A total of 219 people have been injured in clashes between football fans and police across France after Paris St-Germain (PSG) won the Champions League final against Arsenal.
It might have been the police who started the violence, in other words, and the only thing that we know about the non-police combatants is that they were “football fans”.
X perspective: the rioters were Muslims and/or “North African”.
The Muslim gang riots continue in Paris.
A huge fire was started at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.
Notice how they chant “Allahu Akbar.” This is a religious war, and this is their way of saying “we own the place now.” pic.twitter.com/MLXSc3IEXi
Nurul Amin, a 56-year-old grandfather despondent over broken American promises … he spoke no English, and was illiterate.
As a Rohingya, he was part of a Muslim minority essentially stripped of Myanmar citizenship decades ago and subjected ever since to an increasing repression of rights, the burning of mosques, the destruction of villages, even what the United States has called genocide.
After traveling more than 8,000 miles, Nurul Amin and part of his family arrived in the United States on Christmas Eve. Faisal bent down to touch the snow that symbolized their new reality: Buffalo.
“Very exciting,” he recalled.
Buffalo has benefited from the presence of families like Nurul Amin’s. Immigrants, including a Bangladeshi wave moving up from New York City, and refugees, including people from Myanmar, have revived dying neighborhoods, diversified the culture and spurred the city’s first growth since 1950, when it had more than double the current population of 278,000.
“You can’t have economic growth without population growth,” the mayor, Sean M. Ryan, said in an interview. “And the new Americans have been Buffalo’s economic lifeblood.”
Caseworkers for one of the city’s resettlement agencies, Jewish Family Services, moved the family to the ever-changing Black Rock neighborhood, where they settled into the top floor of a gray, Depression-era house.
Via the magic of federal welfare dollars, e.g., for Medicaid, SNAP, and public housing, even someone who speaks no English, is disabled, and can’t read can generate economic growth in the Rust Belt. Much of the money is skimmed off by taxpayer-funded nonprofit do-gooders:
Caseworkers for one of the city’s resettlement agencies, Jewish Family Services, moved the family to the ever-changing Black Rock neighborhood, where they settled into the top floor of a gray, Depression-era house. A caseworker helped them to adjust.
Donald Trump is the bad guy here:
Even worse, the president’s executive order also meant that Nurul Amin’s three older sons and their families in Malaysia would not be coming to the United States.
(This would have been an additional 20 immigrants who didn’t speak English?)
The hero of our story had a problem with the police that might have stemmed from the police officers’ inability to speak the Bangla and Rohingya languages that the new Americans we’re welcoming speak:
The two police officers who responded found a short, stocky man in the backyard and an aluminum shed with its door yanked off. They repeatedly ordered him to drop the poles, their voices rising with each new command, but he did not seem to understand. Where he came from, people in paramilitary uniforms represented oppression. … Nurul Amin became agitated. He began walking toward the officers, swinging the curtain rods and saying words they didn’t understand. Within 45 seconds of the officers’ arrival, there came the electrified crackle of Tasers. … He didn’t understand them any more than they understood him, as he recited, over and over, a prayer for help.
The jail is fully set up to accommodate Muslims, but the jailers might not have been fluent in the Bangla and Rohingya languages.
It is unclear if he knew how to use the commissary, or had access to halal food. “Information about special diets is provided to each incarcerated individual via the inmate handbook,” a spokesman for the Erie County Sheriff’s Office said in an email. But Nurul Amin could not read.
State-paid criminal justice officials try to avoid doing anything that would result in them losing federal welfare dollars via the migrant’s deportation:
Another Buffalo February set in. Nurul Amin had spent 12 of his 14 months in America behind bars.
His son Faisal was working part-time as a housekeeper at a downtown hotel. His son Yassin was in the fifth grade. They and their mother were living now in a cramped apartment across from the old Polish Catholic church, on Buffalo’s east side, where many of the city’s 2,000 Rohingya residents had settled.
Finally, the Erie County district attorney, Mike Keane, offered to end the case if Nurul Amin pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors. “My decision was the result of a comprehensive evaluation of his conduct, criminal history, acceptance of responsibility, medical condition, time served in pre-trial custody, and the proposed resolution,” Mr. Keane later said. “I also considered the significant collateral consequences that would result from a felony conviction — including mandatory deportation.”
