The Left’s Missing Argument on Asylum Violence
What an intelligent left-wing position on Sudanese asylum seekers should have been after the Belfast knife attack
There are benefits to immigration: A short-term GDP bump, cheap labor, great food, lower prices.
And then there’s this:
Thirty-year-old Hadi Alodid, a Sudanese asylum seeker, mounted and stabbed Stephen Ogilvie repeatedly in the face, head, neck, and back with a kitchen knife in north Belfast. Ogilvie lost his left eye and sustained serious injuries but survived.
There’s been a characteristic silence around the attack from left-wing media. The New York Times did cover it, but only in the context of the anti-immigration sentiment that ensued. Same with the other mainstream outlets I checked (BBC, NBC, Washington Post, CNN, etc.). This is a shame, not merely because it is gross journalistic malpractice to frame the event only in terms of its backlash, but because it deprives everyone (left, right, and center) of hearing what the intelligent left-wing critic has to say about the issue.
After the attack I called a few leftist friends to get their perspectives on the attempted beheading. Not a single person had even heard of the attack. Not one.
Maybe there is a reasonable way of interpreting this asylum seeker’s savagery that doesn’t lead one to think, as I did: “Jesus Christ, we’re long overdue to shut the borders and deport these people.” But because of the mainstream’s silence on the issue, we will never know what intelligent leftists have to say.
Whether or not I agree with the left or the right on any given issue, I think the presence of differing opinions and the resulting debate is an inherently good thing for a democracy. If people with whom you disagree are unwilling or incapable of forming arguments for their positions, and if you value truth and intellectual integrity then you should make their arguments better than they could. This is part of being an intellectually responsible adult: Understanding that you cannot be correct about everything and those who have substantive disagreements with you are almost certainly correct some of the time.
So, in the absence of intelligent left-wing discussion on this issue, I’m going to steelman the opposition and tell you what I think the intelligent left-wing response to this issue should be:
A fair immigration system is liberal. We look at an immigrant, and we see him not for his race or country of origin, but for who he is as an individual. Is he likely to commit crime? To take from the treasury more than he will contribute? To be a productive member of the community?
Sometimes, however, we have a moral and legal duty to provide succor to those who are suffering profoundly, even if otherwise they should not be provided entry into our country.
Sudan, the country of origin of our attempted murderer, is in the middle of a civil war. My favorite summation of the war comes from the Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum, who termed it “The War About Nothing.” Essentially, two warlords are creating armies of child soldiers. They are raping and murdering their way through hundreds of thousands of civilians, not for religious or ethnic reasons or any of the “legitimate” reasons to wage war, but simply out of a naked desire for power.
We live in a time and nation of unprecedented prosperity. There has never been a country, in the history of the world, with the wealth of the United States of America. The argument for helping others is not, “We colonized them now we owe them reparations,” nor is it, “This is development aid and a hedge against Chinese power in the region,” the argument is simply that there is profound suffering at mass scale that we can help to remediate at relatively little cost to ourselves. We have the obligation to do so.
The rest is logistical. If we are going to accept refugees, we have a responsibility to ensure that they are able to function in what is to them, an alien society. In the UK, all unaccompanied minors are automatically given a court-ordered social worker who sits down with them, listens to their story and their trauma, and gives them a path, emotional and professional, towards a functioning life in the UK. To close that path to older asylum seekers risks repeating attacks like this one.
Responsible policymakers should be investing more money to immigrants in the form of social and integration services like professional training, and in the form of social workers who are able to guide them through the process of assimilation. We did not do that. We gave in to moral impulses without also doing the boring, tedious, and essential work of making sure those moral impulses are girded by responsible policymaking. We are now facing the natural consequences of that mistake in the form of markedly elevated crime rates among asylum seekers from high-violence regions.
The correct response to this attack is not to defenestrate our moral impulses—to do that would be to sacrifice what makes our society a place worth fleeing to—it is to marry our morality to competence, and to take responsibility for seeing through those who are suffering into lives of productivity and contribution within our society.
I am not asking you to agree with this perspective. I do not agree with it. My disagreement stems from the idea that we have an obligation to take in asylum seekers because we are relatively well off. This is an assertion. It’s not derived. Moreover, there is overwhelming evidence that large, rapid inflows from high-violence, low-trust source regions produce measurable downstream costs in crime, welfare, and trust.**
With that said, I am asking you to consider this argument, and indeed, to rebut it to the extent to which you disagree. We are made stronger as a society when there is public debate on matters of abiding significance. This is my contribution.
