The Uphill Climb to American Citizenship

By Mindy Belz

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

For Chebwa Mutombo, the journey to find a new place to call home has been 22 years long. Born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the 49-year-old mother of three stood on the grassy West Lawn of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, ground once leveled by the hands of African slaves. She raised her own right hand, and under the baking sun of the Fourth of July, swore allegiance to the United States of America.

 

Chebwa’s husband, Joseph, who is 56 and confined to a wheelchair, stayed seated but raised his hand to recite the oath, led by senior U.S. District Judge Michael Urbanski.

 

The two wore matching ensembles made by Chebwa, a seamstress, of super wax cotton, a specially dyed Congolese print recalling their roots. Pinned to them were bronze medal brooches with red, white, and blue ribbon given to each of the new citizens, distinctive badges for family, friends, and dignitaries seated in the audience. They included federal and state officials, and Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who spoke at the naturalization ceremony. Joseph sported an American flag tie, more evidence of the couple’s fresh start.

 

Public gatherings to celebrate immigrants coming to America are in short supply just now. Yet the Mutombos were among 75 immigrants from 36 countries raising their hands to take the final step of the marathon process that is becoming a U.S. citizen. They completed a process now endangered, as naturalization—even for those who meet the qualifications—has become more complex, more expensive, and more likely to end in failure.

 

Everyone born in America should sometime in their lives watch foreign-born citizens swear allegiance to the United States, to defend its Constitution, to bear arms on its behalf if required by law, and to renounce and abjure all others. It’s like a betrothal, intimate and moving, a choice rather than a birthright. It’s a moment so singular that a nation once formed of immigrants still brings the nations in its train with each newcomer who takes the oath.

 

On July 4, the citizens-to-be rose before dawn to make their way up Jefferson’s mountain. A fife and drum corps awaited their arrival, just as it has done since the Virginia home of the third president, the main author of the Declaration of Independence, began hosting annual Independence Day naturalization ceremonies in 1963. They took their oaths of allegiance before a sellout crowd of about 4,000, who filled rows of seats under a tent despite a suffocating heat wave.

 

Each of them has a story. The Mutombos arrived from Africa as refugees invited by the U.S. government seven years ago. Before that, they spent 15 years living in a camp in Zambia, having crossed the border from their war-wrecked home in Lubumbashi, the Congo’s second-largest city.

 

Nineteen-year-old Omar Basel Bouz Alassal, standing in his gray suit and tie, fled Syria with his family at age 4, all “looking for safety and a better future,” he said.

 

Debee Arvind Bouch came from India’s Tamil Nadu state as a teenager with her family for religious reasons, her father sponsored by a church in nearby Charlottesville. She married an American who runs a local locksmith business and works in the ticket office at Monticello. Her name drew boisterous applause when she received her citizenship certificate. Bouch—like Pei-Che from Taiwan and Frank from Switzerland, whose American spouses were also in attendance—shows that many roads to citizenship begin with love.

 

Each of the new Americans filed paperwork with embassies, passed interviews and vetting, paid fees and hired lawyers, passed a challenging civics test, and waited to be invited to the ceremony.

 

Two hours away, at the home of George Washington, another 150 immigrants from 50 different countries took their oaths of citizenship at Mount Vernon. These two presidential centers, the nation’s oldest, are part of a widening effort to boost appreciation for immigrants and their road to citizenship. This year, 21 presidential libraries and museums will host 40 naturalization ceremonies across the country. The ceremonies began in February at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and will conclude in November at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston.

 

The planning is largely the work of John Bridgeland, the founder and CEO of More Perfect, a civics-minded nonprofit he describes as “worried about our democracy.” Bridgeland, who served as director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under President George W. Bush, is drawing on years of experience connecting public and private partners, this time around the country’s 250^th birthday. Working with the National Archives, the presidential centers, and immigration groups—plus living past presidents, first ladies, and historians—Bridgeland hopes to give a wider platform to democratic values and the role of immigration through U.S. history.

 

“We think welcoming strangers is something that divides us, when welcoming is something that brings all of us together,” Bridgeland said.

 

The push to showcase immigrants becoming Americans comes while the Trump administration has focused public attention on illegal immigration. But its enforcement operations and executive orders are obstructing legal immigration too—shutting down pathways that lead to days like the one at Monticello. Policy changes along with bureaucratic holdups are making it harder for many to finalize their citizenship status just as it’s within reach.

 

Latest figures show a 74 percent drop in the number of naturalization applications completed by the U.S. government this year. That’s according to an analysis of available data through July 31 from the Niskanen Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, and includes both approved and denied cases.

 

Other data points are equally drastic. While the number of submitted immigration forms of all types is down by nearly half (48 percent) from one year ago, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) completed only about half of those—so, just 20,674 naturalization cases completed in July 2026 compared to 80,077 one year prior. Meanwhile, denials of completed naturalization applications have doubled.

 

Trump officials say the slowdown is a needed adjustment as they put in place more guardrails. Those include lengthy interviews, home searches, background checks of social media and community activism. Critics say that approach defines who gets to be a citizen in discriminatory ways that go beyond laws on naturalization, many of them as old as the country. With some changes, even those who qualify will increasingly find themselves blocked from naturalization, a lengthy procedure that takes up nine chapters in the USCIS policy manual.

 

Among the changes are rising application fees that make the cost of becoming a citizen prohibitive for many low-income families. The Trump administration also halted most applications for lawful permanent residency, or green cards, an essential step to naturalization. It banned in January all visa issuance to nationals of 75 countries designated “high risk,” a sweeping suspension that was vacated by a U.S. district court judge on August 21 but will take months and years to rectify. That will delay the path to citizenship for spouses, parents, and children of U.S. citizens, plus workers from the banned countries denied employer-based visas. At the same time, refugee resettlement to the U.S., once a reliable pathway to citizenship, is being zeroed out.

 

Some of the latest executive changes promise more lasting disruption. In a May 22 policy memo, USCIS announced it would end the longstanding practice of allowing lawful noncitizens to “adjust status” within the United States. Instead, applicants in some cases must return to their countries of origin to apply and wait months or years for processing. Many are spouses, parents, or adult children of U.S. citizens—potentially affecting people like Debee Arvind Bouch at Monticello.

 

Immigration groups say, if fully implemented, that change alone has the potential to dismantle legal immigration, with devastating consequences for families.

 

A final rule announced in mid-July and taking effect September 18 requires green card applicants to demonstrate they will not become a public charge. Federal law already stipulates that those seeking permanent residency or legal status demonstrate they will not rely on food stamps, Medicaid, or housing vouchers. But the new rule removes any definition for “public charge,” leaving it to the discretion of immigration officers to determine on an individualized basis.

