President Trump’s New York
In January of 2025, President Trump took office. The week of January 13-20, Brooklyn was still in chaos. So was Manhattan. It was a chaos I have sought to describe in past essays, but things had reached a crescendo.
All of the world, it seemed, had descended upon the Five Boroughs.
From the floodgates that opened in 2022, and right up until Inauguration Day, Brooklyn and Manhattan had been under siege. I had never seen anything like it.
Due to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal newcomers, with thousands more arriving every day, the city had been transformed. There was no coherent culture, social contract, understanding of how one gets through a day. It was a circus of confusion, entitlement, aggression and chaos, all of it performed upside-down.
These millions had been ‘magicked’ to this city, then housed, cosseted, clothed and fed, on the dime of the Biden administration (meaning: on our taxpayer dime) and with the funding of the United Nations.
Manhattan and Brooklyn had been thronged with strangers – -people who were not the usual newcomers to the city who arrive legally, have family or business here, and then set about soberly to learn the language, seek out a job, pay taxes, raise kids, and settle into an American life. Legal immigrants in the past have been self-selected; they have thought for a long time about immigrating to America, taken steps to do so under the law, planned and prepared. They have been self-selected in the past, too, because it is their own drive or initiative, without external assistance, that led them to make it lawfully to our shores.
In contrast – and this is not a racist or even ethnocentric observation; it is about people differently situated, differently motivated — the millions abruptly, unlawfully streamed among us, were indeed deeply, truly strangers. Unlike earlier waves of legal immigrants, these folks were not self-selecting, self-propelled, or self-assisted in their journeys. They were people who seemed to have been scooped out of whole villages far elsewhere; people who had been doing other things entirely, making other plans altogether; and who then had been simply lifted up into space, transported, transplanted. They were indeed hoisted up out of other lives, other communities, other sensibilities, virtually other timelines, and transported hither, via the immensely powerful assistance of some of the most massive forces on earth.
Given the massive apparatus built up on three staging nations in order thus to transport this tide of humanity – that is to say, the immense powers and the millions of dollars deployed by the US State Department and by the UN, which I chronicled in my essay “What is a Culture?” — this sense of chaos and alienation that engulfed the city was not surprising.
Their arrival created an immense cultural strain. According to “City & State: New York”:
“More than 210,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since the spring of 2022, many hailing from countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, though a significant number have also come from China and countries in Africa. City officials, advocacy groups, school communities, nonprofits and a bevy of elected officials have mobilized to welcome the ongoing flow of new arrivals, but it’s been a massive – and costly – undertaking.
In those two-and-a-half years, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has stood up more than 200 emergency shelter sites, enrolled tens of thousands of migrant children in schools, gone to court to amend its right to shelter obligations, fought for federal and state funding to help handle the costs of providing services, and sued bus companies sending migrants from the border.”
The numbers involved in funding this transfer of humans, were staggering: In 2023, Mayor Eric Adams planned to spend $4.3 Billion of the city’s budget, in just one year, on “welcoming” the illegal immigrants. The Biden administration poured Federal money into the effort as well, in astonishing amounts:
“June 7, 2023: Building on the roughly $30 million in federal funding offered in May, the Biden administration agreed to provide the city with an additional $104.6 million to help officials manage the influx of migrants through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Shelter Services Program.”
By August of 2023, the grift was out of control: Mayor Adams expected to spend “$12 billion to house and care for migrant arrivals” for the upcoming three years, and Attorney General Letitia James launched an investigation into DocGo, a for-profit medical company, which had been awarded a $432 million no-bid contract to provide medical care to illegal immigrants (in the media of the bad days of 2023, these groups are inaccurately described as “asylum-seekers”).
Events of 2024 were as unbelievable, when it came to the Biden administration’s policies that simply opened doors to millions of illegal newcomers, then paid for their every need:
“June 28, 2024: Biden extends Temporary Protected Status to around 300,000 Haitians living in the U.S.
July 2, 2024: The city expands a pilot program to over 7,300 migrant families staying in city-funded hotels, pledging to give them debit cards to buy their own food.”
The perception that Americans were starting to have by that time — that these numbers represented “an invasion” and that illegal newcomers were being given debit cards, free housing, free medical care and other benefits unavailable to American citizens — was true.
