By Dr. Naomi Wolf
Outspoken
March 26, 2025
In January of 2025, President Trump took office. The week of January 13-20, Brooklyn was still in chaos. So was Manhattan. It was a chaos I have sought to describe in past essays, but things had reached a crescendo.
All of the world, it seemed, had descended upon the Five Boroughs.
From the floodgates that opened in 2022, and right up until Inauguration Day, Brooklyn and Manhattan had been under siege. I had never seen anything like it.
Due to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal newcomers, with thousands more arriving every day, the city had been transformed. There was no coherent culture, social contract, understanding of how one gets through a day. It was a circus of confusion, entitlement, aggression and chaos, all of it performed upside-down.
These millions had been 'magicked' to this city, then housed, cosseted, clothed and fed, on the dime of the Biden administration (meaning: on our taxpayer dime) and with the funding of the United Nations.
Manhattan and Brooklyn had been thronged with strangers - -people who were not the usual newcomers to the city who arrive legally, have family or business here, and then set about soberly to learn the language, seek out a job, pay taxes, raise kids, and settle into an American life. Legal immigrants in the past have been self-selected; they have thought for a long time about immigrating to America, taken steps to do so under the law, planned and prepared. They have been self-selected in the past, too, because it is their own drive or initiative, without external assistance, that led them to make it lawfully to our shores.
In contrast - and this is not a racist or even ethnocentric observation; it is about people differently situated, differently motivated - the millions abruptly, unlawfully streamed among us, were indeed deeply, truly strangers. Unlike earlier waves of legal immigrants, these folks were not self-selecting, self-propelled, or self-assisted in their journeys. They were people who seemed to have been scooped out of whole villages far elsewhere; people who had been doing other things entirely, making other plans altogether; and who then had been simply lifted up into space, transported, transplanted. They were indeed hoisted up out of other lives, other communities, other sensibilities, virtually other timelines, and transported hither, via the immensely powerful assistance of some of the most massive forces on earth.
Given the massive apparatus built up on three staging nations in order thus to transport this tide of humanity - that is to say, the immense powers and the millions of dollars deployed by the US State Department and by the UN, which I chronicled in my essay "What is a Culture?" - this sense of chaos and alienation that engulfed the city was not surprising.
Their arrival created an immense cultural strain. According to "City & State: New York"
"More than 210,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since the spring of 2022, many hailing from countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, though a significant number have also come from China and countries in Africa. City officials, advocacy groups, school communities, nonprofits and a bevy of elected officials have mobilized to welcome the ongoing flow of new arrivals, but it's been a massive - and costly - undertaking.
In those two-and-a-half years, Mayor Eric Adams' administration has stood up more than 200 emergency shelter sites, enrolled tens of thousands of migrant children in schools, gone to court to amend its right to shelter obligations, fought for federal and state funding to help handle the costs of providing services, and sued bus companies sending migrants from the border."
The numbers involved in funding this transfer of humans, were staggering: In 2023, Mayor Eric Adams planned to spend $4.3 Billion of the city's budget, in just one year, on "welcoming" the illegal immigrants. The Biden administration poured Federal money into the effort as well, in astonishing amounts:
"June 7, 2023: Building on the roughly $30 million in federal funding offered in May, the Biden administration agreed to provide the city with an additional $104.6 million to help officials manage the influx of migrants through the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Shelter Services Program."
By August of 2023, the grift was out of control: Mayor Adams expected to spend "$12 billion to house and care for migrant arrivals" for the upcoming three years, and Attorney General Letitia James launched an investigation into DocGo, a for-profit medical company, which had been awarded a $432 million no-bid contract to provide medical care to illegal immigrants (in the media of the bad days of 2023, these groups are inaccurately described as "asylum-seekers").
Events of 2024 were as unbelievable, when it came to the Biden administration's policies that simply opened doors to millions of illegal newcomers, then paid for their every need:
"June 28, 2024: Biden extends Temporary Protected Status to around 300,000 Haitians living in the U.S.
July 2, 2024: The city expands a pilot program to over 7,300 migrant families staying in city-funded hotels, pledging to give them debit cards to buy their own food."
The perception that Americans were starting to have by that time - that these numbers represented "an invasion" and that illegal newcomers were being given debit cards, free housing, free medical care and other benefits unavailable to American citizens - was true.
After Election Day, the about-face in policies in New York related to illegal immigrants, was also dramatic:
"Nov. 7, 2024: The city moves to end the controversial program that provided debit cards to migrant families so they could buy food and other essentials. [...]
Dec. 4, 2024: News breaks that the city is racing to remove National Guard members from migrant shelters ahead of Donald Trump's inauguration.
Dec. 10, 2024: The city announces plans to shut down at least two dozen migrant shelters across the city and upstate by the end of March, including the sweeping family shelter at Floyd Bennett Field. The latter, which is on federal land, is expected to close by Jan. 15 - a few days before Trump's inauguration.
