Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I’d like to talk about immigration, legal and illegal. Under President Joe Biden, we let in an estimated 2 million illegal immigrants and about 1 million legal immigrants. We’re starting to see some of the consequences that happen when you don’t vet people at the border. We have, over the years, a massive Somali expatriate population in Minnesota. Now we are learning that during the COVID-19 period, when there were not audits and scrutiny, as there should have been, a lot of Somali expatriates, both legal citizens and green card holders and illegal aliens, ran a massive fraud against their adopted country, perhaps multibillion. And Rep. Ilhan Omar, the self-appointed representative and the elected representative of the Somali community, has denied anything was wrong. Tim Walz, who is the governor of Minnesota, doesn’t wanna talk about it. That entire community abused the hospitality that was accorded to them. Now we hear that an Afghan refugee who came in, largely unvetted, they say he was militarily vetted, but that doesn’t—that’s not the same criteria for someone that we want to bring in and accord enormous generosity to: give him a subsidized apartment, let him, his wife, and five children have access to it and subsidies with it ahead of normal U.S. citizens. And he repays that gratitude with what? He drives across the country and executes a young National Guardsman from West Virginia and almost fatally wounds—seriously wounds—his companion. Murders one and tries the murder of the other, who’s in critical condition. As what? Thanks for the generosity that was accorded to them? Almost daily, we hear of an illegal alien who is involved in a DUI and kills innocents on the road. We hear about murders. And we’re kind of tired of it, and we’re reexamining immigration. We all understand that illegal immigration is clearly wrong. You cannot come into the country without legal authorization, and if you are here illegally, then you should return to your home. I think all Americans agree with that. They may disagree about the tactics of finding illegal immigrants. It’s much easier to destroy the border and allow 10,000 people to come across a day than it is the hard work of finding them and then rounding them up when they don’t wanna go back home, and then having the Left champion them as if they’re saviors or heroes or something for breaking the U.S. immigration law. But I want to get back to just a larger issue of immigration. Something is wrong with all of this because we are not inculcating immigration—talking about it in the way that we used to talk about it. We’re talking about it in the salad bowl, not the melting pot. We’re assuming that people that come in here, when—the moment they arrive, they have grievances against this country. They’ve been victims of oppression. We don’t really audit them legally. We don’t say to them, “We want you to know English. We want you to respect our laws. We want you to be acquainted with our traditions and customs and history, and we insist that you acculturate, you integrate, and you assimilate and do full American citizenship.” We don’t do that. And so, we have truck drivers who are here both legally and illegally who don’t speak English, they don’t read English. And yet, out of our kindness, our naivete, or stupidity, we give them driver’s licenses. And the result is they’re killing people on American freeways. And yet, we can’t object because we feel that we’re going to be illiberal. So, what is the solution? The solution is to rethink legal immigration. It should be much smaller, maybe 200,000 or 300,000, a number that we feel we can comfortably and easily assimilate. They must come in with knowledge of the English language. They should have some skill sets, so they do not become wards of the local, state, or federal government. And most importantly, we have to have a civic education program in K-12 and outreach to them that explains, “You wanted to come to our country. We don’t wanna go to your country. You made the decision. You said that you wanted to give up your homeland, your customs, everything about it, and transfer across the ocean to the United States. If you wanted to do that, then we can accommodate you, but it’s going to be brutal. You’re going to be an American citizen first and a Somali or an Indian or a Mexican or a Guatemalan second. You’ll be fully assimilated. But don’t come over here and then congregate in a community where you speak your native language and you break our laws, and you feel that you can do so with impunity, as if you’re some victim on a Marxist binary of victim/victimizer, oppressed/oppressor. It’s not gonna work.” Yes, we are a nation of immigrants*. We’re a nation of legal immigrants whose first mission upon arrival in America was to be a better American than a native-born American. And many millions were. I don’t think that is the case now, and the fault is not just with the immigrant, it’s with us. We ask nothing of the immigrant. So little confidence, perhaps, we had in our own culture and civilization, we were derelict. And it’s the 11th hour, and if we don’t change rapidly in our approaches to legal immigration, we’re gonna end up and have a rendezvous with the European disaster and tragedy. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. 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