 

“So now DHS and USCIS can deny people on whatever basis it wants without letting anyone comment on their criteria,” said David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. “The harm is that it will lead to more arbitrary denials for legal immigrants.”

 

All to say, one year into a crackdown on illegal immigration, the current policies have so crippled legal immigration that citizenship, and ceremonies like the one at Monticello, may become relics of the past.

 

An estimated 14 million foreign-born residents of the U.S. currently qualify for citizenship. Their stories are similar to those most Americans would find in their family tree, one reason Americans broadly support them. This year, 73 percent of U.S. adults say immigration is a good thing, according to Gallup. That poll also finds 75 percent of Americans favor giving immigrants brought as children to the U.S. illegally a chance to become citizens, while a 2026 Reuters/Ipsos poll finds 64 percent oppose ending birthright citizenship.

 

Immigration was a hot topic in Jefferson’s day too. A Federalist Party majority in Congress passed restrictive new laws amid the slave revolution in Haiti, which stirred fears of Haitian refugees and ex-slaves coming to American shores. In the 1790s, Congress raised the residency requirement for citizenship from two years to five years to 14 years.

 

Jefferson, who spent five years as a diplomat in France before President George Washington appointed him the first secretary of state, saw immigration as a tool for securing America’s standing in the world, its security, and its economic interests. As the country’s third president, he called on Congress in 1801 to reconsider the recent restrictions.

 

“Shall we refuse the unhappy fugitives from distress that hospitality which the savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this land? Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe?” he said. A new Congress agreed, passing into law in 1802 a standard that continues today: Lawful permanent residents must reside continuously in the United States for five years to apply for citizenship.

 

Monticello’s July 4 naturalization ceremony comes brimming with tradition. The home’s East Lawn is the historic entrance Jefferson designed to welcome dignitaries and strangers, but the ceremony takes place on the West Lawn, the back entrance Jefferson reserved for family and friends. From there, the candidates for citizenship take their seats facing his iconic rotunda, the same view captured on the U.S. nickel, a familiar emblem of American democracy and civic belonging.

 

Jane Kamensky, the Harvard historian who became president and CEO of the foundation that runs Monticello in 2024, has steered the public narrative around Jefferson toward what one exhibit at the house called “the paradox of liberty.” Jefferson, by his rhetoric and his writing, established human equality and individual liberty at the core of America’s ideals, but by his practice enslaved hundreds of people, helping to set the United States on a course where racism and discrimination would play central roles. A tour of Monticello highlights the role of slaves on the plantation, and Jefferson as a flawed figure who fathered six children by slave Sally Hemings.

 

Kamensky sees the nation’s 250^th anniversary as an opportunity “to hold courageous conversations that look to the past to understand a vexed present and anticipate a more perfect future.” She welcomed the soon-to-be Americans in the front rows, saying, “We have always been a nation of immigrants. One of the very first printings of the Declaration in Philadelphia was in German.”

 

Under her direction, Monticello has partnered with civic organizations like Bridgeland’s More Perfect, along with immigration advocates and religious organizations. After the ceremony, one such group, Welcome.US, launched a citizen guide program to link volunteers with lawful permanent residents working toward citizenship. Volunteers help with citizenship test tutoring, interviewing skills, and English-language practice.

 

The ceremony closed with remarks from Welcome.US CEO Nazanin Ash, whose parents came to America from Iran. “We remember the names of the founders and presidents and legislators because these are the names history delivers,” she said, “but most of this story has been written by names history never records—ordinary Americans, like all of us, motivated to right wrongs, care for neighbors, and take on challenges in our communities.”

 

Once the citizens took the oath of allegiance, the ceremony adjourned to another Fourth of July tradition—free root beer floats on the lawn.

 

“This is a very, very beautiful day,” Chebwa Mutombo exclaimed. “I have waited for many days to see this one.”

 

When she arrived in 2019, Chebwa spoke no English. For two years she took classes in nearby Charlottesville while also working for a business making pillows and curtains.

 

“Was it hard to wait so long for this day?” I asked.

 

“Oh no, because I am an American now,” she said, breaking into a broad smile and fingering the bronze medal at her collar.

The Repulsive Online Attack on Indian Americans

National Review Online

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

A few University of Texas at Austin students of South Asian descent cheered their football team’s dramatic comeback win against top-ranked Ohio State, and found themselves in the foreground of a picture worth a thousand tweets. Bo French, the Republican nominee for railroad commissioner (a more important position than its name might suggest, having jurisdiction over energy policy), did not like what he saw. “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” he posted on X.

 

While other Texas Republicans criticized French — some vigorously, some tepidly — a retinue of online defenders ventured creative interpretations of what the problem was. The university catered too much to foreigners. Never mind that the picture did not disclose the citizenship or nationality of its subjects, and the law mandates that 90 percent of students be Texans. Its admissions standards are unfair to white Texans. French himself retreated to this position, but the university has no preferential standards for Indian Americans. In fact, French in the past joined the near-uniform chorus of Texas Republicans in supporting the university’s admissions system, which was designed to eliminate consideration of race and was defended for years by foes of racial preferences.

 

So the rationalizers had to go farther afield. Too many Indian Americans are Hindu: another trait not discoverable from the photo, and also one that appears to pose no practical difficulties for America’s republican institutions. They’re not assimilating. But the photo bears every possible visible sign of assimilation. College football is one of the most uniquely American of institutions and is unknown in India. Indian Americans are participating fully in U.S. life, generally know English, and have high intermarriage rates. Unless the test of assimilation is being white, they’re doing it.

 

To be more charitable to the photo bombers than they deserve, some of these attempted justifications raise issues that, outside this ridiculous context, are legitimate and even important. The H-1B program through which many Indians came here is too often exploitative and needs reform. Too much immigration — even when the immigrants themselves are law-abiding and economically successful — can be disruptive to communities and nations, threatening their sense of shared belonging, creating tensions or at least frictions. In the case of Indian Americans, however, the difficulties have been thankfully minimal; and in any case, needed reforms are no reason or excuse for belittling or demonizing the immigrants in question or their families.

 

The picture gave some viewers a misleading impression of how many dark-skinned people were in the Texas crowd; X.com, for its part, creates a misleading impression of how many Americans have an aesthetic objection to the presence of such people. Barring what seems an unlikely mass conversion to their cause, the objectors will just have to get over it. Most Americans, of all races, find their repulsion itself repulsive. And white Americans, by and large, have too much sense to believe that greater racial consciousness is the answer to any problems they have.

