05/11/2018
Geoff Bennett tweets
WH Chief of Staff John Kelly, asked about separating migrant families at the border, tells
@NPR, āThey donāt integrate well. They donāt have skills.ā Interview airs on tomorrowās@MorningEdition
Kelly said this:
For more, see here. Hereās Joshua Zeitz, comparing Mexicans with the 19th century Irish:
Word for word, this is in line with how nativists described John Kellyās Irish ancestors, who were overwhelmingly rural and thought to be ill-suited to the rhythms and discipline of an urbanizing, industrial econony.[Sic, itās a Tweet, so spelling errors are excusable.]
And Jake Tapper goes what I am forced to call "full retard":
First of all, any objections to Irish employees are a very long time ago ā an Irish Catholic President was elected almost 60 years ago.
Second, there were never any "No Irish Need Apply Signs" ā itās a debunked myth.
See A Reader Writes On The "No Irish Need Apply" Myth (Or Not), and these two articles:
The sign reproduced by Tapper isnāt genuine, itās Historical Grievance Porn, printed in the 21st century, designed to keep hatred of "nativists" green.
The Irish who poured into New York caused the huge crime wave depicted in Martin Scorseseās Gangs of New York.
See my 2001 Ganging Up On America, and Steve Sailerās Scorseseās "Gangs:" A (Circus) Train Wreck.
Sample quote from one of the Irish Immigrant characters:
"You know thereās more of us coming off those boats everyday? Some say 15,000 Irish a week! Get all of us together and we aināt got a gang, we got an army!"
Of course thatās fiction, but the movie is at least partly based on the real-life Civil War draft riots, which I talked about in my 2001 piece:
āSo-called native Americansā! Thatās g-o-o-d! But in fact the āso-called native Americansā were indeed natives of the United States of America. The Irish immigrants were natives of Ireland, where rioting was considered an āagreeable recreation.ā
The Draft Riots were a revolt by the immigrant Irish against Civil War conscription. The Irish, who were competing with native-born free black Americans for New York jobs, committed striking atrocities against them. Asked by American Enterprise magazine whether New York really had an āIrish problem,ā Daniel Patrick Moynihan replied:
āOf course. There was a flood of immigrants from Ireland. Probably a third of them did not speak English. They couldnāt do anything but laboring work, pick and shovel.āThe draft riots were the worst violence in the city ever. Burning a Negro orphanage! Mostly Irish instigated.ā["Live" with TAE, The American Enterprise, June 2002]
Were native-born New Yorkers justified in being suspicious of the Irish immigrants who were taking over City Hall ā making New York a byword for corrupt government even before they committed all these murders and tried to set the city on fire?
Yes ā they were.
So the "nativists" were right about the Irish, and Kelly is right about the Mexicans, many of whom not only donāt speak English, they donāt speak Spanish, because they're Indians from Chiapas, unassimilated, after 500 years, to Mexican society. The only thing I object to is Kelly saying they're "good people", as Trump said in his announcement. They're not good people. Sure, many of them arenāt gangsters and rapists, but they're all thieves, coming to the US to steal a better life.