Victor Davis Hanson: Could France’s Crisis Happen in America?

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

This is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.  

In the news right now, it’s rioting in France, rioting in Belgium, rioting in Italy, rioting in Albania, with other countries experiencing threats to riot. Who are these people? Well, they’re supposedly students that are angry that their classrooms or their education is not competitive or it’s subpar. 

They’re socialists that are driving the unrest, but especially they’re immigrants. And let me just say at the outset, it’s very common among the Left in the West, in Europe, Canada, the United States, to immediately bash anybody who criticizes immigration. But the Left is the party that created this problem because most people who are centrist or independents or on the right approve of immigration with a qualifier. 

It has to be legal. It has to be diverse from all over the world, not just from Africa or south of the border or Asia. It has to be measured so, in some fashion, the people coming in are not a million, two million, three million a year. They have to be in the thousands that can be acculturated, assimilated and integrated, because if they’re not, then what’s over there comes here—and not what over there comes here and becomes West; it brings that culture into the West. 

Now, another thing to remember is it has to be meritocratic. Everybody wants to come to the West, and to the degree that Western nations say to those in Africa and Asia and the Western Hemisphere, “We can’t accommodate everybody. We have a few for refugees. We have a few from family reconciliation. 

“We have a few from people that have outstanding talent, but we have to have the majority speaking the native language, willing to acculturate, and most importantly, have skills and be self-supporting so they don’t burden the social welfare system at the expense of U.S. citizens.” That’s not happening in Europe right now. 

It’s not happening. The historic Limoges Town Hall in Limoges, France, is burned down. It’s toppling. If you go to Marseille, you often see the historic statue of Marianne. She’s the symbol of the French Republic, a statue. 

It’s been defaced and is threatened with destruction. At Lyon, they destroyed a 175-year-old town hall. One of the most impressive Gothic churches in all of Europe is the Duomo, the Duomo in Milan, and they’re right outside burning and rioting, right outside.  

So what is driving this coalition? Who’s doing this? 

Why are they angry? Well, we have a very strange phenomenon happening. In Western countries over the last two decades especially, about 15%, up to 20%, are first-generation immigrants. I mean, they are first-generation, and they do not come from European countries. Some of them come from one country to another, but most of them are from the Middle East, Asia, Africa and the Western Hemisphere. 

And what’s happening is they come at a time where the West is in crisis, and it does not believe that its culture and civilization is superior to the alternative. So there’s no state effort to assimilate, to acculturate, to integrate, to teach people about Greece and Rome, or the medieval period, or the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment, or the Founding Fathers here in the United States. 

Or whether you’re left or right, Rousseau or Voltaire or Shakespeare or Plato, none of that.  

In fact, it’s just the opposite: that people are coming because they have rejected with their feet their own culture, and yet they are praised as the other, as if their cultures, which are failed and which have driven them out, are somehow superior.  

And therefore, they can retain their own cultural identity within a Western nation, with the caveat that they also will be protected by Western security, given Western freedom and have Western economic prosperity that they didn’t have in their own country. 

This is not sustainable. It’s not sustainable. This new alliance between socialist immigrants and Islamists. We’re seeing it in the U.S. as well. We see all of these candidates that are running for Congress, for state office, for Senate, mayor of New York, and they have nothing good to say about the United States. 

They have a lot of good to say about the countries that are illiberal, from which they came and to which they under no circumstances want to go back.  

The iconic moment in the United States was the protesters in Los Angeles who were here illegally, and they were waving the flag of the country under no circumstances they wanted to go back to and burning the flag of the country under every circumstance they wanted to stay in. 

Now, there are geostrategic implications of this. We are becoming estranged from Europe. Europe is becoming estranged from Europe. Prime Minister Georgia Meloni in Italy just unleashed a diatribe against the French president, Emmanuel Macron. And she said he was responsible for opening the borders of Europe and beginning this suicide pact in which European countries now have 15% to 20% to 25% first-generation immigrants. 

