When he was arrested for burglary in early 2006, Kesler Dufrene, a Haitian native residing in Florida’s Manatee County, already had a long history of sometimes violent criminality. His first arrest was at age 14 when he assaulted a teacher, and he has built up a long rap sheet since then. Often described as a drifter, Dufrene was caught burglarizing a home in July of 2006. Already on probation for theft, a judge gave him five years and ordered him deported after serving his sentence.
He never was. Dufrene emerged from prison in 2010 during a moratorium on deportations to Haiti enacted by the Obama administration. Due to his history, he was being “supervised” by immigration authorities, but that supervision was lax to say the least. Weeks after his release Dufrene committed a vicious, seemingly random triple homicide. One of the victims was a 15-year-old girl.
The local news ran a quote by the teen’s mother lamenting that “immigration” killed her daughter. Few news articles pointed out that the grieving mother, 37-year-old Audrey Hansack, is a native of Nicaragua who moved back to her home country in disgust with our immigration system. It’s hard to argue with her criticism. Dufrene spent his entire life in our country breaking the law and there is evidence that he did not act alone in his last crime, that perhaps his friends and family aided his violence.
What Hansack’s criticism doesn’t articulate is the root cause of criminality involving illegal immigrants. The postmodernist disdain for assimilation not only leads to ghettoized, impoverished immigrant populations cruelly barred from achievement; it encourages criminality by allowing barbarity to flourish in America under the guise of multiculturalism.
In 2006, Dr. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, a renowned criminal profiler, wrote an essay titled “Importing Violence: The Dangers of Immigration from Violent Cultures” that identifies this phenomenon. Schurman-Kauflin concentrates on Latin American and Muslim immigrants who refuse to assimilate to Western values’ treatment of women. Her exposition of certain Mexican cultural peculiarities is especially disturbing:
Over the past several years, the U.S. has seen a large influx of immigrants, both legal and illegal, from countries whose values are opposed to the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, there are large numbers of immigrants coming from countries that are misogynistic. These societies accord women little to no rights, and the idea of violence committed by men against women and children is not unusual.
First, take the concept of “rapto.” This comes from Mexico where in some areas, it is socially acceptable for a man of any age to abduct a female of any age as long as long as he intends to marry her. That is right. Men can kidnap and rape females. This is acceptable in Oaxaca where the government continues to view rapto as a minor crime. One legislator even referred to this horrid violation as “romantic.” Lest anyone believe such garbage, note that 24 year old Mexican immigrant Eliseo Nunez snatched a 12 year old girl and took her to Mexico to fulfill his erotic desires. Isn’t that romantic?
Many such cases have surfaced in America, where Mexican immigrants who have avoided or been denied access to the forces of assimilation then commit crimes that would be considered acceptable in Mexico. Many Americans are shocked to learn that the statutory age in several Mexican states is 12. Little wonder that we find stories of adult Mexican nationals molesting children — why wouldn’t they in a society that refuses to demand they conform to our standards?
In 2008 a 36-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico named Olivar Roblero attempted to kidnap his 9-year-old neighbor. Authorities learned that prior to the kidnapping attempt Roblero had failed to buy the girl from her parent. He told the mother he wanted the girl to be his wife and he’d treat her well. Rebuffed, Roblero tried to resort to the “rapto” of his native country.
Even if he was aware of U.S. law regarding such matters Roblero clearly thought that Americans viewed sex, marriage, and child brides the same way he did. It does not excuse his attack, but it does raise questions about how isolated from the American mainstream this man was, even after living in the country for years. No one in his community told him that American families don’t sell their pre-pubescent daughters to men in their late 30s? Doesn’t that illustrate the need for a policy of assimilation?
But the acceptance of these un-American values also changes our society as we absorb them. In 2009, 11-year-old Julissa Rodriguez ran away to Mexico with a 23-year-old man named Enrique Vasquez. Oddly, news reports and even some community members treated the 23-year-old as though he was little Julissa’s boyfriend as opposed to a pedophile. Julissa was molested by a pedophile who convinced her to run away with him and news reports treated the child like a 17-year-old out on a lark.
In a clearer case of American moral values losing ground to third world barbarity, an 11-year-old Hispanic girl in Texas was brutally gang raped by more than 10 assailants who filmed the attack. A reporter who viewed the arrest affidavit wrote that the attack details were too obscene to repeat. Defenders of the attackers, all of whom were African-Americans, claimed that the 11-year-old was a slut who wanted to be violently raped. Even the New York Times ran an article that blamed the victim for “dressing older” than she was. The brutalized child was treated in a more sexualized way than any adult rape victim. It’s hard to believe that the acceptance of Latin and Central American misogyny played no part in both the crime and the reaction to it.
Assimilation isn’t just a mechanism to help immigrants prosper. A culture and its values need it to survive.
No one can deny the link between un-assimilated (often illegal) immigrants and crime. A 2009 decrease in crime in Phoenix, Arizona, coincided with a decrease in the illegal alien population. ICE recently swept up 20 foreign nationals in the South who were sex offenders and announced that in 2011 they deported almost 6,000 rapists and child molesters.
Also note that legal immigrants who arrive here with the express purpose of becoming American citizens do not have anywhere near the levels of criminality as illegal aliens. There are many theories, but the criminality dividing Somali Muslims best illustrates this.
Leaders in the Somali community in Minnesota have long complained about the radicalization of their children. In 2008 more than 40 young Somali Americans disappeared from the state and many showed up working as soldiers for African jihadist groups. These events coincided with a rise in bias attacks against non-Muslims, homosexuals, and even other Somalis who broke the social mores of that community’s former home. Some of the attacks were so brazen that their perpetrators filmed and uploaded them onto the web with no attempt to disguise identities.
It’s clear that in this case, an insular, ghettoized community lives by the values and standards of a war-torn country overrun with Islamism. But why? How have we allowed people living in America to completely reject American standards of morality and culture? How do we produce communities so insular that the members within seem shocked when what they consider normal gets them arrested?
America is having a crisis of confidence. The left in this country has introduced the postmodern concept of subjective truth and morality into our culture, convincing many that American values are not superior — just different. This is, of course, untrue. American values and morals tower over the rest of the world. The ideas of personal autonomy and individual sovereignty make attacking homosexuals or people of different faiths abhorrent even to the most zealous Muslim American if they adopt our values. Children are protected from sexual predation here, not just because we have different standards, but because we’re a civilized society that recognizes how exploitative and dangerous it is for adults to have sexual relations with children. We don’t assault teachers, break into other people’s houses, or commit random mass murders because in America we understand these things are wrong, not just illegal.
We have begun the process of losing that understanding. Dufrene didn’t just slip through the cracks in 2010, he had a long criminal history that we as a society simply accepted because we no longer have the confidence to put an end to it. Dufrene should have been deported long before 2006, and the community he lived in should have been brought into the American mainstream. We should have the strength as a society to embrace immigrants and refugees while still insisting that they become Americans. Multiculturalism and a flickering faith in our traditions and values are what killed Audrey Hansack’s daughter, not immigration.
Related: See Rob Taylor’s previous articles on crime and culture:
Seasons in Hell: The Brutality of America’s Modern Day Slave Trade
Mumia Abu-Jamal, Damien Echols, and the Cult of the Murder Groupie
The Victim Factory: Occupy Wall Street and The Left’s Culture of Crime
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