Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
We all know that there are jobs that Americans won’t do. That’s what the politicians who don’t want Americans doing them tell us. If an industry is dominated by immigrants or illegal aliens, they say that it’s because Americans won’t do these jobs.
But when immigrants and aliens dominate certain types of crime, is it because there are some crimes that Americans won’t commit?
Like kidnapping?
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, 42.4 percent of federal kidnapping convictions are of non-citizens. Non-citizens also account for 31.5 percent of federal drug convictions. Even though they’re only 8.4% of the population. Obviously there aren’t enough Americans to commit these crimes.
We need immigrants to commit the kidnappings and drug crimes that Americans just won’t do.
What’s behind the kidnapping exceptionalism?
Federal kidnapping charges often involve human trafficking. And human trafficking is one of those jobs that Americans aren’t doing. Federal kidnapping charges have also been leveled at members of the violent MS-13 gang whose cause has now become popular on the open borders left. In one MS-13 murder in a Washington D.C. bedroom community, the suspects were hit with kidnapping charges that were easier to prove. MS-13’s habit of abducting and murdering its victims helps raise kidnapping rates.
“They kidnap, they extort, they rape and they rob,” President Trump declared. They certainly kidnap.
Over in New York, five MS-13 members and associates were caught trying to kidnap and randomly murder a 16-year-old. Prestige in the El Salvador gang comes from murder. Bodies of MS-13 initiation murders keep popping up in public parks near prominent locales. In Texas, two MS-13 gang members kidnapped three teenage girls, raped them and killed a 15-year-old girl in a “Satanic ritual”.
Maybe it’s a good thing that there are some crimes that Americans won’t commit. And we should keep it that way. Ending Temporary Protected Status for El Salvador keeps Americans safer.
In Virginia, a teenage girl can be seen confessing on video to the torture and murder of a 15-year-old girl. MS-13’s butchers stabbed her in the stomach, neck and chest. Video of the murder was sent to MS-13 leaders to win a higher status for the killers. Last year, the media had portrayed her as a victim.
In a gang culture, the monsters are everywhere. And they’re hard to tell apart from their victims.
The media is outraged that President Trump shut down TPS for El Salvador because the country is so violent. But if El Salvador isn’t even safe enough for its own citizens to return to, why would we want import its violence to America? Do the lives of Americans matter less than those of Salvadorans?
In the United States, MS-13 victims occasionally turn up in parks. In El Salvador, the bodies fill the fields.
“All those sugar cane fields in El Salvador are cemeteries. My son-in-law would remove bodies in pieces, thinking it was his son. Bodies missing legs, missing hands, missing their head,” one account describes.
It’s starting to happen in America. We should do everything possible to stop it before it gets worse.
When neighborhoods miles from the White House become MS-13 enclaves, the officials responsible for that disaster clearly feel that refugees from El Salvador are more entitled to safe and secure neighborhoods than Americans. And that’s exactly the mindset that President Trump ran against.
El Salvador has one of the highest murder rates in the world. At its peak a few years ago, it was living through a murder every hour. Kidnappings by MS-13 and other gangs are commonplace. But MS-13 and other gangs like it were actually formed by immigrants from El Salvador in the United States.
Immigration from El Salvador to the United States didn’t do either country any favors. It doesn’t make El Salvador any safer when its people have an easy way out of the country and when its gangs can build international networks. Immigration exported El Salvador’s problems to America and worsened them.
Immigration made America and El Salvador into more dangerous places. It didn’t solve anything.
The people fleeing drug gangs create niches for them in the United States. They don’t leave the social problems behind because they didn’t come out of thin air. They came out of people just like them. The sons they brought to escape the gang life end up joining the same gangs in the United States.
Immigration won’t break this cycle. Instead immigration perpetuates it.
The Salvadorans who flee MS-13 bring it with them. Their neighborhoods quickly develop an MS-13 presence. And bodies start showing up in the parks around major cities in the United States.
If a country has a major gang problem, immigration will spread it. If it has a drug culture, it will follow. If it has a terrorism issue, then there will be bombings wherever the new immigrants settle down.
The only way to avoid that is by absorbing the immigrants and limiting their numbers. Those are two policies that the left militantly opposes. And so we’re left with too many immigrants to absorb and no way to absorb them. Instead the poorest immigrants set up enclaves of their home country in America.
And those enclaves duplicate the conditions, threats and problems of their home countries.
The CIS statistics show a pattern of migrant exceptionalism in certain key areas: kidnapping, drug offenses, money laundering and assorted forms of fraud. There’s a pattern to this exceptionalism. The crimes in question are commonly the ones committed by organized criminal networks.
21.4% of Federal convictions were of non-citizens. It’s hard to ignore crime exceptionalism like that.
Federal kidnapping cases are unusual. That 42.4% still only adds up to 123 cases out of 290 over 5 years. That’s not a lot. Unless one of your children or neighbors becomes a victim. But there are other areas where non-citizen crime is far more prevalent. Take the 45,317 drug offenses, the 2,192 money laundering, racketeering and extortion convictions. (Not to mention the 134,709 immigration crimes.)
What the list does make clear is that just as domestic gangs are responsible for much of our murder rate in urban areas: foreign criminal organizations are having a dramatic impact on organized crime.
There may be no simple ceiling to how big and dangerous MS-13 can get.
In one poll, 42% of Salvadorans said that gangs rule their country. Only 12% believe the government is in control. When a past lefty government negotiated a truce with the gangs, millions of dollars were pumped into MS-13 which used the cash to develop a network of legitimate businesses .Now it finances entire legislatures and controls the outcome of elections in its territories.
And there are MS-13 outposts downwind of the White House.
Gangs already play a role in Chicago politics. And, like El Salvador’s left, the American left has built an unspoken alliance with gangs like MS-13 based around open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens.
That dirty alliance with organized crime is a threat to this country. MS-13 could easily corrupt the lefty allies of open borders as thoroughly as it corrupted the radical leftists in its own country.
Migration from broken countries doesn’t make us any stronger. It breaks us.
Unless we have a desperate need for gang members who will commit the kidnappings that Americans won’t, maybe it’s time to keep the kidnappers out of this country.
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