Trump’s anti-immigrant policies continue to expand and mutate. They are masterminded by his poison dwarf, Stephen Miller, and now overseen by Ken Cuccinelli, acting head of Citizenship and Immigration Services. Clearly he is a bad actor and is providing a disservice. He is the man who revised “The New Colossus” to read: “Give us your well-off, peppy, employable few yearning to live in white suburbs and vote Republican.”
The logic is impeccable. Letting people into the country who are just like us — ethnically acceptable, well-educated, English-speaking, with useful skills and money in the bank — is good. All others need not apply They might become a “public charge.”
So how do you know whom to reject? Which green card holders should get the boot because they pose the threat of costing more than they produce? Well, a long list if disqualifications has been suggested. You are unfit for citizenship if you:
Might have to to avail yourself of public programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and so on.
Don’t speak English.
Don’t have plenty of cash. About $70,000 by one reckoning.
Aren’t rich enough to cover foreseeable medical expenses.
Have financial liabilities.
Have a low credit score.
Don’t have private health insurance.
Don’t have a college degree or job skills that are in demand.
Don’t have a spokesperson to support you financially when you turn out to be a loser.
The list goes on and on. Analysis suggests that 69% of present green card holders have one strike against them and 43% have two. Let the deportations begin.
Surely this makes sense. After all, what have the poor, tired, huddled masses yearning to breathe free who arrive here penniless and unemployable ever done for us? If you don’t count writing our songs (Irving Berlin), creating our movie industry (Adolph Zukor, Sam Goldwyn, the Warner brothers, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer), helping to found our country and design its government (Alexander Hamilton), founding our industrial and tech companies (Andrew Carnegie, Andy Grove and any more), wining us Nobel Prizes (Elie Wiesel et al), building the weapons that defeated our enemies (Teller, Szilard, Von Neumann and many more).
As as for refugees seeking asylum after fleeing famine, persecution and misery, what have they added to our country if you don’t; count many of the above, as well as thosands of others from Oscar winners like Billy Wilder and Vilmos Zsigmond to the grandparents of Presidents Kennedy and Reagan and the parents of half the billionaires on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley.
I could go on, but I know what you’re thinking. Anyone can cherry pick examples to make it look like immigration is a good thing. But everyone in the country, even the Native Americans, came from somewhere else. The successful ones are exceptions. What about the normal, average, everyday, immigrant rapist, murderer, and deadbeat cases so often cited by Trump, Miller, and Cuccinelli?
Why waste a green card or welfare dollars on them? Take the case of Wolf and Bessie Glotzer who arrived from Belarus fleeing a pogram, had little money and spoke only Yiddish. They wouldn’t have gotten in if Miller’s rules had been in effect in 1903. How much better America would have been today, since the Glotzers are Miller’s ancestors and clearly unfit to add anything to America according to the harsh strictures their descendent is promulgating.
Or consider the case of a poverty stricken illiterate laborer from southern Europe who came to America without a dime, zero years of schooling and remained a menial laborer all his life. What did Dominic, Ken Cuccinelli’s grandfather, ever do to improve America?
Or take a nobody from a cold, windswept island, so awful it was described as “indescribably filthy” and its people as “wretched,’”who came to America with a miserable $50 in her pocket and could only find work for many years as a domestic servant.
Even worse, Mary Anne MacLeod was an instance of the vile practice of chain migration excoriated by Trump. At 17, she came here all alone to join her older sister. Yet the foolish government gave this penurious wretch a green card and a chance to become a citizen.
How much better off America would be if Miller had been in charge then to quench the torchlight of freedom, chain shut the golden door, and deny Donlad Trump’s Scottish mother entry.