It’s a mercy that nobody was killed in yesterday’s terror attack in New York. How many more attacks will it take before Americans demand serious, sovereign immigration policies?
Given that Americans have no input into who comes here and joins our society, most would be surprised to learn we’ve handed out over 178,000 green cards to Bangladeshi nationals since 9/11 — from 2001 to 2015. While some of them assimilate properly into our culture like any other groups of immigrants, there is a growing problem of Sharia supremacism from this almost exclusively Muslim country. Rather than being more judicious about immigration from the Middle East in this era of fervent Islamic jihad, we have made Bangladesh one of the fastest-growing source countries of immigrants. One can only hope that today’s botched suicide bombing in New York, allegedly perpetrated by a Bangladeshi immigrant, sheds light on this growing problem.
Rather than placing the brakes on immigration after 9/11, we stepped on the gas pedal. From 2001 to 2015, roughly 1.8 million individuals from 47 majority-Muslim countries, mainly in the Middle East and North Africa, have been granted green cards, according to the DHS Yearbook on immigration statistics. The rate has even grown in recent years. The sending countries with the largest percentage increase in the number of immigrants living in the United States since 2010 are predominantly Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia (up 122 percent), Afghanistan (up 74 percent), Syria (up 62 percent), Bangladesh (up 53 percent), Nigeria (up 40 percent), Iraq (up 39 percent), Egypt (up 32 percent), and Pakistan (up 28 percent).
Notice Bangladesh is on that list. We gave out 178,466 green cards to Bangladeshi nationals from 2001 to 2015, topped only by Iran and Pakistan among predominantly Muslim countries. In addition, we admit a growing number of foreign students on non-immigrant visas, topping 7,100 this year. When did the American people ever vote for this?
With so many wonderful people among planet Earth’s 7.6 billion inhabitants, why should we bring in even one person who doesn’t love America and cherish our values? Instead, what percentage of people we bring in from the Middle East do you think hate America? It’s hard to tell, but the polling data revealing the values from these countries is not very reassuring. In Bangladesh, 82 percent of Muslims favor making Sharia the law of the land, according to Pew Research. While one would expect that number is less among those who come to America, it is quite evident the number living here in favor of Sharia is a lot higher than 0 percent — the number it should be under an effective system of immigration and assimilation.
Before yesterday’s bombing, it had been six weeks since the last terror attack, perpetrated by a Muslim immigrant from Uzbekistan who came here through the diversity visa lottery. Yet Congress has no intention of abolishing this odious policy and is instead, of course, clamoring for more amnesty.
Bangladesh is the perfect example of what is wrong with the infuriating combination of the diversity lottery and chain migration. The diversity lottery began as a program for countries that had low rates of immigration. In the ’90s and early 2000s, Bangladesh was one of those countries. But once the first wave gained a foothold in this country, chain migration policies allowed those numbers to multiply simply due to relationships to the initial immigrants, not because of particular skills or attachment to America, much less assessment of security concerns. This is the very definition of stolen sovereignty.
Bangladesh is now off the diversity lottery as of 2012, because we have so much immigration from that country.
Bangladeshis in Brooklyn
In a prescient article from 2014 titled, “Beheadings, Bombings, and New York’s Little Bangladesh,” Daniel Greenfield warned of a long-term problem in Brooklyn, NY:
For now the Bangladeshi settlements in Brooklyn are quiet places where the tenements and shops close off the streets into small private worlds with their own justice systems, feuds and secrets.
“I feel like I’m living in my own country,” the editor of one of the Bangladeshi newspapers in New York, said. “You don’t have to learn English to live here. That’s a great thing!”
Overhead may be the same sky, but Little Bangladesh has been cut off from Brooklyn and attached to a country thousands of miles away. Immigrants step off a plane from Bangladesh at JFK airport, get into a taxi driven by a Bangladeshi playing Bengali pop tapes and step out into a small slice of Bangladesh on McDonald Avenue.
And when the infidels of Brooklyn wander into their territory, they are glared at as the foreign intruders that they are.
I have heard similar complaints from a relative of mine who lives near that neighborhood.
The suspect in today’s bombing, Akayed Ullah, appears to have lived in “little Bangladesh” on Ocean Parkway in Kensington, Brooklyn. How many more Akayed Ullahs are there in that neighborhood? And when will Congress finally wake up? The “clustering” problem that has plagued Europe is creeping in to America. Is it too much to ask that we slow down the unchecked flow of immigration while we deal with the existing assimilation problems? According to the International Organization for Migration, Bangladesh is now the single biggest sending country of refugees to Europe, even more than Syria and Afghanistan.
Non-assimilation leads to “clustering” — and more non-assimilation
Terrorism is downstream from the much broader culture problem of Sharia supremacism that we have needlessly imported. This culture of Sharia supremacism and anti-Americanism cultivated in clustered communities becomes the breeding ground for terrorism. Just this past Friday, a large gathering of Muslims assembled in New York to protest Israel. They chanted violent pro-Hamas slogans and called for an Intifada. These are people living on our shores, not in some far-off land like Gaza, most of whom were admitted relatively recently. This should scare all of us.
A sane Congress that represented Americans would immediately do the following:
Terminate the diversity visa lottery.
Pass the RAISE Act to place Americans, not immigrant families, back in charge of immigration policy.
Expand Trump’s immigration moratorium to more countries.
Tighten up statutes mandating deportation for those with green cards who subscribe to or espouse jihadist views, similar to the way we did with communists and anarchists. Under current law, “any immigrant who is or has been a member of or affiliated with the communist or other totalitarian party (or subdivision or affiliate thereof), domestic or foreign, is inadmissible.” [212(a)(3)(D)(iv).] Congress must apply this to Islamic supremacists.
Sadly, this Congress will do nothing for Americans in the budget bill. “Our representatives” only care about illegal immigrants, not fixing legal immigration to work best for Americans. Trump must double down and make specific demands in the budget bill to defund the diversity visa lottery and visas from the countries he seeks to ban.
Until then, the million-dollar question still looms: Given that we have stepped up immigration since 9/11, would there ever be an attack deadly enough to make it fashionable among the political elites to stop importing the danger? (For more from the author of “178,000 Bangladeshi Immigrants and the Threats of Non-Assimilation” please click HERE)
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