Dr Naomi Wolfe
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.
[…]
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 . . .
[…]
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.
[…]
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.
You saw this in New York and Brooklyn by the end of 2024. Central American women and even small children, as I have described elsewhere, were being freely trafficked in the city’s subway system; women who spoke no English were forced, it appeared, to sell candy and beg for money all day long in subways, with unconscious or drugged babies strapped to their backs. Teenagers, working during school hours, had to man carts selling fruit and ices . . .
[…]
In city parks, couples who were recent arrivals, laughed as their children did things that are considered impolite or inappropriate here, such as engaging in overt sexualized play. A lot of weird public sexuality took hold of the city, as there were no longer shared cultural mores. I witnessed at least one single man masturbating while stretched out on a park bench, looking at porn on his phone, quite oblivious to passers-by, including children. I had the misfortune of taking a cab with a recently arrived driver who was watching porn on his phone as he drove. Someone else posted a video of an immigrant couple apparently having intercourse while zipped up into a sleeping bag, in full daylight in Prospect Park.
[…]
Taking the subways had become terrifying. People shouted on subway cars, or fought with one another. A lot of men with Central American gang tattoos appeared. Aggression and violence seemed just below the surface. That wry New York City chit chat, that pleasant or whimsical interaction with the stranger, was gone, seemingly for good. We all sat, on our journeys, in tense apprehension, closed in on ourselves. No one gestured to anyone to go first; opening doors for one another was a memory of the past.
[…]
Then — Inauguration Day came.
On January 21, 2025, I took a flight to Toronto. On the subway that day, I noticed that things were very quiet. On my flight to Canada, almost the entire flight consisted of recent arrivals to America; they were mostly Haitian, Central American, and, for some reason, the flight included many Sikhs. These people had immense loads of luggage with them. It seemed as if they had given up and were leaving the United States. My intuition was confirmed when I saw most of them waiting to be processed at Immigration in Canada. Having fled the US, almost the entire planeload of people was intending to stay over the border, where regulations against at-will immigration, seemed almost non-existent.
The emotion on the flight, though, was not one of outrage or despair. While this is just a gut feeling, I felt that the energy among these people fleeing President Trump and ICE — for that was what was happening — was oddly calm and accepting, even resolute. It was a feeling of, “Well, we got caught. Fair enough.”
The Canadian officials processing the newcomers, looked as pained as our Border Patrol had done, back in the bad old days of the Biden administration. The officials asked the arrivals if they knew anyone in Toronto or had any means of support, and when little evidence to that effect was forthcoming, they bitterly enough had to just wave them onward to sign up for Canadian benefits and take up their residency in the country.
Please fast forward. It is now only March. There have been dramatic crackdowns against illegal immigration across the United States. President Trump has revoked legal status for 530,000 entrants into the country. Members of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang, were dramatically deported to a violent prison, the transfer of humans complete with images of chains and shaved heads. Thousands of agents have been directed to assist with this crackdown on illegal immigration — meaning, that agents are being allowed at last to do their jobs.
What is amazing is how New York City feels now. You look around and it is so much less…crowded. Many people across the country are noticing that malls during the day now are almost empty; parks and subways, are so much less full. People are vertiginously realizing how many, how very many, people in America were in fact here illegally. And Americans are processing how much money, taxpayer money, went into giving these millions of strangers, benefits that we ourselves never had.
It is hard to describe in detail, but the social contract in New York feel as if it is back. We are almost all, of whatever race, ethnicity or country of national origin, Americans again, or lawfully visiting. It feels extraordinarily peaceful; and restful. Taking subways, that arterial experience that binds all New Yorkers, is fine once again. No one is listening to a phone aloud, and if they do, other passengers gently shush them with a look.
[…]
Via https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/president-trumps-new-york
The Most Revolutionary Act 
What has been described as far as the invasion of illegals would have continued if Harris had been elected and no matter how bad Trump is, he is doing the right thing in getting rid of all the illegals regardless of what anyone says to the contrary. But it still begs the questions, who was behind the invasion of illegals, and what was the purpose? And we ALL know Biden is senile, and so he wasn’t running the show.
LikeLike
Shelby, I think the main purpose of the mass immigration was to disrupt any preexisting community unity, to reduce any organized opposition to the “great reset” global billionaires are trying to impose. I think there may have been a secondary purpose of compensating for drastically falling birthrates. There seems to be major angst in a lot of Western countries about a shrinking workforce being incapable of supporting a massive aging population.
LikeLiked by 1 person