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Immigration Reform

Now we all agree that saying El Salvador is a shithole country isn't exactly something a smart person would say out loud, but what % of people think it? 60%? 30% don't know it IS a country. So we got 10% left.

Just talked to a lady in our office whose doctor husband has done 1-2 weeks/year medical missionary work in Haiti since the earthquake; she's been with him a few times as well. Her comment: "beautiful people, but Trump's right, the place is a shithole; that's why my husband keeps going back".
 
Obama obliquely referred to Kennedy’s role in pushing his influential political accomplishment: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

“Towards the end of his life, Ted reflected on how Congress has changed over time. And those who served earlier I think have those same conversations. It’s a more diverse, more accurate reflection of America than it used to be, and that is a grand thing, a great achievement,” Obama said.

In this case, Obama is right: It’s worth reflecting on how much America has changed since 1965, and examine the effects of the legislation Kennedy promoted that brought it about.

The passage of the act marked a fundamental change in America’s immigration policy: Rather than serving the interests of Americans and national unity by setting limits on immigration, the act put “family unification” as the top priority, serving the interests of foreigners first.

Kennedy declared:

“First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same…

Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset… Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia…

In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think… The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”

How have Kennedy’s promises stood up to the passage of time?
 
Now we all agree that saying El Salvador is a shithole country isn't exactly something a smart person would say out loud, but what % of people think it? 60%? 30% don't know it IS a country. So we got 10% left.

I'm pretty sure that people are not taking issue with Trump calling those countries shitholes, aside from it being rude and unpresidential. The bigger issue is the implication that people from those countries are worthless and we don't want them in the US. Also, brown people.
 
We aren’t. That’s the problem. This is completely normal and he does it with strong support from large parts of our population.
 
Obama obliquely referred to Kennedy’s role in pushing his influential political accomplishment: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

“Towards the end of his life, Ted reflected on how Congress has changed over time. And those who served earlier I think have those same conversations. It’s a more diverse, more accurate reflection of America than it used to be, and that is a grand thing, a great achievement,” Obama said.

In this case, Obama is right: It’s worth reflecting on how much America has changed since 1965, and examine the effects of the legislation Kennedy promoted that brought it about.

The passage of the act marked a fundamental change in America’s immigration policy: Rather than serving the interests of Americans and national unity by setting limits on immigration, the act put “family unification” as the top priority, serving the interests of foreigners first.

Kennedy declared:

“First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same…

Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset… Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia…

In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think… The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”

How have Kennedy’s promises stood up to the passage of time?

Love how you flakes completely ignored this

karllllll ??????????????????
 
I'm pretty sure that people are not taking issue with Trump calling those countries shitholes, aside from it being rude and unpresidential. The bigger issue is the implication that people from those countries are worthless and we don't want them in the US. Also, brown people.

BUT Trump wants people from Norway to come to America.
 
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
 
What Makes a Country Great? Meet Haiti’s People.

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When I was growing up in Gonaives, Haiti, we didn’t have a toilet. We had a latrine, an outhouse in the back of our yard where we went to the bathroom. A literal “shithole.”

By Western standards of modernity, you could say the same of Haiti. Our roads aren’t great. Our politicians are corrupt. The late dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, a.k.a. Baby Doc, stole hundreds of millions. His wedding famously cost $2 million. That was a lot of money in 1980. Today, the average Haitian lives on less than $2 a day.

I’ve witnessed extreme acts of violence in Haiti. But I’ve also encountered the most decent people I’ve ever met. I’ve seen a busload of people work together to help a woman in labor give birth on the side of a road. I’ve seen entire villages care for children as if they were their collective parents.

Like every other place on Earth, Haiti is of mixed character. It’s a place of extremes.

When I was in high school, we had a program called Alphabetization. High school seniors would volunteer to teach how to read and write to illiterate elders from the community. I participated in it during my senior year and taught many elders to joys of reading and math. Some of them were octogenarians, yet still had the desire to learn.

My favorite one, Rosemarie, was a lady in her 70s. She was hardheaded. But she had more enthusiasm than anyone else in class. One time, it took me an entire week to get her through a paragraph in the assigned textbook. It was hard; I almost lost my patience. But every day her eagerness got me through. Every time I was frustrated, she would say: “Met, map aprann li. Pa lagem.” (Teacher, I will get it. Don’t give up on me.)

