Sh**hole hypocrisy

In the news:  “Trump derides protections for immigrants from ‘shithole’ countries,” at the Washington Post.

President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they discussed protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to several people briefed on the meeting.

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to these people, referring to countries mentioned by the lawmakers.

Trump then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway, whose prime minister he met with Wednesday. The president, according to a White House official, also suggested he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt they help the United States economically.

In addition, the president singled out Haiti, telling lawmakers that immigrants from that country must be left out of any deal, these people said.

“Why do we need more Haitians?” Trump said, according to people familiar with the meeting. “Take them out.”

And, of course, this caused an internet freak-out, both for the coarseness of the language and because of the presumed racism of the contrast between Norway and Haiti.

But here’s what bugs me:

Those same people castigating Trump for these comments are, at the same time, insisting that the Temporary Protected Status for the Haitians, Salvadorans, and others who were in the country illegally when natural disasters hit their home countries, which has been renewed year after year, be converted into de facto Permanent Protected Status.  While they acknowledge that the particular natural disasters happened long enough ago that the specific damage that those disasters caused, has been remedied, they insist that the situation in those countries is simply so awful that these people cannot be sent back there, regardless of whether the law has any provision for their continued residence.

In short, they say, those countries are sh**holes, and because of their sh**holity, we need to allow immigration from them.

Now, the question of whether we should be welcoming people from sh**hole countries, and, of those people, whether we should be welcoming those with education and skills, say grad students from middle-class families seeking to stay, or those who are dirt poor, and favored by the wealthy as their future nannies and elder caregivers, is another issue altogether.  But I just don’t have the patience for this hyperventilation.

Image:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ADonald_Trump_(8567813820)_(2).jpg; By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Donald Trump) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons