Washington D.C.–A bold, new Republican Congressional caucus headed by Margorie Taylor Greene made a big splash last week by announcing its intentions to uphold America’s “respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon traditions” and suggesting that immigrants who arrived after 1965 were swarthy, disloyal slackers who put their feet up and collected welfare at the expense of industrious, flaxen-haired Heartland patriots.
The America First Caucus, led by the Georgia firebrand who first identified the Jewish Space Laser as the source of California’s wild fires, produced a policy paper that caused quite a stir in Congress and the media when it was published by the Punchbowl News site. The paper daringly reintroduces the racial pseudo science of the early twentieth century, which led to the exclusion of Asian immigrants and severe restrictions on southern and eastern Europeans in the National Origins Act of 1924. That act was only repealed in 1965, and since then, decent white Americans have been denied the right to work long hours in the hot sun picking strawberries with few bathroom breaks and been forced to endure the torment of hearing conversations in foreign languages while at the grocery store.
The paper, which somehow neglects to use the Klan trope “old pioneer stock,” argues that “an important distinction between post-1965 immigrants and previous waves of settlers is that previous cohorts were more educated, earned higher wages and did not have an expansive welfare state to fall back on when they could not make it in America and thus did not stay in the country at the expense of the native born.”
This, of course, would be news to the undocumented immigrants and Dreamers, who are ineligible to receive food stamps, medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. It would also be news to millions from the “previous cohorts of settlers” that they were all well-educated, high wage earners who made the arduous, life-threatening journey across the ocean not due to any poverty, political instability or lack of opportunities at home but rather just for the chance to sing “America the Beautiful” with the chirpy pep squad of the Greatest Nation on Earth.