Dec. 12, 2024: After meeting with Trump's incoming "border czar" in early December, Adams told reporters that he and Tom Homan are on the same page. "We're going to protect the rights of immigrants in this city that are hard-working, giving back to the city in a real way," Adams said. "We're not going to be a safe haven for those who commit repeated, violent crimes against innocent migrants, immigrants and long standing New Yorkers."
We will look back on 2022-2024 with astonishment. President Trump has referred to the 30 million illegal entrants to our nation as an "invasion", and he is right to do so. It is clear now, not just in the United States and Canada, but throughout Western Europe, that "Mr Global" has weaponized immigration to destroy existing cultures, and make war on sovereign nations - a cynical enough misuse of the bodies of millions of people; people who are often without options, to start with.
This was a marginalized, "right-wing" view a year ago, but it is now a common perception throughout the West and across political perspectives. There is no escaping this conclusion.
By transplanting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, from nations that are themselves broken in many ways, to the heart of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the Biden administration created an atmosphere of chaos, incomprehension and fear.
What were we importing in such vast, unassimilable numbers? Attitudes and cultures alien to our own.
Haiti is a failed state. According to international think tanks, there is a nearly complete collapse of civil society and national governance in Haiti. Informally, when you talk to Haitian legal immigrants to this country, they describe the way in which crime, plunder and corruption have made what was once a beautiful, safe country, now unlivable; everyone who can leave, they say, has fled.
China is also a source of the "Biden invasion" numbers. This is frankly weird. People in Communist China cannot just up and leave. They need permission from the Chinese Communist Party:
"Article 5. Chinese citizens who desire to leave the country for private purposes shall apply to the public security organs of the city or county in which their residence is registered. Approval shall be granted except in cases prescribed in Article 8 of this Law.
The public security organs shall decide, within a specified time, whether to approve or disapprove the citizens' applications for leaving the country for private purposes, and shall notify the applicants accordingly."
The above is from China's legal codes. So that means that the thousands and thousands of Chinese nationals who simply appeared in the United States from 2022-2024, were sent on their way by our existential adversaries - people who want to destroy the United States as a superpower!
Then there are the illegal immigrants from nations such as Afghanistan, Yemen, and other MENA - ("Middle Eastern and North African") - Muslim countries. The immigration-friendly Migration Policy Institute estimates that there are between 50,000 and 200,000 illegal immigrants to the United States from MENA nations alone! While these are not failed states, they are nations that are often theocracies with values very different from our own. Today in Afghanistan, women have been virtually erased from public life by the Taliban, and are forbidden even from singing. In Yemen, according to the advocacy organization Human Rights Watch, though women have legal rights on paper, "[t]he authorities across Yemen are increasingly restricting women's freedom of movement [...] The restrictions have harmed women's ability to access work, education, and health care, and are a form of discrimination." In Algeria, 14% of women participate in the labor force, versus 67 per cent of men, and they are subject to Sharia law, which treats them unequally to men: "Algerian women are subject to the family code (Sharia law), a retrograde and patriarchal interpretation of Islamic law passed in 1984 by the Popular National Assembly, under the pressure of religious and conservative representatives. On the whole, laws under the family code serve to reinforce the domination of men over women, contradicting Article 29 of the Algerian constitution..."
I could go on and on. The bottom line is that it is not racist or even ethnocentric, to object passionately to the "invasion" of the United States, or any Western country (or any country), by illegal immigrants. When you import people in large groups, you also import their cultures. We need to face the fact that the freedom, rule of law, relative peaceableness, and high level of civil society functioning, of Western nations, is an incredible achievement and an incredible gift. When you import millions of people who are not acculturated to these norms and rules, you also will import the reflexes and expectations of those who live in failed states, or under corrupt rulers, tyrannical or unequal laws, and oppressive theocracies. You simply cannot sustain the high level of functioning civil society, the peaceableness, rule of law, legal equality, etc, that characterize the West, under these conditions. And we need to stop being shy about saying so aloud.
You saw this in New York and Brooklyn by the end of 2024. Central American women and even small children, as I have described elsewhere, were being freely trafficked in the city's subway system; women who spoke no English were forced, it appeared, to sell candy and beg for money all day long in subways, with unconscious or drugged babies strapped to their backs. Teenagers, working during school hours, had to man carts selling fruit and ices —- carts that appeared illegally in the bowels of subway stations, in a city that used to guard every legal pushcart permit, jealously and with abundant documentation.
In city parks, couples who were recent arrivals, laughed as their children did things that are considered impolite or inappropriate here, such as engaging in overt sexualized play. A lot of weird public sexuality took hold of the city, as there were no longer shared cultural mores. I witnessed at least one single man masturbating while stretched out on a park bench, looking at porn on his phone, quite oblivious to passers-by, including children. I had the misfortune of taking a cab with a recently arrived driver who was watching porn on his phone as he drove. Someone else posted a video of an immigrant couple apparently having intercourse while zipped up into a sleeping bag, in full daylight in Prospect Park. Foreign adult men stood creepily outside the skating rink in the same park, where kids skated, eyeing the young girls hungrily. People urinated on traffic medians, and defecated down alleyways, and spat in gutters.
