Last week in the Gasconade County Republican a reader from Warrenton submitted a letter to the editor quoting the 40th President of the United States, Ronald Reagan:
America represents something universal in the human spirit. I received a letter not long ago from a man who said, ‘You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk.’ But then he added, ‘Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.’
This I believe is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people, our strength, from every country and every corner of the world. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge; always leading the world to the next frontier.
Then the author went on to call our current president a racist for wanting to uphold the laws of the United States, laws that were voted on and passed by both Democrats and Republicans.
I believe Reagan was referencing legal immigrants in that speech from his last day in office.
This gives me a wonderful opportunity to point out the difference between legal and illegal immigrants.
Let’s get one thing straight, all Americans, with the exception of the small percent of Native Americans, can trace their ancestry to immigrants from other nations around the world. Most of those, including my family which has it’s origins from Prussia on my mother’s side and Ireland from my father’s side, came here legally.
According to the 2016 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics (the latest figures available), the United States admitted 1.18 million legal immigrants in 2016. Guess what, that makes the USA number one. In fact we allowed more legal immigrants that year than the next three countries combined — Germany (1,051,000), The United Kingdom (350,100) and Canada (296,400). In the continuing argument over immigration policies that is rarely brought up.
In Trump’s 2019 State of the Union speech he said he wanted to see the “largest numbers ever” of legal immigrants entering the country. “I want people to come into our country, in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.”
To follow up on that, this summer the Trump administration nearly doubled the H-2B guest visa program, which brings in mostly Mexican workers.
The reason it’s called illegal immigration — something Democrats running for president will not say — is they are breaking the law. Illegal differentiates from those seeking legal immigration.
In 2014 a leading politician in a message to Central American families said, “Do not send your children to the borders…if they do make it, they’ll get sent back.” That was said by President Barack Obama.
That was just one of many tough statements he made to stem the flow of illegal immigration from Mexico. In 2010, Obama said, “The presence of so many illegal immigrants makes a mockery of all those who are going through the process of immigrating legally.”
During the Obama administration we deported three million illegal immigrants. Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens says “The Obama and (Joe) Biden administration were terrible in their first term, his title of deporter in chief was earned.”
Earlier this year House Democrats used a picture of migrant children in cages in a tweet to promote a hearing on immigration detention facilities to show, in their minds, how inhumane and racist Trump really is. Problem is the photo they used was taken in 2014 during Obama’s term.
The Obama administration built those cages that hold immigrant children at the U.S. border with Mexico. The parents are separated from their children because they broke the law. State and local government take away children from citizens who break the law all the time. We report on it in this publication. Everyone seems shocked when it happens to someone breaking the law entering the U.S..
Using the same measurement that our letter writer had I can only assume that Obama is a racist. But of course no one says that because only a Republican president is considered racist for trying to uphold the laws of the United States.
NOTE: Just last week, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Alveda King said “I’ve had the experience of going head to head with genuine racists. President Trump is not a racist.”
