[See also: Diversity Is Strength! It's Also...Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome, by Brenda Walker]

I pity the poor immigrant

Who wishes he would've stayed home,

Who uses all his power to do evil

But in the end is always left so alone.—Bob Dylan

For some curious reason, immigrants of all stripes are lauded by America's elite for their exemplary family values. But huddling in high-density hovels should not be mistaken for loving relationships or psychologically healthy lifestyles. There is plenty of dysfunction in those communities of diversitude, from continuing high levels of Hispanic teen and unmarried pregnancy to numerous cases of familial mass murder. Intrafamily killing deserves our attention, because it reveals the underside of immigrant communities in a way that little else can.

When an American mother like Andrea Yates or Susan Smith kills her children, the news coverage is plentiful and angry. But when a dim immigrant mom murders her kids, no one in the media seems to care.

Why is that? The dead children of foreigners are just as innocent as American youngsters.

Apparently the big brains in the editorial offices become squeamish when the sordid details of immigrant life don't conform to the happy-face template—diverse Horatio Algers making their way up the sparkly ladder of success.

The only time the press admits dysfunction among the diverse is when some ethnic group is demanding a new handout from the taxpayer for an expensive fix.  For example, I've reported on the importation of foreign misogyny to these shores from various backward countries. You don't see a lot about that in the news. What you see is reports that  "comprehensive multilingual services " are being provided to "immigrant women" and that this requires "funding."

Achieving the American Dream is alive and well on paper—but less so in real life.

Following is an incomplete but representative list of unhappy immigrant parents who have murdered their children.

• Mexican Angelica Alvarez killed her four children by two fathers last November in Elkhart Indiana. An illegal alien, she had lived in the US for five years but didn't speak any English, according to an American neighbor even though Alvarez attended an ESL class. She had recently lost her job, which left her depressed. She called each child to the basement, where she asphyxiated them one by one.

 

• Last October, Said Biyad, a Bantu refugee from Somalia, killed his four children in Louisville and attacked his estranged wife with a blunt object, and then turned himself in to police. He slashed the throats of the children, aged 2 to 8, because his wife disrespected him he said. Prosecutors say they intend to seek the death penalty.

Recent news in the case has been the difficulty in finding a court interpreter who speaks Bantu.

Keep in mind that Bantus are the despised of Somalia, one of the most primitive and chaotic societies on earth, "a country without government or law" according to the LA Times, and where slavery ended only in the 1930s. At the burial of the Biyad children, women stood separate from the male mourners, as is the custom. [All About America in 3 Days |Dogs are treated like people, money flows and life is easy. Or is it? By Edmund Sanders, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2006]

USA Today declared that Bantus are "not latter day cavemen" and then built a convincing case that they are:

"Resettlement counselors who work with Bantus say many had never flushed a toilet, flicked a light switch, watched a TV, talked on a telephone, cooked on a stove, ridden in a car, held a pen, used a fork, seen a two-story building or written or read their own language. In Kenya, some Bantus had gotten stuck in a room at an orientation session because they didn't know how to turn the doorknob. Others asked whether they had to go with their luggage as it passed through the airport X-ray machine." [ After 3 years, Somalis struggle to adjust to U.S. By Rick Hampson, USA Today, March 21, 2006]

Is it reasonable to think that persons from such cultures can ever adjust to modern societies? Many refugees from primitive tribal cultures will never be self-supporting in their lifetimes. At best, it is misguided benevolence to bring them here. At worst, it is a crass money-making enterprise for Catholic Charities and other "resettlement" agencies of the Refugee Industrial Complex.

• Kao Xiong, a Hmong refugee, shot and killed five of his children and then himself in Sacramento in 1999. The family of nine lived in a $310 one-bedroom apartment on Xiong's $1000 monthly groundskeeper salary and his wife's $500 welfare check.

Apparently Xiong had his eye on a spiffy new hunting jacket that cost several hundred dollars. The wife probably thought the money could be better spent on food for the brood. An argument ensued. Xiong then went to a casino and gambled away $450. It was not long afterwards that he shot the kids using a shotgun and high-powered rifle.

Hmong are a rudimentary agricultural people. Their written language was devised only in 1953. One shocking statistic from the 2000 Census is that "Over half of Hmong-American women ... have had no formal education at all." The same report found that Hmong living in the US "had the lowest average per-person income of any ethnic group described by the 2000 Census: $6,613." But Hmong refugees often continue to have enormous families in this country, sometimes polygamous ones.

• Ukrainian Nikolay Soltys killed several members of his family in the Sacramento area on August 20, 2001. He stabbed his pregnant wife first, then went to his aunt and uncle's house a few miles away and killed them and two nine-year-old cousins. After that, Soltys went to his mother's house and picked up his three-year-old son Sergey, whom he murdered the next day.