 

The commenters who object to the picture are wrong about many things, but they are right to feel that their side is losing. Those harmlessly happy young people have found their perfect counterpoint in the toxically miserable.

No Alternatives for Merkel

By Andrew Stuttaford

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

In the wake of the Alternative for Germany’s victory on Sunday in Saxony-Anhalt, I looked back at some articles I had written about the party in the past, including this one from 2016. It was mainly devoted to discussing an article in Der Spiegel asking why people were voting for the AfD, a party for which the authors did not have much sympathy, but about which they had clearly thought carefully.

 

Der Spiegel:

 

 At its core, the rise of the AfD is the story of strife and of growing alienation between the chancellor and a portion of the German electorate. The triumph of the AfD is nothing less than a revolt against Angela Merkel.

 

It is a rebellion targeting a CDU leader who has continually led her party to the left, stripping many conservatives of a political home. It also targets a chancellor whose open borders policy in the refugee crisis may be attractive to left-leaning Germans, but is one which strikes more conservative voters as high-handed. . . .

 

And so we see the developing stages of a process in which Merkel’s CDU (the story was somewhat different with her partner-party, the CSU in Bavaria, although the AfD is now making substantial inroads there, too) had left a gap on the right, which the AfD filled, and filled in a much more aggressive way than it would have been able to had Merkel herself not chosen to ignore those on the right who didn’t share the immigration extremism she revealed in 2015.

 

Der Spiegel:

 

A vital part of any healthy democracy is having alternatives and parties that are distinguishable from each other. At the moment, it’s no longer possible to tell what it is that separates the CDU from the SPD or the Greens. The party is whatever Merkel says it is. There are close to no correctives left in Germany and there is no longer a balance of power. The more Merkel tries to peddle her policies as being without alternative, the greater the anger within the populace will grow. . . .

 

Merkel has not understood the depth of this alienation, as her closest confidants proved in the wake of the March 13 [local elections]. Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, who has, at times, been seen as a possible heir to Merkel’s political throne atop the CDU, noted blithely that 80 percent of voters cast their ballots for parties that support the chancellor’s refugee policies.

 

Wait a minute, wait a minute. Ursula von der Leyen, the Ursula von der Leyen, the woman who now heads up the EU Commission?

 

The very same.

 

Von der Leyen, an incompetent defense minister, went on to become the president of the EU Commission in 2019. The Commission’s tolerance of dissent, never high, has fallen far lower since von der Leyen took over. She had clearly learned a lot from her old boss, a pioneer in the field of censoring online speech, something in which the EU, faced with rising unhappiness among its own subjects, has become something of a specialist.

 

The thickness of the bubble inhabited by Merkel’s loyalists can be seen from von der Leyen’s comment that 80 percent of voters voted for parties which supported Merkel’s “refugee policies.” That was indeed the case, but it did not mean that they liked those policies. Indeed, a chart accompanying the article reflects the findings of a survey that suggested that 61 percent of all German voters were either “not very” or “not at all” satisfied with them, including majorities in the AfD (99 percent!), but also in the free market (ish) FDP and the far-left Die Linke.

 

That latter result may well foreshadow the split within Die Linke that resulted from the departure of Sahra Wagenknecht. She had joined East Germany’s governing SED Party less than a year before the Wall came down as, it seems, a true believer. These days her beliefs combine both hard left and some conservative views — the horseshoe theory in action. The BSW, the party she formed in 2023 after leaving Die Linke, is currently talking to the AfD (which fell three seats short of an absolute majority), about giving it enough support to form a minority government, although there would be no coalition between them.

 

Looking at the chart in Der Spiegel, the only voters who supported Merkel’s refugee policies were her own (the CDU), the center-left SPD, and the Greens, but even within those groups the dissenting percentages were 45, 48, and 41 percent respectively.

 

Never mind! The future president of the EU Commission looked at the voting numbers and decided that the votes of those who thought they had nowhere else to go were good enough, an example of the cynical complacency that is such a hallmark of Brussels rule.

 

As for Merkel, Der Speigel reported that she was determined to plug on:

 

On the Monday following the election, the chancellor made an appearance at CDU headquarters in Berlin — and acted as though nothing had happened. There is “both light and shadows,” she said. The rise of the AfD is certainly not nice, she said, “but it is not an existential problem.” She was flanked by Julia Klöckner of Rhineland-Palatinate and Guido Wolf of Baden-Württemberg, both of whom had lost their respective elections — and they looked as though they couldn’t believe what they were hearing. They kept glancing at their boss with skeptical looks on their faces. . . .

 

Shortly before her comments at CDU headquarters, Merkel had met with party leaders and made it clear that she sees no reason to rethink her course. According to people familiar with the meeting, her words were met with a combination of horror and resignation. . . .

 

That sounds a bit familiar, but to be clear, Merkel was the second-worst chancellor in German history.

Immigration Policy Matters

National Review Online

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

Anew report from the Center for Immigration Studies suggests that the foreign-born population of the United States is down 2.9 million over the first 18 months of the Trump administration, and from this we can estimate that the population of illegal immigrants has fallen 2.3 million — from 15.8 million to 13.5 million. If these numbers extrapolated from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey withstand further scrutiny, the significance of this development is difficult to overstate. This would be the first time America’s net migration numbers have been negative — more immigrants leaving than coming in — since the 1930s.

 

Proponents of mass immigration have often argued that the movement of people across borders is practically unstoppable. Proponents of amnesty have argued that policy cannot remove illegal immigrants who have already arrived here, and that attempts to enforce the law backfire and bring about even more immigration.

 

It’s important to understand that these are not direct numbers for deportations or immigration. The Current Population Survey is not designed to measure immigrants and migration. But it does capture data from which researchers can make solid inferences over time. New lawful permanent residents and other new arrivals add to the foreign-born population each month. Deaths of foreign-born people living in America subtract from it. There is also a regular flow of foreign-born people who return to their home countries or travel to new ones.

 

The data from this survey captured the massive surge of the foreign-born population under former President Joe Biden, when the foreign-born population increased by 8.32 million in just four years, the fastest four-year increase of any period in American history. The CIS report notes that “the clear upward trend followed by a dramatic downward trend does track well with changes in the nation’s immigration policies, from a highly permissive approach to immigration during the Biden administration to the more restrictive policies during the second Trump administration.” Over the past 18 months, by this account, Latin American noncitizens who arrived in 1980 or later account for all of the decrease in this population.

