Our New Ungracious Immigrants
The contrast between the grateful immigrants who once embraced America and the resentful newcomers who scorn it reveals how radically — and dangerously — the nation’s immigration ethos has changed.
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by Victor Davis Hanson
March 24, 2026
The Traditional Immigrant
I grew up in rural California surrounded by hard-working immigrant farm families from Armenia, India, Japan, and Mexico. Their work ethic, love of America, and productive farms were models for U.S. non-immigrants. Such immigrants explained why the San Joaquin Valley was the most productive and richest agricultural region in the nation.
The Greek American Elia Kazan’s 1963 film America, America is a fictional account based on the Herculean struggle of the director’s uncle to immigrate to the United States from an impoverished and hostile Turkish Anatolia.
The film summed up Americans’ traditional view of immigrants: They had risked everything for the chance to reach America, and once there, became hyperpatriotic in their gratitude for the magnanimity of their new hosts.
An excellent example is the recently released memoir from Encounter Books, American Trojan, by former University of Southern California president and Cypriot immigrant Dr. Max Nikias. It resonates with thankfulness to America for offering him opportunities undreamed of elsewhere.
He and his wife arrived in the U.S. from war-torn Cyprus nearly penniless but determined to work hard, master English, and enrich the country that welcomed them with their talents and education. What followed was an amazing American trajectory that saw Nikias become president of the University of Southern California — arguably the most successful one in recent memory.
My own Swedish grandfather, disabled by poison gas while fighting on the Western Front in World War I, loved all things Swedish, but not nearly as much as his beloved America.
Four Hansons fought on the front lines of World Wars I and II. One was disabled, and another was killed on Okinawa. And all felt blessed that their parents and grandparents had gotten to America.
Silicon Valley was energized by legal immigrants from all over the world who founded eBay, Google, Nvidia, SpaceX, Stripe, Sun Microsystems, Tesla, Yahoo, and a host of others.
Gratitude and Ingratitude
But recently, something has gone terribly wrong with immigration — an open border, of course, but also a change in legal immigration as well as student visitors.
During World War II, Japanese Americans fought heroically in horrific conditions in Italy in the famous 442nd Regimental Combat Team and 100th Infantry Battalion — even as their families were interned in the Western United States. Few native-born Americans were more loyal or patriotic than the Japanese Americans.
But now?
While America is at war with Iran and de facto with its terrorist proxies, crowds of immigrants, visitors, and foreign students in New York scream anti-American slogans as they cheer on our enemies in theocratic Iran and its terrorist proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.
Are we surprised, then, when Islamic terrorists begin hunting down Americans on our own soil?
On campuses today, thousands of Middle Eastern international students, mostly arriving from autocratic, tribal, and failed nations, have staged often violent demonstrations in the years following the October 7, 2023, massacre. They are not shy about cheering on the Hamas slaughter of Israeli civilians.
These pro-Hamas students have not just damned Israel but also often harassed Jewish Americans. They revile their host America and expect Americans to smile and shrug.
It is hard to determine whether such zealots hate the U.S. more than they love living in America and preserving their student visas and work permits.
Hating or Loving the Great Satan?
Take Dr. Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani. She is the daughter of Ali Larijani, one of the late Supreme Leader Khamenei’s murderous henchmen. He sent his daughter Fatemeh to the top schools in the satanic United States. She was eventually even hired as a professor at Emory University — at least until popular outrage at the Larijani family’s hypocrisy prompted her dismissal.
To our enemies in Iran, we may be the “Great Satan.” But Iranian theocrats apparently prefer their children and other relatives to study and get rich in Luciferian America. So, many send their kids to universities in the USA.
Another surreal example is the case of Mahmoud Khalil, who arrived on a student visa at Columbia University and soon led the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.”
When the State Department sought to revoke his temporary visa, the Left made Khalil a veritable martyr. Apparently, his university supporters reasoned that the U.S. had an obligation to invite to its shores those who are active supporters of terrorists like Hamas.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a naturalized citizen from Uganda whose parents became public figures and multimillionaires in America, in the past has had little good to say about his adopted country.
His quite public wife, Rama, whose parents were naturalized Syrian citizens, illustrated a book that was rife with antisemitism. It’s no accident that after October 7, she posted “likes” of social media praise of the terrorist Hamas killers, who are sworn enemies of her own country.
Many Somali immigrants of Minneapolis repaid the kindness of Americans in welcoming them from war-torn Somalia by committing the greatest welfare fraud in U.S. history, which may reach $9 billion in theft. Their iconic representative, Ilhan Omar, has voiced antisemitic vitriol, downplayed 9/11, claimed the U.S. has a dictatorship worse than the one she fled, and said the U.S. was turning into one of the worst countries in the world. That is the thanks she returns for entering a hospitable America under controversial circumstances and dubious legality.
