Дональд Трамп - Triggered

But here in the semi-solitude of the lobby, I had a chance to take a rare deep breath. Maybe have some coffee. Just as I was feeling comforted by the calm, however, I saw a cashier in the coffee shop staring at me. Her eyebrows were arched as though she were ready to give a big speech. I immediately assumed that it would have something to do with my father and his immigration stance. There goes the coffee, I thought. But then the woman smiled and leaned over the counter toward me.

“You know,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper and looking around, “my husband and I voted for your father yesterday in early voting.”

She was a recent immigrant from Ethiopia who, along with her husband, had gone through the proper channels and filled out all the paperwork required of them. She said it was something they were proud to have done.

“Your father’s right,” she said. “People who think they can just come into America and get whatever they want makes it so much harder for people like me.”

Her smile was so genuine, her handshake so warm, it nearly made up for all the smears and slams we had taken for months.

“Thank you,” I said. “You don’t know how much this means to me.”

Over and over during the campaign and after the election, people came up to me, people of all nationalities and from all walks of life, to tell me how proud they were to have come to the United States legally.

These are the people that the liberals would rather not talk about. They like to pretend that there’s no difference between a good immigrant and a bad one. In other words, someone who enters the country illegally, carrying ten pounds of heroin, should be afforded the same rights as someone who has come in to be a doctor. Their rationale is ridiculous. We should be supporting those who followed the rules to come here, not criminals whose first act on US soil is a violation of our laws.

Like many Americans, I come from a family of immigrants. As I’ve mentioned, my mother grew up in a small village in Communist Czechoslovakia. She came to the United States legally through Canada to escape the Communist ideal that so many of the liberal elites are now espousing. My father’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, the youngest of ten (apparently I’m an underachiever; I have only five kids!), came to the United States from a small island off the coast of Scotland during the Great Depression.

Maybe my favorite family immigration story was that of Frederick Trump. In 1885, my great-grandfather came to America from Germany at sixteen years of age with nothing but the clothing he could fit into one small suitcase. He lived in New York City with his sister, who had come over a year earlier, and her husband. In those days, there was no social safety net like there is today. Even if he’d wanted to exploit the system, he couldn’t have. There was no system to exploit. It was only work and survive. So he went to work instead. Seven days a week, for twelve hours a day, he worked as a barber in the city. He learned English by listening to the customers, and he saved his money. When he had enough, he decided to strike out on his own, chasing the American dream as so many immigrants had before him.

In the early 1890s, with $600 in small bills he’d saved from the barbershop, he moved to Seattle and opened a restaurant in that city’s red-light district because he had been told that that was where the business was. In 1892, he became a US citizen and voted in his first presidential election. Around the same time, there was a gold rush in the Northwest. Braving the harshest elements, he made his way to the Yukon—but not to pan for gold. He did what he knew how to do: he opened restaurants, first in tents and later in buildings made from timber. He would go on to serve thousands and thousands of meals to prospectors in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.

My family risked everything to come here and kept taking risks to rise up in American society. Our stories are not unique. They’ve been replicated millions of times. They are the stories that made America great. Make no mistake, I come from a family of immigrants. My girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, comes from an Irish-born father and a Puerto Rican mother (you don’t want to make her mad). I have many good friends who are immigrants, and I have met thousands of immigrants who contribute financially, socially, and educationally to this great nation. That’s just not the case with far too many illegal immigrants.

The left will argue that today’s immigrants pull their own weight, but the facts tell a different story. The immigrants of the late 1800s and early 1900s legally entered an America that was experiencing a spectacular rise in industrialization. There was a great need then to fill entry-level jobs, and our ancestors gladly filled them. Today, no such job pool exists. So instead of a hardworking, grateful pool of workers, there are people who evade the law to enter the country, pay minimal or no taxes, and then rely on government handouts to survive. This invasion—and that’s what it is using any metric—doesn’t hurt people like me. I have private medical insurance, and my kids all go to good schools. The people who really get hurt are the ones on the lower ends of the economic ladder. They are the ones who will experience the decline in the quality of health care that will come about when the system is overstressed by illegal immigrants who have no insurance. They’re also the ones whose children will see the quality of their education decline with overcrowded classrooms. They will face competition with entry-level workers and others who work for cash off the books.

Now, I don’t blame illegal immigrants for trying to come to the United States. Who wouldn’t want to with all we give away? But comparing today’s illegal immigrants to the ones who built this country is ludicrous. In fact, the immigrants of today never had the chance to replicate the experience of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers mostly because of legislation championed and passed by Democrats more than fifty years ago.

After President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas in 1963, the sympathy of the nation was with the Kennedy family, particularly his brother Teddy, who was then the newly minted senator from Massachusetts. At the time, Ted Kennedy could have proposed a bill that required all men to wear pink pants with little whales on them, and Congress would have passed it.

The younger Kennedy, undoubtedly a smart fellow (except when he was drunk behind the wheel in Chappaquiddick), knew that the population of the United States was growing and prospering, which was not necessarily the best thing for the Democrat Party. Soldiers who had returned from World War II bought houses, built businesses, and began voting Republican because Democrats had nothing to offer them other than higher taxes and more spending on government programs that didn’t work (sounds all too familiar, huh?).

So Senator Kennedy hatched a plan to get some new voters. In short, he would need poor people who spoke very little English and who would want to take advantage of some of the massive welfare programs the Democrats were selling to the American people. That year, he proposed a bill that would do away with the old quota system used to govern immigration, which gave equal weight to immigrants from stable, friendly countries and blew the doors wide open for people from Third World countries. Not only would poorer immigrants flood our shores and social services, but Teddy’s plan also enabled the families of those people to be brought in for generations, beginning what we now call “chain migration.”

By the way, the idea of not wanting immigrants who would drain our social safety net is nothing new. A good friend recently took a tour of Ellis Island, where this quote about the Immigration Act of 1882 was displayed: