I remember back in engineering school sometimes interacting with Mohammed, a lab assistant from Egypt (name unchanged for the sake of anonymity). For some reason, he liked to complain that American girls were racist because they wouldn’t go out with him — due, he claimed, to his large nose. What struck me most was how alien his concept of American culture was from reality.
It also reminds me of taking the bus into Oslo’s city center on a Sunday morning, years ago. I was on vacation and needed to run in for some reason I can’t recall. The bus was half full of people from the tropics and subtropics — headed, I assumed, to clean offices. It was a glum, rainy September, and everyone looked miserable and depressed. What hit me then was how unnatural it felt for people accustomed to good weather most of the year to live in a cold, sterile northern environment like Scandinavia.
The common thread in both images is disappointment.
Here’s the point: people migrate for deeply personal reasons. Beneath the resentment that figures like Mamdani feed on lies personal disappointment. And behind that disappointment are hopes, narratives, and fantasies too detached from reality to be realized.
And yet, most don’t do the obvious thing and just go home.
Instead, many use social media to project their “best life” in the West back to families, friends, and rivals. This narrative bubble keeps drawing in more migrants, who in turn pretend everything is great. The cycle continues.
Politically, I think the answer is to pop the narrative bubble. It’s fundamentally asymmetrical to the resentment and victim-driven grievances that leftists sell and agitate on.
Someone with sharp messaging like Trump might actually pull it off. DHS has shown some innovation in its marketing ads, but hope for a large-scale re-migration program is a much, much bigger project in scope.
I remember back in engineering school sometimes interacting with Mohammed, a lab assistant from Egypt (name unchanged for the sake of anonymity). For some reason, he liked to complain that American girls were racist because they wouldn’t go out with him — due, he claimed, to his large nose. What struck me most was how alien his concept of American culture was from reality.
It also reminds me of taking the bus into Oslo’s city center on a Sunday morning, years ago. I was on vacation and needed to run in for some reason I can’t recall. The bus was half full of people from the tropics and subtropics — headed, I assumed, to clean offices. It was a glum, rainy September, and everyone looked miserable and depressed. What hit me then was how unnatural it felt for people accustomed to good weather most of the year to live in a cold, sterile northern environment like Scandinavia.
The common thread in both images is disappointment.
Here’s the point: people migrate for deeply personal reasons. Beneath the resentment that figures like Mamdani feed on lies personal disappointment. And behind that disappointment are hopes, narratives, and fantasies too detached from reality to be realized.
And yet, most don’t do the obvious thing and just go home.
Instead, many use social media to project their “best life” in the West back to families, friends, and rivals. This narrative bubble keeps drawing in more migrants, who in turn pretend everything is great. The cycle continues.
Politically, I think the answer is to pop the narrative bubble. It’s fundamentally asymmetrical to the resentment and victim-driven grievances that leftists sell and agitate on.
Someone with sharp messaging like Trump might actually pull it off. DHS has shown some innovation in its marketing ads, but hope for a large-scale re-migration program is a much, much bigger project in scope.