 

Not all of it, not by a long shot, is the result of interior enforcement. The best data we have suggest that 350,000 people were subject to some kind of enforcement act that led to their departure from the country in this 18-month time period. This enforcement pattern created incentives for others to leave voluntarily. Researchers Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler write, “Based on the data available, interior removals and voluntary departures could not by themselves account for the higher levels of emigration implied by the CPS. Voluntary emigration would have to have increased substantially for the foreign-born population to decline this much.” Overall, the numbers point to one overall conclusion — that “the number of people settling in the country legally and illegally has fallen significantly, while the number leaving has increased dramatically.”

 

The survey suggests that only 44 percent of the net decline is among workers. This lines up with the administration’s hands-off approach to the workplace. The Trump administration has practically exempted entire sectors, including hospitality, agriculture, and construction, from examination, allowing those sectors to continue to be labor gray zones, where illegal labor is tolerated, and increasingly a cultural and economic norm institutionally.

 

What can we conclude? The first is that President Trump has followed through dramatically on his promise to control immigration after a period of lawlessness and chaos under Biden. For this he should be commended. Second, the president and the Department of Homeland Security should step up workplace enforcement. The Republican Party has a proud tradition of fighting for a nation in which workers compete fairly on the same legal standing. Tight labor markets at the bottom end of the skills distribution raise the wages of poorer workers and spur innovation. Not every immigration enforcement action has to be a dramatic, GoPro-filmed kinetic action. Much of it involves carrying a briefcase and checking documentation.

 

Finally, and most important, these numbers refute the arguments of those who try to mystify the issue by portraying immigration as an uncontrollable feature of market economics or the process of globalization. Immigration can be controlled by policy and profoundly shaped by enforcement decisions. Self-deportation is a real phenomenon, and actions that increase voluntary compliance with our just laws should be redoubled. Commonsense enforcement is neither ruinously expensive nor injurious to the broader economy. The president is winning on this issue and should double down on his success.

The Vindication of Tom Homan

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, September 02, 2026

 

Where does Tom Homan go to get his apology?

 

When Trump put his border czar in charge of unwinding the controversial Department of Homeland Security operation in Minneapolis earlier this year, critics on the right believed that Homan would be the instrument of a broad Trump climb-down on his signature issue.

 

Gregory Bovino, the border officer who had been in charge in Minneapolis before getting supplanted by Homan, accused him of pretending to be tough while giving up on mass deportations.

 

As it turns out, immigration arrests hit a record for Trump’s second term in June at 43,000, and the number increased again in July to 50,000.

 

Removals, too, were at a high in July — 34,000.

 

There was a dip in enforcement after Trump pulled back from Minneapolis. It didn’t last long, though. As the administration settled on a new approach, and funding from the Big Beautiful Bill Act — $75 billion for ICE — flowed into additional enforcement assets, the numbers began to increase again.

 

Homan has avoided the pyrotechnics favored by the attention-seeking former head of DHS, Kristi Noem, who sent Bovino to Minneapolis. Instead, he’s continued robust enforcement without relishing cinematic images of militarized raids and clashes with protesters for their own sake.

 

In fact, anti-ICE activists are complaining about the lack of flashiness. According to The Guardian, they say that because arrests are “generally happening routinely, and quietly, volunteers who had taken to keeping watch for ICE vehicles and officers in certain cities and blowing whistles when they spotted immigration agents, were lately having trouble seeing how and where ICE is operating.”

 

The new tactics depend heavily on routine pickups of illegal aliens at traffic stops and immigration check-ins, as well as at airports.

 

A spate of news stories has emphasized, in a critical tone, how for the first time a majority of those apprehended haven’t committed other crimes besides their immigration offenses. It may be that Trump and Homan have put too much emphasis in their rhetoric on going after “the worst of the worst,” but there is no reason that more routine immigration offenders should be held harmless.

 

(The effort to track down and detain criminals continues, by the way — Operation Rotten Apple in New York has taken murderers, rapists, and gang members off the streets over the last few weeks.)

 

It is true that staying and working here illegally doesn’t necessarily make someone a threat to public safety. It does, however, involve committing other crimes — identity theft, Social Security fraud, falsifying I-9 employment forms, and the like. Regardless, immigration law very clearly gives the government authority to arrest and detain illegal immigrants, and in some instances, mandates it.

 

ICE is required to detain aliens who are under final orders of removal, and there are plenty of those. Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies points out that immigration judges issued nearly half a million orders of removal in the first nine months of this fiscal year alone.

 

The fact is that the illegal immigrant population in the United States is roughly 15 million people, with a substantial number arriving during the Biden years alone. The only way to reduce this population is to arrest and deport illegal aliens, or to convince them — as a way to avoid their own arrest and deportation — to leave under their own power.

 

It is Tom Homan’s insight that the most politically sustainable way to effect this policy is to pursue it in a nonconfrontational manner and keep it out of the headlines to the extent possible. There is even more the administration could do along these lines if it used various forms of bureaucratic enforcement to squeeze businesses employing illegal workers.

 

For now, though, Homan has established proof of concept for a less lurid, but more effective version of immigration enforcement. There is much work yet to do, but Homan was never waving the white flag on enforcement and now has the numbers to prove it.

Why European Innovation Lags Behind the U.S.

By Eli Kronenberg

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

 

In September 2024, former Italian Prime Minister and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi released a European Commission report taking stock of the EU’s slowing productivity and innovation. What he found was startling.

 

Over the previous 50 years, Europe had produced zero companies created from scratch with a market capitalization above 100 billion euros ($116.7 billion), while in the same time span six American companies now valued at more than $1 trillion had launched. Since 2013, 137 venture capital funds larger than $1 billion had been created in the U.S., while only 11 such funds had emerged in the EU. And when it comes to cutting-edge technology, 61 percent of global funding for artificial intelligence startups went to American companies, compared with just 6 percent to companies in the EU. That’s despite the EU having a larger population than the U.S. by over 100 million people.

 

Taken together, these numbers paint a clear picture of a stagnating European economy where the conditions needed for innovation and growth lag significantly behind the U.S. and China. Although Europe has had no trouble producing a substantial volume of startups, almost none have grown into globally dominant companies. In few areas is this phenomenon more pronounced than in technology-intensive sectors. The EU’s share of global corporate research and development spending fell from 25 percent in 2004 to 17 percent in 2024, and that drop-off was especially steep in the electronic equipment and technology hardware sectors, according to calculations by Italian economist Andrea Dugo. So how did Europe fall so far behind, so quickly?

 

Europe’s costly fragmentation.

