“Why Are We Having All These People From Shithole Countries Come Here?” President Donald Trump
First of all, even though it was in-artfully said, it is a legitimate question. I’m going to define shithole country as any country tourists don’t want to go to. As an example, I don’t know anybody who went to Nigeria and stayed in a hotel in the capital, Abuja, on vacation. Abuja is a pretty fair-sized city of 2,440,000 and I bet it is interesting as hell. However, for the sake of this conversion, I’m going to call Nigeria, a shithole country by the arbitrary definition that it is not a tourist destination. I mean, nobody is going to call France a shithole country (except when they didn’t want to put troops into Iraq, but they were a shithole country then because they were hard to boss around not because nobody wants to go there). So I’m going with Nigeria.
As I understand Trump’s question, If we don’t want to go to Nigeria, why do we want Nigerians to come here? Well, there are already about 275,000 Nigerians that have come here and a fair question is How are they doing? Nigerians, it turns out, are a hugely successful immigrant community, as are other African immigrants. According to Bloomberg, Nigerian immigrants “have a median household income well above the American average, and above the average of many white and Asian groups, such as those of Dutch or Korean descent.” Dutch or Korean success is a pretty high bar, but Nigerians are well-educated people – who value education – whose education level is way above our National average. A high proportion are Doctors and Engineers and this is a community that adds more to the country than their less educated European immigrant brethren.
And, if you take longer to look at it than Trump obviously took, educated, ambitious, people are more likely to leave shithole countries because these countries are usually more violent and have more limited opportunities, than, say, Belgium. To answer Trump’s question, we should invite people in from shithole countries because they are the people who will Make America great again.
Good points, Steve. But if I understood what KN repeatedly said as she dodged the question of what words DT used, the idea he was presumably pushing was to have immigration based on merit rather than quotas per country. Of course, it already is based on merit. Here is a good link to the various criteria used: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/how-united-states-immigration-system-works
Limits per country is just one. As usual, the real issue in all its beautiful and terrible complexity is lost in the glare of the oversimplified, provocative [****] that comes out of DT’s [********]. (I forgot the words.)
So true, Coco, almost everything we read is simplefied to the point of being inaccurate. (And thanks for the link…When I was building houses in Silicon Valley, many of out Chinese buyers were here on Permanent Employment-Based Preference System #5