I didn’t. We finally got through it. The next week, she cooked diri ak lalo — the best Haitian meal, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise — and brought it for me in class and thanked me profusely. It nearly brought me to tears. She was my Davos Seaworth and I was her Shireen Baratheon. It’s one of my most cherished memories, and I will take the grateful look on her face to the grave with me.

This is the place where I’m from.

I’m not going to give you a history lesson here, but there’s a short apocryphal story that illustrates the pride and sense of righteousness of Haitians. It goes like this: In 1939, when World War II broke out, Haiti, a pioneer of freedom, having led the most successful slave rebellion in the history of the world, joined the Allied forces and declared war on Nazi Germany. When that was reported to Hitler, he picked up a map to look for this presumptuous place he’d never heard of. He couldn’t find it. Suddenly, a fly flew from the map, revealing the small island nation.

We’re a tiny country, but we have the courage of a continent. Yet Mother Nature has tested us. I don’t believe the natural world has a conscience, I think we’re merely geographically unlucky. But sometimes it feels like natural disasters punish us as if we were a nation of reincarnated Nazis.

This is the place where I’m from.

I do a bit on stage sometimes where I say that Trump, in his incompetence, will turn America into a third world country. And I proceed to describe what it would be like for white people to do their own dirty work. It’s a world where cellphones are made by Kurts and Brocks, and white women are laboring under the sun picking their own pumpkins.

Ninety percent of the time, people get it, laugh at it, and love it. But there’s that 10 percent of the time where I see a sea of white faces brooding at the thought of an impoverished America. Even in jest, they can’t take it.

How do you think Haitians feel? Can you imagine the resilience it takes to live in an actual shithole?

Immigration by nature is about looking for better prospects, seeking what one doesn’t have in his or her own country. That is why I came to the United States.

And yet Haiti, for all its ills, has produced some of the strongest and proudest people on the planet. I’m a college dropout, English is my third language, yet I speak it better than the president of the United States who went to Wharton. Rosemarie, who learned how to read and write in her 70s, has more decency and compassion than the leader of the free world could ever imagine.
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Donald Trump Flushes Away America’s Reputation

If you can read via the link there are a number of embedded links.

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For a fleeting moment Tuesday, President Trump seemed to signal he would do the right thing on immigration. At a 90-minute meeting with congressional Republicans and Democrats, much of it televised, he said he’d be willing to “take the heat” for a broad immigration deal of the sort urgently needed by the country and despised by his hard-core base.

Alas, it was all a charade. The real Donald Trump was back two days later with his now notorious “shithole” remark, asking why the United States should accept people from places like Haiti or Africa instead of nice Nordic countries like Norway, and then tweeting his tiresome demands for a “Great Wall” along the Mexican border.

Never mind that Norwegians are not clamoring to leave what is rated as the happiest nation on earth, and setting aside renewed questions about Mr. Trump’s fitness, the flip-flop left the issue of immigration more confused than before.

Where to begin? How about with a simple observation: The president of the United States is a racist. And another: The United States has a long and ugly history of excluding immigrants based on race or national origin. Mr. Trump seems determined to undo efforts taken by presidents of both parties in recent decades to overcome that history.

Mr. Trump denied making the remarks on Friday, but Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who attended the meeting, said the president did in fact say these “hate-filled things, and he said them repeatedly.”

Of course he did. Remember, Mr. Trump is not just racist, ignorant, incompetent and undignified. He’s also a liar.

Even the president’s most sycophantic defenders didn’t bother denying the reports. Instead they justified them. Places like Haiti really are terrible, they reminded us. Never mind that many native-born Americans are descended from immigrants who fled countries (including Norway in the second half of the 19th century) that were considered hellholes at the time.

No one is denying that Haiti and some of these other countries have profound problems today. Of course, those problems are often a direct result of policies and actions of the United States and European nations: to name just a few, kidnapping and enslaving their citizens; plundering their natural resources; propping up their dictators and corrupt regimes; and holding them financially hostage for generations.

The United States has long held itself out as a light among nations based on the American ideal of equality. But the deeper history tells a different story.

The sociologists David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martin have shown that the United States pioneered racially based exclusionary immigration policies in the Americas in the late 18th and 19th centuries. (Not long before he was elected president, for example, Theodore Roosevelt asserted the bigoted but then-common view that the Chinese should be kept out of America because they were “racially inferior.”)

It should sober Americans to know that authoritarian governments in Chile, Cuba and Uruguay ended racist immigration policies decades before the United States.

The current turmoil over immigration conflates several separate issues. One is DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has provided temporary work permits and reprieves from deportation for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. These are the so-called Dreamers, who number about 800,000.