(Had Nurul Amin Shah Alam been deported, the Buffalo economy would have shrunk.)
The wife and youngest son:
The tale of a man who might have lived happily among fellow Muslims in Malaysia has a sad ending. Border Patrol picks him up when he’s released from jail, but then decides that they can’t deport him because the state officials didn’t convict him of a felony. They drop him off in Buffalo at the home that taxpayers had previously been providing.
In its telling, the refugee who did not speak English agreed to be dropped off near his last known address, though a call to his family or lawyer would have revealed that the family now lived on the other side of the city. In its telling, the agreed-upon drop-off point was a coffee shop “determined to be a warm, safe location.”
At 8:19, a white van pulled into a darkened parking lot on Niagara Street, near the Tim Hortons with only its drive-thru open. A short man got out. He had no cellphone, no identification, no English skills, no reading skills and no true understanding of where he was.
The Department of Homeland Security would answer such criticism, in part, this way: “Another hoax being peddled by the media and sanctuary politicians to demonize our law enforcement. This death had NOTHING to do with Border Patrol. Mr. Shah Alam passed almost A WEEK AFTER he was released by Border Patrol.”
The refugee moved past the inaccessible Tim Hortons. Past the drifts and piles of shoveled snow. He raised his black hood and disappeared into the Buffalo mist.
Loosely related, I had ChatGPT check the above headline and our AI Overlord wasn’t happy at all.
“Disabled illiterate” is harsh headline language. It may be factual, but it foregrounds deficits and can sound contemptuous unless those facts are central to the story.
The suggested corrected headline assigns blame:
“Immigration system mishandles case of disabled, illiterate Rohingya man”
Maybe ChatGPT is correct. In our infinite wisdom we have set up a system where a Swiss physician fluent in four languages, including English, is barred from immigration while we preferentially admit people who can’t read and are comfortable only in a Rohingya- or Bangla-speaking environment in which women are covered in burqas.
California is an exemplar for what a lot of Americans want our nation to become. It is 28 percent immigrants, for example. Taxpayer-funded unlimited health care is a human right, including for the undocumented (except, bizarrely, Californians who say that they hate inequality stopped giving MediCal to undocumented new arrivals while preserving it for existing beneficiaries; of course, a newly arrived undocumented migrant disqualified from MediCal due to a completely arbitrary arrival date limit can always get taxpayer-funded care at the nearest emergency room). Any day now, California will ladle out massive quantities of taxpayer funds to those who identify as “African Americans” (a committee was formed (see below) after the legislature passed a law requiring… a committee to be formed).
The unfortunate recent shooting at a mosque in San Diego involved a diverse group of people from different cultures and ethnicities.
Americans can’t agree on the nature of the mosque. It served an entirely peaceful group of Muslims, according to the Righteous at Wikipedia. The peaceful Muslims are mostly notable for being the victims of hatred:
The mosque was the target of an attempted bombing on January 11, 1991. The attempt occurred during a period of high tensions as part of the Gulf War, and the mosque received a large volume of hateful phone calls. The bomb was later discovered to be defective
(No culprit was ever identified or arrested, according to Google AI.)
It was the home for 2 out of 19 of the 9/11 hijackers, according to the Deplorables at the New York Post and was a center for Jew-hatred:
More recently, Imam Taha Hassane has come under fire for his comments on the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
“This did not start last week or on October 7. This is the result of brutal Zionist occupation and genocide,” Hassane said in a video posted to social media days after the savage Hamas attack.
“Resistance is justified when people are under occupation and don’t let them change that narrative.”
His wife, Lallia Allali, allegedly posted graphic images of a “Jewish star murdering babies with ‘the devil is killing’” scrawl in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks
(The helpfulness of the mosque is confirmed by the National Commission on Terrorism Attacks Upon the United States (report).)
Two people who hated Jews killed another guy who hates Jews.
In other words, Californians from different backgrounds might be able to unite under an anti-Jewish political banner (perhaps, as with Zohran Mamdani, this will be styled as an “anti-Israel” banner, not too different from how German forward-thinkers rebranded crude “Jew-hatred”, offensive to middle-class Germans, to the scientific-sounding “antisemitism”, something that educated Germans could sign up for as a policy).
