When I read the comments of educated people making asinine comments such as this one by Heritage Foundation Border Security and Immigration Center Director Lora Ries “They are economic migrants, not victims of persecution” my blood boils. The reason my blood boils is because this comment is covert racism. Every single Caucasian that immigranted into what is now known as America came here because they were economic migrants. They all came here in search of economic gains. Even those that fled their homelands because of religous persecution were economic migrants, they too wanted a better life. Not one Caucasian immigrated into America hoping to find less favorable conditions than the one they were escaping.
In 1840 a potato famine crippled Ireland. The Irish immigrated to America not because they were victims of persecution, they were economic migrants. They immigrated to avoid stravation. Every European immigrant group that came to America – whether they were escaping political oppression, religous presecution, or stravation, which by the way are the very same reasons todays immigrants are coming to America, all wanted a better life, they were all at the end of the day economic migrants.
And before history gets rewritten by the extremist – those that want to pretend that slavery did not exist, that Jim Crow was fake, and that Donald Trump did not throw paper towels at a people recovering from the worst hurricane to hit them in centuries- let us remember that the prisons and mental asylums of Briton were emptied so that the American Colony’s could be populated.
Had the twice impeached, four time indicted former president, Donald J. Trump, made his escalator speech in the 1600’s it may have sounded something like this “When Europe sent its people, they were not sending their best. They sent people that had lots of problems, and they brought those problems with them. They brouhgt diseases, they brouhgt crime, they’re rapists and murderers. And some, I assume, are have profound mental illness.
Those are the founders of this country, we don’t hold that against you, afterall Thomas Jefferson said it best,
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.– In other words, They are entitled to be economic migrants, if the situation where you live is not conducive to a good life, one where you are free to pursue liberty and happiness, you should move, or [im]migrate to some place where you can prosper economically.