Another issue is the Temporary Protected Status program under which undocumented foreigners who were in the United States when disaster or conflict struck their homeland are allowed to remain in the United States. In November, the Trump administration ended the protection for about 60,000 Haitians, and on Monday the administration lifted it for almost 200,000 Salvadorans, most of whom have been in the United States for two decades.

A third issue is the future of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants who have come to the United States over decades and have effectively integrated into American life. The Trump administration has ordered a broad immigration crackdown against them.

And finally there’s President Trump’s imagined wall.

What is concerning is not the wall, or the word “shithole” or the vacillation on the Dreamers or the Salvadorans. It’s what ties all of these things together: the bigoted worldview of the man behind them.

Anyone who has followed Mr. Trump over the years knows this. We knew it in the 1970s, when he and his father were twice sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to black people. We knew it in 1989, when he took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the execution of five black and Latino teenagers charged with the brutal rape of a white woman in Central Park. (The men were convicted but later exonerated by DNA and other evidence, but Mr. Trump never apologized, and he continued to argue as late as 2016 that the men were guilty.) We knew it when he built a presidential campaign by demonizing Mexicans and Muslims while promoting the lie that America’s first black president wasn’t born here. Or when, last summer, he defended marchers in a neo-Nazi parade as “very fine people.”

Just last month, The Times reported on an Oval Office meeting on immigration during which Mr. Trump said that the 15,000 Haitians now living in the United States “all have AIDS,” and that Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts” in Africa once they had seen the United States. See a pattern yet?

Donald Trump is by no means America’s first racist president. But he ran a campaign explicitly rooted in bigotry, exclusion and white resentment. To his die-hard but ever-shrinking base, comments like those he made Thursday only reaffirm his solidarity with the cause. The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, certainly saw it this way. “This is encouraging and refreshing, as it indicates Trump is more or less on the same page as us with regards to race and immigration,” the site wrote in a post.

The meeting at which Mr. Trump spewed his vulgarity was meant to be a discussion of bipartisan immigration proposals by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Mr. Durbin. Two other Republicans, John Kasich and Jeb Bush Jr., are the authors of an Op-Ed article in Thursday’s Times arguing against the forced expulsion of undocumented immigrants who have made a home in the United States. This shouldn’t be a hard call, especially with the economy growing modestly but steadily and unemployment hovering around 4 percent.

Instead, Republicans in Congress are spending most of their time finding ways to avoid talking about their openly bigoted chief executive. Some claimed not to have heard what Mr. Trump said. Others offered tepid defenses of his “salty” talk. House Speaker Paul Ryan called Mr. Trump’s comments “unhelpful,” clearly wishing he could return to his daily schedule of enriching the wealthiest Americans.

Mr. Trump has made clear that he has no useful answers on immigration. It’s up to Congress to fashion long-term, humane solutions. A comprehensive immigration bill that resolves all these issues would be best. But if that is not possible, given the resistance of hard-core anti-immigration activists in Congress, legislators should at least join forces to protect the Dreamers, Salvadorans, Haitians and others threatened by the administration’s cruel and chaotic actions.
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The guys at the bar in Whitefish Bay Wisconsin don’t want Salvadorans here. End of conversation
 
The guys at the bar in Whitefish Bay Wisconsin don’t want Salvadorans here. End of conversation

Oh, they want them here alright - to help mow their lawns and trim the hedges, clean their houses for them, etc. It's like retired folks I know in rural NC who employ Hispanics to work for them around the house, kitchen, or yard. They just don't want these people to have the same rights or privileges as them. They have to know their place, know who's in charge, learn to speak English, and stay as quiet and unobtrusive as possible. Then they're fine hiring them to do manual labor jobs or pick their produce for the grocery store.
 
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Mr. Trump, Meet a Hero Whom You Maligned

Could go several places—I’ll put here.

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In 1885, a poor, uneducated 16-year-old boy arrived in our country from Germany at a time when immigrants were often looked down on by affluent Americans.

This boy was ambitious and entrepreneurial, and, despite language problems, he earned some money and then traveled up to the Klondike during the gold rush to operate a hotel that became notorious for prostitution. He prospered, and today his grandson is President Trump.

After Germany became an enemy in World War I, the Trump family was embarrassed enough about its heritage that it claimed to be from Sweden instead. President Trump himself repeated this lie in his 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal.”