After Election Day, the about-face in policies in New York related to illegal immigrants, was also dramatic:
“Nov. 7, 2024: The city moves to end the controversial program that provided debit cards to migrant families so they could buy food and other essentials. […]
Dec. 4, 2024: News breaks that the city is racing to remove National Guard members from migrant shelters ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Dec. 10, 2024: The city announces plans to shut down at least two dozen migrant shelters across the city and upstate by the end of March, including the sweeping family shelter at Floyd Bennett Field. The latter, which is on federal land, is expected to close by Jan. 15 – a few days before Trump’s inauguration.
Dec. 12, 2024: After meeting with Trump’s incoming “border czar” in early December, Adams told reporters that he and Tom Homan are on the same page. “We’re going to protect the rights of immigrants in this city that are hard-working, giving back to the city in a real way,” Adams said. “We’re not going to be a safe haven for those who commit repeated, violent crimes against innocent migrants, immigrants and long standing New Yorkers.”
We will look back on 2022-2024 with astonishment. President Trump has referred to the 30 million illegal entrants to our nation as an “invasion”, and he is right to do so. It is clear now, not just in the United States and Canada, but throughout Western Europe, that “Mr Global” has weaponized immigration to destroy existing cultures, and make war on sovereign nations — a cynical enough misuse of the bodies of millions of people; people who are often without options, to start with.
This was a marginalized, “right-wing” view a year ago, but it is now a common perception throughout the West and across political perspectives. There is no escaping this conclusion.
By transplanting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, from nations that are themselves broken in many ways, to the heart of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the Biden administration created an atmosphere of chaos, incomprehension and fear.
What were we importing in such vast, unassimilable numbers? Attitudes and cultures alien to our own.
Haiti is a failed state. According to international think tanks, there is a nearly complete collapse of civil society and national governance in Haiti. Informally, when you talk to Haitian legal immigrants to this country, they describe the way in which crime, plunder and corruption have made what was once a beautiful, safe country, now unlivable; everyone who can leave, they say, has fled.
China is also a source of the “Biden invasion” numbers. This is frankly weird. People in Communist China cannot just up and leave. They need permission from the Chinese Communist Party:
“Article 5. Chinese citizens who desire to leave the country for private purposes shall apply to the public security organs of the city or county in which their residence is registered. Approval shall be granted except in cases prescribed in Article 8 of this Law.
The public security organs shall decide, within a specified time, whether to approve or disapprove the citizens’ applications for leaving the country for private purposes, and shall notify the applicants accordingly.”
The above is from China’s legal codes. So that means that the thousands and thousands of Chinese nationals who simply appeared in the United States from 2022-2024, were sent on their way by our existential adversaries — people who want to destroy the United States as a superpower!
Then there are the illegal immigrants from nations such as Afghanistan, Yemen, and other MENA — (“Middle Eastern and North African”) — Muslim countries. The immigration-friendly Migration Policy Institute estimates that there are between 50,000 and 200,000 illegal immigrants to the United States from MENA nations alone! While these are not failed states, they are nations that are often theocracies with values very different from our own. Today in Afghanistan, women have been virtually erased from public life by the Taliban, and are forbidden even from singing. In Yemen, according to the advocacy organization Human Rights Watch, though women have legal rights on paper, “[t]he authorities across Yemen are increasingly restricting women’s freedom of movement […] The restrictions have harmed women’s ability to access work, education, and health care, and are a form of discrimination.” In Algeria, 14% of women participate in the labor force, versus 67 per cent of men, and they are subject to Sharia law, which treats them unequally to men: “Algerian women are subject to the family code (Sharia law), a retrograde and patriarchal interpretation of Islamic law passed in 1984 by the Popular National Assembly, under the pressure of religious and conservative representatives. On the whole, laws under the family code serve to reinforce the domination of men over women, contradicting Article 29 of the Algerian constitution […]”
I could go on and on. The bottom line is that it is not racist or even ethnocentric, to object passionately to the “invasion” of the United States, or any Western country (or any country), by illegal immigrants. When you import people in large groups, you also import their cultures. We need to face the fact that the freedom, rule of law, relative peaceableness, and high level of civil society functioning, of Western nations, is an incredible achievement and an incredible gift. When you import millions of people who are not acculturated to these norms and rules, you also will import the reflexes and expectations of those who live in failed states, or under corrupt rulers, tyrannical or unequal laws, and oppressive theocracies. You simply cannot sustain the high level of functioning civil society, the peaceableness, rule of law, legal equality, etc, that characterize the West, under these conditions. And we need to stop being shy about saying so aloud.
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