Tucker Carlson Is Right: Ilhan Omar is An Ungrateful Immigrant.

Carlson concluded: "Ilhan Omar is living proof that they way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country. A system designed to strengthen America is instead undermining it. Some of the very people we try hardest to help have come to hate us passionately. Maybe that's our fault for asking too little of our immigrants. We aren't self-confident enough to make them assimilate so they never feel fully American.

"Or maybe the problem is deeper than that. Maybe we're importing people from places whose values are simply antithetical to ours. Who knows what the problem is? But there is a problem".

'RACIST'.

It's uncomfortable to address. Not least because when one does, one is relentlessly smeared and attacked as a "racist" or "xenophobe" like Carlson has been over the past 12 hours by CNN, the Huffington Post, Media Matters, and Omar herself.

The Congresswoman tweeted that Carlson is a "racist fool", underscoring his point.

But since, I suppose, I have some brown privilege, allow me to use it in defense of Carlson and his thesis.

There are problems with immigration into the West.

I'll start by making something clear: I love my family, my ethnicity, and the color of my skin. How could I not? It is who I am.

But I loathe when people of a similar ethnic background or persuasion to me are ungrateful for their presence in the West.

Again, don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean immigrants can't be constructive critics. As dutiful citizens, immigrants have as much right and as much responsibility as those born in the West or native to it to contribute to the cultural and political discourse.

But Omar and her ilk don't do this.

“I fell head over heels in love with [India]. If I’d have gone there 100 years earlier, I’d have left my bones there,”                          – Enoch Powell

Instead, they claw at and attempt to tear down that which made the West somewhere they wanted to live in the first instance.

This doesn't only apply to immigrants, either. It's deeply rooted in the tactics of the political left, making Omar's interventions in favor of tearing America apart doubly potent.

Those who warned about it, like the late British Member of Parliament Enoch Powell, were pilloried as "racist" themselves. It's a catch all defense meaning next to nothing, which I wrote about at length in my 2018 book Enoch Was Right.

Powell knew unchecked mass migration would inevitably lead to ghettoization and a lack of assimilation.

He was in favor of inter-racial marriage as a means by which to resolve this, and indeed as a short-term migrant himself, he assimilated in India quite well, proving his point.

“I fell head over heels in love with [India]. If I’d have gone there 100 years earlier, I’d have left my bones there,” Powell once said.

These aren't the words of a racist, or nativist. They're the words of a realist.

RIVERS OF BLOOD.

Powell knew what only few others would dare say, and his core contention, expressed in the form of paraphrasing Virgil's Aeneid, was that the immigrant would suffer hardship in this struggle to integrate. Perhaps even more hardship than the native.

[caption id="attachment_179454" align="alignnone" width="3695"] Enoch Powell, Wikimedia Commons[/caption]

"Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood," is one of the most misunderstood and misquoted lines of Powell's infamous 1968 speech.

Powell wasn't talking about literal rivers of blood, nor was he alleging that marauding, murderous migrants would blow Westerners to smithereens at every chance.

For those who know the Aeneid, they will know the words of warning come from the prophetic Sybil unto Aeneas, as a warning that the migrant's new life would be full of hardship. Such is the way of moving countries. I should know. I've seen my parents do it, and arguably I have done it myself with an albeit smaller cultural shift from London to Washington, D.C..

Far from suffering the indignities of Aeneas, Ilhan Omar and her family have been treated to something quite extraordinary in the world: the pursuit of happiness.

Sir Roger Scruton dealt with this in his 2006 essay on Powell entitled, "Should He Have Spoken?"

"It is, in fact, the Cumaean Sybil who utters that prophecy in Book VI of the Aeneid, and although she is foreseeing the troubles that come from immigration, it is to the troubles suffered by an immigrant that she refers. The immigrant in question—Aeneas—travels to Italy at the head of a determined retinue, carrying his household gods and a divine right of residence. His intention to settle is not to be brooked, and if this means “wars, horrid wars,” so be it. Modern immigrants don’t, on the whole, behave so badly. They don’t need to. They come as the heads of families, and even if the family might comprise four wives and twenty children, it arrives to a red carpet of legal privileges, eagerly unrolled by publicly funded lawyers, and to a welcome trough of welfare benefits that few indigenous citizens can claim, however much they have contributed to the common fund."

Carlson echoes Scruton in his monologue about how well modern immigrants are treated.

Far from suffering the indignities of Aeneas, Ilhan Omar and her family have been treated to something quite extraordinary in the world: the pursuit of happiness.