 

One variable that some economists observing Europe’s sluggish technology sector pinpoint is the continent’s lack of a true single market and the regulatory fragmentation that occurs as a result. Differences in national regulations, taxes, and legal systems mean that a company attempting to expand across Europe often has to deal with multiple sets of rules.

 

“Europe is like a very slow elephant,” Adriana Hoyos, an adjunct economics professor at IE University in Spain, told The Dispatch. “You have European regulation, then you have the national regulations, then you have state regulations with all these completely different ways of behaving.”

 

The Draghi report found that the EU had roughly 100 tech-focused laws and more than 270 regulatory authorities who govern some facet of digital networks across the bloc, including telecommunications and data protection regulators. For example, the AI Act—the EU’s comprehensive regulatory framework for AI passed in 2024—imposes different compliance burdens on AI models depending on which category of risk level they fall into. Although these safety measures can be crucial to preventing abuses in areas like law enforcement, hiring, and education, some provisions may impose disproportionate costs on young technology companies.

 

Understanding Europe’s market segmentation is especially crucial when analyzing its deficit in venture capital investment relative to the U.S. In a January article, Harvard Business School investment banking professor Josh Lerner pointed out that Europe lags significantly behind the U.S. in both the total quantity of its venture capital spending and the return on that investment. While only a tiny percentage of total U.S. businesses are backed by venture capital, half of all American companies that have gone public in the last two decades relied on venture capital funding, and nearly 90 percent of corporate research and development spending by young publicly traded firms is undertaken by venture-backed companies. “All the innovation in the United States being done by dynamic, young, recently public companies is basically being done by venture-capital-backed firms,” Lerner told The Dispatch.

 

While tech companies seeking to grow and raise capital in the U.S. have access to a large public market in Nasdaq—a reliable aid for young entrepreneurial firms looking to go public—European IPO markets are divided among smaller national exchanges. In the late 1990s, a group of venture investors launched a Pan-European stock exchange called EASDAQ to serve as an EU-wide market, but a series of competing regional markets soon emerged and, by 2003, EASDAQ had failed to make a sufficient impact and was shut down.

 

The lack of a continent-wide exchange similar to Nasdaq means promising European firms looking to scale up may be more likely to move to the U.S. for better access to capital, to remain private, or to sell to a larger firm. Between 2008 and 2021, nearly 30 percent of European startups that eventually became valued at more than $1 billion moved their headquarters abroad, with the vast majority of those moving to the U.S, according to the Draghi report.

 

Europe’s difficulty holding on to its most entrepreneurial citizens and their companies is not just a matter of a segmented market, but also of a more difficult tax environment. One example Lerner draws from is Norway, where, according to a recent paper by doctoral candidate Christine Blandhol, an increase in the wealth tax rate preceded a rise in the out-migration rate from 0.2 percent to 2 percent for affected households—and 40 percent of the departing households were active firm owners. And, between 2014 and 2024, the number of U.S. millionaires rose 78 percent, while the number of millionaires in Germany and France grew only 10 and 7 percent, respectively, and the United Kingdom’s share of resident millionaires declined 9 percent.

 

Further fueling its innovation advantage, the U.S. attracts a substantial number of foreign students to its university system, many of whom go on to become entrepreneurs. In an article published in April, Hoyos noted that roughly 75 percent of European Ph.D. students at American universities remain in the U.S. at least five years after graduation. “I have students I teach at IE, and I have students from all nationalities, and … the ones that are interested in technology, basically all of them want to go to the U.S. to work or to study” for advanced degrees, Hoyos said.

 

While tax and regulatory regimes can play a role in fostering or discouraging innovation, some have argued that differing notions of productivity also figure in. As Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, put it bluntly in a 2024 Financial Times interview, “We are not very ambitious. I should be careful about talking about work-life balance, but the Americans just work harder.” Indeed, labor is more strictly regulated in the EU, with the Working Time Directive guaranteeing workers in all member states at least four weeks of paid time off per year, time that cannot be replaced by a monetary stipend. In the U.S., meanwhile, 31 percent of workers have no paid time off, and the average American receives 11 days of paid vacation per year, just above half the European minimum.

 

Could the Trump administration provide an impetus for change?

 

While the U.S. has historically drawn the best and brightest from around the globe to contribute to its innovation edge, whether that advantage will continue isn’t entirely clear. President Donald Trump’s restrictive immigration policies, combined with his “America First” trade and foreign policy, could give Europe and the rest of the world an opportunity to close the gap.

 

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the administration is weighing a $100,000 fee for all foreign students to work in the U.S. upon graduation, after a policy charging that same fee to companies seeking H-1B visas for workers was struck down by a judge in June. In July, the Trump administration also issued a final rule eliminating what it called the “duration of status loophole,” which allowed foreign students on F-1 visas to remain in the U.S. for the duration of their academic program, without setting an exact expiration date on their stay.

 

Lerner recalled a joke he used to tell members of the Canadian government whom he advised. “My joke with them is that the first Trump administration did more for Canadian entrepreneurship and venture capital than 30 years of Canadian government policy ever accomplished,” he said. “Which is to say that when you think about the great successes that the U.S. has had, a lot of that is driven by immigrants, who are just incredibly creative.”

 

Additionally, Trump’s continued pressure on NATO allies to invest more in their own defense capabilities could boost European innovation, especially as the war in Ukraine rages on. The European Commission has acknowledged as much in its Readiness 2030 plan, which could enable up to 800 billion euros ($935 billion) in additional defense spending over the next five years, including by mobilizing “private capital.”

 

However, according to Hoyos, European leaders will need to adopt a more fundamental mindset shift in how they approach artificial intelligence and other technological innovation before the continent can end its decades-long slide in economic influence. “I think Europe is clearly lost [in the] technological world,” Hoyos said. “They don’t see the priority, they don’t see how fast this is going, and they think it’s something that’s optional.”

Identifying the Enemy

By Andrew Stuttaford

Saturday, August 15, 2026

 

I wrote last year about the way in which Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a Social Democrat, led her center-left party to take a tougher stance on immigration after she became its leader in 2015. Not unconnectedly, she became Denmark’s prime minister in 2019. Unsurprisingly, Frederiksen has reiterated her position on immigration in the wake of the events in Ceuta, and in language unimaginable from almost anywhere else on the left.

