"Through much of the 19th century, noncitizen voting expanded alongside U.S. territorial gains..."

"(the government offered the vote to Europeans who helped dispossess Indians and colonize the West). But in the mid- to late 1800s, immigrants started to become scapegoats for changes that native-born Americans saw as threatening.... Confederates banned immigrant suffrage during the Civil War because they thought migrating Europeans were anti-slavery, while northern states rolled back voting rights in reaction to waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century, which they associated with crime. By 1926, no state let noncitizens vote in federal elections. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, making noncitizen voting in federal elections a crime...."

Writes Zak Cheney-Rice, in "The Fear of Noncitizen Voting/For Trump, it is the death of America. For liberals, 'Woke 1' excess. Why is noncitizen voting so terrifying?" (New York Magazine).

"It recounts an immigrant’s life story, told by a Mexican construction worker who toiled, prospered, became an American citizen..."

"... and brought up American children, including a son lost in Afghanistan. 'They were raised to believe in this country,' he sings, heaving a sigh that speaks volumes before continuing, 'that I barely recognize now.' Widowed and alone, all too aware of brutal immigration arrests, he’s going back to his long-ago Mexican hometown."

That's a description of the song "Volver a Celaya," by Steve Earle and Los Lobo, in "9 Songs We’re Talking About This Week/Karol G returns, Steve Earle and Los Lobos link up and Temper City climbs the charts" (NYT gift link).

Listen to the recording here. Live performance here. Lyrics here, which, despite the title, are in English. 

"On a beach next to the border, hundreds of people who had crossed over gathered under the scorching sun."

"But Soufiane ez Znafry, 26, said that many were turning back because they were hungry. 'We have not eaten in two days,' he said, adding that all the supermarkets in the area had closed and that his stomach was 'growling.' He had rushed from Tangier on Thursday after friends told him they were heading to Spain. He said he barely scrapes by in Morocco working as a sous-chef. In the rush, carrying only a bag containing some clothes and a few possessions, he did not tell his parents that he was leaving. 'I did not want to worry them,' he said...."

From "Live Updates: Tens of Thousands Crossed Into Spanish Territory, Officials Say/As many as 60,000 people were estimated to have surged from Morocco into Ceuta, creating a crisis for Spain’s pro-immigration government. At least 34 people died, officials said" (NYT gift link).

"[A]nti-queer' crimes more than tripled in [Berlin] between 2016 and 2025. Violent anti-queer crimes rose by half."

"Both violent and nonviolent offenses peaked in 2023 and have fallen since the city began its strategy, but both types of crimes remain historically elevated.  Much of that effort has focused on countering growing hostility from Germany’s far right; in Berlin, far-right ideology was the most frequently cited specific motivation for homophobic attacks in the city in 2025. But on Sunday, after the authorities said the perpetrator had attempted to join the Islamist terrorist group ISIS, community leaders said they were increasingly worried about threats from a wider range of political and religious motivations...."

From "Even Before Attack, Berlin’s Gay Community Felt ‘More and More Unsafe’/The killing of a woman in what officials called an act of Islamist terrorism rattled a community that has seen a surge in threats, including from the far right" (NYT gift link).

"Some people at the memorial on Sunday said German leaders had contributed to a sense of insecurity. They singled out the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which has climbed in national polls with a platform that defines a family as a man and a woman with children. Others criticized Friedrich Merz, the chancellor, who defended a decision not to fly a Pride flag over the federal parliament building last year by saying Parliament was 'not a circus tent.'..."

"Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit."

Writes JD Vance:

"Opening Japan’s doors more widely to foreigners could help offset the declines. But the government has long taken a cautious approach to immigration..."

"... and nationalist politicians and commentators have gained influence recently with a 'Japan First' agenda. 'Japan has now reached a level where this kind of decline is not reversible in the short- or medium-run' said James Raymo, a professor of sociology at Princeton University who studies Japan. 'It simply will not happen in the absence of mass immigration.'... Professor Raymo said the Japanese government’s efforts to promote fertility had 'not really moved the needle.' He said that ultimately Japan could provide lessons for other governments...."

From "How Japan Lost 3 Million People in Five Years" (NYT).

I'd like to hear something of what Japanese experts think about mass immigration as a solution. 

"If that’s what 'woke' means, it explains why most Americans don’t want to be woke."

