Victor Davis Hanson: The Collapse of America’s Melting Pot

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.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. 

I’d like to review some matters of immigration, starting with illegal immigration. No one thought a year ago that a country that had no southern border and was letting in ten to twelve thousand a day, cumulatively of ten to twelve million, and then they were dispersed into fifty states, they being the illegal entrants, among them five hundred to six hundred thousand known criminals, as well as patients that were ill or came out of institutions from Venezuela and Latin America, that the border would be closed and the wall would be progressing, and that’s exactly what happened.  

The irony was that Donald Trump ran as that was one of his two or three signature issues, and it’s not an issue. 

It’s sort of analogous to the military crisis. Remember, we were told that we were down 40 to 50,000 recruits because people were in gangs, they were overweight, they were playing video games, they were—the demography had collapsed, and people in the Trump administration said: No, no, no, no, no. It’s DEI. You’re not meritocratic. You’re trying to discourage people to join the military ’cause they don’t think they’re going to be rewarded or punished on their abilities, their fighting abilities. It’s how they appear, their superficial appearance.  

And when you got rid of that, guess what? Four or five generational families had — the great-grandfather or grandfather had fought in Vietnam, father had fought in First Gulf War, Second Gulf War. The grandson and the fourth generation said, “My parents and grandparents say, don’t go. This is a different military.” Change that and stop the racial and religious and sexual orientation and gender bias, and what do you have? You’ve met your goal, and now it’s not an issue. 

Same thing with immigration, except what you do with the people that are here. I think the American people, if you look at their polls, they said: We want the border closed, and we want everybody deported. That’s what they said. But what they really said was: We want the border closed, and then I want my—I don’t want to see the deportations ’cause it might be insignificant.  

And the Left knew that, and so that when people say we have to find them, and they’re in 600 sanctuary jurisdictions where local and state governments are on the side of the illegal entrants, it’s almost impossible to say, “Would you please get in the van, and we will take you home?” No, they’re gonna resist. They’re gonna run.  

And if you think you’re gonna go after 600,000 criminals, and you start to arrest a criminal, and you go into, say, a Home Depot facade, and there’s a criminal that you know dealing drugs, and then he’s with six people, you’re gonna ask them for an ID. And if they don’t have a proof of citizenship, or they can’t prove it when detained, then what are you gonna do? Break the law and say, “It’s okay, we were only looking for the criminal?” No. 

So the point was it became very controversial. 

Is there a solution? I think there is. I think you can deport the people who came under Joe Biden for the initial surge, the four years, and then you can say: We’ve got rid of 10 to 12 million people who took advantage of Joe Biden, and they swarmed our border, and they did it illegally, and they have to go home. And then we can say the 500,000 illegal aliens who committed a crime have to go home. 

And they’re going home as we speak, and that’s one reason we’re at a 60 to 70-year low in violent crime. Nobody makes that connection. 

And then what do you do with the pre-Biden illegal immigrants? There’s probably anywhere from 20 to 30 [million]. I think you can say—and I don’t think the Left will go for this. They say they want comprehensive immigration reform, but this might be allowable with a MAGA base if you said anybody who’s been here five years—that is, they didn’t come through the Biden surge, that cynical surge to change the demography and help them balloting and grow the welfare state, all that. They haven’t been—they have been here more than five years. They are able-bodied, and they are not on welfare or public support. If they’re injured or ill and they’re on public support, that’s another question.  

So have to be here five years. They have to be working. They have not to be on social services. They can’t have a criminal record. You can adjudicate whether a misdemeanor or one DUI, but criminal record. And then they have to pay a fine for breaking the law, maybe $4,000 or $5,000. 

How many would qualify? I don’t know, but I think the Left, who would say in theory they’re for that, would be shocked that millions would not qualify. They either are on welfare and able-bodied, or they have committed a crime, or they refuse to pay a fine, or they just disappear.  

But there would be a lot of people who’d take advantage. Would you give them citizenship? No. You would give them a green card. Under the ’86 Simpson-Mazzoli, people that Ronald Reagan did the same deal with, 65% didn’t want citizenship. I can go into that. I wrote about it in “The Dying Citizen.”  

But for the point is, a lot of people would just be happy to not vote and have a green card. 

But there’s a second problem with the immigration, very quickly, and that’s the second generation. We all thought that by the second generation, the powerful forces of the melting pot had taken Eastern Europeans, the Irish, first and second generations of people from Mexico in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, and they had integrated, assimilated, and acculturated, and it was true.  

However, if you bring huge amounts of people in, number one, and two, you choose not to assimilate them, and you say the melting pot is racist and bankrupt and never worked, and it’s too brutal to culturally appropriate.  

What do I mean by that? I mean, in the old days, the workable days, you said: We like your food. You enrich us. We like your music. We like your literature. We like your fashion. All of that’s great. It makes America a very diverse, exciting place. But we do not like your government. We do not like the way you treat women. We do not like the way you are tribal. We do not like your corruption. We don’t like what’s going on in the Middle East and much of Latin America, so we want you to assimilate. Keep your individual contributions, but you must speak our language, you must learn our traditions, you must support our Constitution, and you must love America more than your former homeland. 

We didn’t do that. And so the result now is this assimilation is not really affecting the second generation, and the numbers are huge. We have about 50 to 55 million Americans that were not born in the United States. It’s reaching near 17%. If you count the children who are not assimilating of the first generation who came here and were not born in the United States. 

 And I say that very loosely. I understand. I’m saying the second generation, many of them are not assimilating. Then those numbers get up to the 60%, 65% of America, 18% to 25%. 

And the problem is that you’re starting to see this, a very strange phenomenon where we have people coming into the United States either with their parents, or they were born here in the United States from foreign-born parents.  

I’m talking about Ilhan Omar. I’m talking about Hasan Piker. I’m talking about Mr. Zohran Mamdani. I’m talking about Millet Quiros. I’m talking about this whole new wave of politicians. I’m not picking out people who are Muslim. I’m talking about people who criticize the United States. Some of them are from Latin America, and I could—you could see that during the Los Angeles riots over immigration.  

It was the most Orwellian thing you could see. People were waving the flag, Mexican flag, of the country under no circumstances they wanted to return to and of which they were citizens, and they were burning the American flag of the country they were not citizens of, but under no circumstances do they want to leave the United States.  

Only the Left could have created that paradox. 

So what are we going to do? I think we’re going to have to be very blunt and say: If you come over to the United States and/or you’re born to parents who came over to the United States, then we are not going to suggest to you that you’re exempt, and we are gonna suggest to you that we are gonna remind you in our education and our popular culture that you made a decision to leave the West Bank. You made a decision to leave Venezuela. You made a decision to leave Oaxaca, not us.  

And you’re born into an immigrant family, great. More power to you, but you—we’re going to assimilate you. 

And I think we’re gonna have to phase out all these different languages. You call the drugstore, you call defective parts for Amazon, and you get all of these foreign languages. It’s designed to fragment, not to unify. It’s not diversity. It’s fragmentation and antagonism, and it’s tribalism. 

Read any classical discussion of tribalism, and it always has one synonym: pre-civilizational. Pre-civilizational. Civilizational is the effort to bring people from different tribes and make their tribal affiliation incidental, not essential to who they are, and their primary loyalties are to the nation. That’s a Latin word. And if we forget that, we’re going to suffer the fate of every tribal country that forgot unity, from Rome to the Byzantines to what we see in Western Europe today. 

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