Basically John Kelly thinks that undocumented immigrants are all primitives from shithole countries
by digby
And they bring nothing valuable to the United States:
The vast majority of the people that move illegally into the United States are not bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re not MS-13. … But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing. … They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills. They’re not bad people. They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws. … The big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States, and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.
He’s also said that many of the DREAM kids are “lazy” because they chose not to reveal themselves to a government that never keeps its promises.
Most of the immigrants to this country weren’t highly educated people with advanced skills. They were people looking for a better life and they built the modern democracy we have today. And, by the way, I live in a city full of undocumented immigrants and they are all completely assimilated into this multicultural megalopolis.
People have been migrating over the southern border since long before there was a border. Many of the streets, towns and states of the southwest US have Spanish names, including all the major cities of California. The idea that these are “suddenly” undesirable people is ridiculous.
Sadly, this bigotry has a long pedigree:
Kelly says undocumented immigrants “don’t integrate well” into US society. This was same reasoning used to ban Italian, Greek, Polish,Jewish, Middle Eastern & Asian immigrants from the US 100 years ago. It was wrong then & it’s wrong now. History matters.https://t.co/rLto42xhyY— Robert Chao Romero (@ProfeChaoRomero) May 11, 2018
1924
“The character of immigration has changed and the newcomers are imbued with lawless, restless sentiments of anarchy and collectivism. They arrive to find their hopes too high, the land almost gone and themselves driven to drown into the cities and struggle for a living. Then anarchy becomes rife among them.”- Rep. Albert Johnson, one of the architects of the act that placed national origins quotas on immigration“I would build a wall of steel, a wall as high as Heaven, against the admission of a single one of those Southern Europeans who never thought the thoughts or spoke the language of a democracy in their lives.”
– Georgia Gov. Clifford Walker at a Ku Klux Klan rally
1914“Observe immigrants not as they come travel-wan up the gang-plank, nor as they issue toil-begrimed from pit’s mouth or mill gate, but in their gatherings, washed, combed, and in their Sunday best. You are struck by the fact that from ten to twenty per cent, are hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality. Not that they suggest evil. They simply look out of place in black clothes and stiff collar, since clearly they belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age. These oxlike men are descendants of those who always stayed behind.”
– Edward Alsworth Ross, “The Old World in the New”1896
“While the people who for 250 years have been migrating to America have continued to furnish large numbers of immigrants to the United States, other races of totally different race origin, with whom the English-speaking people have never hitherto been assimilated or brought in contact, have suddenly begun to immigrate to the United States in large numbers. Russians, Hungarians, Poles, Bohemians, Italians, Greeks, and even Asiatics, whose immigration to America was almost unknown twenty years ago, have during the last twenty years poured in in steadily increasing numbers, until now they nearly equal the immigration of those races kindred in blood or speech, or both, by whom the United States has hitherto been built up and the American people formed. This momentous fact is the one which confronts us today, and if continued, it carries with it future consequences far deeper than any other event of our times. It involves, in a word, nothing less than the possibility of a great and perilous change in the very fabric of our race.”
– Henry Cabot Lodge speaking before Congress
This is what they mean when they say they’re making American Great Again.
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