"Transgender adults should have the freedom to live as they see fit and that includes the option to pursue elective medical procedures. But why should that choice come at taxpayer expense, especially for noncitizens? If the fiscal well-being of California isn’t incentive enough to crack down on such wasteful mismanagement of tax dollars, then maybe Newsom’s political future is. The outgoing governor seems determined not to learn from the failure of another California Democrat. The most devastating attack ad against Kamala Harris in 2024 featured her saying during her previous presidential campaign that she supported taxpayers picking up the tab for federal prisoners to receive gender transition care...."

Writes the Editorial Board of The Washington Post, in "Gavin Newsom chooses the wrong side of gender politics again/Sex changes for illegal immigrants might sound like a Republican ad, but it’s California policy."

"We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody's going to write that children's story about Minnesota."

Said Tim Walz, quoted in "Tim Walz condemned for comparing Minnesota children to Anne Frank" (USA Today).

I suppose the condemnation is about equating what happened to Anne Frank to what is happening to the deportees, but I'd like to throw in a little additional condemnation for not knowing enough about Anne Frank's writing. She wasn't a person with a story to tell. It was "The Diary of a Young Girl." Very little of the book is about the larger political drama that forced her to hide indoors. It's about her life as a young girl, and we, the readers, bring the larger context of the Nazis and how she was captured and died. That story is not in her book, which is about the inward life of a young girl. Anne Frank was an excellent writer, and the world lost her. I hope there's a similarly excellent writer enduring the present-day ordeal, but literary art is something beyond having a good story to tell.

Does Tim Walz even know the book he calls a "children's story"? Anne Frank was 13 to 15 years old when she wrote her diary, and much of it is about emerging sexual feelings — especially the "Definitive Edition." It’s quite striking: "Until I was eleven or twelve, I didn't realize there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn't see them. Moreover, I thought the little tube you use to urinate out of was uninteresting.... When you're standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between the outer labia are the inner ones... The entrance to the vagina is hidden between them.... The clitoris.... is particularly sensitive."

See "Which Version of The Diary of Anne Frank Is Best?" (Redeemed Reader): "The Definitive Edition includes a section in which she decides 'losing your virtue doesn’t matter' under the right circumstances (Thursday, March 2, 1944). Both editions imply that she is chafing under their circumstances and that both sets of parents disapprove of the time she and Peter spend together in Peter’s room; the diary implies that not much more than kissing is happening.... Obviously, there’s nowhere in public for Anne and Peter to go on dates; just as obvious, though, is that two young people in love are playing with fire to spend lots of unchaperoned time in a person’s bedroom."

"The last thing we need to do, again, is to make the same mistake when it comes to 'Defund the Police' rhetoric."

"That ended up not actually helping communicate what people wanted. People want a slimmed-down ICE that is truly focused on security."

Said Senator Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona, quoted in "Abolish ICE? It’s a Slogan Some Democratic Critics of ICE Would Abolish/As Democrats grow more alarmed about the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration raids in American cities, some worry that calls to eliminate the agency will distract from efforts to rein it in" (NYT).

Third Way, a centrist Washington-based think tank, released a memo [saying]... “Every call to abolish ICE risks squandering one of the clearest opportunities in years to secure meaningful reform of immigration enforcement — while handing Republicans exactly the fight they want”.... 

“The radical ‘Abolish ICE’ crusade from far-left Democrats seemed like a relic of the past, but it’s the brand-new litmus test for Democrats who are barely hanging on and begging on their knees to get approval from their socialist base,” [said a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee].

"Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes..."

"... by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.... Outrage has swelled among Minnesotans.... Gov. Tim Walz and fellow Democrats are being asked to explain how so much money was stolen on their watch.... Many Somali Americans in Minnesota say the fraud has damaged the reputation of their entire community, around 80,000 people, at a moment when their political and economic standing was on the rise.... Critics of the Walz administration say that the fraud persisted partly because state officials were fearful of alienating the Somali community in Minnesota.... The episode has raised broader questions for some residents about the sustainability of Minnesota’s Scandinavian-modeled system of robust safety net programs bankrolled by high taxes...."

I'm reading "How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch/Prosecutors say members of the Somali diaspora, a group with growing political power, were largely responsible. President Trump has drawn national attention to the scandal amid his crackdown on immigration" (NYT).

