A Warning to America

Ignore Animal Antics and Look to Europe

Following the ABC Presidential Debate on September 10^th, Donald Trump’s opponents are still dedicated to dispelling the rumor that some of the 15,000 recent Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eat domestic animals.

X users responded in shock to one video – shared by accounts like End Wokeness – of an unidentified man (squeamish readers will have to forgive me) strangling a cat. Another photograph of a migrant in Springfield carrying a dead goose by the neck compounded these claims. The photograph accompanied complaints at the Springfield City Committee Meeting that some Haitians were decapitating ducks for food in public parks.

However, there is not enough evidence to claim that Haitians are rampantly hunting and eating the beloved pets of Ohio locals. It makes sense that Democrats are lambasting Trump’s characteristically brash line: “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets” as per their tried and tested tactic of framing him as a peddler of dis- and mis-information. They are keeping the animal debacle at the front of people’s minds in order to distract from the salient problem at hand: Rapid integration of migrants from developing nations remains a pipe-dream.

Flooding small American towns with a diaspora from the most violent, economically deprived nation in the Western Hemisphere is, for the Democrats, the best answer to economic stagnation in Middle America. The country is filling with immigrants desperate enough to relocate to places as culturally distant as the Midwest, providing there is relative comfort and the possibility of low-skilled work. This might sound like a reasonable thing to do. If locals don’t have enough children or work blue-collar jobs, why not welcome people who will do the work more cheaply while raising the fertility rate?

Except now the inevitable cultural clashes – which Europe has experienced in abundance – have set in. When Springfield locals complained to the city council of lawlessness in the streets perpetrated by Haitian arrivals, they were testifying to a commonly observed effect of rapid immigration from nations with radically different cultural norms and sky-high crime. As I wrote here, migrants whose culture involves activities considered criminal in Western nations do not abandon their ingrained norms. Expecting them to do so is utopian. I have discussed the causal relationship between rapid migration from the developing world and increased crime rates in European cities:

“Islamic cultures around the world actively hold Western “decadence” in contempt; this attitude doesn’t just disappear when migrants, especially fighting-age men, move abroad to improve their economic prospects. Islamists easily infiltrate and plot against the very countries which provide shelter and jobs to many communities of Muslims – communities which Islamists successfully target. This is why, as of 2020, the UK’s MI5 has over 40,000 suspects on a terror watchlist, the vast majority of which are related to extremist Islamist terrorism. Terrorism is not the main problem, though. As Eva Vlaardingerbroek points out, immigration is related to crime more generally. I have discussed sex crimes and their relationship to migration in my book Prey, but other forms of crime like the violence described above – especially gang-related violence like shootings, which have more than doubled in the last decade in Sweden – are also skyrocketing.”

As grievous as European rates of violent crime and sex crime are, less sensational phenomena – like petty crime and rental markets – are worth discussion, because they affect everyone living in urban areas. The following graph illustrates how European cities with significant migrant populations also boast the highest rates of robbery. Gang-organized phone-snatching in London soared by 150% over the last year. Many phones – snatched out of hands by thieves as they move through crowds on bikes – end up in China where the second-hand phone market is booming. Gangs are divided along racial lines; diversity is not always the “strength” of London.

In this excellent piece for The European Conservative, Connor Tomlinson describes “a conspiracy of silence” by the Ministry of Justice in the UK for refusing to publish data on crimes committed by ethnicity or nationality. But in countries where such data is occasionally released, like Sweden, the picture is unavoidably clear. In 2021, a study found that 59.2% of sex offenders aged 15-60 who were convicted of rape between 2000-2015 were of an immigrant background; 47.7% of those were born outside of Sweden. These findings are so significant that they are even cited on Wikipedia (“Rape in Sweden”). In fact, there are so many obviously unintegrated migrants in Sweden that the government has announced that it intends to pay individual migrants up to 350,000 Swedish kroner (about 34,000 USD) to return to their home countries. If this isn’t a decisive concession to concerns, typically only voiced by conservatives, about the pipe-dream of integration, I don’t know what is.