 

On August 12, the Danish parliament debated Ceuta and its aftermath. Among Frederiksen’s remarks were these (translation by Google Translate, but from my very, very limited knowledge of Danish it looks to be accurate):

 

A few years ago, Denmark stood very much alone in Europe. Now a majority of EU countries support it, and this has made it possible to create concrete political results. We have succeeded in changing EU legislation so that it is now possible to establish reception and departure canters [for illegal migrants] in countries outside the EU, and . . . Danish authorities are working concretely to make it a reality. In other words: Denmark is now pushing Europe forward, and we intend to continue to do so — also when it comes to the issue of legalizing illegal migrants who are already in Europe, because we are against that. We are against that. It is no secret that I and the Spanish prime minister deeply disagree on immigration policy. We do so at a national level, and we do so at a European level. The Spanish government can make its own national decisions, just as Denmark can. But I and we will not accept that Danish society has to pay the price for decisions in Spain that we fundamentally disagree with. [Emphasis added.]

 

In other words, given the rules governing internal movement within the EU, the amnesty for illegal migrants forced through by Spain’s far-left prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, had implications elsewhere in the bloc. That’s something that Sánchez, who has complained loudly about a lack of “solidarity” within the EU after the Ceuta crisis would do well to remember, a point that Frederiksen addressed later in the debate.

 

Frederiksen also turned her attention to the danger posed to Europe by “undemocratic forces.” After identifying Russia as the principal threat, she then turned her attention to what she referred to a “big enemy that has started to grow from within (en stor fjende er begyndter begyndt at vokse op indefra).”

 

Who might this be?

 

It is foreigners who have come to Europe [“udlændinge, der er kommet til Europe”], it is Hamas supporters, it is people who commit terror against European societies, it is people who do not recognize our fundamental European values, it is people who sympathize with some of the darkest forces in this world. So Europe is threatened. The problem is that we are threatened both from outside and now from within, but it is not because of a disagreement between the Danish and Spanish governments, but because of people with an Islamic background [“folk med islamisk baggrund”] who do not want the open, free European society, unfortunately.

 

As a reminder, Frederiksen was on the left and is on the left. To Bernie Sanders, she must be the Dane from hell.

 

Moreover, she has just co-signed a letter with Italy’s redoubtable (oh, sorry, “far right”) Giorgia Meloni, who is, in many respects, Frederiksen’s polar opposite, as the duo acknowledge in the letter:

 

We are aware that many might be wondering about our cooperation. We come from very different political backgrounds, and we certainly do not agree on everything.

 

But:

 

We do not accept uncontrolled immigration to Europe, and we have promoted a strict immigration policy, both in our Nations and in Europe.

 

And they defend their stance not only on conventional grounds (problems with crime and so on), but something deeper:

 

We are both proud of Europe’s Christian cultural heritage and we want to protect it. We expect those who come to our countries and choose to make Europe their home to respect our values and not seek to impose ways of life on us that we do not share.

 

The reference to “cultural heritage” is carefully chosen. This is not, it should be stressed, some sort of theological declaration. Meloni is a Catholic, if somewhat idiosyncratically so, and a churchgoer. Frederiksen is a member of the Church of Denmark but is not a believer. However, for reasons tied to culture and social cohesion, she is a “virkelig hardcore tilhænger” (a really hardcore supporter) of the Danish church, a stance, incidentally, that has its equivalents in the home of the Church of England.

 

Contrast the attitude of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France’s hard left LFI. He will be running (again) for the French presidency next year and, based on current polling, he may emerge as the leading candidate of the left.

 

Mélenchon talks of a “New France” formed and defined by a process he refers to as “créolisation” (a concept borrowed from Édouard Glissant, a poet born in the French Caribbean), something new formed by the mix of traditional French and immigrant culture, rather than the traditional French model which is, at least in theory, assimilationist.

 

Mélenchon’s approach is, above all, a matter of political calculation. He has realized that the white Catholic working class (“les ouvriers blancs catholiques”) are not going to help build the path to socialism he is looking for. He seems to have concluded that citizens of the nascent New France just might. Given France’s demographics, that has meant a sharp turn toward Muslim voters, which seems to be working. In the 2024 European elections, an estimated 62 percent of those French Muslims who voted (there was a high abstention rate) opted for the LFI and an estimated 69 percent chose Mélenchon in the first round of the 2022 presidential elections.

 

Mélenchon dismisses talk of an informal Islamo-leftist “partnership.” He also denies allegations of antisemitism.

 

Of course he does.

 

Fortunately, his sort of politics would be impossible in New York City, say, or Michigan.

 

Oh.

The Roots of the Ceuta Crisis

National Review Online

Tuesday, August 04, 2026

 

The massive (if largely temporary) incursion of about 70,000 illegal migrants out of Morocco into Ceuta, a Spanish city of 80,000 people on the North African coast, has set off a debate that, to say the least, has been wide-ranging.

 

We will start at the beginning. Ceuta has been under Spanish or Portuguese rule since it was taken by the Portuguese in 1415, almost 40 years before the fall of Constantinople. Asserting that it is unacceptable to have a Spanish city on the African mainland is a variant of blood-and-soil nationalism that, if taken to its logical conclusion, would mean that Turkey should quit East Thrace and Istanbul.

 

Self-determination is the better principle. Ceutans are Spaniards who want their city to remain Spanish. That wish should be respected. Ceuta juts into Morocco, which argues that Ceuta (and Melilla, its “twin”) are part of its patrimony, a claim without any legitimacy. If there is any substance behind recent hints of discreet U.S. support for Morocco over this, it is evidence of appallingly misguided thinking. Spain’s hard-left prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, is profoundly and dangerously anti-American, but his time will pass. The U.S. should not confuse Spain with Sánchez or, for that matter, Morocco with reliability.

 

Much of the controversy over the influx into Ceuta revolves around Sánchez’s responsibility for it. Earlier this year, his government forced through an amnesty for illegal immigrants. About 1 million people applied, roughly double the official, but widely disbelieved, estimate. Eventually, family reunification provisions may increase the total admitted or regularized to, on some estimates, between 2 and 3 million. After, typically, five years of legal residence, they will be able to settle elsewhere in the EU. Unsurprisingly, the news of this amnesty horrified many in a bloc already wrestling with the consequences of mass immigration and badly scarred by the Merkel debacle a decade ago. Thanks to the EU’s rules on free movement within its borders, an immigration problem in one member-state can easily spill over into another.

 

The amnesty sent a signal to would-be immigrants. It was not the first in Spain, and there was no reason to think that it would be the last, Moreover, just weeks ago, the Spanish Supreme Court had opened a loophole in the special immigration regime in place for Ceuta and Melilla. Under this, asylum-seekers can be turned back at the border but, the court ruled (for reasons that are now being addressed), not if they swam there.