Hating — or Hating to Leave — America?
Stranger still is the attitude of visitors and illegal aliens when they finally face deportation.
Joe Biden allowed 10–12 million foreign nationals to illegally enter the U.S. during his tenure, among them some 500,000 known criminals. In the years since his inauguration, not a day goes by without news that illegal aliens of that era have murdered, assaulted, been arrested for felonious acts, or caused horrific auto accidents.
One of them was Kilmar Ábrego Garcia, an illegal alien from El Salvador, who long ago was ordered to be deported for his unlawful entry and residence.
Instead, he too became an icon to the Left when he was recently and belatedly facing permanent deportation. He had clearly ignored his earlier deportation orders, and was an alleged gang member, an often violent spousal abuser, and a human trafficker.
Ábrego Garcia apparently felt he had a right to enter the U.S. illegally. He successfully made a mockery of our immigration laws. But he presciently expected that soon hundreds of thousands of dollars of free legal help would come his way, ensuring he could stay in the country for which he showed utter contempt.
And in the U.S., one of the most bizarre aspects of recent protests against ICE efforts involved episodes of Mexican nationals waving the flag of the country to which under no circumstances they wished to return, even as they burned the flag of the nation in which they insisted they had an innate right to stay.
Our New Americans Killing Americans
Yet the immigration disaster transcends student visas and illegal aliens, since it extends to many naturalized citizens as well.
Consider the terrorist acts that have transpired in just the last eight days.
On March 1, Ndiaga Diagne, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Senegal, shot up a beer garden in Austin, Texas. He murdered three people and wounded 14 others. Diagne wore a “Property of Allah” sweatshirt, along with an Iranian flag T-shirt.
On March 7, 2026, Emir Balat, the son of a naturalized citizen from Turkey, and Ibrahim Kayumi, the son of naturalized Afghan refugees, threw IEDs toward a conservative protest outside Gracie Mansion, the New York mayor’s residence.
The media sought to cover up their Islamist motives but could not, given that the two terrorists openly boasted of their aims. Indeed, the two bragged that they wanted to achieve something “bigger than the Boston Marathon bombing.”
That was a reference to Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the murderous Chechen-immigrant brothers. In 2013, they murdered three and injured hundreds at the Boston Marathon. Their aim too was apparently to further the so-called global “Islamic cause.”
In the same week, on March 12, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, another naturalized U.S. citizen, this time from Sierra Leone, went into an ROTC meeting at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Once there, he murdered the instructor, Lieutenant Colonel Brandon Shah, a decorated combat veteran. Jalloh shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he fired. Jalloh had previously been convicted for attempting to support ISIS but was released before serving his full sentence.
That same March day, Ayman Muhammed Ghazali, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Lebanon, whose family in the Middle East currently has strong Hezbollah terrorist ties, drove his car rigged with explosive fireworks into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
Ghazali was killed by security guards before he could carry out his homicidal plan. Hezbollah, remember, in the past, butchered hundreds of Americans in Lebanon.
There is an endless list of illegal aliens and naturalized citizens who have killed countless Americans, both as common criminals and as would-be jihadists.
And not all the killing is intentional. Thousands of driver’s licenses have been issued to both illegal aliens and legal residents from all over the world, including those who do not understand English, cannot pass a commercial driver’s test, and are utterly unqualified to drive. Is it any surprise that we have recently witnessed serial horrific crashes, where incompetent drivers rammed their 80,000-pound semi-trucks into unsuspecting drivers?
What Happened to Immigration?
So what made the U.S. adopt such a suicidal immigration and visitation policy — one that welcomes in millions illegally, hundreds of thousands who are known criminals, tens of thousands of students who despise the U.S., and thousands of terrorists themselves and their sympathizers?
In the mid-1960s, amid the Great Society’s dreams of transforming America, new immigration laws were passed that ended the older quota process. That traditional system tended to favor better-off immigrants from Europe and the former British Empire to reflect somewhat the founding values of the republic.
But the new law junked the prior merit-based system and instead admitted immigrants chiefly on the basis of family ties and the purported need of the host country for inexpensive labor — with most now arriving from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Suddenly, far less important for entry were critical skill sets, English mastery, high school diplomas, proof of self-support, and knowledge of, or familiarity with, the American system.
But in the subsequent 60 years, Democrats went even further beyond the 1965 Hart–Celler Act efforts to change the demography of the U.S. They began welcoming in anyone, legal or not, who simply crashed the border or claimed they wanted to study in the U.S. The old melting pot was banished, replaced by the “salad bowl.”
Immigration was seen by the Left as the answer to why they had never been able to complete their socialist agendas amid a skeptical American public. Supposedly, by welcoming in a “diverse” demographic, poor and without English fluency, they would grow the welfare state, creating a new dependent constituency.
