John Kelly Goes on a Wildly Racist Rant About Immigration

[Charlemagne]

John Kelly Goes on a Wildly Racist Rant About Immigration

Jorge Rivas

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly made some of his most racist public comments on immigration in an interview that aired Friday, telling NPR that people coming to the U.S. through the southern border are uneducated, “don’t have skills,” and have trouble assimilating “into our modern society.”

Kelly shared his views—which are essentially the same xenophobic claims made against Chinese, Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants in decades past—in an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition.

Kelly was responding to a question about the Trump administration’s recently announced “zero tolerance” policy, which calls for breaking up every single family that crosses the border illegally and prosecuting the parents.

Here’s how Kelly justified separating brown mothers from their babies (emphasis mine):

Let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move illegally into [the] United States are not bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re not MS13. ... But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing. ... They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills. They’re not bad people. They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws. ... The big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States, and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.

Apart from their obvious racism, Kelly’s comments also echo the things people said about his descendants from Ireland when they came to America.

The Library of Congress, to this day, still claims “Irish immigrants left a rural lifestyle” and that many of them were “unprepared for the industrialized, urban centers in the United States.” Sound familiar?

Let the record state that Latinx people are assimilating just as fast as everybody else and actually learn English faster than many European immigrants did when they arrived in America.

So, once again, John Kelly has no idea what he’s talking about.

https://splinternews.com/john-kelly-goes-on-a-wildly-racist-rant-about-immigrati-1825946284

 

[onthebottom]

He’s not wrong, I’ve read (but can’t find) that half of illegal immigrants are illiterate. Not the workforce of the future.

 

[Butler1000]

I love the way he compares Irish immigrants to these ones.

Back then a 5th grade education was the norm even in the USA. Today I would say things are a bit better.....

 

[bver_hunter]

Once again another dumb statement by a Whitehouse person. Just reflects the views of the ignorant POTUS.
Adds to what Kelly said about Trump being "embarrassed" by the Mueller investigation. Then he tries to change it to "distracted".

 

[onthebottom]

Don’t let the facts slow you down....

Adult unauthorized immigrants are disproportionately likely to be poorly educated. Among unauthorized immigrants ages 25-64, 47% have less than a high school education. By contrast, only 8% of U.S. born residents ages 25-64 have not graduated from high school.

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/04/14/a-portrait-of-unauthorized-immigrants-in-the-united-states/

 

[Trevor]

I am an immigrant and I required education, ability to read write English, age was a factor as well
as amount of money I had, and any relatives who would help my resettlement.
A police clearance was also a requirement from the country I was immigrating.
This was to ensure I am able to get a job quickly and not become a burden to the tax payer.
These were the rules to gain entrance into Canada and I think they were just and helped a selection
process that had huge amount of applicants.

 

[bver_hunter]

Let's see the true facts about John Kelly's own family tree:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ntering/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0cb49d644edc

Genealogical researcher Monica Pattangall researched Kelly’s family tree earlier this year.

According to her research, seven of Kelly’s eight great-grandparents were immigrants. Four immigrated from Italy, three from Ireland.

We know the specific places of origin for three of Kelly’s great-grandparents.

His great-grandfather John Edward Kelly was born in Maine, the son of parents who immigrated from Canada. While the name “Kelly” implies Irish immigration, that probably resulted from the famine of the late 1840s. John Edward Kelly’s parents — Chief of Staff Kelly’s great-great-grandparents — were already in Canada when the famine began.


His great-grandmother Mary Connelly came to the United States after the famine from near Clifden, Ireland, in County Galway. (Most of Kelly’s immigrant ancestors came in the late 1800s.) It’s not clear specifically where she came from, but the town is a small one on the coast surrounded by farmland.

His great-grandfather Joseph (Giuseppe) Pedalino came from near the Italian town of Avellino. Researcher Jennifer Mendelsohn, with whom Pattangall shared her research, dug further into Kelly’s family history. (We’ve featured her research in the past.) She found Pedalino’s naturalization papers that indicate that he came from Quadrelle province, a small region in the Italian foothills.

Most people who immigrated to the United States in the 19th century were not doing so because they’d tired of their London mansions. They were seeking better work or an improvement in their lives. Many came from the countryside, as it’s likely Kelly’s great-grandfather and great-grandmother did. The reasons for immigrating to the United States haven’t changed much since.


As for employment, John Edward Kelly worked as a blacksmith at a cooper, making iron bands for barrels. Based in Maine, he worked in the shipping industry as had his father before him, according to Pattangall. (She’s written a book involving the maritime industry in Maine.) Perhaps because of the decline in the shipping industry, John’s son John Leo Kelly moved to Massachusetts and went to work for the railroad, holding a position as a brakeman. His father-in-law Coleman Curran (another of Chief of Staff Kelly’s great-grandfathers) also worked for the railroad. (It’s in Boston where the two sides of Chief of Staff Kelly’s family met. Kelly’s father worked as a mail carrier in the Brighton neighborhood.)

On his mother’s side, Kelly’s great-grandfathers worked as a wagon driver and fruit peddler, according to Mendelsohn’s research. These were not skilled positions, obviously. It’s not clear that any of Kelly’s immigrant ancestors had significant educational backgrounds.


Then there’s the issue of language. This can be trickier to determine, but census forms used to include questions about languages spoken. From one such record, Mendelsohn learned that John DeMarco, the fruit peddler, still didn’t speak English after more than a decade in the country. His wife Crescenza — Kelly’s great-grandmother — lived in the United States for more than 30 years without learning the language.

There’s an obvious response to all of this, which Kelly gets to in his initial comments: That was then. Kelly pointedly says that these immigrants cannot assimilate “into our modern society.”

But things aren’t so different now from then. At the time that Kelly’s Italian ancestors were living in Boston, there was a large population of both Italian and Irish immigrants. You can see in the census documents that Mendelsohn shared on Twitter that the houses near Kelly’s ancestors were populated with people who’d mostly immigrated from Italy and Ireland. In the 19th century, these were neighborhoods in which one didn’t need to speak English to communicate.

Much as there are communities today where the primary language is Chinese or Spanish.

Education is more important now than it was then, but there is clearly work to be done by people with less than a high school education. That’s the point, really: Many immigrants come from Mexico and work in the agricultural industry here as laborers. They may not end up as White House chiefs of staff, but then neither did Giuseppe Pedalino. It took Pedalino’s family three more generations before it attained that level of prominence.

Even had the Pedalinos and the Kellys and the DeMarcos and the Currans not wound up as the grandparents and great-grandparents of a Marine Corps general or chief of staff, it’s likely that Kelly wouldn’t have judged their arrival in the United States as unworthy. That’s much of the reason that Kelly’s comments to NPR earned the reaction that they did: Not all immigrants become prominent individuals or important members of society, but then neither do all native-born Americans.

Everyone on the family tree above who isn’t marked with a colored box is a natural-born citizen of the United States. None of them would be likely to exist had their immigrant parents never moved to the United States and met one another, meaning that Kelly wouldn’t exist, either. Most probably came from rural areas, many probably had little education or preparation for skilled employment, and at least some never assimilated into English-speaking society.

Kelly somehow nonetheless wound up as the top aide to the president of the United States.

So maybe Kelly was referring to his own family tree!!

 

[Aardvark154]

Wildly Racist Rant About Immigration

That his opinion is that of a majority of the U.S. Population, should of course be given no credence, at least in Jorge Rivas' world view.