Douglas Murray’s recent appearance on Life, Liberty & Levin thrust a blunt question into the center of the immigration debate: why would anyone want to integrate into a country whose elites and institutions continually describe that country as “rotten”? Murray laid out a simple, devastating logic — if you tell people the nation they’ve arrived in is morally bankrupt, you cannot expect them to fight for it, love it, or make it their own.
He didn’t pull punches about where this self-loathing comes from: an education and media apparatus that teaches young people to view Western history as nothing but sin and shame, while celebrating perpetual victimhood. That message doesn’t just alienate the native-born; it hands newcomers a reason not to assimilate, because why adopt a national identity you’re being told is worthless?
This is not abstract philosophy — it explains real social breakdowns in towns and cities where assimilation used to bind strangers into neighbors and citizens. What Murray and others keep warning about is the predictable outcome: mass migration without a shared civic narrative produces parallel societies, resentment, and a weaker nation. Americans who still believe in nationhood should find that more than alarming; it’s a call to action.
Politically, the lesson is stark: you cannot have open borders and empty patriotism and expect a functioning republic to survive. Policies that reward migration but refuse to insist on language, civic education, and allegiance guarantee the erosion of social trust and public order. Conservatives have been arguing for common-sense integration standards for years; Murray’s observation makes the moral and practical case impossible to ignore.
Of course, the cultural rot Murray describes didn’t happen by accident — it was cultivated by elites who profit from division and have abandoned the virtues that once united us. If our institutions teach contempt for our history and our heroes, they will hollow out patriotism faster than any migration wave ever could. Calling out that betrayal is not small-minded nativism; it’s the only honest response from people who want a cohesive, prosperous country.
The remedy is straightforward and patriotic: restore pride in our founding, insist on assimilation through language and civic literacy, and stop treating national identity as a negotiable luxury. We can be welcoming and firm at the same time — welcome those who come legally, teach them what America is, and require they join, not carve out separate lives. That is how nations endure; anything less is an invitation to decline.
