Immigration

Invade the world, invite the world. That pithy phrase was invented in the 2000s by Steve Sailer, the right-wing writer, to mock the then bipartisan consensus which supported George W. Bush’s war on terror abroad while pushing open borders at home. Or, as Sailer also put it: "Bomb them over there and indulge them over here." Back then, such analysis was generally dismissed as the preserve of white supremacist cranks. Now, it’s fair to say that Sailerite thinking animates the spirit of the second Donald Trump administration. Disrupt the world, deport the world. That’s the order of the day. Since America’s stunning attack on Venezuela last weekend, almost everybody has had a stab at revealing Trump’s real intentions – including, naturally, Trump and his talking heads.

I suspect that Somalis around the country – especially, but not exclusively, in Minneapolis – wish about now that they had spent more time studying the wit and wisdom of Gertrude Stein.  Stein, had she lived in our own day, might well have become commissioner of New York City’s Fire Department. She had the one qualification that Zohran Mamdani seems to deem essential to the post.  Sadly, that was not to be. But there is no denying that, on certain matters, Stein was a font of practical wisdom that remains as pertinent today as it was when she was pontificating in Paris a century ago. It is important, Stein warned those aspiring to be part of the avant garde, “to know how far to go when going too far.” This is true of all the arts.

Life has never been so good for Jordan Bardella, the 30-year-old president of Marine Le Pen's National Rally. A recent opinion poll had him as the runaway favorite to win the 2027 presidential election. One man who believes in his credentials is the former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. Now out of prison and promoting the book he wrote during his 20-day incarceration, the center-right Sarkozy said that Bardella reminds him of a young Jacques Chirac. Despite Sarkozy’s conviction for criminal conspiracy, he retains a large and loyal fanbase among the metropolitan boomer bourgeois, a demographic that the National Rally has traditionally struggled to attract.

Earlier this year, a striking 28-year-old woman, dressed head to toe in a vivid shade of crimson, stepped up to the podium at a conference in Hungary. “Ladies and gentlemen: hello Budapest. I’m so thrilled to be here again,” she began, adjusting the twin microphones and gently swiping a strand of long blonde hair from her forehead. “As some of you might remember, last year I gave here a speech as well, about the ‘great replacement,’” she continued, confidently glancing around the assembled audience. “I wanted the whole world to know that the ‘great replacement theory’ was, in fact, not a theory, but reality. White people are becoming a minority in their own homelands at an exceptionally fast rate.

Whatever happened to Britain, or the UK, or England, or whatever they're calling it? We can't even agree on what it's called. But what happened to England, the England that, if you're over 50, you grew up learning about, the England that controlled the world, the England that ran the largest empire in human history at the end of World War One?  Britain, which is an island in a pretty inhospitable climate, controlled literally a quarter of the Earth's surface – and not controlled in the way the United States controls the rest of the world with an implied threat or with economic ties through trade, but with administrators and people sitting at desks with eyeshades, counting things.

Britain’s post colonial reckoning can be summed up in a single sentence delivered last June at the Glastonbury music festival when rapper duo Bob Vylan shouted “You want your country back? You’re not getting it back!” to an overwhelmingly white, middle-class audience roaring its approval. The message was unmistakable: Britain has been colonized – and its dominant culture not only accepts, but celebrates, it. Britain’s transformation has been driven not by invasion, but by invitation. The country’s population, political culture and national cohesion has been radically reshaped by immigration – one wave in the 1950s, driven by post-World War Two labor shortages, and another following Brexit.

The second Trump administration tends to characterize those who have illegally crossed the southern US border as drug dealers, criminals and rapists. That is, of course, exaggeration, but it is no more a fiction than is the alternative belief, common among liberals, that all migrants are desperate people fleeing for their lives, who cannot possibly be expected to live in their home countries and are utterly dependent on making it to America in order to survive. If that were true, illegal migration would be little to worry about and good for the soul – and indeed the economic well-being – of America.

