Tour-a-lour-a-legal
With the protests in France, the Brexit muddle in Britain, the Senate voting to end American support for Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen, and the outrage of Saturday Night Live making fun of Trump, you may have missed it: Paul Ryan has chosen to end his undistinguished career with an act of sheer ethnic pandering. Knock me over with a cheese, right?
Ryan has noticed that there are 10,500 E-3 "green card" visas set aside every year for Australians who want to work here in "specialty occupations," but only about half are used. He has introduced a bill which would give the rest to Irish citizens who are in the country illegally, having emigrated in the 1990s when the high-tech "Celtic tiger" economy went tits-up (their expression, not mine). Most are employed in the shadow economy as nannies, restaurant workers, construction workers, etc., frequently paid in cash and ineligible for Social Security or other benefits -- like Mexicans, Chinese, Filipinos, Central Americans, etc.
Why the Irish? Certainly not because his name is Ryan. Think of it as reparations for all those NO DOGS OR IRISH signs, or the cartoons of Thomas Nast. Did you know the first Irish to come here were actually slaves, captured during Oliver Cromwell's campaigns or kidnapped from their homes and sold to planters headed for Virginia in the seventeenth century? Truth. Not even considered "white" when that category was being willed into existence in the land of the free, the Irish survived a long and dismal history to reach the ascendancy of John F. Kennedy. So a better question is "why just the Irish?" What exactly separates them from all those other groups besides a weakness for bagpipes?
Need more time?
The unembarrassed racism of Republicans is breathtaking. Though the Irish have entrusted their government to a man whose parents came from India (as once they entrusted it to a man whose father came from Spain), they are certainly "white" now, and Paul Ryan has no problem with Making America White Again. If the Australians won't come here -- nobody expected those people with "specialty occupations" to be Aboriginal -- and the Norwegians and Swedes and Germans won't give up their social safety nets, let's make it easier for the Irish to stay. They already speak English! They pay taxes and have families, children who are Americans under the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment! Identifying and deporting them would be expensive and economically disruptive, same as with Mexicans, Chinese, Filipinos...
Amusingly, there are Rightzis complaining that the Ryan project would reward "illegals," though it doesn't move them a step closer to citizenship. Which is to miss the point: Which "illegals" are being rewarded, and why? For half a century America welcomed any Cuban who could get one foot on a Florida beach; will we extend the same bienvenidos to Venezuelans as their country implodes? Or Brazilians fleeing fascism? Isn't the Trump regime already deporting Haitians who came here after the earthquake in 2010? Does it not want to deport Vietnamese who came after 1975 and have no place to go back to? I'm for rewarding all "illegals" who haven't been convicted of a felony and have managed to evade la migra. We couldn't run this place without them, even educated Europeans who will literally take jobs away from Americans if they no longer have to work as bartenders and babysitters. Even the people who make the beds at Mar-a-lago.
So good luck, Paul, you tool. Maybe Speaker Pelosi will introduce a bill that makes up for all the shortcomings in yours.
Ryan has noticed that there are 10,500 E-3 "green card" visas set aside every year for Australians who want to work here in "specialty occupations," but only about half are used. He has introduced a bill which would give the rest to Irish citizens who are in the country illegally, having emigrated in the 1990s when the high-tech "Celtic tiger" economy went tits-up (their expression, not mine). Most are employed in the shadow economy as nannies, restaurant workers, construction workers, etc., frequently paid in cash and ineligible for Social Security or other benefits -- like Mexicans, Chinese, Filipinos, Central Americans, etc.
Why the Irish? Certainly not because his name is Ryan. Think of it as reparations for all those NO DOGS OR IRISH signs, or the cartoons of Thomas Nast. Did you know the first Irish to come here were actually slaves, captured during Oliver Cromwell's campaigns or kidnapped from their homes and sold to planters headed for Virginia in the seventeenth century? Truth. Not even considered "white" when that category was being willed into existence in the land of the free, the Irish survived a long and dismal history to reach the ascendancy of John F. Kennedy. So a better question is "why just the Irish?" What exactly separates them from all those other groups besides a weakness for bagpipes?
Need more time?
The unembarrassed racism of Republicans is breathtaking. Though the Irish have entrusted their government to a man whose parents came from India (as once they entrusted it to a man whose father came from Spain), they are certainly "white" now, and Paul Ryan has no problem with Making America White Again. If the Australians won't come here -- nobody expected those people with "specialty occupations" to be Aboriginal -- and the Norwegians and Swedes and Germans won't give up their social safety nets, let's make it easier for the Irish to stay. They already speak English! They pay taxes and have families, children who are Americans under the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment! Identifying and deporting them would be expensive and economically disruptive, same as with Mexicans, Chinese, Filipinos...
Amusingly, there are Rightzis complaining that the Ryan project would reward "illegals," though it doesn't move them a step closer to citizenship. Which is to miss the point: Which "illegals" are being rewarded, and why? For half a century America welcomed any Cuban who could get one foot on a Florida beach; will we extend the same bienvenidos to Venezuelans as their country implodes? Or Brazilians fleeing fascism? Isn't the Trump regime already deporting Haitians who came here after the earthquake in 2010? Does it not want to deport Vietnamese who came after 1975 and have no place to go back to? I'm for rewarding all "illegals" who haven't been convicted of a felony and have managed to evade la migra. We couldn't run this place without them, even educated Europeans who will literally take jobs away from Americans if they no longer have to work as bartenders and babysitters. Even the people who make the beds at Mar-a-lago.
So good luck, Paul, you tool. Maybe Speaker Pelosi will introduce a bill that makes up for all the shortcomings in yours.
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 12:13 PM
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