Except for agreement regarding the pernicious nature of Jews/Israelis, however, what do the people who currently live in California have in common? At one time, the answer might have been a shared economic interest. This was strained a bit during the early Silicon Valley boom, but the chip and electronics companies built factories in California as well as design labs. In the current AI boom, some people with IQs of 160-200 in the SF Bay Area work at desks and all of the high-value manufacturing happens in Taiwan. The data center construction and operation jobs that AI creates will nearly all be in states (and countries) other than California, which has a high cost of electric power. Absent state government confiscation and redistribution, it isn’t clear how profits from AI will reach Californians outside of the Bay Area (or even most of those who don’t work in AI and who live in the Bay Area).
Pew regarding the shift in data centers away from California:
The chart does a simple count, but because new data centers are much larger than ones built 20 or 30 years ago, California’s #3 position is misleading. ChatGPT says that California is a “legacy market” that has already been reduced to irrelevance:
If the shooters hadn’t killed themselves, in other words, they might have grown up to receive a state transfer of some wealth earned by Jensen Huang, but otherwise it is tough to see what connection or common cause they might have had with Jensen Huang or anyone else at NVIDIA. Same deal with the victim. Amin Abdullah, the security guard who perished in the attack, was a Muslim who worked at a mosque and was a father of eight children. What was his shared cultural or religious connection to a childless atheist working at a tech company and spending weekends at Pride events in San Francisco?
Note that with our asylum-based immigration system, I don’t think that the rest of the U.S. is far behind California in terms of being a random assemblage of humans with nothing in common. By design, the only thing that asylum-seekers have in common is that they didn’t like where they used to live. But California is a little ahead of the national trend.
As part of my April 2026 move-out-of-Cambridge experience, I went to the Home Depot in Somerville, Maskachusetts. Four “youths” were riding full-size e-bikes around the aisles. The checkout lady appeared to be a Somali and was in full Islamic attire. One of the young clerks was white and Following Science (wearing a surgical mask to protect him/her/zir/theirself against an aerosol virus), but mostly it was an environment that would have been alien to a working-class native-born American.
I remember Somerville as a white working-class suburb when I arrived at MIT in 1979 and we would head over to Somerville Lumber in Bennett’s station wagon to buy loft-building supplies for my dorm room (I don’t think MIT ever charged me for the wall damage done by the toggle bolts!). ChatGPT says that it was 95 percent white in 1980 vs. about 60 percent non-Hispanic white today.
Malden was another bastion of the white native-born working class. Today is at least 43 percent immigrant, as shown on this January 2019 PDF (perhaps Malden is up to 50% by now; MA was at 17% in 2019 (below) and today is closer to 20%).
The transformation seems to have occurred well prior to the Biden-Harris open borders period. Here’s some 2016 data on “newly diverse places” (as of 2016, non-Hispanic whites were already a minority in Malden):
Some specifics regarding Malden from the above, again using 2016 data:
Note that the newly diverse communities don’t include places where the decision-making high-income elites would be likely to live (Cambridge might appear to be an exception, but the city maintained an Underclass of Color even in the old days). It seems that the white working class in Massachusetts (voters without a college degree) actually voted against a continuation of the Biden-Harris open border policy by voting, in a narrow majority, for Donald Trump 2024. Naturalized immigrants are more likely to vote Democrat than native-born Americans. So it seems that the native-born white working class of Massachusetts voted solidly against this transformation and yet it was imposed on them.
Consider the effect on someone who grew up in Somerville or Malden and was 20 years old in 1980. This person is now 65 years old and, if still in his or her hometown, part of a literally alien society. Here’s old white guy/Senator Ed Markey at the Malden Islamic Center:
Maybe this particular old white guy wants to talk about the “victims of Gaza”, which the mosque seeks to support, but does the average native-born white person want to do that? In order to live in a society that resembles that one in which the Somerville or Malden Boomer grew up, he or she would have to move to The Villages (NW of Orlando), which is roughly 95 percent non-Hispanic white and only 5 percent foreign-born. (Moving to Florida isn’t as much of a financial win for a Maskachusetts peasant as it would be for an elite. Social Security income isn’t subject to state income tax, for example, and the state estate tax exempts the first $2 million in assets.)
