Abbreviated pundit roundup: Racist and unfit for office
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We begin today’s roundup with reaction to the president’s remark that Haitians, Africans, and others are from “shithole” countries, a blatantly racist remark which the White House is not denying (indeed, they are defending it claiming it will play welAbbreviated pundit roundup: Racist and unfit for office
We begin today’s roundup with reaction to the president’s remark that Haitians, Africans, and others are from “shithole” countries, a blatantly racist remark which the White House is not denying (indeed, they are defending it claiming it will play well with the president’s base). First up, Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast: Come on, America. What more evidence do you need? Let me be overly generous here. Suppose you agree that Haiti is a “shithole.” It’s not one of your high-functioning nations, that is true. Of course, if you bother even to go to Wikipedia to read up for 10 minutes, you’ll find that the mess that is Haiti was partly made by these United States of America, with our ironclad support over three decades of the Duvaliers, father and son, brutal dictators and murderers and thieves, to whose crimes our governments turned many blind eyes. If you look around a bit more, you’ll see that Haitian soldiers fought in our Revolutionary War, in a battle in Savannah, Georgia. And if you’re really intellectually adventurous, you’ll read about how Haiti was a slave colony in the late 1700s, remorselessly brutalized by Napoleon, and how Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of Haitian independence, has inspired artists from William Wordsworth to Jacob Lawrence to Ralph Ellison to Jean-Michel Basquiat. [...] We used to think everyone from everywhere wanted to move here. Of course. We’re America! We’re the beacon. But not anymore. With the President of the United States making racist comments like this — and proposing policies to match — the only people who’d be really excited about moving here are other racists. David Graham at The Atlantic: Since the start of his campaign, Trump has depicted immigration as a zero-sum game. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said during his candidacy announcement. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” His presumption seems to be that other nations are deliberately sending to the United States their least-desirable citizens. That sounds a lot like the Mariel boatlift of 1980, in which Cuba released a number of inmates from jails and mental facilities, dispatching them to the United States as part of a massive refugee exodus. It seems to shape the way Trump views all immigration—he and aides have cited it repeatedly. But in the vast majority of cases, this is not how immigration works. Governments are not deciding who to send. People are deciding to leave, often at great risk, out of personal motivation. Those who come are the ones “who had a special love for freedom and a special courage that enabled them to leave their own land, leave their friends and their countrymen, and come to this new and strange land to build a New World of peace and freedom and hope,” as Ronald Reagan once put it. Read more