In case you’ve been blissfully unaware, one of the greatest and most iconic cities in American history could be on the precipice of irreversible destruction.

No, I’m not talking about Los Angeles, or San Francisco, or Boston, or Chicago, or Seattle, or… You know what? This is getting depressing, so let’s just move on to the actual issue at hand.

New York City has decided that Zohran Mamdani, a self-avowed Muslim socialist, is the best the city’s Democratic Party has to offer in the forthcoming mayoral race.

Given Mamdani’s pro-terror, anti-Israel stances, that’s not a good thing. Just look at Chicago.

So how did we get here?

The easy answer is that illegal immigration played a huge role in this. Many of New York City’s ills — which also afflict those aforementioned once-iconic American cities — can be traced back to a porous immigration policy that placed some misguided sense of “compassion” over American pragmatism.

Mamdani’s just smart enough to capitalize on that, as his new political surge has shown.

There’s a reason that President Donald Trump and his administration have made illegal immigration such a focal point of their platform.

But as Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk astutely observed, it’s not just illegal immigration that can pose a grave danger to America.

Even legal immigration has its pitfalls:

The lesson from New York City is that BOTH illegal and legal immigration can ruin your country. It’s not just the open border, it’s also our suicidal mass LEGAL migration policies bringing in over 1 million people a year: green cards, chain migration, refugee resettlement, anchor…

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) June 25, 2025

“The lesson from New York City is that BOTH illegal and legal immigration can ruin your country,” Kirk posted Wednesday.

“It’s not just the open border, it’s also our suicidal mass LEGAL migration policies bringing in over 1 million people a year: green cards, chain migration, refugee resettlement, anchor babies, and asylum scams,” he continued.

“This all needs to be ended.”

Since my parents were legal immigrants, Kirk’s claim initially caught my eye for all the wrong reasons.

“What is he smoking?” I thought. But giving it a deeper thought, I’m not ashamed to admit that Kirk is 100 percent correct about this.

Bringing millions of people into your country at once — legally, mind you — is both a cultural and societal reckoning for any place.

If you could get some guarantee from those million people that they would make an honest effort to integrate with American culture, while learning Western cultures and mannerism (as my parents did with me) then, yes, Kirk would be dead wrong.

But you obviously can’t get those guarantees, at all, when mass importing people to your country. The sheer volume and depth of the background checks would be a logistical nightmare.

In fact, we have ample evidence now that many legal immigrants come here with the expressed intent of destabilizing the American system.

(Look no further than the Somalian witch in Minnesota.)

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller similarly spelled out the significant issues of “legal” immigration:

When the adjective “legal” is affixed before a verb it means to have government approval or permission. A state-sanctioned activity. The most uncontroversial but vital policy statement is that a government must not sanction the migration of anyone who rejects the nation’s values.

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) June 25, 2025

To understand the pace and scope of migration to America in past years, one-third of NYC is foreign-born and almost two-thirds of NYC children live in a foreign-born household.

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) June 25, 2025

NYC is the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration.

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) June 25, 2025

Mass quantities of immigrants, whether legal or illegal, radically change cities, regions, and countries. That’s indisputable. Whether that radical change is for better or for worse is the issue at hand.

If you could somehow get guarantees from these immigrants that they’d try to assimilate into the culture, rather than fight against it, we could probably triple or quadruple our legal migration programs.

But since we can’t get those guarantees, the opposite must hold true, too: We should probably greatly restrict or make it much harder to legally migrate to America, at least for the time being.

It’s definitely a hot take, and one that made me do a double-take. But it’s worthwhile food for thought as America continues to battle for her soul.

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