Since 2015, President Trump has obviously become very popular because of his stance on illegal immigration.
He said what most people aren’t willing to say: Illegal immigrants should go home. They don’t have a place in the country.
And the Left went nuts.
They are still going nuts over the fact that the president of the United States has single-handedly shut the southern border, and this means that apparently he’s bad and racist and all the rest.
But most Americans don’t believe that about Trump. Most Americans look at illegal immigrant crime and say President Trump is right.
The latest case in point: According to the Department of Homeland Security, California Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom and his continued support for sanctuary policies are to blame for an illegal immigrant trucker who was given a driver’s license in California, then charged with killing three Americans in Florida when making an illegal U-turn.
Harjinder Singh entered the U.S. illegally in 2018 and then the state of California decided to give him a driver’s license. He was driving a semi in St. Lucie County, Florida, and he made an illegal U-turn that left three Americans dead.
Newsom was held responsible for Singh getting a driver’s license. He immediately responded that it was the fault of the Trump administration.
The issue is that he only had a commercial driver’s license despite being an illegal alien, thanks to a law passed in 2013 and then expanded by Gavin Newsom in 2022.
DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin wrote, “Harjinder Singh is in the United States illegally, and his work authorization was rejected under the Trump administration on September 14, 2020. It was later approved under the Biden administration, June 9th, 2021. The state of California issues commercial driver’s licenses. There is no national commercial driver’s license.”
It turns out that the illegal immigrant trucker allegedly responsible for all of this failed an English language proficiency test and also failed to accurately identify highway traffic signs, according to the Department of Transportation.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, “If states had followed the rules, his driver would never have been behind the wheel and three precious lives would still be with us. This crash was a preventable tragedy, directly caused by reckless decisions and compounded by despicable failures. Non-enforcement and radical immigration policies have turned the trucking industry into a lawless frontier, resulting in unqualified foreign drivers improperly acquiring licenses to operate 40-ton vehicles.”
Authoritative estimates have placed California’s undocumented immigrant population in the range of 2 million. As far as driver’s licenses, California has, since 2015, allowed illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. By 2023, the California Department of Motor Vehicles had issued nearly 1.2 million original AB 60 driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants.
That’s crazy. So 1.2 million illegal immigrants are roaming around the United States with California driver’s licenses.
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But this is part and parcel of a broader Democratic policy that suggests that somehow illegal immigration is a positive good for the United States, and you are inhumane or bad if you say that immigrants should not be in the United States.
In essence, this comes down to a question that’s increasingly being asked online: What ought an American to be? What is an American?
If you go all the way back to the American founding, the definition of an American was to be a natural-born citizen of the United States. There were real holes in the citizenship definition because it didn’t include, for example, black slaves in the South.
But the basic predicate for citizenship was that you were assimilating to the dominant culture of the United States, an Anglo-American culture, and you abided by the applicable law in your state, and you were not a drain on the people around you.
The history of the United States was successive waves of immigrants who were then assimilated into the dominant majority culture. Those successive waves of immigrants could be welcomed because there was no facilitation of inability to speak English. There was no facilitation of inability or unwillingness to assimilate to the dominant adherence to law.
My great-great grandparents came to the United States in the early 20th century. They spoke Yiddish, but they and their families immediately stopped speaking Yiddish as fast as possible so that they could actually immerse themselves in the American culture. That was true for the Irish, it was true for the Germans, it was true for the Italians, and it was true for many Hispanics.
And then something changed. And what changed was a gigantic welfare system, accompanied by a view of multiculturalism that suggested that not only ought you bring your home foods and some of your home traditions, but that your culture need not in any way mesh or assimilate with dominant traditions of law or believing in things like free speech or private property, or the constitutional government of the United States. The United States was to be the repository of any people who wished to come here, even if those people were just coming here to take advantage of the system itself.
That meant lower rates of assimilation. It also meant that people came here who didn’t speak English, couldn’t read road signs, were immediately entered into the stream of commerce, and then sometimes did things like commit crimes.
But if you say no to this, you are the problem.
What you actually want is people coming to the United States and becoming part of the American experiment by accepting the American experiment, by learning the language and becoming part of the culture, by believing in the creed of the Declaration of Independence.
But if you say those things, then many members of the Left will say, that’s wrong, that’s bad, that’s racist, because what you actually need are segmented populations that don’t actually believe in the American experiment. They don’t just bring their food and their customs; they also reject the dominant customs and heritage and law and legal framework of the United States.
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That’s led to identity politics on the Left and to a concomitant rise of a new identity politics on the Right, which says, “If we are going to do various ethnic cliques in a ‘multicultural country,’ then what we really ought to do is have a white ethnic clique as a form of identity politics.”
None of this is good.
Until we get back to accepting legal immigrants but demanding that they know our laws, accept our laws and live by them, know our Declaration of Independence and Constitution and live by them, we are headed for the cliff.
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