"For the past two decades, the flamboyant right-wing leader has made the fight against immigration —and against Islam, in particular — the centrepiece of his political offer."

"His reward came in the last election in November 2023 when the PVV became the dominant force in a four-party coalition.... Wilders has maintained an unrelenting focus on immigration. One of his most discussed — and complained about — postings on X juxtaposed half the face of a blue-eyed young woman with long blonde hair labelled PVV with half of an older woman in a headscarf marked PvdA, the initials of the rival Labour party. Underneath it read: “The choice is yours on 10/29.”

From "Dutch towns rocked by anti-immigration protests ahead of election/With polls fast approaching, Geert Wilders has seized upon the recent violence to aid his anti-Islamic agenda" (London Times).

Here's that image:

That is much more intense than anti-immigrant material I've seen in the United States. I believe it is too crude to work as propaganda in the U.S.

"The pope, who did not single out any country for its treatment of migrants, called on Catholics to 'open our arms and hearts to them, welcoming them as brothers and sisters, and being for them a presence of consolation and hope.'"

Reuters reports.

A liar or just woefully ignorant?

lol
pic.twitter.com/G4GSTfijFR

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 2, 2025

The hand-raising at the June 27, 2019 Democratic candidates debate is a powerful visual retort, but when I click the fact-check icon at Franken's post, X's own AI says:

• Al Franken's post critiques Vice President JD Vance's recent claim during a 2025 government shutdown debate that Democrats seek to provide health benefits to undocumented immigrants, framing it as either deliberate falsehood or profound misunderstanding. 

• Vance's statement targets a Democratic funding proposal to reimburse states for emergency Medicaid services to "lawfully present" immigrants, such as refugees and asylees, but federal law explicitly bars undocumented individuals from enrolling in such programs. 

• Independent fact-checks, including from FactCheck.org and The New York Times, describe the Republican portrayal as misleading, as it exaggerates limited emergency reimbursements into broad taxpayer-funded coverage for all

"The Democrats onstage saw themselves as morally courageous. American voters, it turned out, saw a group of politicians hopelessly out of touch."

"Standing side by side at a primary debate in June 2019, nine of the party’s candidates for president were asked to raise their hand if they wanted to decriminalize illegal border crossings. Only one of them held still. Six years later, the party remains haunted by that tableau. It stands both as a vivid demonstration of a leftward policy shift on immigration that many prominent Democratic lawmakers and strategists now say they deeply regret, and as a marker of how sharply the country was moving in the other direction."

I'm reading "Can Democrats Find Their Way on Immigration? The party’s leftward shift in the Biden administration arguably laid the groundwork for President Trump’s aggressive approach. Deciding the next move won’t be easy" (NYT)(free-access link).

"The next move" = it's a game. You can't win the confidence of the people if they can see it's a game. 

What can you do to demonstrate/fake sincerity? The old plan was to denounce Trump as a racist, and there are still prominent Democrats like Ayanna Pressley, who's quoted saying: "Democrats have to stop talking about the issue of immigration within a Republican frame. This has nothing to do with law and order. This is about power, control, terror, and it is about racism and xenophobia. Donald Trump wants to make America Jim Crow again, and then some."

French police "charged into the water with knives to slash a rigid inflatable boat (rib), which migrants were scrambling to board."

I'm reading "French police use knives to puncture migrant dinghies in the sea/The tactic, used for the first time, is a ‘precursor’ to a change of French maritime law that will allow officers greater powers to prevent Channel crossings" (London Times).

"A prolific criminal who threatened to behead Aled Jones and attacked a Bridgerton actress was not deported back to Algeria as he was under 18, the Home Office has said."

"Zacariah Boulares admitted stealing a phone from Genevieve Chenneour, 27, and assaulting another customer when he appeared at Westminster magistrates’ court last month. The Algerian, now 18, has 12 previous convictions relating to 28 offences, magistrates heard, which include stealing a Rolex watch worth £20,000 from a 78-year-old man at Paddington station in May 2023. In July 2023 Boulares threatened to behead Jones, 54, the Songs of Praise presenter, and cut off his arm when he stole his Rolex Daytona watch in Chiswick, west London. He pleaded guilty to robbery and possession of an offensive weapon and was given a 24-month detention and training order. He was released after 14 months...."

