This blogger expresses few hopes, but the Dumbo/Teabagger presidential nomination of El Pendejo would be a dream come true. As Forest Gump was wont to say, "Stupid is as stupid does." The Trumpster seems to be doubling down on racist/xenophobic language. Give him your votes, Dumbos. You have nothing to lose but your a$$es. If this is a (fair & balanced) electoral fantasy, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
Not Like Us
By Eags (Timothy Egan)
Tag Cloud of the following piece of writing
They were criminals — thugs and thieves — a single ethnic group that filled the jails of big cities. “Scum unloaded on American wharves,” one speaker in Philadelphia said of them. Dirty, filthy, foreign. As for their children, they were “utterly ignorant of a place such as school,” The New York Herald reported.
Mexicans? No, the Irish of the 1850s, then pouring into Anglo-Saxon America at such a rate that it gave rise to a political party founded in opposition to immigration — the Know-Nothings [the American Party]. At one point, it was second largest party in the United States, complete with a paramilitary arm called the Wide Awakes.
Nearly 50 years later, as Italians and other southern Europeans left their barren lands for hope in America, a prominent educator and writer, Francis A. Walker, expressed a widely held view of these new arrivals: “They are beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.”
Donald Trump — we’ve found your century. The xenophobes have always been with us, sometimes in power, usually not. It’s the mother of all ironies that a nation where all but about 2 percent (the Native Americans) of the population can trace its lineage to some distant land is now going through another of its anti-immigrant moments.
But good news: The 2015 version is a weak strain of the earlier tea. It will flush out those camped in the Republican Party who have long used code words and fabrications to hide their loathing of people who “are not you,” in Trump’s phrase.
“I salute Donald Trump,” said Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, one of the first to be flushed, and also one of the jillion candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. Cruz wants some of the immigrant-hatred vote, at least 10 percent of the primary audience, that has catapulted Trump to the top tier in polls. The other candidates are afraid of Trump. And Democrats, even the atheists, have become devout believers in a benevolent God, as Trump keeps delivering on their prayers.
It will only get better as Republican primaries move into all-white, anti-immigrant strongholds. Here, you can expect to see clusters of red-faced older men clutching copies of Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole (2015), by the polemicist Ann Coulter. Here’s a sample line: “Today’s immigrants aren’t coming here to breathe free, they are coming to live for free.”
Her book has influenced Trump, even as his hotel construction projects benefit from those same immigrants. No matter. If intellectual consistency were threads on Trump’s head, he would be as bald as a snow globe. If this keeps up, the 27 percent share of the Latino vote that Republicans got in 2012 will look like a high-water mark.
History is a guide here. The Chinese of the late 19th century were subject to exclusion laws and outright pogroms on the West Coast, and cast as inscrutable opium addicts. The major railroads probably could not have been built without them.
The Irish did make up a majority of people housed in New York’s jails — and the city’s mental institution — at one point. But they also dug the Erie Canal and provided the shovel muscle to remake the city.
The new Know-Nothings have certainly kept fact-checkers busy. Mexicans: They’re pouring across a porous border, yes? And with them comes something else — “tremendous infectious disease,” said Trump.
The pouring is actually going the other way. Since 2006, more Mexicans have left the United States than have arrived, according to a Pew Research Center study in 2012. Since 2009, there’s been a 50 percent drop in those trying to sneak across the border. A falling birthrate in Mexico, better economic opportunity at home, and economic stagnation in the United States are the contributing factors.
At the same time, President Obama has deported more undocumented immigrants than any of his predecessors. And doctors note that Mexico has a higher vaccination rate against disease than many United States communities.
As for those who want to “live for free,” in Coulter’s sneer, they better step up the mooching. Poor immigrants are less likely to take advantage of free government help than citizens, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Well, then, if they aren’t leeches, Mexicans are still rapists and criminals, as Trump claimed. What about the oft-deported illegal held for murder in San Francisco? That killing looks more like a result of bureaucratic negligence, in part because of San Francisco’s inane sanctuary policy, than a reason to go after job-seeking Latinos living in the shadows. Still, in conservative media circles, one murder proves the narrative.
In fact, first-generation immigrants have a much lower crime rate than the overall population. As to the rapists claim, whites accounted for 71 percent of all sexual assaults in 2013, even though they are only 63 percent of the population, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Latinos, though 17 percent of the population, committed 9 percent of sex crimes.
In other words, whites are far more likely to meet Trump’s description than Latinos. But don’t expect to hear that statistic, or any other that sets the record straight, during a presidential debate. Whites make up an overwhelming majority of the Republican primary base. You can insult your audience’s intelligence, but not to their face. Ω
[Timothy Egan writes "Outposts," a column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America (2009).]
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