Word games can’t conceal the ‘Third World’ truth about open borders

Politically incorrect words don’t kill, but Venezuelan gangs do.  

Donald Trump this week warned rally-goers in a small Wisconsin community that “if Kamala is re-elected, your town and every town … will be transformed into a Third World hellhole.”

He’s repeatedly said that Biden-Harris open borders are turning New York into a “Third World nation” and America into a “Third World disaster” — and the rhetoric makes left-wing elites apoplectic.

Never mind the violence perpetrated by migrant gangs and the societal disorder caused by open borders: Their problem is with the words.

NPR says the term “Third World” is “offensive.” Foreign Policy columnist Howard French calls it “utterly racist rhetoric.”  

It’s an intentional distraction.

People watching their neighborhoods being degraded know what they are seeing with their own eyes — and they have no problem calling the conditions as they see them.

“We’ve got a Third World country now here in New York City, with Third World crime,” says Republican New York City Councilwoman Vicki Paladino. She estimates that 60% of the arrests in her Queens district involve what she calls “illegal aliens.”

Queens resident Ramses Frias, a former Democrat and current Republican, complains that commercial streets have become a “Third World market,” with illegal vendors hawking stolen merchandise and half-naked sex workers strutting in plain sight of children walking to school. 

Roosevelt Avenue is so overrun with recently arrived hookers that it’s been dubbed the “Market of Sweethearts,” an American copy of Bangkok’s sordid Patpong market.  

The Trump campaign got backlash for a recent post on X showing side-by-side photos: one of a quiet, clean street lined with single-family homes, the other of hundreds of migrants huddled on the sidewalk outside the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan.

“Import the third world. Become the third world,” the caption reads.

The NAACP responded sharply: “They are showing us all how racist they are.”

No, bedlam is being imported to the area around the hotel, once a Manhattan landmark.

Businesses are fleeing.

The migrants pictured are mostly black, but commuters of all races dread walking past the chaos to get to Grand Central Station.

Trump was tagged a racist for calling migrants who rape and murder “animals” during last Saturday’s campaign stop in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.

“Just this month, right here in this beautiful town,” he said, “police arrested an illegal alien, a member of the savage Venezuelan prison gang known as Tren de Agua” for “holding a woman and her daughter against their will and sexually assaulting them again, and again, and again.”

Trump called the alleged assailant “an animal”  — not, it should be noted, all migrants.

When he used the same word in April to describe the Venezuelan illegal immigrant who raped, bludgeoned and killed Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, Reuters accused Trump of wrongdoing for “resorting to the degrading rhetoric he has employed time and again.”

Ridiculous.

The issue isn’t Trump’s choice of words. It’s the loss of life caused by Harris’ open border.  

Similarly, leftist elites turn a blind eye to the impact of prostitution on business owners and families trapped in close proximity to the city’s new brothels, as most Democratic politicians — except Mayor Eric Adams — incredibly align themselves with the sex workers.  

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortes (D-NY), whose Queens district is overrun with street prostitution, has insisted in the past that “sex work is work” and generally favors its decriminalization.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) too supports decriminalization, even as prostitution spreads in his Manhattan district.

Harris backed the idea of legalizing sex work as recently as 2019.

A Democratic bill in Albany would decriminalize buying and selling sex, operating a brothel and sex tourism — never mind the impact on existing neighborhoods.

“This legislation would make NYC a major sex tourism destination,” says Sonia Osorio of the National Organization for Women, who has documented the explosion of exploitative migrant prostitution.  

Trump was accused last week by the Washington Post of alarming voters by depicting an “imaginary and frightening world.” 

Frightening, yes. But not imaginary.    

Felonies are up 35% in New York City since 2019, and an estimated 75% of arrests in Midtown Manhattan for assault and other crimes are illegal migrants.

Street sex sells for as little as $50, according to NOW.

As early as 2015, Trump insisted that uncontrolled illegal immigration would produce Third World conditions here at home.

His dire warnings have materialized — and we’ll get four more years of this mayhem if Harris is elected president.

Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.