Liberals Have Been Mugged by the Reality of Migration

It’s an old joke, a conservative is a liberal mugged by reality – but in one tragic case, it is literally true. In 2020, Shivanthi Sathanandan, a vice chair of the Minnesota Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party, called for the dismantling of the Minneapolis Police Department.

“LISTEN and LEARN from our Black siblings,” she wrote in capital letters for the hard of hearing, adding that the cops have “systemically failed the black community.”

Three years later, Sathanandan was carjacked in front of her own children. She posted a picture of her injuries, writing with familiar force:

“Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets.” She went on to thank the “incredible Minneapolis 4th Precinct” police officers for their help after the attack. The poor lady, who one hopes is fully recovered, wrote: “we need to take back our city.”

If only the bods at Apple could give up on the green rubbish and invent a time machine – not to save Kennedy or down Hitler, but so that we might arrange a debate between 2020 Sathanandan and 2023 Sathanandan, chaired by Congressman Hindsight.

In a similar spirit, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has also GONE TO WAR against everything he stood for five minutes ago, having once been an enthusiast for migration but now so sceptical that they’re calling him the “black Trump”. The reason? It turns out his city can’t afford lots of people turning up and using its services.

“Never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to,” Adams recently told a town hall meeting. “I don’t see an ending to this. This issue will destroy New York City.”

Hitherto, NYC was so pro-migration, it styled itself a “sanctuary city”, a phrase Adams cheerfully endorsed. Taking the Big Apple at its word, an estimated 110,000 have arrived looking for help, forcing the mayor to ask local agencies to cut their budgets by 15 per cent to cover the cost. The price tag could hit $12bn in three years.

Joe Biden isn’t helping, complains Adams: the administration blames Adams for failing to organise an exit strategy. Adams also points the finger at “a madman” in Texas, i.e. its governor Greg Abbott, who – overwhelmed with migrants crossing the southern border – decided to call the Left’s bluff and put them on buses to Democrat-run cities. The mayors of those cities say this is unfair, but why is it any fairer that rural border communities should do all the work? Abbott has hit upon a very socialist idea. Redistribution.

Chicago has taken around 13,500 at a cost of at least $250 million; Massachusetts has declared a state of emergency after the shelter population rose 80 per cent. The first bus from Texas to Washington DC parked outside Kamala Harris’ house. You might say the policy is the ultimate in trolling. Others call it cruel (in August, a three-year-old was put on a coach to Chicago, fell ill and died). But it cannot be true that Greg Abbott is personally responsible for New York’s crisis: only around 10 per cent of its arrivals hail from his state.

New York is a magnet to so many because migrants have connections there; it enjoys an image as a global city; and because it operates a very powerful magnet in the form of “right-to-shelter”, a legal duty on the city to put a roof over one’s head. Writing at City Journal, a right-wing urban policy magazine, Daniel Di Martino interviewed migrants staying at the “once glamorous” Roosevelt Hotel – including a 24-year-old from Chad, obviously with means, who flew via several other countries to reach America in the hope of completing his science studies. When asked why these people chose New York, “their responses varied but had a common thread,” says Di Martino. “They could get housing at no cost.”

Well, that’s nice, isn’t it? There’s a comparison here with San Francisco, which – out of the kindness of its heart – decided to let addicts use drugs, and then discovered that this encourages drug addicts to move into the neighbourhood. Today, San Francisco is finally trying to reduce the presence of narcotics, and Adams has attempted to weaken right-to-shelter.

New York City proves that a generous welfare system encourages mass migration across porous borders, and that this migration then renders the welfare system unsustainable – financially and politically. Immigration undermines classic Left-wing goals, driving voters into the arms of conservatives. In Chicago, a heavily Democrat city, black residents have voiced their objections against a shelter being located in their neighbourhood. They’ve got enough poverty and crime already, they say, and this would be one more source of competition for resources that were scarce to begin with. The New York Times quotes one resident arguing that the very concept of a sanctuary city “is wrong… No one is entitled to anything.”

It’s a popular narrative that the American Right has gone extreme in recent years, and it’s true. But so has the Left, and probably the only reason its radicalisation is commented upon less is that the media has made the journey with it. Looking at this generation of leftist leadership that seems absolutely convinced America is “systemically” racist, sexist and phobic, and that only a complete deconstruction of our way of life will help – one wonders if it must be allowed to discover by painful experience how idiotic that philosophy really is. Alas, sane Americans will have to suffer the consequences of their foolish experiment, too.