Victor Davis Hanson: ‘Unassimilated Immigrants Will Make a Failed State in the United States’ 

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Jack Fowler:  A 26-year-old sub-Saharan African, Benedict Chinedu Ogbodiegwu, I’m sure I’m saying that wrong, allegedly murdered a white man, 62-year-old Andrew Wimsatt, sitting on a bench, and he stabbed him to death and tried to behead him. 

It turned out that Wimsatt was actually friends with Tyrus and Kat Timpf and others. 

For whatever reasons, you know, he communicated with them, went to some of their local shows. So he seems like a nice guy. They knew him. So some of this news has gotten out, but otherwise, if he didn’t have friends in high media places, this seems to be another kind of story where a heinous black-on-white illegal immigrant—I think he’s an illegal immigrant, this dude—murder has happened, and gruesome. 

Again, an attempt to saw off this guy’s head would have just passed in our media, as do so many shootings and murders in Chicago, for example. We don’t hear about this. Anyway, any thoughts on this beheading attempt, Victor? 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, I mean, it was … The Left sees this as collateral damage. 

So they have a narrative that white supremacists and white rage hurt black people. And the reality is that 49% to 50% of all rapes, assaults, murders are committed by black males who make up 2.5% of the population. That is a narrative that they do not want to discuss. They call this collateral damage to the narrative. 

The narrative is anti-empirical; it’s deductive. It just says this: White people are racist, therefore they must kill black people inordinately, even though in rarer interracial crimes, depending on the violent act, it’s six to 20 times more common for a black person to hurt a white person. I think in the case of female crime—and please, listeners, correct me; I’m doing this by memory—but the data that I had looked at said that is even more egregious that black … 

I don’t think there was a case last year of a white woman killing a black woman. But the reverse is certainly true. So the second myth is that our immigrants, both legal and illegal, are more law-abiding. They always say that they’re more law-abiding than Americans are, and that’s not true if you look at the data, especially on illegal immigrants and especially on the recent generations of legal immigrants. 

And that makes sense not because of racial differences, but because we are importing people. I say that because they look at it as—their home countries look at it as export for remittances. They are exporting people from some of the most violent places in the world, from the Sudan, from Somalia, from Venezuela, from Central America, some of the most violent places in the world, Mexico cartels. 

And that behavior continues. And we always get back to the same truism, Jack, that if you bring people into the United States and you don’t have confidence that you’re going to assimilate, acculturate and integrate them, and they have no desire to do that.  

They did not come here to be Americans. They came here to be Syrians or Egyptians or Qataris or Venezuelans or Ugandans or Nigerians with greater prosperity and greater security, prosperity and greater freedom. 

That’s all they wanted. They did not want to integrate into the system. And if you do that, then why wouldn’t they retain the same characteristics, values, behaviors that made their countries failed states? And if, therefore, they do not acculturate and integrate, then they will—and their numbers are large enough—they will make a failed state within the United States. 

And that’s just—that’s not racist. It’s not culturally chauvinistic. Right. If you look at one million Mexican nationals in Los Angeles County, and they’re not integrating or intermarrying and assimilating, then that million people will follow the same patterns of behavior that they did in Mexico, which collectively drove them out, and they voted with their feet and they said, I don’t want to live in Mexico because I don’t feel safe. 

I don’t feel I have enough money. I don’t think I have freedom. I wanna go to the United States. 

But part of the bargain, what they used to call the brutal bargain, was if you come here, you’re gonna be an American or not. It’s your choice. If you’re not, go back. And we haven’t done that, and they don’t want to. 

You remember, right during the infancy of the [Abdul] El-Sayed candidacy, he had a hot mic and he was with his handlers, and he said right after the first day of the war on Feb. 28, he said, well, be careful. I don’t think my constituents in Dearborn are going to like the news that we killed the supreme leader of Iran, a terrorist leader who had just been responsible for butchering 30,000 to 40,000 of his own people. 

So what El-Sayed was saying is, I have a whole constituency that doesn’t integrate or assimilate and took an American city and took it over  and feels more affinity with theocratic Iran than the country who welcomed them in. That’s a fact. 

Jack Fowler:  Well, some of these, you know, some of these documentaries that we’ve seen the last few days, I have, I assume you have and many of our listeners have, on 9/11 show these clips taken from not America, from some Arab countries, of joy in the streets. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Oh, yeah. 

Jack Fowler: With the news. And then even more — 

Victor Davis Hanson: Handing out candies in Cairo. 

Jack Fowler: Yeah. And more recently, of course, after Oct. 7, the dancing and thrill in Gaza over the slaughter of Jews. And so — 

Victor Davis Hanson: Did you see that? That one is making its rounds. It’s one of the sickest things I … I think her name was Shani Louk, and she was a German Israeli, and she was one of the first hostages that they sexually abused. 

They stripped her, they crushed her limbs, and she’s in the back of that little truck, almost naked, and they’re pulling out her hair, the corpse, and they’re driving through Gaza, and everybody’s trying to get there to harm her, and a young kid comes up and spits on her. I think she was dead at the time that was taken, but the pictures show her 80% naked, suffering sexual trauma, and her limbs have obviously been broken and at angles that are sick. 

And when you look at the crowd, there’s not one—I mean, everybody is in a state of ecstasy. Right. So when I hear that Israel committed genocide, Israel said that they picked out 30,000 Hamas people of maybe the 45,000 or 50,000 that were killed that were collateral damage. But unless these … And that’s — I would just give one example. 

It seems like all the people in Gaza after Oct. 7, if you took a poll, would say 99%, I like the idea of butchering, dismembering, disfiguring, raping, beheading Jews. 

Jack Fowler: Yeah. Well, you know, let me throw another immigration-y thing quickly here, Victor. I just saw it before we came on. 

Maybe I said it before. [New York Mayor Zohran] Mamdani announced that he is now going to sue the Trump administration over the administration’s new rule to deny green cards to foreigners who rely on welfare. 

Victor Davis Hanson: That used to be a law in most countries. It was a law here. You had to have proof of self-sustainability before you could get a visa. So I don’t know what he’s talking about. 

Jack Fowler: Yeah.  

Victor Davis Hanson: A green card. 

Jack Fowler: Yeah. Well, fleecing the system, tapping into the system, not the opportunity for meritocracy, but the ability to draw a check on the taxpayers of the United States is truly now, everywhere you go, part and parcel. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, everybody should remember there’s this, there’s always this cycle with socialism. When it comes in on its body of lies, it is initially very successful for the first few months because it promises everybody free stuff. When they threw [Fulgencio] Batista out, people were in the streets praising Fidel [Castro]. Praising even Che Guevara, the psychopath, they were praising. 

And it didn’t take them more than a year. Then they started going after especially the upper middle class, the bourgeoisie. And usually the very wealthy cut a deal with them. But they always go after the bourgeoisie first, and then the honeymoon was over when they broke the country, and that’s what’s gonna happen in New York. 

Everybody’s happy. They’re gonna get free stuff. Some of the aristocratic rich people said, I can deal with him. I can buy him this. They’ll leave me alone. But you watch, month by month, he will target the upper middle class, and they will start leaving or they will start voicing their furor at him, and it’s already started because that’s who he is. 

It’s the same frog and the scorpion. He can’t help it. He’s a socialist. That’s what socialists do. They have no choice. 

Jack Fowler: You know, sometimes, Victor, we’re Eeyore, sometimes upbeat. Despair is a sin. And we’ll talk about this a little later. There’s an article from National Review about, are we entering a new age? And we talked recently about David Mamet’s piece, essay on kind of despairing. 

But it’s hard not to despair. We love our country. We love everything it stands for. But significant pockets of it, and those are our major cities like New York, they’re circling the drain. And again, the other day in Providence. So remember, we thought Providence had a whack-job mayor when those murders happened. 

