Trump swears off American dream
Boston built by immigrants from lowliest places
Mass starvation, desperate poverty and widespread disease like typhus and dysentery. A quarter of the population either dying or fleeing to countries like America. President Trump, does this sound like a “s---hole” to you?
It’s called “Ireland.” Circa 1850.
Even before the Great Famine (1845-49) nobody would have described the impoverished and oppressed nation as a paradise. Once the famine hit, millions of Irish men and women emigrated to, well, pretty much anywhere that would take them. Why? Because the “Emerald Isle” was “Excrement Island,” by President Trump’s standards.
Here’s how Christopher Klein of the History Channel describes the scene:
“Barefoot mothers with clothes dripping from their bodies clutched dead infants in their arms as they begged for food. Wild dogs searching for food fed on human corpses. The country’s legendary 40 shades of green stained the lips of the starving who fed on tufts of grass in a futile attempt for survival.”
Who wants these people? Why couldn’t Boston have the Norwegians instead? Or maybe the Italians.
Only — who would want to live in the “s---hole” that was Italy at the turn of the 20th century? Poverty, corrupt politics, backwards technology and a disease that destroyed many vineyards drove 7 million Italians off the peninsula between 1860 and 1900. By 1920, more than 4 million Italians had abandoned their own “buca di merda” for the blessings of America.
Should we have blocked the Italian and Irish — “Take them out!” — in favor of the Swedes and Swiss? Would that have “Made America Great” 100 years ago? Because if we had — who would be reading this Boston newspaper?
Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s hard to get a good plate of homemade lefse and lutefisk in the Boston area. The only Swiss cuisine is from the “Miss” and comes with marshmallows. If Trump’s “s---hole ban” had been in place a century ago, Boston would be a s---hole today.
The problem with Trump isn’t his language — it’s his logic. America isn’t great because people come here from great places. It’s great because we welcome great people from across the globe. When you come to America, we don’t judge you by what you left behind, but by what you bring with you when you arrive: Your skills, your imagination, your work ethic. And perhaps most important, your willingness to embrace and protect the American ideals of freedom, liberty and rule of law.
Those ideas can be held in the heart of any human being from any place on the planet. However, Trump is right when he implies that these values are harder to find in some spots on the map. There are places in the world where the local culture is antithetical to American values. Places where people reject democracy and embrace authoritarianism, where fathers will kill daughters in the name of “honor,” where girls are forced to undergo unspeakable mutilations. These places are real.
And it is completely reasonable to take this fact into consideration as we evaluate would-be immigrants who want to make America their home. But careful evaluation is not the same as a closed door.
Because from these places also come great people who reject those homegrown horrors and want to embrace the American way. People like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who fled the Islamism of Somalia and now fights for liberty in the West. People like Miguel Bezos, who came to America from Fidel Castro’s Cuba in 1962 knowing only one word of English — “hamburger” — married, and then raised his new wife’s 4-year-old son Jeffrey as his own: Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com.
Do the people of Boston — the grandchildren of Irish immigrants — really want to embrace the politics of “No [Insert Name Here] Need Apply”?