https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/05/11/john-kellys-assimilation-into-a-hard-line-stance-against-illegal-immigrants/?utm_term=.e2507001a73c
Eugene Scott writes in “The Fix” @ WashPost:
White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly provided another reminder that he continues to support President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies in an NPR interview that aired Friday.
Kelly was defending the Justice Department’s policy that includes separating children from parents being prosecuted for immigrating illegally into the United States, when he told NPR that undocumented immigrants do not “easily assimilate” into American culture. Here’s what he said:
The vast majority of the people that move illegally into the United States are not bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re not MS-13. … But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing. … They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills. They’re not bad people. They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws. … The big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States, and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.
Kelly’s belief is a popular one from hard-line conservative groups, and that line of thinking often extends to claims that undocumented and legal immigrants are more of a drain on the American economy than an asset.
In a 2016 piece on welfare use in immigrant households published by the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit group advocating for lower immigration, Jason Richwine claims that both legal and illegal immigrant households cost taxpayers more than native citizens in welfare dollars than the average household of native-born citizens, and that “The greater consumption of welfare dollars by immigrants can be explained in large part by their lower level of education and larger number of children compared to natives.”
However, other right-leaning think tanks disputed the findings in the CIS report. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, picked apart the methodology used by CIS to support their claims, calling their findings “exaggerated.”
CIS — and many hard-liners on immigration — don’t want to see less illegal immigration. They want to see less immigration period, wrote Alex Nowrasteh, a senior immigration policy analyst at Cato. If they can argue that immigrants struggle to “Americanize” well and instead end up draining this country’s resources, they hope lawmakers will back policy ideas that keep immigration numbers as close to zero as possible.
It’s true that immigrants from rural communities, with little education, no command of English and a lack of skills to gain meaningful employment do not find assimilating into “modern society” easy. But it’s not impossible. Beginning more than a century ago, nearly 2 million immigrants from Ireland — the country from which Kelly’s ancestors descend — came to the United States, where they faced harsh backlash from native citizens. People of Irish heritage now make up 10 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Census Bureau.
As with previous cases, not all of Kelly’s statements Friday totally meshed with the president’s.
In the same NPR interview, Kelly spoke in favor of granting a path to citizenship for immigrants who have been in the United States under temporary protected status from countries like El Salvador, Haiti and Honduras, if they had been here long enough to assimilate.
You take the Central Americans that have been here 20-plus years. I mean if you really start looking at them and saying, “Okay, you know you’ve been here 20 years. What have you done with your life?” Well, I’ve met an American guy and I have three children and I’ve worked and gotten a degree or I’m a brick mason or something like that. That’s what I think we should do — for the ones that have been here for shorter periods of time, the whatever it was that gave them TPS status in the first place. If that is solved back in their home countries they should go home.
Still, Kelly’s strong stance against illegal immigration will probably land well with Trump’s base, and could help him remain in good favor with his boss despite frequent reports that Trump is often frustrated with Kelly’s performance in other areas. Kelly spoke to NPR the same day Trump reportedly unleashed a tirade on Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, a close Kelly ally, over what Trump views as unsatisfactory border security.
But it’s worth highlighting that significant percentages of Americans don’t share the Trump White House’s hardest positions on immigration. And separating children from their parents has previously been a line that even conservatives did not want to cross.
Like Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Kelly has made it clear that “law and order” — perhaps based on stereotypical ideas of outsiders — will be the dominant philosophy he employs when responding to immigrants seeking the American Dream that Kelly’s ancestors pursued.
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Also in the Post, Karen Tumulty provides a little history lesson to Kelly:
White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly wants you to know that he does not think most immigrants who come to this country illegally are bad people. His concern, as he explained it in an interview with National Public Radio on Thursday, is that they are “overwhelmingly rural people,” with little education. “They’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States into our modern society,” he said.
It would be disturbing to hear any person in a position of trust express such lack of regard for the fundamental values that have made this country what it is. But in Kelly’s case, it was particularly egregious because … well, because his name is Kelly.
His ancestors came from Ireland, as mine did. He grew up on Bigelow Street in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston, where reminders of his heritage — and of the opportunities made possible by his immigrant forebears — would have been everywhere he looked.
The Irish came to America with plenty of assimilation challenges of their own. They had mostly lived in rural areas, which made it difficult for them to adjust to the big cities in which they found themselves. They had little education. As they were fleeing seven years of famine, few had been able to scrape together more than the fare to get them on the boat over. They arrived hungry and sick after a journey that lasted four weeks. They were seen as lazy and shiftless. In the 1850s, 70 percent of charity recipients in New York City were Irish.
They were hated for their religion as well. In Boston, posters proclaimed: “All Catholics and all persons who favor the Catholic Church are … vile imposters, liars, villains, and cowardly cutthroats.” Some back then might have said that when Ireland sent its people, they were not sending their best.
That wave of Irish immigration arrival sparked a nativist backlash, and even a new political party, The Know-Nothings. This was no mere fringe movement, as Smithsonian Magazine has noted:
At its height in the 1850s, the Know Nothing party, originally called the American Party, included more than 100 elected congressmen, eight governors, a controlling share of half-a-dozen state legislatures from Massachusetts to California, and thousands of local politicians. Party members supported deportation of foreign beggars and criminals; a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants; mandatory Bible reading in schools; and the elimination of all Catholics from public office. They wanted to restore their vision of what America should look like with temperance, Protestantism, self-reliance, with American nationality and work ethic enshrined as the nation’s highest values.
Does all that sound familiar? There are still Know-Nothings among us. They are the people who forget their own history.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/05/11/john-kellys-know-nothingism/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.3f18462ae01f
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Yeah, but Kelly’s ancestors were (presumably) White. So, in the long run that outweighed their (presumed) Catholicism and made them OK (but only in retrospect).
I met migrants, legal, undocumented, first generation, second generation in my courtroom every working day for more than a decade. The vast majority have skills, lots of them, along with courage, resourcefulness, a work ethic, determination, and persistence that would put most “native-born Americans” to shame, particularly Trump, his family, and his boorish, overprivileged, under-humanized cronies.
The skills migrants often bring — working with crops, construction, child care, elder care, cleaning, repairing, building, cooking, teaching, coaching, running small businesses are absolutely essential to our economic survival. They just aren’t the skills that are recognized and respected by arrogant, bigoted, members of the privileged classes like Trump, Kelly, Sessions, Cotton, Pence, etc. But, as I’ve pointed out before, none those restrictionists would last very long or be very valuable picking lettuce or laying shingles in the hot sun.
And, many migrants don’t “choose” to come here outside the legal system. Conditions in their home countries, along with the US’s stubborn refusal (magnified by this Administration) to set up viable overseas refugee processing in Central America leaves many no realistic choice but to come here to seek refuge through our asylum system.
Under both U.S. and international law they have every right to seek refuge in the U.S. and to receive humane treatment and a fair and unbiased determination of their claims for protection — something that is not happening under the current system as administered under the toxic, biased, and often lawless leadership of Trump & Sessions. Such refugee migrations have been taking place for decades and will continue, in some form or another, until the problems causing individuals to flee their home countries are addressed by leaders much wiser, more talented, and less bigoted than Trump, Sessions, Pence, and Kelly.
Also, just how are folks being encouraged to “assimilate” by an Administration that spreads racial slurs, bias, and false narratives, encourages racists within its own “base,” advances bogus rationales to terminate the legal status of many long-time residents, rails mindlessly against legal immigration, and actually prides itself on destroying migrant families and spreading terror and fear among ethnic communities?
Another of my predictions coming true: Kelly’s reputation and integrity will fit in a thimble with plenty of space left over by the time he finally parts ways with “Don the Con” and his ugly, dysfunctional White House Circus.
PWS
05-14-18