The American Dream.

THE PROBLEM.

Omar has not had to suffer any rivers of blood in America. Nor do most legal migrants.

But there is a major problem with mass migration as most people in overly-welcoming Western nations know.

In another of my books, No Go Zones, I went to the source of these problems for Muslims.

Not only is ghettoization and lack of assimilation a problem. Along with it comes those very same troubles Powell warned about for the migrants: High poverty, high crime, disease, and radicalization.

Much of the time, this nation-within-a-nation mindset is sponsored by nefarious, external forces. The governments of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and others are known to financially support such endeavors to keep "their people" separate.

They pay for mosques, and prop up hardline imams to warn against integration.

Muslim communities aren't the only ones like this. But increasingly, they are the ones who are shouted loudest about, in an attempt to draw a false equivalence between their current plight and that of Jews in Europe in the early 20th century.

It is a farcical and insulting comparison, but not one we should be surprised about given the gleeful perversion of history by the left.

MORE PROBLEMS.

According to the Pew Research Center, America has more immigrants than any other country in the world.

[caption id="attachment_179457" align="alignnone" width="5968"] Omar, Flickr, CC[/caption]

More than 40 million people in America were born elsewhere. That's one in five of the world’s migrants.

And Americans like immigration, too. Study after study finds positive attitudes towards high-skilled, legal immigration.

But not all immigrants feel the same way about America.

Just 52 per cent are proficient in English, with just over one third speaking it "very well".

Immigrants can – depending on their background – vote less, donate less, and be less voluntaristic than native-born citizens.

But not all immigrants are the same, as any academic in the field will tell you.

Sharia law – the underlying legal doctrines of Islam – makes one objectively far less likely to accept all part of being Western.

It isn't possible to talk about "all immigrants". That would be risible. Instead, one must look to the patterns of behavior of migrants depending on where they come from, and indeed depending on where they settle.

If we were trying to broad brush it, it would be easy to quote old, meaningless polls that say "immigrants love America". But despite America's willingness to treat all people equally, the rest of the world scarcely feels the same. The rest of the world scarcely does the same.

And given America's rapidly shifting population, what Carlson talks about when he discusses America and the American Dream is shifting along with it.

RADICAL ISLAM.

Donald Trump's "Muslim ban" resonated because many Americans understand some migrants will be more willing than others to become a part of the American fabric.

Sharia law – the underlying legal doctrines of Islam – makes one objectively far less likely to accept all part of being Western. And attitudes towards Sharia are still highly favorable in countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Niger, and, yes, in Somalia, where Ilhan Omar is from.

But not when Omar was growing up.

Her family, according to her own stories, were far more Islamic than her country was.

Strict Islamic adherents view America as "the Great Satan". Again, not all. But the prevalent strains of Wahhabism and Salafism drill it into children from a young age.

It's unlikely, however, that all of Omar's intolerant positions are derived from her fealty to Islam alone.

LEFTISM.

Somalia, where she grew up, went through extreme strife following independence in 1960.

Omar's family worked for the dictator Siad Barre, the leader of the Revolutionary Socialist Party.

Barre was a Leninist who attempted to merge Quranic diktats with those of Karl Marx. He fled the country in 1991 after being overthrown. Her family left at the same time, finding refuge in Kenya, then a few years later, finding their way to America.

In an ominous foreshadowing way, the first thing Omar recalls telling her father is, “This doesn’t look like the America you promised.”

Maybe it was the false promises from her family, who worked for a socialist dictator back home.

Maybe it was fundamentalist Quranic interpretations (Omar recalls her family complaining about not being able to wear their hijabs growing up).

Tucker Carlson is right. Ilhan Omar is an ungrateful immigrant.

Or maybe it was both.

Islamism has long been a bedfellow of both fascism and communism, depending on what was more popular and pragmatic at the time.

The "problem" Carlson mentioned in his monologue on Fox News is as simply identifiable as many would have thought while watching last night.

"Maybe we're importing people from places whose values are simply antithetical to ours," is probably as specific as you can get when dealing with an enigma like Omar.

Virulently anti-Western, a hardline socialist, and a even petty nationalist (identity politician) who expresses more solidarity with her native community and religious kinfolk than she does with the United States of America, we can concur but one thing conclusively: Tucker Carlson is right. Ilhan Omar is an ungrateful immigrant.

Raheem Kassam is the Global Editor in Chief of Human Events