Let me be frank. I am tired of hearing a man in a white robe who lives safely protected by high walls and Swish guards pontificating about how the rest of us should accept massive waves of immigration. He doesn’t bear the cost. In fact, the Catholic Church in the United States may gain members among the immigrants and get government funds to help the immigrants on their arrival.
Matthew Crawford had an excellent article in the March 2026 issue of First Things magazine where he made an important distinction. An individual traveler is to be granted the assumption that he is not an opportunist. He should be given every courtesy. The same thing applies to those the nation allows to enter as legal immigrants.
When a stranger greets a child, they look at their parents to see if the stranger can be trusted. A citizen has an obligation to care for the safety of their family. They expect the government to guard the border and ensure that those who come to stay permanently will contribute to the country rather than harm it. Obviously, that can’t be true in an “open borders” regimen.
Crawford pointedly explains why those in charge have an obligation to protect their neighbors before protecting a stranger who would immigrate.
We are commanded to love our personal enemies. We are also commanded to love our neighbors. Conveniently, these are often the same people. The neighbor, like the personal enemy, is someone specific and concrete, someone known. … for the same reason, he is someone who is difficult to love.
By contrast, “the other” as he appears in the liberal imagination is an abstraction. To love the other, in the manner of a yard sign pronouncement, costs me nothing. … To maintain the sentiment, …I need the other to remain an abstraction.
If there are enough people involved, immigration is costly to the existing population, even if there is no crime. The Dallas Federal Reserve talked about the impact on the cost of housing:
One key cause of elevated worst-case needs is immigration. Between 2021 and 2024, the foreign-born population of the United States increased by more than 6 million—the largest such increase over such a short period in American history,” the HUD probe found.
“This immigration-driven increase in households has contributed to a significant increase in housing demand, thus driving up housing prices,” the HUD probe continues. “In fact, in some markets, immigration has accounted for nearly all of the increase in housing demand in recent years.
There is a massive increase in school costs and waiting times in hospital emergency rooms. These costs are before the damage caused by criminal behavior and motor vehicle fatalities.
The self-anointed charitable leaders completely misunderstand the signals they’ve been sending to a major segment of the Islamic immigrant population. A substantial portion of this group is young, male, and unattached. Islam includes a tradition of seeking to dominate the world. Christian victories in France and Vienna prevented that. Islamic males are assaulting European women virtually everywhere and paying almost no price. The women and their families are supposed to accept it to avoid creating a wave of Islamophobia.
Society’s leaders think this is “Christian Love.” In 2015, Michel Houellebecq published a novel titled Submission. He talks about France becoming increasingly Islamic. Jews are leaving because life is becoming unsafe. Life for women is changing. Some men have multiple wives.
I read the book in 2017 when there were articles in the Washington Post about Jews leaving France. I saw it as a warning. Amazon reviews described the book as satire. Its rankings included “Fiction Satire” as a category. I realized it was a warning, not a joke.
The immigrant “Trojan Horse” is now big enough to cause a major problem everywhere. In 2015, the BBC covered a French government report on Islamist ‘Entryism’.
entryism means getting involved in republican infrastructure… in order to change it from the inside. It requires dissimulation… and it works from the bottom up.
It is a major step forward that the French government sees a problem. They are proposing a law to deal with it. I don’t doubt their motives in that law, but there are problems with it.
But France is not the only country dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempt to change society this way. Germany is facing the same problem and dealing with it more directly. They are actively monitoring and banning groups. Deutsche Welle reported that in July 2024 the government banned the Islamic Center of Hamburg [IZH] because it was “accused of undermining the German state as well as women’s rights.”
[It was also] considered an extension of the Iranian regime in Germany and is thought to have a significant influence over certain mosques and associations, according to Germany’s domestic intelligence services.
The IZH is being probed for “spreading aggressive antisemitism,” Faeser said on Wednesday, adding that raids against the group in November established proof of connections to Hezbollah and led to [the] ban.
Chancellor Merz is also directing many Syrians to return home. Italy used a paperwork maneuver to order Islamic leaders to leave the country.
The point is that more and more European countries are recognizing the need to control who is in their countries. The United States is not alone in recognizing the problems and dangers posed by massive immigration.
World leaders who tried to downplay it for years have joined in realizing there is a genuine problem.