The day after we deported the immigrants

train

The day after we deported the last illegal immigrant, America was not yet great again. That’s to be expected. Even though illegal immigrants had been causing a lot of problems, something as complex as the United States isn’t going to turn around overnight. We’re talking about a whole, complicated system. It would take a while for the job creators to restaff the illegal immigrant’s old, illegal jobs with working-class white people. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

But then, on the anniversary of the day we deported the last illegal immigrant, America still wasn’t great. The factories hadn’t opened up again, and houses cost about the same as they did before. They were still too slow at the doctor’s office. The busboys were all white teenagers with no sense at all, but otherwise, little had changed.

We figured something must have gone wrong, and it didn’t take long to figure out what. Even though we had gotten rid of the illegals, there were still a bunch of legal immigrants who were basically the same people. They came from the same places. They looked and talked the same way: different. The only difference between an illegal immigrant and a legal immigrant is a piece of paper, and that’s no difference at all. When you’re tackling a project as big as making America great again, you have to tell it like it is. Anybody who says otherwise is just being politically correct.

So we deported all the legal immigrants, too. Anybody who wasn’t born here was out. We figured that would make America great again. But after a year or so, everything was still about the same. If anything, the doctor’s office got even slower, and there were a lot fewer restaurants. But the big stuff—jobs, terrorism, that overall feeling that everything was getting worse—hardly changed at all. All we did was spend a billion dollars on trains.

Then we realized what it was: Even though we had gotten rid of all the immigrants, their kids were still here. Technically, they were born in America. But everybody knows that if your parents are from Mexico or Syria, you’re not going to learn American values. You’re going to learn what they teach you. All those people were running around keeping America from being great, acting like this was their country just because they grew up here. And then they turn around and indoctrinate their kids!

It was a real problem, so to make America great again, we deported people whose parents or grandparents were immigrants. A lot of people didn’t have their grandparents’ birth certificates, and some didn’t even know who all of their grandparents were, so we deported them, too, just to be safe. Now everyone in America is an American, and it’s going to be great. I mean, what else could the problem be?

Trump’s first ad shows us how he perceives himself

The Donald Trump campaign released its first-ever television ad yesterday, and its content suggests that Trump considers features what many of us regarded as bugs. He’s doubled down on two of his most risible ideas: a ban on Muslims entering the United States “until we can figure out what’s going on,” and a wall at the Mexican border. When fact-checkers pointed out that footage of immigrants storming a wall during the “wall at our southern border” part of the ad actually showed Moroccans trying to get into Spain, Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski responded, “No shit it’s not the Mexican border, but that’s what our country is going to look like if we don’t do anything.” So the tradition of decorum continues.

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High school student disputes scholar’s denial of “no Irish need apply”

"The Usual Irish Way of Doing Things" by Thomas Nast, 1871

“The Usual Irish Way of Doing Things” by Thomas Nast, 1871

Patrick Young, Esq. is one of several to report that a high school student has disproven University of Illinois professor’s Richard Jensen’s claim that signs reading “no Irish need apply” were a historical myth. Originally published in the Journal of Social History in December 2002, Jensen’s “‘No Irish Need Apply’: A Myth of Victimization” argues that the signs forbidding employment to Irish immigrants in the 19th century were “an enhancement of political solidarity against a hostile Other; and a way to insulate a preindustrial non-individualistic group-oriented work culture from the individualism rampant in American culture.” That’s kind of a bigoted thesis, bro. Unfortunately, Rebecca Fried’s article—which is extremely commendable and impressive for a high school student—doesn’t seem to disprove it.

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McCain connects AZ wildfires to illegal immigrants

Photoshop is the lowest form of wit.

Arizona senator and former Republican presidential candidate John McCain—who, incidentally, doesn’t have any particular plans for 2012—remarked Saturday that a portion of the Arizona wildfires were started by immigrants. “There is substantial evidence that some of these fires have been caused by people who have crossed our border illegally,” McCain said at a press conference. “The answer to that part of the problem is to get a secure border.” As of press time, McCain has not provided said evidence to the public, nor has he described what its substance may be. But the important thing is that we used to start our own fires in this country, and being an arsonist/bolt of lightning used to mean something, but now—thanks to immigrants—decent, hard-working Americans have to sit home taskless, drinking their wives’ unsold beer and staring at their oddly deathless boobs. No word yet from McCain on who’s been poisoning wells.

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Friday links! Spectacle of morality edition

hotdogIt’s Friday, and that means it’s time to look back in evaluation of the week that is about to finish having been. If you’re like me, you’ve been paying extra-special attention to being good lately, in the hopes of getting that Barnes & Noble knock-off Kindle that costs as much as a regular Kindle for Christmas. The problem with being good, though, is that it’s awfully hard for other people to notice. So much of being good is about not doing stuff, especially stuff—stealing, looking at boobs, I think farting—when no one is around to see you anyway. The problem with personal morality is that it’s so personal. If only there were some way that I could make a public spectacle of my goodness, so that all the world would be forced to acknowledge what a moral/books-equivalent-of-a-Zune-deserving person I am. Oh, well. I guess I’d better just resign myself to reading books printed on wood pul—wait a minute! What if I looked to the morality of others? If I were some kind of self-appointed superintendent of other people’s goodness, I could not only make a spectacle of my own righteousness, but also relieve myself of the burden of scrutiny of my own actions. It’ll be like having a maid to clean my kitchen for me, while I accuse her of adultery. Or something. Whatever it is, it’s going to be awesome, at least for me. I guess for everybody else it will be kind of irritating, but what are they going to do? Turn my own righteous indignation against me? That’ll be the day. I just hope nobody has thought of this alrea—oh, dammit. It turns out the totality of world culture beat me to it. I guess I’ll just go back to documenting their craven attempts to aggrandize themselves by pointing out the foibles of oth—HELLO! We’re back in business.

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