Tea at Trianon: How Immigration Broke NYC and Delivered It to an Islamic Marxist

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, October 23, 2025

How Immigration Broke NYC and Delivered It to an Islamic Marxist

From Amuse on X:

Begin with scale, because scale governs possibility. Nearly two fifths of New Yorkers are foreign born, a share that would challenge even a well aligned integration system. The dominant origins today are the Dominican Republic, China, and Jamaica, which is a different profile from earlier European heavy waves. Those facts alone do not indict immigration, they do, however, heighten the importance of a firm common language and shared civic norms. On that front the city is slipping. Roughly one in five residents has limited English proficiency, and New York’s public schools now educate children who, taken together, speak 156 different languages at home. Teachers cannot conjure qualified bilingual staff in dozens of tongues, administrators cannot translate every service into scores of dialects without diluting other priorities, and students cannot reach grade level when the medium of instruction is constantly fragmented. In an earlier era, public schools were engines of Americanization. Today, they are being asked to sustain islands of language alongside the curriculum, which is a very different task.
The second constraint is fiscal. New York has spent billions in a short period to house, feed, and service recent arrivals, including large outlays for emergency shelters and purpose built relief centers. Hospitals expanded taxpayer supported programs so that uninsured newcomers could obtain primary and emergency care. Agencies layered on translation, transportation, technology, and navigation services. None of this is free. City and state watchdogs document multibillion dollar annual costs while warning about overlapping contracts, poor data sharing, and weak accountability. New York has grown a humanitarian bureaucracy inside city government, one that now commands a permanent claim on the budget. Supporters say this is moral leadership. But budgets require tradeoffs. Every dollar that sustains a newcomer in a hotel room is a dollar not spent fixing a boiler in the New York City Housing Authority or putting another cop on the beat. When leadership says there is no money for infrastructure or for restoring police headcount, ordinary citizens notice the contrast.
There is also the matter of what the aid buys. The old integration bargain asked much of newcomers. The new model asks little. City policy cushions extended unemployment among migrants and recent arrivals while guaranteeing shelter, food, and extensive services regardless of status. The point is not to deny emergency aid, the point is to note what prolonged substitution does to human capital formation. If you subsidize non work you entrench non work. The city’s own labor force snapshots show large pools of non employment among immigrant groups, not evenly distributed, and a long queue for work authorization. Advocates insist that work permits will solve everything. Permits help, but they do not supply English, education, or networks, and they do not erase the incentives created by a local welfare architecture that treats new entrants as permanent program clients (literally) rather than temporary beneficiaries aiming for independence. (Read more.)