Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [177]
aw
“Never used telephones.” Michael Savage, a conservative talk radio expert on the true nature of the immigrant, disputes that. “We’re getting refugees now who have never used a telephone, a toothbrush, or toilet paper. You’re telling me they’re going to assimilate? They will never assimilate. They come here and they bring their destitute ways to this country, and they never assimilate. And then their children become gang-bangers.” (“Savage: ‘We’re getting refugees now who have never used a telephone, a toothbrush, or toilet paper. . . . . [T]hey never assimilate. And then their children become gang-bangers,’” Media Matters, 25 Jun. 2008, http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200806250001.)
ax
“Not with a bang but a whimper.” T. S. Eliot was a fitting choice. In 1933, Eliot declared, “The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” (T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy [London: Faber and Faber, 1934]: 20.)
ay
Buchanan’s arguments resembled those of another book that warned of the “immigrant flood” threatening America’s infertile founding race with extinction. The author described the newcomers as immoral, lazy, ignorant, disloyal, unpatriotic, drunk, unskilled, criminal, unsanitary, and unattractive—but extremely fertile. The book, titled The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration, was published in 1913. The problematic immigrants were Greek, Polish, Italian, Irish, Jewish, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Portuguese. (Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration [New York: The Century Co., 1914]: 300.)
az
Illegal is such a perfect slur for illegal immigrants. Dropping the word immigrant renders them stateless and homeless, neither here nor there, and reduces their essence to one of pure violation, unlawfulness in the flesh.
ba
Tom Tancredo likes to conflate terrorism with immigration to maximize the scary factor. In campaign appearances, he warned people that illegal immigrants were “coming here to kill you, and you, and me, and my grandchildren.” He did not explain why the immigrants hate his grandchildren so much. In a similar vein, Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) warned that Arab terrorists are learning Spanish in Venezuela and sneaking across the border disguised as illegal Mexican immigrants. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) claimed that terrorists are sending women to give birth on U.S. soil so that their terrorist babies have American citizenship—”And then one day, twenty . . . thirty years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life.”
(Ed Quillen, “Preventing Wars, the Tancredo Way,” Denver Post, 26 Jul. 2005: B7; Sue Myrick, “Myrick Calls for Taskforce to Investigate Presence of Hezbollah on the US Southern Border,” U.S. House of Representatives, 25 Jun. 2010, http://myrick.house.gov/index. cfm?sectionid=22&itemid=558; Walid Zafar, “Rep. Gohmert Warns of Baby Terrorists,” Media Matters, 25 Jun. 2010, http://politicalcorrection.org/blog/201006250005.)
bb
“Barack the Magic Negro.