RUDE PUNDIT: America Is Not Just for Americans

[kpete]

8/30/2019
America Is Not Just for Americans
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At my college, the semester just started. And in my classes, as usual, I have an array of students from other countries, including Syria and Lebanon.............

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So it was disturbing as hell to read about Harvard freshman Ismail Ajjawi, who is a Palestinian from Lebanon, being denied entry to the United States because, as he explained it, a Customs and Border Protection agent searched his phone and laptop. "She said that she found people posting political points of view that oppose the U.S. on my friend list," Ajjawi said. Because of those friends' posts, his visa to study here was revoked. Ajjawi said he himself has never posted anything political on social media.

It makes me wonder where this examination of what's-on-your-laptop will end for some foreign students. It makes me wonder if some asshole CBP agent will look at the computer of one of my students one day and see the readings, like plays that are sympathetic to the Palestinians, and then perhaps that asshole CBP agent will dig a little deeper and see that the student's professor is a wild and woolly blogger/tweeter who has called President Trump all kinds of horrific shit and strongly suggested that Trump is a rapist who fucks his own daughter.

Because, see, if someone can be excluded from coming to the United States because his Facebook friends said the United States is, say, a racist country that mistreats immigrants and supports maniacal dictators, then what's to prevent the next person to have a visa revoked be an international student who went home to visit family over the summer and just so happens to have taken me or any politically-active professor who has a problem with the policies of this bullshit president and his bullshit party. What's to prevent any CBP agent from looking at the reading list for the student's classes and seeing The Communist Manifesto on there and freaking the fuck out?

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This isn't just hateful, xenophobic, and racist. It's all actually un-American. While the United States has rarely lived up to the principles that it has propagated about itself, at the very least there was an understanding that America is not just for Americans, that the very idea of America is of people who made a journey to get here and that the only reason America exists is because people continued to make that journey (and kill the people who were here first and take their land). I mean, fuck, one way to see slavery is forced immigration. They weren't Americans but we sure as hell exploited, raped, and brutalized them for their labor in order to build the goddamn country.

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Ultimately, incidents like what happened to Ajjawi or not giving flu vaccines to migrants in detention centers have nothing to do with protecting the lives of Americans. It's about fear, and not just fear of violence. It's about the constant fear that a new population will come to the United States and change it, make it less white, less homogeneous. But that shit never works.


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The rest:
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2019/08/america-is-not-just-for-americans.html

[Stuart G]

1. i taught in a public high school in Chciago where there were lots of imigrants from all over.

....Migrants, immigrants, citizens, (family immigrants, but born here) Over 50 languages spoken in the halls. You name it, we had it. In the class I taught we spoke English. In the halls you heard it all..And most important, all were accepted. It didn't matter where you were from, almost all teachers were glad we had so many different kinds of people. (I had a simple system to get grades... 900 points for an A. 800 points for a B,...700 points for C and so on. If you got 900 you automatically got an A. Didn't matter your background, language, how you looked, or whatever. A certain number of points got you a certain grade.)
...That area in Chicago was well known for the diversity as was the high school. We also: had the nasty, the kind, the smart, the stupid, the tall, the short, the brilliant, and the foolish. One student I had was murdered, and another, later on after he left school, murdered someone. ..............So the bottom line is.......................

...America is not just for Americans..also, those students wanted to be in the U.S.A., and wanted to be in that public high school.

[mopinko]

3. this is not only why i live in chi, it's why i live in the hood i live in.

my kid's elementary school had 32 languages spoken at home.
my sisters, in the burbs that i escaped, could not believe i would raise kids in the city.

but i'm tellin ya, my kids dont even see color. they were in their teens, and they pointed to a girl, and asked my if it was a particular kid in the hood. but the girl they were pointing at was white. the kid they were thinking of was mixed race. they didnt even realize that about her.

[smirkymonkey]

2. K&R

[Hoyt]

4. Agree 100%. And it goes even further. People/officials/candidates who promote America First are

shirking our global responsibilities.