Finally, a New England senator says that the U.S. is short by hundreds of hospitals for the existing population. At the same time, it makes sense to continue bringing in 1-2 million legal immigrants every year to add to the population that is facing the hospital shortage:
In the United States we need hundreds of new hospitals and health clinics.
We need thousands of new child care centers.
We need millions of new units of affordable housing.
We do NOT need to spend another $500 billion on the military for endless wars.
More recent new construction hasn’t replaced America’s graying housing stock, meaning the age of the median home is a record 44 years, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
The cost of home maintenance, even after accounting for broader inflation, has jumped. Structural repair costs grew by about 14.1% in real terms between 2022 and 2024, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Plumbing jumped by 23.6%. The increase reflects the rising cost of individual parts and labor, and the larger size of necessary repairs.
This is on top of the rising costs of home insurance, property taxes and homeowners association dues, which are making it prohibitive for many to simply own a home, not to mention buy one.
The newspaper says “it [is] prohibitive for many to simply own a home, not to mention buy one” and at the same time tells us that the U.S. should have increased immigration, i.e., more demand for a relatively fixed supply of houses.
Our shabby/old house by Palm Beach County standards is 23 years old and that puts us in the top 25 percent of home youth:
Getting close to my 4% number:
Financial advisers traditionally suggested setting aside 1% of a home’s value annually for upkeep, but many now argue that isn’t enough. While 1% may cover routine upkeep, 2% to 3% provides a more realistic cushion for expected maintenance, home-improvement projects and unexpected repairs, particularly for older homes, said Angie Hicks, co-founder of home-services company Angi.
The Americans who were most eager to lock themselves into their homes during coronapanic will now bear a heavy burden:
Forty-nine percent of all improvement spending is now for necessary replacements like HVAC that owners can’t delay, said Rachel Drew, director of Harvard’s Remodeling Futures Program. The financial burden is particularly heavy in regions like the Northeast, where homes tend to be older.
Speaking of old, the article highlights the inability of folks in the Northeast to adapt to changed circumstances:
Mindy and Joseph Mevorah own an 88-year-old colonial [“more than 3,500-square-foot”] in Sands Point, a New York City suburb with plenty of old homes that is often considered an inspiration for “The Great Gatsby.” The house is due for a new coat of paint, a task they know to approach with caution. … “A new brick next to an old brick would look terrible,” said Joseph, 66. … The Mevorahs have stayed in their home for 29 years … They have a pool that could be a draw for future grandchildren. … When replacing their copper gutters a few years ago, they considered switching to aluminum, which would have been cheaper, but ultimately stuck with copper to preserve the home’s integrity. After all, they expect to be there for many years to come.
A 66-year-old in Florida whose kids were grown wouldn’t stay in a 3,500-square-foot wreck of a house. The Floridian would recognize that different kinds of real estate are suitable for different phases of life and likely move to a condo or small new house.
Circling back to the immigration theme… how can end-of-career financially comfortable Americans who struggle to afford house maintenance imagine that the U.S. can afford to house tens of millions of additional welfare-dependent low-skill immigrants?
Kansas wildlife officials have removed more than 100,000 pounds of invasive Asian carp from the Kansas River over the past four years … They are known for growing quickly, consuming massive amounts of food and crowding out native species that rely on the same resources.
#Science: Immigrant animals make us worse off by “growing quickly, consuming massive amounts of food and crowding out native species that rely on the same resources” while immigrant humans make us better off (don’t breed, consume food, or crowd out natives from resources such as health care).
Sad to say, but it seems that the haters in Kansas hate Asians almost as much as the Harvard admissions office (deemed racists by the U.S. Supreme Court, a rare distinction!).