At Brown University. Well, he was defeated in a primary by a far greater whack job. So all of our major cities, one by one, seem to just be turning into— 

Victor Davis Hanson: And I think a lot of that is where we have 53 million people who were not born in the United States. Probably 20 million are exemplary legal immigrants, but 30 million of them are illegal and maybe more. 

Seventeen percent of the population. The majority of those people live in cities. That’s why the British government wants to take illegal and legal immigrants from Third-World countries and take them out of Birmingham, Liverpool and London because they’ve already served the purpose. They have got majorities in there that get liberal politicians and Labour politicians elected. 

Now they want to take them out in the country and disturb what they call, oh, these quaint little old white people out in their little shires. We’re going to screw that up. You just watch. And that’s sort of what is the subtext. 

Why did the cities fall apart? Why did Los Angeles fall apart? One reason is we imported millions of people who could not support themselves, and they became wards of the Democratic Party, who basically has got 45% of the federal budget through distributions to the states and local municipalities for welfare of all sorts: education, food, shelter, legal, health. 

And that enormously goes to people here, especially here illegally. And they live in cities, and they want blue representation. So you say Mayor [Brandon] Johnson couldn’t possibly be reelected because he’s a racist. He’s broke. He has absolutely bankrupted the finances of Chicago, and he has increased the shootings by defunding and demasculinizing the police. 

He couldn’t be elected. Well, he has a lot of people who feel that the welfare system is really great. They feel that teachers’ unions and all these people who are not subject to any audit are great. They get highly paid. 

Jack Fowler: He’s gonna run again, you know. 

Victor Davis Hanson: He’s gonna win. 

Did you hear that? 

Yeah, he’s gonna win. 

Jack Fowler: Yeah. Unless— 

His work is not completed. He has more. He’s a— 

Victor Davis Hanson: Maybe we can get Lori Lightfoot back. 

Jack Fowler: Oh, gosh. My gosh. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Karen Bass said she failed. She said, I didn’t … They ask her about all the fires and all the disasters, and the streets are not—they’re just … I just remember driving Los Angeles. There are huge—everywhere. 

And she said, it’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. I’m only mayor.  

I mean, the thing about—another thing about DEI is that if there’s no accountability, that’s the real secret of DEI. There cannot be accountability because the person is always in a protected species. They’re always a victim of a— 

Jack Fowler: They’re victims, yeah. 

Victor Davis Hanson: —cosmic injustice generations ago, and therefore, they’re incapable of being culpable. And human nature being what it is, they understand that. And so, if you’re a DEI person and you’re driving down the road and the cop pulls you over, you’re going to badmouth the cop and say, you know, you basically want another George Floyd incident, and the cop will treat you in a way different than he would somebody else. 

And if you’re an official in L.A. and you want to be water and power director, you might get 750,000, and nobody’s going to look at what you did when you were working for PG&E. No one’s going to look at the fact that half the fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades area don’t work. Nobody’s going to look at the fact that a reservoir has been dry for months, critical to the safety of that neighborhood, because you’re a DEI person. 

And the same thing with the mayor. If you phone in—the deputy mayor phoned in a bomb threat, nobody’s going to put you in jail for very long. You’ll just be at home. You’ll have a suspended sentence, maybe sent—I don’t know. And if you’re mayor, yeah, you can go on a junket to a wedding in Africa right during fire season, but because you’re a victim. 

And so, add the number of victims and the victimhood scenarios, and you’re going to get an utter disaster in a complex society. It can’t work on anything other than meritocracy. It can withstand or it can accommodate some incompetencies.  

You can have the old white-boy network where seven generations of policemen were heroic, and then finally in our age, they hire their son, and their son’s a total blank. Maybe the society can hire them.  

Or you can have a whole family of billionaires that get their kids into Harvard, and one kid is a complete moron, and he gets in. But those are incidental. They’re not essential to the system.  

But when you have blanket thousands of people who are being promoted on without demonstrable skills that are necessary for the job, and your society is not a hunter-gatherer society, but it’s a complex post-industrial society, you’re asking for disaster. 

And that’s what we have now. 

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