Trump is right to protect American citizens. We should protect ours

Telegraph

2 days ago

Sometimes the best policies are the ones that produce the shrillest wails from the Left. Such may be the case with Trump's latest travel ban, which by rights should spark serious soul-searching in Britain. Overnight, the President announced restrictions on the citizens of 12 countries.
This was a response to the recent terror attack on Boulder, Colorado, in which an Egyptian national, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, is alleged to have thrown firebombs and sprayed burning petrol at a Jewish vigil on Sunday in support of Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
Although Egypt is not on the list, Homeland Security officials said Mr Soliman was in the country illegally, having overstayed a tourist visa, but that he had applied for asylum in September 2022. So far, so Trumpian. (He took similar measures during his first term, after all, and they were repealed by Joe Biden who called them 'a stain on our national conscience'.)
But then came the kicker. 'We will not let what happened in Europe happen in America,' Trump said. Ouch. If the months of Trump 2.0 have so far shifted the Overton window across the West, allowing even the likes of Sir Keir Starmer to contemplate – at least rhetorically – tackling immigration, then such a travel ban should be welcomed on these shores as well.
Already, the usual suspects are accusing Trump of being 'racist'. But a glance at the range of countries on the list shows that this is not a question of race, or even religion. Rather, it is a question of homeland security, and that holds a stark lesson for Britain.
A few months back, official data revealed that though foreigners comprise just 15 per cent of the population of our country, they commit 41 per cent of all crime and up to a quarter of sex crimes. In the first nine months of 2024, almost 14 per cent of grooming suspects were Pakistani, five times their share of the population.
Two nationalities – Afghans and Eritreans – were more than 20 times more likely to account for sexual offence convictions than British citizens, according to the data. Overall, foreign nationals were 71 per cent more likely than Britons to be responsible for sex crime convictions.
Based on convictions per 10,000 of the population, Afghans with 77 convictions topped the table with a rate of 59 per 10,000, 22.3 times that of Britons. They were followed by Eritreans, who accounted for 59 convictions at a rate of 53.6 per 10,000 of their population.
In March 2025, data from the Ministry of Justice revealed that foreigners, who claim £1 billion a month in benefits, were also responsible for large proportions of violence, robbery, fraud and drug offences, between 2021 and 2023. There was no data for terrorism offences or acts of anti-Semitism. But does anybody want to hazard a guess?
Which brings us to a fundamental question. Why? Why does Britain need to allow the criminals of the world to come to our shores to abuse women and girls, run criminal enterprises, foster terrorism and anti-Semitism, and claim benefits in the process? Obviously not all foreigners from these countries behave in this way. But facts aren't racist. Large numbers are pulling down our pants, spanking our buttocks and pulling them up again.
In fact, the problem is not one of race but one of politics and culture. In my new book, Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself, which is coming out at the end of September, I look at groundbreaking research published in April by cognitive scientists Scott Barry Kaufman and Craig Neumann.
They found that 'citizens in democratic countries have more benevolent traits, fewer malevolent traits, and greater well-being' than those living under autocratic regimes. Based on a study of 200,000 people from 75 countries, people living under autocracies were found to be much more likely to exhibit the 'Dark Triad' of negative personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy.
In democracies, by contrast, more people displayed the 'Light Triad' of humanism, faith in humanity and 'Kantianism', or treating people with dignity in their own right rather than viewing them as a means to an end.
Obviously, this is not related to race. Russians are hardly black, but they hardly live in a democracy either. It is a case of cognitive development. The problem occurs when, in an age of global travel, 'Dark Triad' migrants who grew up in despotic regimes encounter gullible 'Light Triad' officials in the democracies, whose empathies are easily played upon.
That is why we find British judges ruling that an Albanian convict should avoid deportation because his son had an aversion to foreign chicken nuggets, a Pakistani drug dealer could stay so he could teach his son about Islam, and a paedophile of the same nationality should not be sent home since it would be 'unduly harsh' on his own children.
These real-life cases, reported by the Telegraph, provide a clear collision of the 'Dark Triad' traits in the criminals and the 'Light Triad' tendencies in the judges. It is a chemical reaction waiting to happen, and the vast majority of the population, wherever they are born, are suffering the consequences.
In other words, we are being taken for fools. No foreign criminal has a God-given right to set up home in Britain just because he fancies it. This is our home, and although we are delighted to welcome strangers, that generosity should be withdrawn from those who nick our television and threaten our children – even if their own happen to like the chicken nuggets in our fridge.
Trump has now thrown down the gauntlet. What is the British Government going to do to set our own house in order? Will it take an anti-Semitic outrage like the firebombing in Colorado before the Prime Minister takes action? Will he take action even then?