 

People respond to incentives, whether real or imagined. Some sort of surge was foreseeable. Indeed, there are claims that Madrid was warned that one was on the way. The government’s response has ranged from denial to the somewhat more credible position that it was given no warning of the size of any incursion. Whatever the truth, no new steps were taken to deal with a surge, a negligent coda to a reckless amnesty.

 

The sheer size of the crowd that overwhelmed Ceuta’s inadequate defenses and poured into the city has understandably given rise to suggestions that the incursion was organized. But by whom?

 

The most obvious suspect is the Moroccan government. Not only does it claim that Ceuta is Moroccan, but also, some argue, it was angered by a recent visit by Sánchez to Algiers during which he described Algeria as a “strategic partner.” Morocco and Algeria do not get along. Under the circumstances, for Morocco to take advantage of the opportunity created by Madrid to demonstrate Ceuta’s vulnerability would make a lot of sense. There are reports that the Moroccan government encouraged the exodus, and there are others that suggest something more complex. If only, perhaps, for diplomatic reasons, Sánchez has distanced himself from the accusations against Rabat and cast some of the blame on people-traffickers and, one way or another, social media.

 

Sánchez was, however, enraged by criticism from some EU countries (above all, Italy, which also introduced temporary checks on non-EU citizens traveling directly from Spain) and their supposed lack of “solidarity.” However, in a letter sent on Saturday, 22 EU prime ministers (the EU has 27 member-states) made clear what they thought of Sánchez’s solidarity. They stressed the importance of working jointly against illegal immigration, an approach that included “addressing all policies that can serve as pull factors, such as the regularization of [a] very large number of irregular migrants.” Ouch.

 

In an attempt to defuse matters, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU Commission, has praised the speedy resolution of the Ceuta crisis (even if more migrants remain there than was first claimed). She is calling for tighter external border controls, something that obviously makes sense. These would, however, have done nothing to stop Sánchez’s amnesty. So, what to do? We would recommend offering member-states a choice. If they want to preserve their prerogative to unilaterally pass such measures, they should agree to withdraw from the EU’s border-free Schengen Area. This is unlikely to happen, though, and Schengen will limp on until it collapses.

The Ceuta Migrant Wave Was a Power Play by Morocco Against Spain

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

Most of the commentary on Ceuta that you’ll find on platforms like X reiterates the same four points.

 

·         If we hadn’t reelected Trump, this is what America would look like.

 

·         This is what you get when you elect socialists like Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

 

·         The Moroccans attempting to cross the border are overwhelmingly military-age males, so this isn’t migration, it’s an invasion.

 

·         The 1973 French novel The Camp of the Saints is more than a xenophobic tirade, it’s a prediction of our future.

 

All those arguments are true to varying degrees. Most notably, in February the Sánchez government said it would offer amnesty, expecting to legalize an estimated half million immigrants who had arrived illegally in recent years. More than 1.3 million applied for the amnesty. Under the laws of Europe’s Schengen area, if you’re a Spanish citizen, you can travel or work in 28 other countries. (Our Andrew Stuttaford, back on July 3: “This amnesty, the seventh in 40 years, will only encourage more arrivals. Needless to say, it is a mistake.”)

 

But there are also a couple of wrinkles in the rush to Ceuta that are getting overlooked, although not by John Gustavsson or Josh Treviño, both writing for National Review Online.

 

On July 20, Prime Minister Sánchez visited Algeria:

 

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said in Algiers on Monday that he sought to deepen ties with Algeria, as the countries mend relations after a dispute over Western Sahara.

 

Sanchez told reporters that the visit, a first in four years, held “particular importance” for Spain, which views Algeria as “not only a neighboring country but also a strategic partner.” . . .

 

Ties between Algiers and Madrid deteriorated in 2022 when Spain backed Morocco’s sovereignty claim over Western Sahara, reversing its decades-long neutral stance on the conflict over its former colony.

 

The governments of Algeria and Morocco do not get along and have not gotten along for a long time. They both want to be the big dog in northwest Africa, and any gain by Algeria is seen as a loss for Morocco, and vice versa.  Algeria cut ties with Morocco in 2021, and the land border between those two countries has been closed since 1994.

 

There’s even an arms race:

 

Against this backdrop, the two countries began to prepare for the possibility that their dispute might evolve into armed conflict. Both sides ramped up military spending. Morocco bought Israel’s anti-drone Skylock Dome system in November and its Harop drones in December. In February 2022, it additionally acquired Barak MX, a modular Israeli-made system that can knock down both missiles and drones. Finally, in April 2023, the U.S. State Department approved the sale of eighteen U.S. HIMARS multiple rocket launchers, along with other military equipment, to Morocco.

 

Algeria rushed to keep pace with these purchases. In November 2022, the Algerian parliament approved a staggering increase in the 2023 military budget to around $23 billion, up from around $11 billion the previous year. In late 2022, local media indicated that the authorities were preparing to buy Su-57 stealth jets, SU-34 bombers and Su-30 fighters, in addition to new air defence systems, such as the S-400, from Russia. To diversify its weapons sources, Algeria turned to Türkiye to buy Anka S+ drones and to China to acquire Halcon drones, to give two examples.

 

Do tens of thousands of people spontaneously decide, all by themselves, to rush a fenced border? No, they do not.

 

From the New York Times (emphasis added):

 

Like so many others in Morocco, Mohammed Ahmidho saw on his social media feeds early Thursday that the heavily guarded border his country shared with the Spanish territory of Ceuta was open.

 

Soon enough, he joined a crowd in the tens of thousands, many of whom were astonished to see Moroccan police urge them, as he recalled, to “come to Spain.”

 

It is still unclear why so many people came to Ceuta. Many of the Moroccans who wandered around Ceuta on Friday wondered if the doors hadn’t opened because of some unknown plan by Morocco, which has been accused of using immigrant flows in the past for political pressure.

 

“I don’t know why they let us through,” said Ajoub el-Arrot, 24, who said he heard about the open border on social media. “Maybe they had some political reason. They opened the border and let everyone go by.”

 

He added, “When there are political problems, Morocco opens the doors and tells us to go.”

 

Douae Tabit, 19, who also said she heard about the unchecked crossing on social media, said it went “viral” and passed by word of mouth, attracting people from all around Morocco. Fluent in English, French and Spanish, she said she worked as a nurse and photographer and spontaneously decided to take advantage of the opportunity.

 

Moroccan police do not just randomly encourage people to cross into Spain without documentation.

