The President vs. NYC

Donald Trump using a four-letter word is not the problem. His “shithole” outburst was disgusting for what it revealed about how profoundly he misunderstands the American character. In rejecting a Senate deal to legalize Dreamers because he deemed it too kind to the people of Haiti, El Salvador and African countries, he smeared residents of developing nations as just not the types of folks who make good Americans.

And revealingly asked this follow up question: Why can’t we let in more people from Norway and places like that? Which is to say, rich whites.

The answer is because that’s not the way immigration works. Well-educated people from stable and prosperous countries aren’t so interested in leaving it all behind and coming here to start over.

It’s the strivers, from places where life is rough and governments bad, who are most powerfully drawn by the tides to the glowing beacon in the harbor. They leave their homes, their cultures, and leap. When they land, they typically are intensely motivated to work hard and better themselves, their families and their community.

This is no hollow paean to immigrant virtue; it’s a simple human truth — one that a man born and raised in New York would understand were he not dangerously deluded.

Survey the population of the most prosperous metropolis in the history of the world.

Twenty-five percent of the city is black; generations back, most were initially brought here in chains, then left the South for a better life in the North. The remainder come from not-so-prosperous parts of the Caribbean, including Haiti, where Trump seems to think everyone has AIDS.

And from Africa, including countries the President singled out as irredeemable backwaters. African immigrants happen to be among America’s most educated groups.

A quarter of New Yorkers are Hispanic, many hailing from places where prosperity is hard to find and governance is lacking.

One in eight are from Asia, where over generations poverty has consigned billions to misery.

Huge numbers of white New Yorkers are of Italian extraction. Many others are of Irish descent. Their ancestors journeyed across the ocean at times when their countries were wretched.

So too the Jews, Poles, Germans and others, many of whom fled here to escape the yoke of terrible tyranny.

New York City is a towering achievement built and sustained by people from places that, in the painfully pinched moral vision of the President, are or were shitholes.