I think I have this immigrant migration/invasion/big USA brouhaha figured out. It will not be solved by either political party, protests, mandates, laws, or even a border wall. We have to recognize how this all started and then, and only then, can we address the problem with a clear solution that will serve also as retribution.
What it comes down to is…we need to lay the blame for all of this on the French.
Yeah, their bread is yummy, and they have some cool spots to visit. And we can surely give them Belle Époque, gorgeous models, and those fries. But they also sneakily handed us the Statue of Liberty in 1885 and seven years later we have the inspection station at Ellis Island open.
Most anyone reading this is probably a relative of immigrants who came to the US from another country. If you are an indigenous American, I’m sure you are of the minority of my readers here, as you have been in the minority of this country for decades. But historian and abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye surely knew what he was up to when first proposing his monument to commemorate the U.S. centennial of 1876 and sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s statue opened the floodgates for what is now, assuredly, too many, beyond your ancestor’s trek in.
As these things usually go, it was a layering of maneuvers that brought us to where we are now. Joseph Pulitzer didn’t help matters by raising funds for the statue’s pedestal construction, nor did President Grover Cleveland in dedicating the thing or the real nail in the coffin, those lines from Emma Lazarus’ 1883 poem “The New Colossus,” first written to raise funds for the pedestal and then later inscribed at its base, and its most famous all-welcome:
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
So, the way I see it, we have the French to blame. And instead of busing truckloads of folks from one US city to another, causing overcrowding and crime to reign and rain, let’s gather all the folks coming in on a few airplanes and drop them on the French. Those are the guys who started this in the first place.
Really, shouldn’t we have known to suspect the French all along anyway? This is the same country that declared Jerry Lewis a genius.
