On immigration and the Virginia Tech atrocity

More explicitly than I did (and I was strongly criticized for it), Patrick Buchanan draws a causal link between Cho Seung-Hui’s immigrant background and his mass murder of 32 Americans. Buchanan also makes a connection between America’s loss of national, ethnic, and ethical identity resulting from the 1965 Immigration Act and the failure of the Virginia Tech community to see that Cho was a weird misfit and to do something about him: “Before 1970, we were a people, a community, a country. Students would have said aloud of Cho: ‘Who is this guy? What’s the matter with him?’ Teachers would have taken action to get him help—or get him out.”

Then, drawing on information from Vdare, Buchanan does something that I had in mind to do at the time I wrote about Cho but didn’t have the information at hand to do: he provides a catalogue of non-European immigrants to the U.S. who have murdered Americans.

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Jacob M. writes:

Perhaps this is mere nitpickery, but in reading your comment on Pat Buchanan’s article connecting the VT massacre with immigration, I stopped to think about the phrase “mass murder of 32 Americans.” I wondered, is it likely that in today’s multicultural, diverse, “enriched” America, all of those 32 people were Americans? Of course not, especially on a college campus. So I found a list of the victims with biographical information and tried to count the non-Americans:

Daniel Perez Cueva, 21, a student from Peru

Henry Lee, 20, “family fled to the United States from Vietnam, arriving in Roanoke in 1994”—I assume this means he was not born here, despite the Anglo name.

Liviu Librescu, 76, the Holocaust survivor, who was an Israeli citizen.

G.V. Loganathan, 51, “Indian-born.”

Partahi Lombantoruan, 34, of Indonesia.

Juan Ortiz, 26, from Puerto Rico.

Minal Panchal, 26, from the city we are no longer allowed to call Bombay. [LA replies: at VFR we still call it Bombay.]

Waleed Shaalan, 32, of Zagazig, Egypt.

Of course, the article doesn’t state whether any of the immigrants were naturalized citizens. I also did not count a few people with non-Western names whose country of birth was not made clear, nor a few who looked like they could have been Canadian or Western European immigrants. But it looks like at least 8, or a full one-quarter, of the victims were not native born Americans.

In searching for articles on this, I noticed that several celebrated the diversity of the victims, noting, for example, that they came “from around the United States and around the world, from different cultures and different continents” as CNN put it. But in a double dose of irony, not only would these people not have been killed had Cho not come to America, as immigration restrictionists have been pointing out, but the eight listed above would not have been killed had they not come to America either. The very same open immigration policies that welcomed them here also turned a homicidal maniac loose upon them.

LA replies:

On discriminately refering to all the victims as Americans you’re right. It’s the same with the 9/11 attack. People constantly refer to “3,000 Americans” who were killed, when of course a large number of the slain were immigrants or foreigners. It was the World Trade Center, after all.

On your point that the victims at Virginia Tech would not have been killed had they not come to America, that’s true. Notwithstanding my earlier criticism of the phrase, it looks as though they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

BE writes:

You can find a depressingly long list of Americans killed by illegal immigrants at this website. The list of crimes includes both murder and accidental killings (like vehicular manslaughter), and the list of victims includes police officers, paramedics, students, nurses, mothers, fathers, and even children.

I don’t know which is worse: that we allow people with such low regard for human life to wander freely across our border in the first place, or that the criminal justice system and the immigration authorities fail to incarcerate or deport the perpetrators before their behavior escalates to murder, as many of the killers have histories of multiple arrests before committing their most heinous crimes. It should also be mentioned that many of the criminals listed are also sex offenders, and some of their victims are children—one as young as four.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 02, 2007 05:02 AM | Send