Ohio did what European cities have been doing for a generation: it saw a labor shortage and sought a quick fix, ignoring all long-term socio-cultural issues which might follow. Take the UK’s recent Conservative governments, who oversaw skyrocketing immigration in service of ensuring that total GDP growth remains above 0%, albeit by minuscule margins. While the overall population grew in 2023 by 685,000 net migrants, GDP grew only by 0.1%. This logic lacks all regard for the fact that GDP per capita is falling: Life for the average person is economically harder (by about £1,500/ year per the cited report). With imported populations the size of entire cities entering the UK annually, people notice unwelcome changes to their local communities rather than the supposed benefits of mass immigration surmised in the meaningless invocation of “GDP growth” (by 0.1% annually!). Consequently, the Tory party has been punished by its electorate, with conservative voters flooding to the new Reform party in the July 2024 election.

A factory owner in Springfield, for whom the lower wage demands of immigrants is a boon, praised the relative industry of his Haitian workers compared to the locals with drug problems. Immigrants function as a sticking-plaster which Democrats slap over the festering wounds of social decline: endemic drug addiction amidst an opioid crisis claiming 1,500 American lives per week, falling fertility rates, and sapped ambition which has addled Middle America for decades. This is putting aside the negative fiscal impact which low-wage migrants, who often reserve money for dependents and make more use of the fiscal safety net than they contribute in tax, have on developed host nations. (A new study from the UK has documented this trend.) In lower-wage sectors, migrants who are enlisted to remedy labor shortages work for less than the host population would typically ask for, lowering hourly wages for the labor market’s lowest earners over time. The populist appeals of Vance to blue-collar Americans are not unfounded.

It is also intuitive that sudden influxes of people put pressure on services and housing. Once again, we can look to Europe for surefire proof: A study covering 382 German administrative districts found that an increase in migration inflow of 1% of a district’s initial population causes a hike in flat prices of about 2.5–3% as well as a hike in flat rents of about 1%. Naturally, social housing is often given to low-wage or unemployed migrants, with 74% of Somali housing in London being social housing. It is lamentable that so much attention is devoted to Trump’s remark about domestic animals and so little to the fact that from 2019 to 2023 homelessness in Ohio increased by 10% following sharp increase in rents. It’s even worse in the UK: where 38% of those sleeping rough are foreign nationals. Though immigration is rarely the sole contributing factor to rental problems, it is no wonder that locals wonder about the effect of importing thousands of people to areas with scarce housing. To demonize them as Nazis is the all-too common response of establishment media.

Thanks in part to the reticence of cheap-labor-hungry governments to be transparent about the felt effects of immigration, and because of the general crisis in social science studies which produce findings which often cannot be replicated, the topic remains radioactive for many politicians. It may be true that there is a drug addiction problem plaguing white working-class areas, and that this is not the fault of honest immigrants looking for factory jobs. It is also true that politicians’ duties are, first and foremost, to serve the current citizens of their nation: the people for whom this is their only home, their only source, their only history. Those duties include getting drugs off the streets, ensuring that blue-collar wages remain dignified, and tackling homelessness. They also include listening to the complaints of locals when they have grievances with immigration, not scolding them for noncompliance.

Like this eloquent young woman, I am baffled by the typical Democrat response to the mere suggestion that the benefits of immigration are debatable. Implying that not all Haitian migrants are perfectly integrated citizens will earn you derision from Democrats, particularly in election season; the conversation is not aided by hysteria about cats and dogs It is also worthwhile noting that, in Haiti, the syncretic traditional religion voodoo is very widely practiced alongside Catholicism and Protestantism. As the popular saying goes: “70% Catholic, 30% Protestant, and 100% Vodou”. Voodoo includes practicing animal sacrifice; so it may only be a ticking clock until someone is arrested for the ritualistic slaughter of a pet. Were one only myopically focused on filling gaps in the labor market, they might be forgiven for overlooking how this may present a barrier to integration. But this provides no comfort to the Springfield locals, who now live alongside thousands of unassimilated strangers. To de-escalate tensions, their concerns must be heard and addressed — not dismissed as racist.

Americans must take heed from Europe, where knife crime, gangs composed of ethnically distinct groups, Honor Based Violence (HBA) against women in Islamic communities, and general sexual violence is rising dramatically. To deny that these phenomena are associated with ethnic division, caused by rapid immigration and imported cultural baggage, is to betray the duties of any political office.