I'm reading "Thief who attacked Bridgerton actress was too young to be deported/Zacariah Boulares, who stole from the actress Genevieve Chenneour, has 12 convictions but was not returned to Algeria as he was under 18" in The London Times.

The "Oh no, not work!" guy is so repulsive that I had to wonder if he is an actor deliberately evoking our disgust.

"Oh no, not work!"pic.twitter.com/RSfBNl90j9

— Stephen Knight 🎙️ (@GSpellchecker) June 12, 2025

The lovely black woman also seems perfectly cast.

But I'll assume they are real people in a real confrontation. Somebody's there with the camera, and they know it, but everything's in front of cameras these days. Human behavior is behavior for the camera now. Is this scene real? It's real in today's terms — real and very viral.

The scene is so perfect: The ordinary person, burdened in her daily life, is so reasonable, so appealing, and the man, cocksure in his cause, is so enragingly and hilariously awful. His cause is, to him, so obviously more important than her work. But what is his cause? It is, ironically, persons of color getting to work in the United States of America.

"[Geert] Wilders’s party — which has advocated banning the Quran, closing Islamic schools and entirely halting the acceptance of asylum seekers..."

"... won the largest number of seats in November 2023 elections, sending shock waves through the Dutch political system. Mr. Wilders was able to form a government with three other right-wing parties... after more than six months of wrangling.... Mr. Wilders had aimed to bring the 'strictest migration policy ever' to the Netherlands, something his governing partners had said they agreed with. In May 2024, the four parties reached a deal that included 'the strictest asylum admission policy and the most comprehensive migration control package ever.' But Mr. Wilders said that implementation was not going quickly enough. Last week he said he wanted to add 10 more proposals... includ[ing] calls for a complete halt to asylum, a temporary stop to family reunions for asylum seekers who had been granted refugee status and the return of all Syrians who had applied for asylum or were in the Netherlands on temporary visas. The leaders of the other coalition parties said that while they did not oppose Mr. Wilders’s plans, they wanted him to propose them in the House of Representatives. That would have taken longer and would not have guaranteed implementation...."

From "Dutch Government Collapses Over Migration Dispute/The populist Geert Wilders withdrew his right-wing party from the ruling coalition, saying partners were stalling plans for the Netherlands’ 'strictest migration policy ever'" (NYT).

About that proposal to ban the Quran — as reported in January 2024, after the election and before the formation of the coalition — "Dutch anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders has withdrawn a 2018 proposal to ban mosques and the Quran" (Independent). The proposal denounced Islam as a "violent, totalitarian ideology."

"I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly."

"And so that's not because I hate the migrants or I'm motivated by grievance, that's because I'm trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation. And I don't think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly."

Said JD Vance on the new episode of Ross Douthat's "Interesting Times" podcast — audio and transcript at Podscribe.

Douthat was challenging him to coordinate his political thinking with his Catholicism. To quote a bit more of what Vance said:

"The world’s first modern art museum celebrating migration opens on Thursday in the Dutch port of Rotterdam...."

"Dominated by a giant, futuristic, silver staircase at its centre — to symbolise movement — the Fenix museum is in the eye of a political storm and a populist backlash against mass immigration in Europe and across the Atlantic in the US. The museum is housed in what was once the world’s biggest warehouse next to the port’s famous 'Holland-Amerika' pier, where millions of European migrants left Europe for America in the 19th and 20th centuries.... 'These docks witness the departures of millions, including among them iconic figures like Albert Einstein, the actor Johnny Weissmuller and artists Willem de Kooning and Max Beckmann — and welcomed just as many arrivals, shaping the vibrant, multicultural city that is Rotterdam today,' [said Anne Kremers, the museum’s director]."

From "Tornado-shaped museum invites political storm with art of migration/As Geert Wilders’ government clamps down on immigration, the Fenix museum in Rotterdam aims to show that the movement of people ‘has always been there’" (London Times).

You can see some pictures of the architecture here (at Archipanic). It's ugly from some angles, kind of cool from others, but doesn't seem to relate to the desperation of mass migration. It's coldly abstract and design-y. You may like it if you're the sort of person who wishes Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum had been built out of stainless steel.

It's kind of funny to see Johnny Weissmuller extolled alongside Albert Einstein and Willem de Kooning, but I am not the arbiter of icons, and I wandered off into the Wikipedia article on Weissmuller: