Sunday, May 13, 2018

White House chief of staff demonizes immigrants in racist rant

Xenophobia doesn't get more hackneyed than this.


ZACK FORD
MAY 11, 2018, 9:49 AM

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.”

Read more
https://thinkprogress.org/john-kelly-racist-assimiltion-fc308b2f5ce9/

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