On Tuesday evening, the Illinois pope weighed in on Illinois politics. A reporter from the Catholic news outlet EWTN asked Pope Leo XIV about the Archdiocese of Chicago’s decision to award Senator Dick Durbin with a “lifetime achievement award” for his work advocating for immigrants coming to America. “Some people of faith are having a hard time with understanding this because [Durbin] is for legalized abortion,” the reporter said. How should Catholics feel about that? “I am not terribly familiar with the particular case,” the Pope conceded, speaking in English. Then he spoke more broadly, and vaguely, about what it means to be “pro-life”. “Someone who says ‘I am against abortion’ but says ‘I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life,” he said.

When news broke that the head of Iowa’s largest school district was in ICE custody as an alleged illegal alien, the response from all quarters was disbelief. A school superintendent undergoes intense vetting, and every rung on the career ladder requires background checks. How could such a man possibly have slipped through?Anyone hoping the full story might provide a sensible explanation was quickly disappointed. The more you dig, the more absurd it becomes. Although we don’t yet know the full truth about his immigration status, there is already plenty in his record that raises red flags about the biographies he’s offered. Ian Andre Roberts' life reads less like a CV than a pitch for a Hollywood script in the classic tradition of the charming conman.

When the superintendent of Iowa’s largest school district was detained by ICE on Friday, the story startled parents, educators and anyone paying attention to the integrity of our institutions. Dr. Ian Roberts, a man with a final deportation order, allegedly fled law enforcement, leaving behind a vehicle containing a loaded handgun, a fixed-blade knife and thousands in cash. Yet for months, he led thousands of children, set policy for an entire district and enjoyed the prestige and authority that comes with public office. The question society must ask is unavoidable: How did someone with an outstanding removal order rise to the top of a school district? How did a man technically in violation of federal law gain the trust of an entire community?

Was there a plot against President Trump at the United Nations? Upon his arrival, the escalator apparently stopped working. Next his teleprompter failed. Small wonder that Trump was in less than a concessive mood as he delivered his speech denouncing the UN itself as a colossal failure. The result was the kind of talk he would give to a political rally – except it was to an unreceptive, if not hostile, audience. Throughout, Trump made it clear that his estimation of his abilities is very different from his view of the UN. “I’m really good at this stuff,” he declared. “I’ve been right about everything.” As for everyone else: “Your countries are going to hell.

When Donald Trump made building a “big, beautiful” wall along the southern US border a priority in his first term, he was widely derided. There wasn’t enough concrete or steel to build such a structure. Anyway, it was futile because migrants would find some way over or around it. It was a heartless and evil project being promoted to distract from other failures. When shutting off immigration from Mexico became an unrealized project from that first term, Trump’s critics enjoyed themselves. Campaigning for his second term, Trump hardly mentioned the wall. Yet something remarkable has happened. Undocumented migration across the border has all but ceased.

President Trump’s call for a new US census that excludes illegal immigrants has stirred up exactly the kind of debate this country needs – but not necessarily in the way he’s proposed it. Let’s be clear: the spirit of Trump’s order is right. It’s outrageous that congressional seats and federal funding are based, in part, on populations that include people who entered this country illegally. Sanctuary states like California, New York and Illinois benefit politically and financially from shielding those who bypassed our laws, while law-abiding states are left underrepresented. The American people have every right to demand that representation reflect citizenship, not lawbreaking.But even as I share the outrage, I can’t support the tactic.

There is never a dull moment in the second, more cheerful reign of Donald Trump. I am writing from London, but was in France last week, picking my way through various battlefields and cemeteries in and around Verdun, Bastogne (think “Easy Company” and “Battle of the Bulge”), and Reims. Well-informed readers will know, as I did not, that “Reims” is not pronounced as its letters might suggest but rather as a nasalized “Reince.” I have always associated the place with champagne, and I am pleased to say that the city capitalizes on the association. But one point of interest had nothing to do with that magical elixir. Reims was also the location of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s headquarters at the end of World War II.

New York Mayor Ed Koch used to ask almost everyone he met, “How’m I doing?” Trump hasn’t asked me “How’m I doing?” on immigration, but if he did, I’d answer, “Outstanding, Mr. President, but with one hiccup and much left to do.” The first challenge the President faced was to stop the disaster at the border. And he’s succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. As journalist Byron York asked on X, “How many presidents solve a problem... that was a huge issue in the campaign, and solve it in the first few months of their presidency?” Arrests at the southern border in May were down 93 percent from the same time last year.