The idea the America can take in Afghans and migrants from other countries en masse and make them Americans is a fallacy, if you just look at the failure of Westernizing a country that quickly turned back to Taliban control, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio J.D. Vance told Newsmax.
"It just totally betrays everything that we learned over the last 20 years," Vance, a U.S. veteran of the Iraq War, said Wednesday on "Cortes & Pellegrino." "We cannot do it. And this conceit that we can just take everyone from across the world and turn them into Americans in half a generation, it's clearly not true.
"And I don't know why that they continue to pretend that it is."
Vance, author of "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis," noted that so-called sanctuary states and cities have crime and safety issues to prove we have enough problems at home to be inviting more issues we cannot handle.
"Look at our country," Vance told co-hosts Steve Cortes and Jenn Pellegrino. "We have an American elite that is unable to solve basic problems of crime and safety in our own country. Why do we need to add to those problems instead of solving the ones that we have.
"Of course, we don't. And it's evidence to the fact that our elites really don't care about the citizens who live in this country. It's just a total joke."
Vance pointed to Afghanistan polls showing that 40% of Afghans believe suicide bombings can be justified. He added that chain migration policies can turn 60,000 Afghan refugees into "400,000 really quickly," and even if 0.5% of them are radicalized to hate Americans, the odds are not in our favor.
"Our country is just not prepared for this," he said. "We're not ready for it. It's not good for our own citizens. We have to ask the question: Does this serve the interests of the American people? The answer is obviously no.
"The idea that you can bring in a thousand of a few hundred terrorists into this country without serious consequences is just a joke," he added. "Nobody believes it."
The U.S.-Mexico border is not secure either, so if Afghans are rejected for Special Immigration Visas, they could just walk across the border illegally and be released under President Joe Biden's catch-and-release policies.
"If they can't get in by air, they could just walk across the U.S.-Mexico border," Vance said. "I really think people are radically underappreciating what this means."
Some Democrats are calling some Americans racist for being insistent on legal immigration merely as a political weapon, according to Vance.
"Racism is not something progressives say because they care about judging those based on the color of their skin," he said. "It's not something that they're actually worried about at all. They use it as a rhetorical weapon: 'How dare you complain about how bad people might be coming into your country. If you do it, you're racist.'
"So it's actually not about building up our country. It's not about making people less judgmental toward their fellow Americans. It's actually about weaponizing our compassion for one another, so the progressives can gain more power and jam their agenda down our throats."
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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