John Kelly went on an anti-immigrant rant during an interview with NPR, complaining that undocumented immigrants are “overwhelmingly rural,” can’t assimilate, and are uneducated—basically the same exact stereotypes his Irish and Italian ancestors probably faced when they came to the U.S.:
On the administration’s recently announced “zero tolerance” policy that calls for separating families who cross the border illegally and prosecuting them:
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 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.
There’s so much wrong in that horror show of a statement—there’s evidence Latino immigrants have learned English at a faster rate than past non-English speaking white immigrants, for example—but one thing stands out in particular. Take a look at this Politico profile on Kelly, published just last month. Emphasis mine:
Kelly grew up a few blocks from the small park, up the hill on Bigelow Street. His father, John F. Kelly, was of Irish descent; his mother, Josephine “Honey” Pedalino, was the descendant of Italian immigrants (a “mixed marriage,” as John Kelly likes to say). Her father never spoke a word of English and made his living peddling a fruit cart in East Boston.
The White House chief of staff wasn’t just wildly racist, he was wildly wrong. But then again, that’s probably why he works for Donald Trump in the first place.
”Current immigrants assimilate just as well as immigrant in past generations,” conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin writes. “Most undocumented immigrants in the United States are not poor, uneducated people coming over the border … immigrants who are here illegally are more likely to work (hence, they must have some job skills) than other groups”:
One could imagine President Trump saying very similar things in private or even in public. Kelly’s boss, who does not want black and brown people from “shithole” countries, would no doubt applaud Kelly’s comments.
Yet, like Kelly’s grandfather, Trump’s paternal grandfather didn’t speak English when he got to the U.S. either. In fact, under Trump’s proposal attacking family reunification—so-called “chain migration”—his unskilled grandfather probably wouldn’t have been here in the first place:
Were that policy in place in 1885, Friedrich Trumpf would likely not have gained entry to the United States. The immigration record for his arrival that year indicates that he arrived without an identifiable “calling”: The word “none” sits next to his name in that column.
A biographer of Trumpf — father of Fred Trump, who was the father of the president — told Deutsche Welle that Donald Trump’s grandfather didn’t speak English when he got here.
“They don’t have skills,” Kelly moaned, yet American industries, like farming, would whither and die without immigrant labor, and undocumented labor in particular. Trump himself uses their labor to run his family’s hotels, resorts and wineries.
From the start, Trump and Kelly’s vision has been of a downtrodden America that has lost its greatness. The immigrants I know don’t believe them, because their vision of America, even through all its faults, has been of a place full of hope, where their sacrifices are rebirthed as their children’s successes. That’s the America they know. That’s the America worth fighting for.