White House Chief of Staff John Kelly Demonizes Immigrants in Racist, Xenophobic Rant
"White House Chief of Staff Demonizes Immigrants in Racist Rant: Xenophobia doesn't get more hackneyed than this. Think Progress, Zack Ford, May 11, 2018
In a wide-ranging interview with NPR, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly shared some rather racist views to justify the Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy on illegal border crossings.
Defending an approach that will split up families, Kelly explained that he thinks these immigrants don’t really fit in with United States culture anyway:
Let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move illegally into United States are not bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re not MS13. … But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society.
Concerns about immigrants’ ability to assimilate with American society have been used repeatedly throughout the country’s history to justify barring different groups from immigrating. For example, the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law that prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers from 1882 until 1943, was passed because Chinese immigrants were blamed for the depressed wages that followed the Gold Rush and Civil War. In 1890, the New York Times printed an article that explained that while “the red and black assimilate… not so the Chinaman.”
Similar arguments have been used since to justify xenophobia against Italian, Irish, Jewish, and — most recently — Muslim immigrants over the past century. As Splinter News points out, the Library of Congress still characterizes Kelly’s Irish ancestors as having “left a rural lifestyle”; these “destitute” immigrants were “unprepared for the industrialized, urban centers in the United States.”
But Kelly seems to have no problem applying these same stigmatizing assumptions to immigrants from Mexico and Central America who seek a better life in the U.S.:
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...More..
Read More:https://thinkprogress.org/john-kelly-racist-assimiltion-fc308b2f5ce9/
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