Victor Davis Hanson: Spain Is Overrun by Migrants

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the latest edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Jack Fowler: This from the New York Post the other day: “Thousands of illegal African immigrants overrun Spanish enclave, turn streets into open toilets, bathe in fountains.” 

Sixty thousand illegal immigrants from Africa flooded the Spanish enclave of Ceuta—I’m not sure if I said that properly—prompting Spain to deploy its military as terrified locals likened the invasion to an apocalypse. 

Ceuta is located on the North African coast, and I just want to see some of the reaction. I’m looking at headlines from The Brussels Signal, which is an English-language center-right news source. 

Here’s the reaction from the rest of Europe: 

Von der Leyen, the head of the EU, demands an immediate halt to the crossings and swift returns. 

Sweden tells Spain to regain control of Ceuta and warns it is ready to act. 

France deploys a rapid border force and tightens checks at the Spanish border over the Ceuta crossings. 

The Netherlands tells Spain to protect the EU’s external border after the crossings, etc., etc. 

Victor Davis Hanson: My gosh—they’re border hawks. How illiberal. 

Fowler: Yeah, I know, right? 

So, your thoughts on this massive overnight invasion? 

Hanson: Well, in 1973, a member of the French Academy, Jean Raspail, wrote “The Camp of the Saints.” Everybody said he was a racist because it was a fictional novel about an announcement that France was going to allow anybody to come in who wanted to. Then this whole army from impoverished lands on the Indian subcontinent arrives, takes over, and starts demanding religious and political concessions from the French. 

Everybody said he was a racist. He wasn’t a racist, I should say that. He was a Renaissance man—an explorer, athlete, novelist, essayist, everything. 

But it’s like reality is imitating fiction. 

Sixty thousand people swarm this little enclave—this little, can I say it, colonial enclave in Morocco—and it was all preordained. 

As soon as you saw thousands of people pouring into a city of only about 70,000 or 80,000 people, the first thing you ask is: Where are they going to relieve themselves? Who’s going to feed them? Where are they going to sleep tonight? Who’s going to clothe them? Some of them were just in cutoffs, barefoot, with no shoes on. 

Then those who say, “Go back,” are called cruel, and you start to see what the socialist enterprise is. 

Why did Alejandro Mayorkas want 12,000 people coming from the poorest areas of the world here every day? The answer is they wanted to grow the progressive project. 

So, they come in, and then they say, “You’re heartless. You’re heartless. All our ERs are overcrowded, you can’t get legal services, and there’s a big line at the food stamp office.” 

Yes—you caused that, and at the expense of U.S. citizens who were in need. 

Then they say, “We need this. We need billions of dollars. Minneapolis needs billions of dollars, and Los Angeles needs billions of dollars to help.” 

Of course, we know where that money goes. Most of it never goes to the people. It’s siphoned off, as we’ve seen with these crooked communities, many of them immigrant communities. 

But then you get a constituency. 

The second part of the paradigm was that, under the guise of COVID, we adopted same-day voter registration in many states. 

Most states—I think only about 20 require an ID, and they’re all red states—allow no ID, same-day registration and voting, ballot harvesting, ballot curing, early voting, and votes that can come in up to a week or even ten days later if they’re postmarked by Election Day.  

In some states, I think they don’t even have to be postmarked on Election Day. They just have to arrive within a certain number of days. 

All of that was geared toward letting people who are not legally qualified to vote cast ballots. 

That, coupled with demography, was the answer to the left-wing dilemma. 

The left-wing dilemma is that socialism never works. It impoverishes everything it touches. 

Nobody wants open borders. 

Nobody wants trans men in your teenage daughter’s locker room. 

Nobody wants to defund the police or the Pentagon. 

Nobody wants to get rid of the Senate. 

Nobody wants to pack the Supreme Court. 

We all know that, so we import voters. That’s what we do, and that’s what they’ve done. 

Fifty-three million immigrants in the United States is an all-time high. So is 16% of the population. 

This has been another gift to Donald Trump if he can use it. 

He can say, “I kept telling you that when Joe Biden destroyed our borders and we got 12 million people here—people we’re still paying for—and they affected everything from available housing to health care, you laughed at me.” 

And it spread, didn’t it? 

People said, “Why not Spain? Why not Britain? Why not France?” 

If they don’t get it under control … 

Yeah. The only difference is that when Donald Trump starts arresting people and deporting them, they’re going to call him a fascist. 

In Europe, a few may, but they’re very proprietary, and finally they’ve had it. 

They’re not going to say a word when they round up many of these people and start deporting them. 

Before you say Donald Trump is cruel because he’s deporting people on visas, remember that Sweden is going to deport even citizens if they don’t commit major crimes and send them back to their country of origin. 

Fowler: I don’t know what the oath of allegiance is in Sweden, but if you come somewhere and raise your hand—or whatever you do—to say, “I’m abiding by the rules here,” I feel that’s contractual. 

If you break the contract, we’ll send you back to whatever blank hole you came from. 

Hanson: Yeah, I think what we’re watching is a counterrevolution. 

I wrote about that in the book that’s coming out on Sept. 8. 

It’s a counterrevolution, and its essence is that we’re going to be traditional and normal and follow the law. 

What we’ve seen over the last 40 years is the law becoming a joke. It’s fluid. 

It’s all about compassion and empathy—fake empathy—and we let people go because of their color, sexual orientation, gender, or race. 

Everybody’s going to say, “You know what? That is racist. That is Neanderthal.” 

We’re going to go back to  equality under the law. 

Fowler: Right—and truth. 

Justice doesn’t matter. Truth doesn’t matter to the Left. What matters is power. 

Two plus two is five if the party says so. 

Hanson: Yeah. When you see Hasan Piker, whose parents are wealthy Turkish immigrants … 

He was born in the United States, so he’s a citizen. 

Then he was taken back to Turkey—his supposed paradise—but apparently he didn’t like paradise in Muslim Turkey, so he came back here. 

Now he’s praising Mao, he has a celebratory image of 9/11, and just the other day he said, “I can guarantee you a Jew won’t be nominated as our candidate.” 

What if he said, “I can guarantee you that a Turk won’t ever be the Republican nominee”? 

Would that be racist? I think it would. 

How would he like that? 

He’s really a demonic figure. He really is. 

Fowler: Yeah. Well, Victor, we’re going to take a little break, and when we come back— 

Hanson: Although he has good taste in cars. 

I mean, if you have a $130,000 Porsche sports car and a $2.8 million home in West Hollywood, I guess you’re doing pretty well as a capitalist.

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