 

Do you think it’s a coincidence that less than two weeks after Sánchez went to Algeria and declared that country a “strategic partner,” the Moroccan police started encouraging tens of thousands of Moroccans to attempt to cross the border into Ceuta? Me neither. Yes, Sánchez’s amnesty policies are a factor in this, but what happened here is that the Moroccan government, irked that Sánchez is trying to build a better relationship with Algeria, sent a signal to the Spanish prime minister that it can make life for him, his government, and the people of Ceuta miserable, any time it wants.

 

In the combined fiscal years 2024–2025, the U.S. government sent $112 million in foreign aid to Morocco. According to ForeignAssistance.gov, the U.S. has sent $1.4 million so far this fiscal year, although that data may be incomplete.

 

One last point: Andrew Stuttaford notices with irritation that the National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Act of 2027, which passed the House nearly unanimously a few weeks ago, states:

 

The Committee notes that the Spanish-administered cities of Ceuta and Melilla are located in Moroccan territory and remain the subject of Morocco’s longstanding claim.

 

And:

 

The Committee supports efforts by the Secretary of State to encourage diplomatic engagement between Morocco and Spain on the future status of Ceuta and Melilla.

 

“The wording of the committee’s report has no legal status, but it was, at the very least, careless,” Andrew concludes. “Making matters worse, it didn’t pass unnoticed in either Spain or Morocco.”

 

Was someone in our government, irritated with Spain over the amount of its NATO spending, attempting to stick a thumb in the eye of the Spanish government?

 

By the way, for all the legitimate gripes about Spain and its contribution to NATO, let us observe that the Spanish government has increased its defense spending by 70 percent in the last decade; its investment of 32 percent on equipment is above the 20 percent required by NATO and actually a bit higher than the U.S. level at 29.7 percent. Spain spent $40 billion on defense in 2025; we all love the Poles, but Poland spent about $46 billion. The reason Spain’s defense spending as a share of gross domestic product seems so much lower is that Spain has a GDP just above $2 trillion, while Poland — now in the top 20 economies in the world — has a GDP of around $1 trillion.

 

The Cyberattacks That President Trump Doesn’t Want to Acknowledge

 

Considering the importance of what it does, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is surprisingly low-profile. It could use a CBS prime-time drama or two. Then again, the agency may well like it that way; like offensive lineman, you usually hear about the more obscure federal law enforcement agencies only when something goes wrong.

 

Efforts to hack into critical infrastructure are widespread: in 2024, Check Point Research documented 1,162 cyberattacks on U.S. utilities, a 75 percent year-over-year increase. Given those numbers, perhaps it’s good that we hear about CISA so rarely. But the agency regularly puts out new alerts about foreign cyber threats. (Keep in mind that “approximately 50 to 85 percent of critical infrastructure is privately owned, depending on the sector, from large corporations to small and medium-sized businesses.” So it’s up to the private company to make sure its cyber defenses are up to the task.) China and Russia may take the gold and silver in the cyber-threat Olympics, but the Iranians consistently edge out the North Koreans for the bronze.

 

In February 2024, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned six officials in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Cyber-Electronic Command for a November 2023 attack on the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa, Pa.

 

CISA put out alerts regarding “malicious cyber activities conducted by advanced persistent threat cyber actors affiliated with the Iranian Government’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” or similar Iranian threats in August 2024, October 2024, and December 2024.

 

Also in 2024, President Trump’s campaign said it had been targeted by “an Iranian military intelligence unit in June sending ‘a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior advisor.’”

 

In mid-March, the U.S. Justice Department “announced the seizure of four domains as part of an ongoing effort to disrupt hacking and transnational repression schemes conducted by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security.” Later that month, “cyber criminals linked to Iran accessed FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email account.”

 

Then, on July 30, the FBI put out a new public service announcement:

 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Environmental Protection Agency are issuing this Public Service Announcement to warn critical infrastructure asset owners and operators that malicious cyber actors are conducting cyber-attacks targeting Operational Technology devices, including Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley Programmable Logic Controllers , specifically MicroLogix 1100 and 1400 series. Since July 27 2026, Water and Wastewater Sector utility companies in at least seven states have reported incidents to the FBI, and some of that activity degraded water operations.

 

Minnesota and Michigan have been identified as two of those states.

 

Now, the most recent PSAs did not specifically state that the Iranians were doing this. But we know from past attacks like the one in Aliquippa, Pa., that this is the Iranian modus operandi.

 

Anyway, here’s our president on Friday:

 

Today, I just want to mention that we heard in Minnesota there was a cyberattack and they blame it on Iran. I don’t think so. I think — I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent. There was a cyberattack of 30 water plants, and I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota. They like to say, oh, it’s Iran. Iran should be so lucky. Iran’s got bigger problems than worrying about Minnesota. This month it was announced that inflation is dropping at the fastest rate in more than six years. Walmart, Sam’s Club, Giant Eagle and others are slashing prices by hundreds of grocery stores.

 

And then later in that same appearance:

 

I don’t think — no, I think that Minnesota is behind it. You know who’s behind it, Minnesota, because they’re grossly incompetent. I think the governor’s behind it. I don’t think there was an Iranian cyberattack. I think that Minnesota ought to get its act together. It’s one of the worst-run states. JD will tell you. He found tremendous corruption in Minnesota.

 

And how about the attacks on water systems in those six other states, Mr. President? Do you think “the governor’s behind it” for all of those, too? You think Tim Walz is the criminal mastermind behind all of these cyberattacks?

 

Our critical systems are under attack, and our rambling, erratic, living-in-his-own-world president does not want to acknowledge it. If he did publicly recognize that Iran is trying to harm Americans through their water systems, the public might be rather upset by the latest cancellation of a massive military response against the Iranian regime.

 

Oh, and under this administration, CISA has gotten significantly smaller:

 

At the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the government’s top cyber defense body protecting U.S. election systems, nearly 1,000 CISA personnel — or nearly one-third of the agency’s workforce — had left or been removed from active service by mid-2025.

 

Some were terminated, while others resigned or took administrative leave. Others had contracts that were not renewed or their programs were shut down. Altogether, staffing lingered at around 2,500, down from approximately 3,400 a year earlier.

 

Hey, didn’t our president just give a big prime-time speech about how “the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes [us], like levels never thought possible, to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference”? If you’re so worried about foreign hacking and exploitation, why are you dramatically cutting the number of staff at the federal agency designed to fight foreign hacking and exploitation?

 

ADDENDUM: Out in Ohio, Republican Senator Bernie Moreno writes of his son-in law, Republican Congressman Max Miller:

 

If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives. I believe Max Miller needs to seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake. I believe he should not be free to continue endangering others until he does.