Arriving ‘Legally’ Doesn’t Make Immigrants Good Americans

Within the last few weeks, the United States’ homefront has been under siege.

From a mass shooting at a downtown bar in Austin, Texas, by a man reportedly wearing a “Property of Allah” hoodie with an Iranian flag shirt underneath, to the killing of a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps instructor at Old Dominion University by a convicted ISIS supporter; from a truck attack at a synagogue in Michigan to homemade bombs allegedly thrown at protestors and dropped near police outside New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s residence, the violence against Americans has been unrelenting.

While the media has attempted to obfuscate or even spread lies about the nature of these attacks, one common denominator links them all together.

All four attacks were apparently committed by those who were either “integrated” into the fabric of American society through America’s naturalization process, or, perhaps more ominously, the children of naturalized citizens.

With this in mind, it must be admitted that contrary to the assertion of pro-immigration Republican politicians such as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who unequivocally believe that so long as immigration is “legal,” it is by nature “good,” America’s “legal” immigration system has failed.

Mistaken Idea of a Melting Pot

At the root of this crisis is not only the failure of assimilation, but the very myth of assimilation itself — especially in the modern age. This has brought tens of millions of people from incompatible cultures into America, such as from Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Turkey, Senegal, and Lebanon. 

Americans have been taught from a young age that their country is a melting pot, a sort of universalist stew where, regardless of where the ingredients originated from, the resulting dish will only get better.

Under this belief, America has ceased to be a particular people in a particular place. Instead, it has become a global welcome mat where people from every corner of the world can come, wipe their feet of all that came before, and “assimilate” into an overarching and unified “American” family.

What’s more, it is said that the children of newly minted Americans are instantly “just as American” as anyone else. In this view, these birthright Americans retain none of their parents’ cultural or ideological priors, quickly becoming indistinguishable from those Americans with generational ties to the land.

This is, of course, nonsense.

New York City Case

And this month’s “ISIS-inspired attack,” allegedly attempted by two well-off children of naturalized U.S. citizens outside the home of New York’s first Muslim mayor, Mamdani, should immediately put such myths to rest.

By all accounts, Emir Balat, 18, and Ibrahim Kayumi, 19, the two men caught on camera attempting this alleged homemade bomb attack against “far right” protestors, were living the “American Dream.” Their parents, naturalized citizens, were the beneficiaries of “legal” immigration — the “good kind,” according to Cruz.

Yet, despite growing up in an affluent Pennsylvania county, Balat and Kayumi allegedly chose to pledge their allegiance not to the American Republic, but to the Islamic State, and launch a potentially deadly attack against innocent people in the name of their militant Islamic ideology, as the Justice Department documents.

Virginia’s Case

Then we have the shooter at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, identified as Mohamed Jalloh, a naturalized citizen from Sierra Leone and former Army National Guardsman who was arrested in 2016 for attempting to provide material support to ISIS.

Though he was sentenced to 11 years in prison, he was released two-and-a-half years early and was free to kill an ROTC instructor and wound two more before being killed himself.

These two examples expose the central lie of our era: that assimilation from culturally divergent societies into a dominant American fabric is viable at scale, and that multiculturalism leads to societal harmony. By prioritizing “diversity” over a dominant American culture, our institutions have traded social cohesion for a volatile state of permanent friction, where the “welcomed” are increasingly at war with the “welcomer.”

Era of Mass Migration

The post-1965 Hart-Celler era of mass immigration has not produced a unified populace but rather a fractured landscape of competing interests. The myth of the melting pot, once touted as America’s strength, has completely shattered, leaving behind a collection of disconnected people and cultures that share geography but little else in common.

Nothing illustrates the sheer scale of this cultural displacement better than the 90-foot bronze Hanuman deity at the Sri Ashtalakshmi Hindu Temple in Sugar Land, Texas. This statue is a literal monument to America’s new cultural reality, where elements of a foreign culture now tower over America’s traditional landscape.

But proof is not just found within American communities, but perhaps more consequentially, in the halls of American power.

Mayor Mamdani recently transformed City Hall into a prayer hall, hosting a formal Iftar on the building’s historic floor — a symbolic centering of a specific religious identity within a supposedly secular civic space.

This ideological and cultural shift is mirrored and amplified in the halls of Congress, where foreign-born representatives like Shri Thanedar, Salud Carbajal, and Ilhan Omar routinely demonize the very agencies charged with protecting our borders and enforcing immigration laws within our cities. Omar has even gone as far as openly boasting of her intent to use her American office to advance the interests of her birth nation, Somalia.

American Leaders Once Understood This Threat

In 1915, former President Theodore Roosevelt vociferously championed what he called Americanism in an effort to unify the United States in the face of cultural friction and fragmentation. Roosevelt lambasted the concept of “hyphenated Americans,” which he labeled those who elevated their ethnic or ancestral backgrounds and allegiances above that of their American nationality, going so far as to say that “a hyphenated American is not an American at all.”

Later, in 1923, President Calvin Coolidge recognized the danger posed by immigration in his first annual message to the nation. In his address, Coolidge correctly stated that “American Institutions rest solely on good citizenship,” and that they were created by people who already “had a background of self-government.” For this American trait to be retained, he believed that “new arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship.”

Coolidge stated clearly that “America must be kept American,” and so he believed it was necessary to continue with policies that restricted immigration.

With this goal in mind, Coolidge later signed the Immigration Act of 1924, which drastically reduced immigration by setting strict quotas based on the 1890 census. It aimed to preserve American, Northern, and Western European homogeneity and allowed for a form of ethnogenesis to occur, which lasted until 1965, when the passage of the Hart-Celler Act ultimately began America’s cultural unraveling.

Cultural Suicide

Today, this form of Americanism, as championed by Roosevelt and Coolidge, is, effectively, dead — as evidenced by the recent terrorist attacks by “American” citizens, as well as the words and actions of naturalized elected leaders in Congress. This is the logical conclusion of a decades-long experiment akin to committing cultural suicide.

If we continue to prioritize a project of culturally incompatible “diversity” over a robust, dominant form of Americanism, we will continue to see foreign ethnic conflicts play out on the streets of America’s communities. We must recognize that our capacity to absorb newcomers is not infinite, and that our primary duty is to the welcomer, not the welcomed. We must end the myth that America’s magical soil transforms foreigners into patriotic Americans and re-establish a standard of citizenship that demands more than a passing test score and a signature on a form.

But most importantly, American leaders must pass new immigration legislation such as the PAUSE Act that will effectively freeze most immigration into the United States until certain security conditions are met.

The reality is, however, that immigration must not only be temporarily frozen, but effectively ended for decades. This will allow the space for cultural cohesion to form, much like it did during the decades of immigration restrictions stemming from the 1924 Immigration Act that reduced the percentage of America’s foreign-born population from around 13 percent to under 5 percent.

If we do not, the “homefront” will cease to be a home at all, becoming instead a permanent cultural battlefield where the American people become strangers in their own land.

As Coolidge warned a century ago, “America must be kept American.”

Adam Johnston is a senior contributor to The Federalist whose work has been featured in The Blaze, WrongSpeak Publishing, and Man’s World Magazine. He is also the creator of conquesttheory.com, where he regularly writes about politics, history, philosophy, and technology. You can find him on X @adamkjohnston.