It was just an avalanche of gross habits, which are not considered socially acceptable here, but that no social barriers now prevented; imagine them scaled by the tens of thousands.
Taking the subways had become terrifying. People shouted on subway cars, or fought with one another. A lot of men with Central American gang tattoos appeared. Aggression and violence seemed just below the surface. That wry New York City chit chat, that pleasant or whimsical interaction with the stranger, was gone, seemingly for good. We all sat, on our journeys, in tense apprehension, closed in on ourselves. No one gestured to anyone to go first; opening doors for one another was a memory of the past.
Then there was the noise. It became deafening. I have mentioned in "What is a Culture?", the horror of being stuck on a subway car or on a train, surrounded by the deluge of people listening aloud to telenovelas or comedy shows on their phones, while using no headphones. There was no silence to be had in any public space any longer. This devolved into a genuine torment.
Then — Inauguration Day came.
On January 21, 2025, I took a flight to Toronto. On the subway that day, I noticed that things were very quiet. On my flight to Canada, almost the entire flight consisted of recent arrivals to America; they were mostly Haitian, Central American, and, for some reason, the flight included many Sikhs. These people had immense loads of luggage with them. It seemed as if they had given up and were leaving the United States. My intuition was confirmed when I saw most of them waiting to be processed at Immigration in Canada. Having fled the US, almost the entire planeload of people was intending to stay over the border, where regulations against at-will immigration, seemed almost non-existent.
The emotion on the flight, though, was not one of outrage or despair. While this is just a gut feeling, I felt that the energy among these people fleeing President Trump and ICE — for that was what was happening — was oddly calm and accepting, even resolute. It was a feeling of, "Well, we got caught. Fair enough."
The Canadian officials processing the newcomers, looked as pained as our Border Patrol had done, back in the bad old days of the Biden administration. The officials asked the arrivals if they knew anyone in Toronto or had any means of support, and when little evidence to that effect was forthcoming, they bitterly enough had to just wave them onward to sign up for Canadian benefits and take up their residency in the country.
Please fast forward. It is now only March. There have been dramatic crackdowns against illegal immigration across the United States. President Trump has revoked legal status for 530,000 entrants into the country. Members of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang, were dramatically deported to a violent prison, the transfer of humans complete with images of chains and shaved heads. Thousands of agents have been directed to assist with this crackdown on illegal immigration — meaning, that agents are being allowed at last to do their jobs.
What is amazing is how New York City feels now. You look around and it is so much less...crowded. Many people across the country are noticing that malls during the day now are almost empty; parks and subways, are so much less full. People are vertiginously realizing how many, how very many, people in America were in fact here illegally. And Americans are processing how much money, taxpayer money, went into giving these millions of strangers, benefits that we ourselves never had.
It is hard to describe in detail, but the social contract in New York feel as if it is back. We are almost all, of whatever race, ethnicity or country of national origin, Americans again, or lawfully visiting. It feels extraordinarily peaceful; and restful. Taking subways, that arterial experience that binds all New Yorkers, is fine once again. No one is listening to a phone aloud, and if they do, other passengers gently shush them with a look.
This is our home. This is our home.
The ability to police and defend one's own national border is an existential need; we need to know who lives in our home; we need to know that these are people we affirmatively desire; we need to know that we have made them part of our national family; and we need to know that our boundaries are secure.
This need has been part of our basic consciousness since the dawn of human history.
I had lunch with an old friend from the "Before" times, a famous liberal; he remarked, as we skirted around my defection to a more libertarian view, that he felt that conservatives, in relation to the immigration issue, "lack compassion."
I don't agree. I think conservatives and libertarians have compassion for ourselves first — our kids, our elders, our own homes. That is the resonance of the phrase "America First". And the country is divided now into people to whom this form of compassion makes absolute, existential sense, and people who have been propagandized to see compassion for one's own nation, family, city, homeland, as being cruel.
But this issue is everything. This is why the Democrats lost, and President Trump won; this, I would say, above all. It is astonishing to me, speaking as a former Democrat, that the Left still does not see it - does not understand why "ordinary" Americans from across every political divide, would be fed up with handing our treasure over — by the billions - to welcome people who have nothing to do with us, and who are flouting our laws.
Someday, maybe, the Democrats will wake up to the resonance of this issue - what it means to have, maintain, defend and protect one's own home.
In the meantime, a revolution is at hand. America rose up in November of last year and rejected Mr Global, and his plans to annihilate us via the weaponization of masses and masses of humans.
Europe is rising up as well.
This decade may well turn out to be the decade that the idea of globalization and mass, culturally murderous migration, died, with a stake through its heart.
This may well be the decade when something we were told was dead altogether - the idea, at its best, of a nation-state, with a national culture and language; the idea of the beauty and the ethical value of maintaining sovereign nations and caring for sovereign cultures — came roaring back to life, and that, with a vengeance.