The Supreme Court recently ruled against a race-based congressional district in Louisiana. It was developed under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) in order to give Black voters a chance to elect a candidate of their choice. 1965 was the same year that we opened our borders via Hart-Celler. I’m curious to know how the laws were ever supposed to work together. It seems that the VRA envisioned a majority-minority split between just two groups: white and Black. After Hart-Celler, though, a state could easily have the following:
a white minority (under 50%)
an Asian-American minority (we’re informed that all varieties of Asians, including Indians and Samoans, can be lumped together under AANHPI, Asian American and Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islander) that wants to elect a fellow Asian-American, such as the noble Ted Lieu (proof that not everyone from Taiwan believes in a government that spends only 18% of GDP, including state/local)
a Black minority that wants to elect someone like Kamala Harris
a Hispanic minority that wants to elect someone Hispanic
an Arab minority that wants to elect a fellow Muslim Arab (BBC: “This month, the Midwestern city of 28,000 has reached a milestone. Hamtramck has elected an all-Muslim City Council and a Muslim mayor, becoming the first in the US to have a Muslim-American government. Once faced with discrimination, Muslim residents have become integral to this multicultural city, and now make up more than half its population.”)
If the VRA isn’t specifically limited to one racial group, which it doesn’t seem to be, who decides which of the above minorities will get its own district and which will see its votes diluted and its dreams denied?
Loosely related, in the Department of Diversity is Our Strength:
Miami, America's "most diverse" city, has the lowest rate of helping neighbors among the dozen most populous cities in the US.
States with the highest rates of "formal helping" — Utah, Wyoming, Minnesota and Maine — are among the least diverse in the US.https://t.co/2iBQ2Sb3qX
We’re informed that low-skill migrants make a country rich. If this is true, could there be any rational basis for opposing open borders? From Lionel Shriver’s A Better Life, a conversation between a Honduran and the 27-year-old son in her Brooklyn host family (“Big Apple, Big Heart” program):
“America is rich.”
“America is broke—thirty-three trillion dollars in debt, and a couple trill more every year.”
“Los inmigrantes take small money.”
“Small money adds up.”
“You is crowded? This house, three bedroom with nobody. In Honduras, thirty, forty people live here, no hay problema.”
“Okay, no, I’m not personally crowded.”
“You no pay. You no crowded. Why big feeling?”
“The ‘big feeling’ has to do with home. Home isn’t only a place; home is a big feeling. That you belong. That you can understand the people around you, and they can understand you, because you’re mostly the same.” Nico was struggling for a definition that didn’t stray into the tar pit of race. He resorted to Google’s conversation mode. “It’s about feeling comfortable and welcome and not having to try very hard. It’s a place where people laugh at your jokes, and you laugh at their jokes. You can sing some of the same songs. You watch some of the same TV programs. You know you can trust most people, and you know how to recognize the people you can’t trust. When your home fills up with people from somewhere else. Who speak different languages so you can’t understand each other. Who think different things. Who have no deep connection to your home, no ‘big feelings’ for your home. No history there. Who often . . .” Here he hesitated; this was awkward face-to-face, but he remembered Palermo’s unflattering characterization of her brother as only braving negative sentiments about people behind their backs. “Who often come to your home to take advantage, to see how much they can take. Well, then your home doesn’t seem like a home anymore. It seems like anywhere. It makes you sad.”
Of course, rich people in the U.S. can escape the above by moving, e.g., to an all-white ski town in the winter and an all-white beach town in the summer. The only migrants they’ll encounter are deferential service workers (i.e., servants). It is the middle-class resident of Dearborn, Michigan who might be forced by economics to stay in a neighborhood that has become almost entirely Arab-Muslim. It is the middle-class resident of Elmhurst, Queens who doesn’t have the resources to move away when every other family on the block speaks primarily Mandarin.
(I recently met a reasonably-rich-via-trust-fund older lady who’d moved after decades in Key Biscayne, Florida. It was mostly non-Hispanic white when she moved there. It’s now over 70 percent Latinx. Despite being a lifelong Democrat, she unashamedly said that she’d moved to Florida’s Treasure Coast because she was tired of hearing Spanish spoken all the time and not being able to communicate with everyone she encountered in a shared language (she hadn’t learned significant Spanish). ChatGPT: “Key Biscayne went from almost entirely non-Hispanic in 1960 to a Hispanic-majority community by ~2000, and today is roughly two-thirds Hispanic.”)
Loosely related, a visualization of migration into Europe. It would be interesting to see one for the 70+ million migrants who’ve entered the U.S. since 1976 (Pew).