After a 10-day nationwide manhunt, during which the 27-year-old Ukrainian immigrant was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, he was captured in his mother's back yard in Sacramento. The police search was made more difficult by the Ukrainians' cultural mistrust of law enforcement and the inability of many to speak English. In February of the next year, Soltys managed to commit suicide in his jail cell.

At the time of his murder rampage, Soltys was unemployed and living on welfare. He had hoped to open an auto repair shop or become a paramedic but his failure to learn English made any career advancement impossible.

Because of the high-profile search for a dangerous and unpredictable mass murderer, the MSM paid attention. And when one listened carefully, there was mention that 75,000 Russians and Ukrainians were living in the Sacramento area.

Who knew?

In addition, it was noted that Soltys had a record of domestic violence in Ukraine and was too mentally unstable to enter the military there. But no one with a byline asked how such an undesirable character could be admitted to the U.S.

• Jihad Hassan Moukalled was a Lebanese immigrant living near Detroit who had a serious gambling problem. By November 2000, he had pulled $500,000 from his printing business to cover his gambling debts and had run up large credit card bills also. Before shooting himself, he killed his three young children and wife. Evidently, he felt they couldn't manage to live without him.

In a Grand Rapids Press article no longer online, "Immigrant gamblers have few support groups" [Dec 17, 2000, Pay Archive], local Lebanese complained that America did not offer culturally appropriate psychological help for gambling addicts. "I wish someone would help us," said Rosemary Antone of the Chaldean American Ladies of Charity.

• India immigrant Laxma Reddy shot and killed his wife Uma, his 13-year-old daughter and father-in-law as they slept in their beds in Brookline, Massachusetts in March 1997. Reddy had a medical degree from an Indian university and had left in the middle of his residency in a Cleveland hospital, apparently not able to make the adjustment to practicing medicine in the US. He had not been in contact with his family for several weeks prior to the murders. He was shot dead a few days later when he pulled a gun on a police officer in Elko, Nevada, during an unrelated traffic stop.

 

• In Maryland there is still some mystery about the March killing of the four Rodriguez children, since the mother Deysi Benitez remains missing. They were found dead in their home along with the father Pedro Rodriguez who had hanged himself. The police now believe Pedro killed the kids.

Whatever the details of the crime, there is no doubt the family was in over their heads financially. The couple purchased a $195,000 townhouse in 2005 they could ill afford. He worked in a factory, she in a restaurant. Pedro, a Salvadoran beneficiary of TPS ("Temporary" Protected Status) was arrested for shoplifting kids' clothing. He lost his job several days before the murders.

Deysi Benitez was born in a mountain village of El Salvador. She "was pregnant at 15, had only a third-grade education and could barely read Spanish, let alone English," according to the Associated Press ["Missing mother of dead kids lacked the skills to build her dream" AP, March 31, 2007]

Passionately wanting the American Dream of a middle class life doesn't mean that everyone can achieve it. Skills and knowledge become more necessary to making money. A century ago, an immigrant could more easily get an unskilled job that would support a family. In today's global exploitation economy, a foreign family has to work several jobs just to survive. Any bump along the road, be it financial pressures or an emotional explosion, can precipitate violence from accumulated stress.

We see the sociological blowback in the huge gang problem among immigrants. In fact, if you wanted to create gangs, you would welcome families whose cultural backgrounds make them totally unprepared to deal with a society where a high degree of literacy is required. The parents struggle with survival issues of learning the language and earning enough money. The kids struggle with school, where they try to fit in but are torn by being neither fish nor fowl. The 1.5 generation lives in a cultural no-man's land, where they receive mixed messages about whether to identify with their ethnicity or to their family's new home. Gangs, even violent ones, provide a community of shared outlook and experiences.

It is cruel, not to mention foolish public policy, to welcome millions of uneducated people from the Third World who are unprepared for life in a complex technological society. It is hard to live in a strange country where you don't speak the language and live in a limited cocoon with others of your tribe, alienated from the mainstream community. Multicultural cheerleaders like to downplay how difficult immigration can be under the best of circumstances. But many immigrant crimes have some basis in the interior culture clash and the ongoing stress of social maladjustment.

Less cheerleading for the multicultural delusion and more honesty from the MSM about diversity's downside would be welcome. Less sentimental, more honest reporting about the real immigrant experience might even save some lives down the road.

Brenda Walker (email her) lives in Northern California and publishes two websites,

LimitsToGrowth.org and ImmigrationsHumanCost.org. Recent events have convinced her that the Second Amendment should apply to citizens only.