and they’re not European-looking, they have all these things that are challenges that need to be assimilated, and they can’t or won’t do it. And the people coming in have no desire to do it.

And it’s a socialist country that assuages their guilt by giving entitlements that they cannot afford and they don’t have a defense budget because they can’t afford it. And they’ve developed this strange ethos that young men and young women should not marry, buy homes, or they can’t buy a home and have children.

But once they change, they will go full Japanese. Japanese don’t allow immigrants to come in and ever be Japanese, for most cases, can’t be a Japanese citizen.

I think everybody, you know, they sold us this idea that the old wisdom of the United States is diversity, historically, doesn’t work and we have to work at it because we are, say, in 1960, we were 88% white, 2% or 3% Hispanic, 1% Asian, and probably 10% black. And then former Sen. Ted Kennedy came up with the idea of, you know, so open the borders, etc. So now it’s about 68% white, I don’t know, 10% Asian, 10% Hispanic, 12% black. I don’t know if that adds up. And that is a challenge for everybody on the diverse side.

Look at the Balkans. Look at Rwanda. Look at—it doesn’t work, usually, in history. Look at India. It doesn’t work—Brazil. But it works here and it works here only to the extent that people, all people—white, brown, black, Asian—say that their color or their race is incidental to being an American, being an American is essential. But Europe has never really done that.

And so, then when they bring in people of different religions and colors, they patronize them. And then these people think they’re gonna be treated separately, i.e., better, they’re not gonna be subject to the full extent of the law, or they’re gonna get more because these wealthy but drone-like Europeans, Eloi, H.G. Wells’ Eloi, they feel guilty and they’re gonna give them stuff.

Well, when they reach a breaking point, they will act and it won’t be like what we act like, they will deport people and it won’t be pretty. But it was an insane policy. So, what I would say to people is: I like diversity. I like diversity in food. I like diversity in music. I like diversity in people. But I don’t like diversity in the Constitution.

I do not want to live under the Mexican Constitution. I do not wanna live under the Guatemalan ethos about women. I do not want to live under South Africa’s idea of race now, either apartheid then or what they have now. I don’t wanna live on any of these political systems or these value systems.

I just want, if immigrants want to come here, I want them to enrich us with their fashion, their food, their music, their literature, their art, and then become American and share the same ethos.

So, when I walk outside my street, I don’t see somebody, as I saw three weeks ago, open the car door and throw out two dogs, and then when I yelled at him, tell me in Spanish to blank-blank and take off.

I don’t like to do what I did this morning and walk around and see a new—that was last night, excuse me—a new dryer thrown. And then when I look in the dryer, there’s a bunch of garbage with Spanish-language literature. I don’t like that. That’s what they do in Mexico. I don’t want them to do that here.

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