The LA Riots Are a Warning To Europe

Los Angeles has now entered its sixth day of rioting. The scenes coming out of the Californian city are like something from a warzone. Driverless taxis have been torched. Businesses have been looted. Police vehicles were attacked with cinder blocks. Officers have had Molotov cocktails hurled at them. American flags are being burned, and Mexican flags being brandished by protestors. 

The LAPD was forced to respond with tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash-bang grenades against the rioters. Over the weekend and on Monday, President Donald Trump sent in 4,000 National Guard troops in an effort to quell the violence, bypassing California Governor Gavin Newsom. This marked the first time federalized National Guard troops have been deployed without the consent of a sitting governor since the 1965 Selma March for black voting rights. On top of this, roughly 700 U.S. Marines have arrived in the greater Los Angeles area and are conducting pre-mission training, expected to deploy Thursday or Friday. LA mayor Karen Bass even issued a curfew on Tuesday, from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., covering a roughly one-square-mile area of downtown. That curfew has since entered its second night and remains in effect “indefinitely.” So far, over 400 people have been arrested in LA alone and ICE reports that more than 330 illegal immigrants—many with existing criminal records—have been detained. Similar protests, albeit less violent, have spread across the country, including to New York City, Dallas, Seattle, and San Francisco. 

All this was sparked by the fact that Trump has decided to enforce existing immigration laws. Last Friday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents started to conduct raids in particularly immigrant-heavy LA, arresting over 40 immigrants suspected to be in the U.S. illegally. 

Of course, Trump has been roundly blamed for causing the riots, for daring to actually police America’s borders—unlike the Democrats, who under the Biden administration let in around 10 million illegal aliens. That’s not to say that the kind of mass deportations we’re seeing under Trump is somehow unique. Barack Obama deported and removed more migrants during his two terms as president than any previous president except Bill Clinton. Of course, no one rioted about this at the time. 

Nor are Trump’s deportations unpopular with Americans. For starters, he was elected on a platform based largely around halting Biden’s de facto open borders policy. Recent polling also shows that a majority are in favour of deportations, even if they disagree on just how far ICE agents should go.  

As much as the Democrats and large sections of the mainstream media would like it to be the case, the LA riots are not the fault of Trump. They are not a valiant response to an authoritarian crackdown against innocent people, as some have tried to claim. The widespread violence is rather the inevitable reaction to the open-borders lie. It is the consequence of a sustained, decades-long campaign by the political, media, and cultural classes that asserted that every single person in the world has an inalienable right to enter and settle in the U.S. That same fiction has been repeated all across the West. 

In Europe, we are told that the most noble and virtuous thing we can do is to ‘welcome refugees’ with open arms—even when those refugees are dangerous criminals. Even when those refugees refuse to integrate. Even when those refugees make it more difficult for states to help their own people. And even when those refugees turn out to not even be refugees at all. The belief that borders are an inherently evil concept, a project constructed purely out of exclusionary or supremacist notions, is now so widely held that even the most basic attempts to police who enters our countries are met with cries of ‘fascist!’ or ‘racist!’. 

If and when our politicians do decide to start seriously policing borders, they will be met with significant, potentially destabilising, resistance. We see this already in some nations where governments have been elected on a mandate of cutting migration and then attempt to carry that out. Thankfully, the pushback has so far been primarily legal, coming from within the state or from supra-state authorities rather than from violent protesters. In Germany, the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) won February’s federal elections partially based on the promise that it would finally control Germany’s borders. Then, when CDU chancellor Friedrich Merz announced that he intended to start turning asylum seekers away, this was halted by a Berlin court earlier this month. The fact that Germans had elected Merz to fulfil this promise was apparently unimportant for the unelected judges in Berlin. The situation is similar in the UK, where, despite the popularity of deporting foreign criminals, the state is routinely prevented from sending even the most heinous characters home by the ECHR. 

In the long run, the opposition won’t just come from the courts, though. Already, we are seeing large-scale, mostly non-violent protests across the continent in favour of open borders. Parts of some European cities with large immigrant populations are already verging on ungovernable. In December last year, Paris saw hundreds of illegal migrants—mostly from West Africa—occupying the Gaîté Lyrique theatre, demanding housing and legal papers. The standoff lasted a whole three months and ended only after riot police forcibly removed the occupants in March. 

In Germany, the situation is dire, too. In 2018, around 200 African migrants at an asylum centre in Ellwangen, Baden-Württemberg, physically prevented the deportation of a man from Togo. The police were outnumbered to the point they had to withdraw from the centre and return three days later with hundreds of armed officers to re-establish control. 

Then, in 2022, a similar incident took place in the Spanish enclave of Melilla, in North Africa. Almost 2,000 migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, attempted to storm the heavily fortified border separating Melilla from Morocco—the only land border between Africa and the EU. This quickly descended into chaos, as people were crushed in a stampede. The incident left 23 migrants dead, and hundreds injured. 

Europe need not guess where this all leads. The LA riots show what happens when states lose the ability, or the will, to enforce their own laws. When migration policy is decided not by voters or even elected officials, but by activist judges and violent mobs, the result will always be lawlessness. The more this persists, the more brittle the social contract becomes. Then, all it takes is the arrest or attempted deportation of a single individual for large-scale unrest to erupt. If LA is America sneezing, Europe is in for one hell of an outbreak.