The new immigrants and visitors were envisioned as left-wing voters-to-be who would look to the Democratic Party as their guarantors of open borders, a new entitlement society, and a criminal justice system that saw the perpetrator as a victim — and the real criminal as a supposedly racist America itself.
Diversity, the Immigration Force Multiplier
The new “diversity” ideology peaked under Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The subtext of their open-borders nihilism was a new oppressor/oppressed binary.
It dictated that traditional America was still too white, too traditionalist, too Christian, too unfairly successful — and too hostile to the Democratic Socialist agenda of a mandated equality of result achieved through massive coercive government redistributive efforts.
Under this warped view, the criminally minded Ábrego Garcia became a victim of supposed “Gestapo” ICE “goons” (ironic, when patriotic and skilled Mexican American officers disproportionately staff ICE ranks).
The Tsarnaev Boston Marathon killers became “hot” underdog freedom fighters. So the supposedly sexy, photogenic young murderer Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was highlighted on the cover of Rolling Stone.
The more Mahmoud Khalil took on the mantle of an anti-American, pro-Hamas activist, the more the Left rallied to his cause.
When Major Nidal Hasan, the son of naturalized Palestinian immigrants, slaughtered 13 and wounded 32 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, the Pentagon resisted efforts to tie him to the Islamic terrorist cause. That was hard to do, since he screamed “Allahu Akbar!” as he mowed down his fellow soldiers.
Then Army Chief of Staff George Casey responded to the mass murder with his lamentation on CNN that, “As great a tragedy as this was, it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.” He sought to quash any speculation about Hasan’s Islamic motives, in fear that the ensuing truth might endanger the Army’s diversity efforts.
Then we come to the case of Eileen Gu, the recent American Winter Olympic multi-medalist skier.
She was born in San Francisco to a Chinese immigrant mother and an American father and lived her entire life in the U.S. But Gu chose to compete in the games for Communist China, despite its efforts to isolate, dehumanize, and eventually vastly “reduce” its Uyghur minority population.
Dr. Frankenstein and his Monster
The final irony: Why do so many criminals believe they can enter the U.S. illegally and get away with murder?
Is it because they feel contempt for any nation that opens its borders, requires no background checks, destroys its own immigration laws, and weaponizes its criminal justice system to make the criminal the victim and the state his victimizer?
Why do so many burn the U.S. flag while waving the flag of Mexico, a country they have no intention of returning to?
Is it because they sense they might be praised for “celebrating diversity,” as the popular culture would term such abject cultural schizophrenia?
Why would the Tsarnaev brothers repay the country that took them in by killing innocent Americans?
Would it be because, in their formative years in American schools, their teachers and texts emphasized what was wrong with a supposedly exploitative U.S.?
Why, in the middle of a near-existential war with Iran to stop its efforts to obtain nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles pointed at the U.S. and its allies, would naturalized citizens feel so free to slaughter Americans for the cause of Islam?
Would it be because they sense from left-wing universities and popular culture that it is a virtual open season on Jews? Or that any time an Islamic terrorist commits an act, a Democrat operative will warn America of “Islamophobia” — as if, say, mowing down soldiers at Fort Hood is the lesser crime?
Why would a rich, privileged Eileen Gu feel no discomfort competing for a murderous regime whose agenda is to displace her country from its global preeminence in favor of a communist dictatorship?
Is it because in our relativist modern America, Gu’s “truth” is just as meaningful as any other? And who, after all, is qualified to judge anything or anyone?
Who created our current Frankensteinian monstrosities?
We did.
We are the Dr. Frankensteins who ask nothing of immigrants, in a complete break from our nation’s past. And we got our wish for a new, quite different class of immigrants, who treat the U.S. the very way they were taught to do by the Left: as an evil entity that deserves what it gets.
And we sure have gotten it.
— Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and a scholar of ancient warfare. He is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. This essay originally appeared at American Greatness.
Victor Davis Hanson is absolutely On Point! Thank you for posting it. He covers this topic well and his books "Mexifornia" and "The Dying Citizen" demonstrate exactly what is happening here. We tolerate far too much anti-American actions here under the false guise of "compassion." These people are too weak or too unmotivated to change their own country.
Lawless, illegitimate "president" Joe Biden orchestrated an invasion of the homeland and should have been impeached for treason. Now, as President Trump tries to undo the massive damage, activist judges and blue state governors and mayors block every move.
We are in a shooting war with Iran and are in serious jeopardy from imported Islamic terrorists, legal and illegal. It's time to take off the gloves. President Trump should declare a state of emergency and empower National Guard troops to round up and deport these hostile actors. Courts have no authority to impede the Commander in Chief and should be ignored.