by Brian Lonergan
Throughout Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign for president and his nightmarish first year in the White House, he and his acolytes have extolled the virtues of near-limitless immigration. His campaign talked about immigration as an “irrefutable source of our strength” and how it is “essential to who we are as a nation, our core values and our aspirations for the future.” Anyone who suggests that we bring immigration to safe, manageable levels is shamed with a retort of “that’s not who we are.”
Nowhere to be found in the White House’s rhetoric is any mention of the costs of such reckless policies, specifically higher crime and the shattered lives of those victimized by it. This has become one of the great underreported stories of our time. Most people see what is happening, but the establishment media, Big Tech, and government look the other way.
While the details of these stories have become all too familiar, they deserve repeating for those still in denial.
In Philadelphia this month, Fiston Ngoy, 35, was arrested and charged with raping a woman for 30 minutes on a metro train while passengers watched. Ngoy, a Congolese national, has been living in the United States illegally since 2015. He overstayed a student visa and was not deported after earlier criminal convictions.
He pleaded guilty to a sex charge in 2017 and served 120 days in jail, but was never deported because an immigration judge granted him a “withholding of removal” after an appeal board determined his sex offense was not a “serious crime” that warranted removal.
Recent government data shed light on the scope of this problem. Foreign nationals make up about seven percent of the U.S. population, yet accounted for 64 percent of all federal arrests in 2018. The same group accounted for a quarter of all federal drug and property arrests in the same year. Keep in mind these statistics are from the time of the law-and-order Trump Administration. Unless the data are skewed for political reasons, the results will be significantly worse when we get a reckoning from the day Team Biden assumed power.
The idea that illegal immigration is a victimless crime is patently false. It can be seen both in the shocking violent crimes that occur, as well as nonviolent crimes that nonetheless scar their victims. This was shown in the investigation that revealed that up to 39 million Americans have potentially had their Social Security numbers stolen by illegal aliens pursuing work in the country during the Obama Administration alone.
Then there is the matter of resettling Afghan nationals in the United States. White House officials have assured us that these Afghans have been helpful to the U.S. war effort and were vetted prior to arriving on our shores. The administration has since admitted that only a small number of those airlifted from Afghanistan entered through a special visa for those who worked directly for the U.S. military or its contractors. Immigration experts have also charged that the vetting process for Afghan refugees has been inadequate and rushed.
The White House’s words must be cold comfort to the growing list of victims who have suffered from the actions of these refugees. They would include an 18-year-old woman in Missoula, Montana, who reported that she had been raped. Police arrested Zabihullah Mohmand, 19, and charged him with sexual intercourse without consent. Mohmand had been placed in Montana as part of the federal Afghan Placement and Assistance Program less than two weeks before his arrest.
The arrest of Mohmand is the latest in what has been a series of alleged criminal actions by Afghans who recently arrived in the country. At U.S. military bases where Afghans were initially housed, there have been reports of child molestation, domestic violence, and the assault of a female soldier. The Air Force general in charge of the Northern Command reassured concerned Americans that the crime rates in evacuee resettlement facilities are much lower than in comparable U.S. populations.
At the risk of being accused of nativism, the crime rates among those we have gifted a lifeline by allowing them to come to our country should be at or near zero. That these actions are being explained away by saying they are lower than comparable U.S. populations is an insult.
The citizens among us who commit crimes are our problem. We have to deal with them. At a time when we are still recovering from destructive urban riots and a nationwide pandemic, importing criminals from around the world is both lunacy and a problem we can no longer absorb.
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Brian Lonergan is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and director of communications at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.