It’s one thing to see a graph saying, “12 million illegal migrants entered Europe since 2008.”
It is possible to see a visualization of “illegal immigrants” (the undocumented, in other words), but only since 2020. And the people who’ve transformed the U.S. in the most profound ways have been legal immigrants.
Happy Tax Week for those dumb enough to work and pay federal personal income tax (about half of us, as Mitt Romney famously noted)…
I hope that all of you put extra postage on your tax payments this year since the money needs to go all the way to Somalia and Diego Garcia. Maybe with enough undocumented low-skill migrants our economy will be so rich that none of the native-born will have to pay taxes? There are some statistics hidden in “To File or Not to File: Undocumented Immigrants Face a Tax Return Dilemma” (New York Times):
The federal treasury could take a hit. Many undocumented immigrants have taxes withheld in every paycheck, but experts worry some could shift into under-the-table jobs. Others with less formal earnings may now skip filing a tax return — and therefore not pay federal taxes at all. The Yale Budget Lab, a nonpartisan research center, projected lost tax revenue of about $300 billion over a decade.
Yale estimated that we were being enriched by 22 million undocumented migrants in 2016, which would mean a population of approximately 30 million enrichers today without legal immigration status. If we divide $300 billion by 30 million and then by 10 years we get $1,000/year paid by each enricher into a welfare state where each dependent family costs nearly $100,000 per year (some data in pre-Biden dollars). A different study in the same article works out to about $2,000/year paid per undocumented migrant:
Before the agreement between the I.R.S. and ICE, unauthorized immigrants paid roughly $60 billion annually in federal taxes, according to an estimate by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a progressive think tank. Much of it went to Social Security and Medicare, which are programs that undocumented immigrants cannot benefit from.
(I think the last sentence is factually incorrect, despite the NYT’s claims of checking facts. As soon as an undocumented immigrant’s anchor baby turns 21, the undocumented migrant is immediately eligible for a green card and, thus, immediately eligible to receive Social Security and Medicare.)
The New York Times repeats the absurd statistic that the number of undocumented migrants in the U.S. has barely grown over the past 30 years, even during the Biden-Harris administration’s open border period (see the Yale study: “There’s a number that everybody quotes”):
About 14 million undocumented immigrants lived in the United States in 2023, the latest available estimate, and about 70 percent of them were in the labor force, according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank.
Department of Undocumented Migrants Aren’t Getting Welfare:
But last year’s Republican tax law cut off the child tax credit, which had been available to families if a child was a U.S. citizen.
(A cash handout from federal taxpayers (“the chumps”) isn’t “welfare”, apparently.)
The child tax credit by itself is $2,200, $1,700 of which is “refundable” (i.e., if you don’t owe any tax because you don’t work or have a low income then you get $1,700 anyway). So the child tax credit alone is larger than even the largest estimate of taxes paid per undocumented migrant.
As 18-year-olds and their parents manage their grief over the stack of rejections received from elite colleges, here’s a Wall Street Journal article for those who were rejected by Duke (95 percent rejection rate): “He Had a Full Ride at Duke—Until America Cut Him Off”.
(This article could also be inspiring to Americans graduating next month from Duke with crushing student loan debt. They can sleep easier knowing that some of the money they borrowed and must pay back (unless Kamala Harris is defrosted and elected?) was used to give “a full ride” to a migrant.)
The villain of the article is Donald Trump, of course, referenced 6 times. Here’s a peculiar Trump reference. The South Sudanese are so smart that they thrive at Duke, but they aren’t smart enough to realize that any migrant is an enricher. They refused to accept a migrant on the grounds that he was Congolese rather than South Sudanese:
Trump’s displeasure with South Sudan began when it refused to accept a man being deported by the U.S. The man was Congolese, South Sudanese officials said, but the administration didn’t want to take no for an answer.
South Sudan has a GDP per capita of less than $400. We’re informed that migrants are an economic boon to any nation. Why doesn’t South Sudan want to become richer by accepting migrants from Congo?
A separate question: if migrants enrich the U.S. as a whole, why are migrants at Duke being funded by American students paying tuition at Duke? Shouldn’t full tuition for migrants be paid with federal tax dollars on the grounds that every migrant makes the U.S. better off?