But the key number is first- and second-generation, because unlike past immigration waves, the second generation, those born to immigrants, are not acculturating very well. And that’s the key indicator.  

In Canada, it’s 45% first- and second-generation. In Australia, it’s nearly 50%. And across Europe, it averages about 25% to 35% of the entire population is either first- or second-generation immigrants. 

And as we see now, it’s an unsustainable proposition because they do not want to accept the culture in which they fled to. They want its benefits, but they want to take it over culturally or socially or politically. And when I say it’s not sustainable, the welfare cost of European nations, especially Northern and Western European nations, is about 40% of their entire budget. 

It’s over 30% in many countries of their total GDP, and that is money that is given to people who are not able to support themselves in this socialist utopia.  

But it’s even worse than that: it’s not sustainable for the taxpayer, but it fuels the resentment of the taxpayer. In other words, it’s this strange phenomenon of human nature. 

The more you give someone, the more they interpret that as weakness to be exploited and not magnanimity to be reciprocated in kindness. That’s part of the root of the entire problem. But, as I said, it has geostrategic problems because Europe’s energy program is in shambles. The U.K. and Germany have wrecked their economies by warring on nuclear power and fossil fuels. Wind and solar are not compatible with a dynamic economy as the primary sources of energy. Energy costs in Germany or the U.K. are double, triple and, in some parts, quadruple ours. 

Fertility is 1.35 across Europe on average. Only Donald Trump’s anger and bombast and barrages of rhetoric have allowed Europe to spend 2%, a measly 2% of GDP, on defense. But they have promised to go to 5%. It will be impossible for them to go to 5% with the energy policies they have, with the fertility rates that are so low, with an indigenous population that is aging and shrinking, and borders that are not secure, and immigrants who see them as decadent and weak and ripe for exploitation. You can see the geostrategic ramifications in the war in Ukraine and Iran. 

Why did the U.K. let out terrorists who were scouting a Royal Air Force NATO base where we had 11 B-1s? And they were essentially conducting a milk run or a dry run on how to destroy three and a half billion dollars of U.S. bombers. And what did the U.K. do? They let these people out on bail. They let them out on bail. 

Why is it that in so many Northern European and Western European countries, when immigrants commit crimes, they do not face the same level of punishment as indigenous people? In the U.K. as well, why is it that these countries would not allow the United States to use their airspaces or their bases when we wanted to hit the nuclear facilities in Iran? 

And the answer to all these questions is they are terrified, not just that they have 15% to 25% immigrant populations, not just that they have 30% to 40% first- and second-generation immigrant populations, but because they have immigrant populations that don’t like them and don’t want to integrate and feel that Islam or the autocratic method is superior. 

And I’ll end on two notes. The West is unique. It’s so self-critical, and it’s so hospitable to immigrants that no other country follows this pattern. China has 1.4 billion. They don’t let people into their country. Japan is 99% indigenous population. Russia would not hear of this. Some of our closest allies, South Korea or Taiwan, they don’t do this. 

We in the West are unique, and yet we suffer the wage of being unkind to immigrants from the very countries that would never allow it, for the very reasons that they’re seeing what’s happening in the West. Second and last, we’re not far behind. We have 16% to 17% first-generation, and we have about 25% first- and second-generation. 

About 70 million people have either not been born in the United States or their parents weren’t born here. And we are not integrating and assimilating them and using the melting pot, partly because of the Left’s cultural revolution that they’ve taken over in institutions, and they are ashamed of their very culture, and they’ve used the word “cultural appropriation,” et cetera, and partly because the immigrants themselves refuse to give up their religion. 

I’m not talking about their religion in the sense of private worship, but I’m talking about their religion as a state religion imposed on entire communities. That is a goal of many of the immigrants.  

It’s not going to end well in the United States unless we take a look at what’s happening right now in Europe, and there’s no better time to take a look than before the midterm elections that are upon us in less than three weeks. 

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