“The Promise Of America.” An Open Letter To The GOP. SHUT UP!

Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to be free/   Emma Lazarus

You know, I’m a lifelong bleeding heart liberal, and will die that way. But that being said, growing up in the era that I did, I also learned firsthand that the Democrats didn’t have a lock on good ideas. Republicans could have them too. And in that long ago era, that’s where comity, compromise, and bipartisanship came into play. The two sides put aside their petty bickering to move forward the peoples business.

But the one policy difference that I have never understood was the GOP’s isolationist policy towards immigration. Their bullheaded insistance on slowing the flow of immigrants to a trickle goes against everything this country stands for. and it is antithetical to everything that has made this country the greatest country on earth.

The United States, as young as we are, is still the only country on the planet created by an ideal. Unless you are a member of a Native American tribe, you are an immigrant! We all came from somewhere else. It was the Founding Fathers that created the principle that this country was based on. That all men are created equal, with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And from the time of our independence, the United States became the shining beacon for people the world over to come to to try to obtain the dreams they could never hope to obtain in their native lands.

When the Tiny Thumbs Diktator launched his presidential campaign in 2015, he led off with When Mexico sends us people, they are not sending their best. They’re murderers, they’re rapists, they bring drugs, and some of them I assume are fine people. What unutterable bullsh*t!

What the immigrants and refugees from Mexico and Central America bring to this country is the workforce that puts food on our tables without it costing an arm and a leg. They do the jobs that Americans, even low skilled, unemployed southern rednecks deem to be beneath their dignity.

Why not simply ask GOP mental midgets like Tate Reeves, Kay Ivey, and Ron DeSantis how their uber restrictive anti immigration policies are working for them. Undocumented immigrants have fled, even leaving their tool of the trade behind, and now produce is rotting on the vines. Let’s see an American meat processing plant offer $20 an hour for labor, and see how many American applicants show up to fill those jobs.

And here’s another one. Anybody here remember World War II, the war to end all wars of your definition of war is elastic enough? Simple question for the morons in the GOP. How many more American military lives would have been lost in the subjugation of Japan in 1945 without the contributions of Jewish German immigrants like Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, who engineered the Manhattan Project that shortened the war with the atomic bomb?

Immigration doesn’t bring the worst of the world to the US, it brings the best. Just look at the list of American Nobel Laureates in such wide ranging fields as medicine, mathematics, physics and philosophy who have surnames ranging from Asian, European, Baltic, Indian and Persian countries who benefitted from their ancestors decision to emigrate to the United States to give them the chance to chase their dreams and obtain their potential.

Look, I’m no moron. Of course there are going to be some scumbags that slip through the cracks. That’s what Immigration and enforcement policy are supposed to be all about. You find, track, and deport the scumbags, but what you don’t do is to throw the baby out with the bathwater!

Simple question. In the Japanese tech surge, or the Chinese manufacturing booms, how many people immigrated to those countries to try to ride the wave. Simple answer, not many. Because those countries don’t offer the benefits of the United States.

You can move to Tokyo, and never be Japanese. You can move to Berlin and never be German. You can move to Istanbul, but never be a Turk. You can move to Montreal and never be Canadian. Only in the United States can you move to New York, or Chicago or Cleveland, and with time and effort become a flag waving American.

The fallacy of the GOP’s draconian immigration policy is both simple logic as well as simple math. The GOP is playing exclusively to an older, lower income, lower information male white base that is terrified of the changing demographics of this country. They are mourning the bygone days when Blacks worked in kitchens and housekeeping, Hispanics worked in the fields, and women put dinner on the table and pumped out babies.

Newa Flash! for the GOP. It isn’t the United States that’s changing, it’s the world. The world is getting younger, more Hispanic and Asian, and more black while the birthrate in the United States is shrinking. But the United States is still the shining beacon on the hill that former President Ronnie Raygun spoke of. And we can either continue to profit from the best and brightest that immigration has to offer, or we can fall farther behind other industrialized nations that will welcome them instead. The choices are the same as those faced by the dinosaurs, adapt or perish.

I thank you for the privilege of your time.