Yet Trump hypocritically joined the modern Know-Nothings by reportedly railing against immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti and those in Africa. He favored admitting white people over black people — which is just the latest incident in a four-decade record of his racial epithets and discrimination.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, I carefully reviewed Trump’s race-related history, including the 1,021 pages of legal documents from racial discrimination suits against him, and the evidence is devastating. We should be careful about tossing around the word “racist,” and any one incident can be misconstrued. But in Trump’s case, we have a consistent, 40-year pattern of insults and discrimination, and I don’t see what else we can call him but a racist.

It’s true, of course, that some African countries are in wretched shape and that some immigrants from poor countries arrive uneducated and end up, along with homegrown Americans, in dubious trades. But careful, Mr. President, given your own grandfather’s history.

More important, the toxic disparagement of immigrants tarnishes heroes like Emmanuel Mensah, 28, a New Yorker who came from the West African country of Ghana and joined the Army National Guard.

Then a couple of weeks ago, when he was back from training, a fire broke out in Mensah’s Bronx building. Mensah easily saved himself, but then rushed back into the burning building to rescue others. Three times he rushed in and out, bringing out four people.

Then Mensah dashed toward the flames again and reached the fourth floor in a desperate effort to save a fifth person. This brave soul from what Trump would describe as an s-hole country, the kind of person Trump was insulting, never made it out. Mensah’s body was found high in the building’s wreckage.

A few days ago, the Army posthumously awarded Mensah the Soldier’s Medal, its highest award for heroism outside of combat, and New York State awarded him its Medal for Valor. The citation on the state medal reads: “His courageous and selfless act in the face of unimaginable conditions are consistent with the highest traditions of uniformed service.”

Who better embodies our nation’s values? A politician with a history of racist comments who took five deferments to escape military duty in the Vietnam War, including one for heel spurs? Or a heroic Ghanaian immigrant and soldier who dies in a fire while rescuing others?

Most of us recognize that immigration is complex and that we cannot throw open our borders, but also that newcomers enrich us. That is true not only of Norwegians but also of penniless refugees from impoverished, war-torn countries, such as my father — a Polish-Armenian fleeing Eastern Europe, whose first purchase in the U.S. was a Sunday New York Times to teach himself English.

Trump once showed a willingness to be big-hearted to immigrants who break the rules: He married Melania, a Slovenian who came to the U.S. on a visitor visa and then earned money as a model before she was authorized to work, according to an investigation by The Associated Press.

If only Trump could show a similar compassion to unauthorized immigrants who don’t look like Melania. In particular, his decision to send Salvadorans back, in the face of murderous gang violence in that country, and his rejection of a bipartisan deal to protect DACA “Dreamers,” simply seem cruel.

So what can we do?

Obviously, we need to stand up to racist xenophobia even when it emanates from the White House — particularly when it emanates from the White House — and in addition, if Americans are looking for a constructive way to respond, here’s a suggestion: Donate to an immigrant rights organization like the National Immigration Law Center, or to an aid group that works with people whom our president just insulted.

I’ve seen firsthand and admired the work of two American aid organizations that save lives in Haiti from tuberculosis, cervical cancer and more. They are Partners in Health and Innovating Health International. Both are working heroically on the front lines to save the lives of ordinary Haitians, particularly women.

It seems to me that a fine, practical response to racism is to help save a life.
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Two letters to editor in today’s W-SJ

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RONDIE HICKMAN


No purpose

What purpose is served by sending 200,000 Salvadoran refugees out of the U.S. and to a country where they face an increased threat of being murdered (“Protections for Salvadorans to end,” Jan. 9)? Who supports this decision? What possible benefit can they imagine?

It won’t help the economy. It won’t make America safer.

It will split families. It will lead to another illegal, underground population in the U.S.

Does President Trump suppose this will show his base how tough he is? It shows me how heartless and uncaring he is.

Trump makes me feel ashamed to be an American.
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MICHAEL NEWMAN, Winston-Salem

A cruel country

“Protections for Salvadorans to end” (Jan. 9) and about 200,000 of them may be forced to leave the U.S. after 16 years of legal residence. What kind of cruel and heartless country have we become?

Where are those who claim to follow Jesus? Where are the men and women who are Americans because their ancestors braved stormy seas to reach our shores and then labored to create our great and unique country? Where are my fellow citizens who must stand up for what is fair and honorable? Look in the mirror, today, and answer those questions.

If we want to make America great, this is the place to begin for all of us to be kinder, caring and real Americans.
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Searchers all say they’d have made whitefish bay if they’d put fifteen more miles behind her
 
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