Peter
**Citations
Statistics Denmark, Indvandrere i Danmark 2025 (Copenhagen: Statistics Denmark, 2025). Male descendants crime indices relative to Danish-origin baseline: Lebanon 386, Somali 316, Syrian 312, Iraqi 268.
Statistics Denmark, conviction tables (STRAFNA4 series), penal code convictions per 100,000 residents aged 15–79 by country of origin, 2021–2025. Somali-origin rate 7.8 times Danish-origin baseline (428 per 100,000); 40 of 65 tracked origin groups exceeded the native rate.
Ministry of Justice (UK), prison population statistics, June 2021–June 2025, analyzed in Migration Observatory, “How do conviction rates and prison populations differ between migrants and the UK-born population?” (30 September 2025). Prisoner numbers from Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan increased over the period concurrent with higher asylum inflows from those countries.
Migration Advisory Committee, Migration Advisory Committee Annual Report 2025 (London: Migration Advisory Committee, 17 December 2025), https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisory-committee-annual-report-2025/migration-advisory-committee-mac-annual-report-2025-accessible. “We expect the lifetime net fiscal impact of those entering through asylum and refugee routes to be unambiguously negative.”
Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), Police Crime Statistics 2025 (Wiesbaden: BKA, 2025). Non-German suspects accounted for roughly 34% of total suspects while comprising approximately 16% of the population, with elevated representation in violent crime categories among asylum-linked migrant cohorts.
Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (BRA), Registered offendings among persons of native and non-native backgrounds (Stockholm: BRA, September 2021). Foreign-born show relative risk of 3.2 for rape offences and up to 4.0 for homicide. Those born in Sweden to two non-native parents show relative risks of 11.2 for homicide and 11.5 for robbery.
I'll bite!
"There is profound suffering at mass scale that we can help to remediate at relatively little cost to ourselves...."
The gentry progressive symbol manipulators who write such things of course pay little cost, as the West isn't importing Theorists or journalists in bulk but manual laborers who they only meet as low-wage nannies, gardeners, cooks etc. Gentry progressives in the age of globalism have privatized the gains and socialized the losses and have created massive social discord and dislocation that threatens their entire project.
Also, considering brain drain and the reality that most poor immigrants will be living hard lives here of constant labor, much of it spent on expensive yet rundown housing, maybe the better way to remediate their national suffering is exporting the norms, habits and systems that have helped the West create its wealth—rule of law and a reliable judiciary, a political class that represents its people and doesn't prey on them, not to mention deferred gratification and the social stability that follows this—instead of treating their people as our human capital.
And as for "moral impulses" and other claims to morality and its fruits, this is when I reach for my wallet and try to get out of the way of the gentry progressive and their desperate need for a hit of moral superiority. Moral narcissism is the great vice of our age and as we've seen in the past decade in everything from BLM to migrants to Trans and Palestinians, the goal is to BE SEEN as performing a noble deed toward a member of a marginalized group, to be the whited sepulcher in the front pew who is a Good Person on the Right Side of History™️—but once the buzz wears off, none of these same people are around to deal with any adverse consequences and have absolutely ZERO interest in finding out that their exalted morality might have led to downstream problems, such as a guy getting beheaded on a street in Belfast.
What we have here in the West is the Golden Goose of prosperity and when you've been blessed to inherit a Golden Goose your first responsibility is tending and nurturing it so it can be there for your future, your kids and communities, not to carve it up and pass out the best slices to distant strangers as a way to broadcast your pure and righteous soul. Not that I'm in any way opposed to generous immigration (my family are all Ellis Islanders) but I am opposed to people who refuse to state limiting principles and treat politics like religion and policy like Scripture.
Thanks!
I've reached the point where I now pay more attention to U.K. news than American news because it seems they represent our future if we don't change course. Funny that the American leftists you reached out to hadn't even heard of this story. Also, the New York Times article covering it from the "backlash" point of view was utterly infuriating. I also notice that the New York Times is burying their reporting on the riots in Belfast. Someone behind the scenes wants that news suppressed from Americans, lest they get any "funny ideas."