Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that mass migration had gone “too far” and is “disruptive and destabilizing.” But her acknowledgment rings hollow when her party spent years decrying conservatives as “racists” for saying the same thing while causing the destabilization Clinton warns about.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Saturday, Clinton said, “There is a legitimate reason to have a debate about things like migration.” Clinton said such mass migration has become “disruptive and destabilizing” and that “it needs to be fixed in a humane way with secure borders that don’t torture and kill people.”
And while Clinton’s comments are true at face value, they are actually more insulting than honest.
Clinton’s comments come as the United States grapples with efforts to mass-deport millions of illegal aliens whom President Joe Biden dumped into the country via a wide-open border, parole programs, and systemic abuse of asylum law — policies Democrats relentlessly defend while demonizing critics. But now as the political and cultural fallout of those policies becomes impossible to ignore and as midterm elections approach, Democrats are suddenly claiming to have discovered common sense.
Conservatives for years have been decrying mass migration for many reasons. Putting aside the sheer strain that importing millions of foreigners has on American cities, schools, hospitals, and resources, the influx of millions of illegal aliens erodes our national unity and security and undermines the shared civic culture a republic requires to survive.
Border enforcement was never merely about economics, but about preserving America and the conditions that are necessary for a republic to function. Mass migration reshapes the political and cultural character of the country itself — often in ways openly hostile to our founding.
Take for example Ugandan-born Socialist Zohran Mamdani’s recent ascension to the office of the mayor in New York City. Mamdani’s rise was not accidental. A survey released in October from Patriot Polling found Mamdani had 62 percent support from foreign-born New Yorkers and just 31 percent amongst American-born.
Mamdani later referenced the large immigrant support that catapulted him to the city’s highest office: “New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant.”
His victory illustrates something Democrats desperately try to deny: Mass migration doesn’t simply add people to a society, it alters the society. Mamdani’s ideology is hostile to the republic and the very principles on which it was founded. When the electorate shifts because it’s filled with people indifferent to, unfamiliar with, or hostile to those principles, the political outcome inevitably follows. Clinton’s acknowledgment of this reality doesn’t undo it.
In fact, it’s something Alexander Hamilton cautioned in 1802, writing that foreigners will “entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived.” Even if they “should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism?” he warned.
Concepts like personal liberty and limited government mean little to people whose experience with governance comes from nations where republican values never existed in the first place. Importing people from cultures wholly incompatible with America produces instability and destabilization, as Clinton pointed out.
Consider Minnesota, where a massive Somali-run fraud scheme has shaken the nation. But anyone who pays attention isn’t surprised. According to CIVICUS — a “global alliance of civil society organisations and activists” — “Weak public institutions [in Somalia] mean civic freedoms are not enforced as they should be.” Further, Somalia’s “Civil society also struggles with funding, a common problem for civic institutions worldwide, as they rely on domestic and international financial support rather than profits.” The International Center for Not-For-Profit Law reported in October that “civic freedoms are fragile” in Somalia.”
These realities shape behavior. Somalia’s spoil-based political culture stands in stark contrast to the system of ordered liberty in America, and those habits don’t just vanish Somalis set foot on American soil.
This is the uncomfortable truth Democrats refused to acknowledge. That is, culture matters, and not all cultures produce the same civic outcomes. And now that they’re acknowledging it — well, now that Clinton and some others appear to be acknowledging it — it’s too late for the good people of Minnesota who have been defrauded.
A functioning nation cannot afford to pretend that all cultural norms are interchangeable. If they were, they would yield the same results — but they don’t. That is why any serious immigration policy must consider cultural compatibility. A nation is not a random assortment of people. People are bound together by a shared language, culture, history, and civic tradition. Importing people who can’t speak English, who don’t share the same culture or civic traditions, results in the destabilization Clinton spoke of.
Yet, for stating these truths — that Clinton now casually references — Republicans were maligned as racists, Nazis, white supremacists, and cruel. Now with cities and states destabilized, and with public opinion turning sharply against mass migration, Democrats understand they must rebrand themselves as “moderate” to win the upcoming midterm elections.
But Americans should remember that Biden’s open borders were done on purpose. Only when elections are at stake do Democrats pretend to notice the consequences of mass migration.
